Farah watches me silently, her lips tight. The words are words I thought I’d never have the courage to say, but they come easily.
“Jonah was right,” I say, changing tack. “There’s something watching us. I’ve seen It before, in my seizures. And now we’ve caught Its attention and It thinks It can control us. It tells us that the outside is bad, so we lie down and sleep—”
“How do you know all this?” Chiu says.
I shake my head. “I don’t know how, but I know I’m right. The point is, you’re not someone who gives up and lies down because something tells you to, Farah. You’re not someone who lets anyone, or anything, claim authority over you. And neither am I … not anymore.”
“Or me,” Chiu says.
“Right,” I agree. Farah’s mouth twitches in that half smile of hers. She must think I’m ridiculous, but I feel a rush of hopefulness anyway. “I don’t even care if It wins in the end,” I say. “If It wants to eat us, then fine. I’m still going to spit in Its eye first.” On impulse, I pull out the tiny fruit knife from my pocket and brandish it. “And I’m going to stab It in the bloody face and Chiu is going to tear a chunk off Its goddamn ear!”
Chiu nods his enthusiastic agreement.
“That’s quite a speech.” Farah smiles.
“I’m serious,” I reply.
“Will you kick It in the balls for me as well?”
“Absolutely!” I say. Then I add, “If I can reach. I mean, I think It’s probably quite big, whatever It is, and if It’s trying to eat me I’m going to be up high and so I might not be able to reach all the way down to—”
“I get it,” Farah says. “It’s OK, I get it.” She stands, slowly, shakily. “Let’s go find this bloody machine then.”
We reach the bridge that cuts beneath the railway line and then we weave back through the side roads, making our way diagonally towards where the map tells us UCL is. I watch Farah anxiously. We’ve promised to keep an eye on each other and get inside at the first sign of any of us flagging.
But Farah is different since last night. She’s distant. There’s something broken about her, like cracked china. We pass a larger road and a strip of shopfronts and I make a mental note of them so we can get back there quickly if we need to.
Chiu picks up a stick and lets it rattle along the panels of the garden fences. It’s hypnotic, more complex, more absorbing, than the sound would be in the ordinary world. Farah walks ahead of us, checking her map frequently, unwilling to talk or make eye contact for too long.
The houses get steadily grander as we get nearer the centre. They look like giants compared to the little matchbox houses at home. They’re so huge it’s hard not to imagine the rooms and the furniture inside as equally oversized: an armchair you have to climb on to, a dining table you need to scale like a mountaineer. It makes me wonder how anybody could possibly need that much space. People buy these houses because it makes them feel safer, I think. Like ballast, they tie themselves to them in the hope that nothing, not even death, will be able to sweep them off the face of the earth.
We walk and walk.
And, suddenly, we’re lost. I look back to where we’ve crossed a main road and find that the road isn’t there anymore. There’s only the wide arc of another road filled with houses, fading into the distance.
Farah pauses, takes a closer look at her map.
“What’s going on?” Chiu says. He turns to where I’m looking and stops. “Oh.”
“That’s not right,” Farah says, quietly.
We walk on, more urgently, none of us wanting to say out loud what we’re all thinking. Falloden Way. Ballards Lane. Wainwright Road. The roads smear and blend into each other. The fear grows between us.
Farah murmurs as she walks, checking her map. No, no, no, no…
“What’s happening?” Chiu says.
“There should be … there should be a road.”
Farah stops, her chest heaving. My own head throbs. We can’t get stuck out here again. We won’t survive this time. Chiu looks quickly between us.
In the ordinary world we’d ask a passer-by, or we’d use the sun to point us in the right direction, but we have none of that here. We’re lost, and not because we took a wrong turn, but because things have changed, because they keep changing. The strangeness of this place crawls through my hair.
“It’s trying to test us,” Chiu says.
“Or trap us,” Farah replies.
“This way,” I say.
I sound more confident than I am. Farah and Chiu don’t question. I walk and they follow and I have no idea where I’m going, but we feel better for walking. More roads. More indifferent houses. It doesn’t want us to get out of this estate.
The houses here are all semi-detached and have big bay windows and the road stretches on into the distance with no sign of any junctions.
“What do we do?” Chiu says.
“It’s this way,” I answer, taking a turn that has come into view without warning.
“Do you feel something?” Chiu says hopefully. “Is it blindsight?”
I don’t have the heart to tell him that I don’t. I’m just walking, trying to buy us some time by keeping them from despair. My feet are screaming and time seems to be sliding around beneath us. The sky was the same colour as a fifty-pence coin when we set off, now it looks more like ash. Late afternoon, I guess, or what passes for it in this place. We need to rest, but if we stop, we won’t get up again. It’s ready for us this time.
“Kyle,” Chiu calls. “Kyle, I need to stop—”
“Come on,” I say. “It’s just at the end of this road.”
I start to wonder if I do feel something. I think at first it’s wishful thinking. The urge to see round the next corner is a kind of agony, a blend of hopefulness and despair, a sense of anticipation. I don’t know if I really believe Chiu and his blindsight, but there’s something, isn’t there? Something pushing me on.
When we reach a T-junction, I turn left without pausing.
