Farah turns the key and the engine makes another slower, lower whining noise.
“The starter’s turning, but the engine isn’t catching,” I say.
Chiu looks surprised. “Do you know about cars?”
I shake my head. “Grandad did. I used to hang out in the garage with him when I was little, but he never really taught me anything.”
There’s a hollow clunk as Farah pulls the catch under the steering wheel and pops the bonnet. She flashes me a winning smile. “That makes you our resident expert,” she says. “You better take a look, hadn’t you?”
I go round and lift up the bonnet with an air of resignation. I have vague notions of spark plugs and fuel pumps but my memories are hazy and date back to when Grandad was alive. I only know about starter motors because he once had to replace one and he let me play with the old one, connecting the battery and watching the pinion pop out and connect the electric motor.
I open the bonnet and my stomach instantly lurches in revulsion.
What’s inside is not an engine.
Its shape resembles that of an engine but it’s twisted, tortured and diabolical. I can see the engine block and a mass of thick pipes and wires curling around it. But the wires are in constant motion – reaching like vines, crushing and squeezing – while the engine block itself yields and folds and sinks like it’s being swallowed, reshaping itself painfully and becoming liquid at the same time. The wires multiply, reach and grasp like fingers. I can hear their dry, rubbery squeaking. Usurious, avaricious.
A moment later and my eyes saccade and the engine is restored, back to where it started. I watch this process two or three times, transfixed in horror as the engine is sickeningly devoured again and again before snapping back into place. Only the starter motor remains stable. The idea of a starter motor is the only fixed point.
I slam the bonnet shut and stride back past the car, suddenly desperate to be out of there. “Let’s go,” I croak.
“We’re walking.”
“What?” Chiu and Farah exclaim.
“Car’s broken; we should walk.”
About forty minutes later, we reach the flyover that leads down to the A5. After I explained what I saw under the bonnet of the car, Chiu and Farah fell into a thoughtful silence.
“In a world of ideas,” Chiu says, after a little while, “complex things – mechanical things – lose their way. It’s too hard for someone to keep the idea of them in their head.”
“Hence no mobile phones, no electric lights,” Farah says.
I nod. “It was the starter engine; that was the only part I understood, nothing else. What I saw … it was never going to run. Maybe if we had a book. Studied mechanics, or something…”
We follow the arc of the filter lane as it drops down on to the A5. It’s hard to walk because of the slope – something you don’t notice in a car. We step on to the hard shoulder and immediately my senses are flooded by an overwhelming sense of speed and movement. All at once I see the traffic again, loud and lethal, thundering past inches away from me.
“Kyle? What’s wrong?” I hear Farah’s voice as if it’s coming from a long way away.
“The traffic,” I say. “Can’t you see it?”
“Kind of,” Fara says. “Try to unsee it.”
I swallow. Unsee it? Have you ever tried to unsee an optical illusion once you’ve seen one? It’s not easy. It takes a moment. I choose not to see the traffic … and it goes. It doesn’t fade. It’s becomes … never there.
We walk along the hard shoulder, none of us fancying the road itself in case our unseeing falters. We’re making sense of this world, I think. Coming up with names for what’s happening. The Stillness. Unseeing. Blindsight.
We’re making it more real.
Chiu and Farah walk slightly ahead of me, playing a game that involves one of them punching the other on a fairly regular basis. Farah is tall: nearly as tall as me and twice as tall as Chiu. There’s a kind of unhurried smoothness to the way she moves, a confidence I know I’ll never have. She glances over her shoulder and grins at me and I feel my pulse instantly begin to throb in my ears.
Evening and then late evening come on suddenly. It felt like mid-morning all day, but then, without any of us noticing the change, the air is cooler and the sky has turned from concrete to slate grey.
“We need to find somewhere,” I say. “We can’t be out here at night.”
“I know,” Farah says.
Farah folds and refolds the map until she has it centred on our location. We crane over her shoulder to see. I haven’t the first clue where to start but Farah traces her finger along the road.
“We passed the M69 a while back,” she says. “So we’re roughly here…”
“There are some warehouses,” Chiu offers. “They might be OK. Or maybe there’s another hospital nearby?”
Farah scans the map. Then her face cracks into a smile. “I have a better idea.”
SEVENTEEN
The hotel is actually famous. Not that any of us have ever been here before, but it’s one of those hotels where celebrities and rich people fly in on private helicopters and publish their experiences on Instagram.
It’s an imposing stone-walled country mansion set in vast, perfectly manicured gardens. It takes a while to hike up the long gravel driveway with Chiu complaining all the way. At one point he stands stock-still and threatens to bed down where he stands.
“It’s too far,” he says petulantly. “There’s a perfectly good petrol station at the bottom of the hill.”
“Ignore him,” Farah says, not breaking step.
I glance back at Chiu and he throws his arms up in frustration before hurrying after us. At last, the building comes into view. Vast and timeless. Ivy-clad stone walls that look like they’ve come straight out of a period drama. East and west wings that jut forward dramatically like arms held up to shoo us away.
