The Unlikely Heroics of Sam Holloway

by Rhys Thomas

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ he said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  He watched them drive away at dusk that day, down the hill, with the twins in the back turning to wave goodbye.

  That summer, when he thought about it after all these years, had passed without the formation of any real memories. He recalled hardly anything from it. The geography research trip to the Brecon Beacons was a blur, the memories malformed, half formed, and not like memories at all but something more akin to a person being aware of experiences that took place in a previous life.

  The first time he became aware of a plane crash was when his professor came to get him for the phone call, though even this was unclear.

  The plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Manaus and had come down in the rainforest. A remote voice from the ether was telling him – directly, one to one – that 150 souls had been lost. There were just four British nationals on board and all belonged to Sam’s family: his mother, father, Steven and Sally.

  It was an impossible thing, hearing this, impossible to grasp the information in the message. He remembered more emotions than events, sitting with the phone at his ear, a physical kind of shock, electric, as though a surge of power had flashed through him, then a feeling of disbelief, the familiar numbing, then panic, horror, anger; all hustling to get front and centre. All these feelings would revisit him later, and for longer periods, but he felt them all in those first few moments, a carcinogenic bubbling tumescence before disbelief won out; they weren’t really on the flight, they had bailed out and were safe in the rainforest, there had been an awful mistake, it was mistaken identity, it was an elaborate prank.

  But none of these were the case. They were on the flight and they had all perished. The plane had entered a zone of turbulence and was struck by lightning, igniting a fuel tank, blowing a wing off, and causing catastrophic failure across the whole vessel. It fell seven miles to Earth. Sam had read the reports because his capacity for hope, back then, was undiminished. He devoured article after article, looking for clues as to his family’s survival. Many of the bodies were unidentifiable and some completely vaporised by the fires. And if this was the case, and a true body count was impossible, then surely some people might conceivably have survived and walked away. There were rare cases where people had survived mid-air plane crashes by simply falling out of the thing before it hit the ground. It was rare but it was possible.

  The local press took a melancholic angle on the story, focusing on Sam, lonely Sam Holloway who had lost his whole family. Cut adrift. He didn’t reply to any of the offers for an interview. It was all pointless anyway; his family would eventually return.

  Even after the funerals he couldn’t bring himself to believe it was true, that they were truly and eternally gone. He pictured them trekking through the Amazon jungle, his mother identifying the plants and animals, Sally quietly digesting the information, Big Steve feeling the texture of waxy leaves between his thumb and forefinger, his father foraging for their meals, a real Swiss Family Robinson adventure. They were easy thoughts, benevolent, a kindly offering from his mind to his soul. It couldn’t be true that they’d burnt to death in a falling aeroplane.

  The reaction of his hometown was kind. His parents’ friends visited with cards and offers of help, and it was during these visits that Sam was thankful for the internal numbness acting as a great wall, deflecting everything the world threw at him.

  At night though, when the phone calls stopped and the visitors left, the numbness would crack open and the fingers of truth grasped at him through the slits. A great hand was tugging at his centre. His entire family were gone and he was alone. Alone in the house, he watched his mother walk across the carpets, Big Steve sitting in the corners, Sally smiling at him, his father reading newspapers. The visions became so vivid, it was as if the images he superimposed on reality were actually happening.

  Time after time he asked the same question: How could this happen? And the cruel, uncomplicated answer kept coming back: Because it just has. In one awful moment everyone he loved had been wiped off the face of the earth.

  As he told her all this, Sarah said nothing. She put her hand over her mouth, and though tears lensed her eyes they didn’t break.

  ‘Sam,’ she said at last. ‘I’m so sorry. God . . . I – I don’t know what to say.’

  He shrugged and reached for his wine glass on the table, but when he tried to lift it he realised he was shaking.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  He couldn’t look at her all of a sudden.

  ‘Yeah I ju—’ He stopped himself. His voice had caught. ‘I’ve never told anyone this before. Sorry.’

  ‘Hey, don’t say sorry.’ Her voice a soft song.

  She put her hand on the top of his arm, and he started. The wine sloshed over the top of his glass on to the table. Sarah jumped up.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a cloth.’

  ‘Shit, sorry,’ he said, upset. ‘I’m gonna just . . . Can I use the bathroom?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  He swung his head around and caught a glimpse of her and the two tears that had run down her cheeks, which she wiped away with the back of her hand.

  In the bathroom he pulled on the light cord and took a massive breath. There was a tiny wood-framed window with a little spider living in a web in the corner. His breathing was erratic. He thought he could just tell her and it would be fine. It had felt right. He hadn’t expected for it to be like this. He thought he’d be able to handle it but he couldn’t. His mind was swimming.

  In the weeks and months after the accident Sam had isolated himself. The house was making him sick but he couldn’t bring himself to leave it. Offers of counselling were rejected and after a time Sam had grown weary of people’s offerings of help. In his mind he was readying himself for dealing with what had happened, but he wanted to do it the same way he wanted to do everything: alone. He’d unplugged the landline and refused to answer the door. He’d switched off his mobile and didn’t use the Internet.

  His friends had found it hard. Socially awkward, emotionally immature, they could not engage with his family’s death head-on. They showed their support by taking him to the pub, the cinema, board-game nights in the local community centre. But this just made him feel guilty, guilty for going on living when his family could not. And he hated how quiet he was, how unable to participate, as though his energy core had lost its fuel, and how he was nothing but a burden, a bore.

  In those few weeks, with the latticework skeleton of family gone, everything else in his life fell apart. And now, having spoken about it out loud for the first time, everything felt weird. He felt untethered, but not in a good way. He splashed cold water on his face and inspected himself in the mirror. What would they make of him? His parents. How disappointed would they be by the coward staring back from the mirror?

  Back in the living room Sarah had brought the bottle of wine over and refilled the glasses.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, looking at him over the back of the sofa.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Listen. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you all that. I don’t know why I did it.’

  ‘Sam, don’t be silly.’

  ‘I think I’m gonna go.’

  ‘I’ve just poured you a new glass of wine,’ she said.

  He smiled but didn’t move, and there was a long silence. He really couldn’t handle this. He reached for a way but there was nothing.

  ‘OK,’ she said, at last.

  The whole thing seemed staged, somehow. The room shook with the passing of a train, and he thought of that day in his past when they’d waved to him from the back of the car as they’d driven away. Steve and Sally smiling, two little kids with so much love in their hearts. It had been the last time he’d ever seen them. Before his world broke in half.

  The Phantasm #007

  Vulpes Vulpes

  Another cold night, frost on the blacktop like glitter. A truck rumbles down the
high street and the masked hero smiles. The economy turns, the world of man endures. He pushes recent events on the other side of the mask away – this is what a true champion of the people must do. This is the sacrifice.

  Perhaps the driver is heading to one of the nation’s mighty industrial complexes, like Telford, delivering the nuts and bolts and cogs to the myriad factories so machines can be made, brought forth from the countless assembly lines, into the world. And it is all done in darkness, at the aprons.

  From his perch atop the flat roof of the public library he reaches into his pack, past the night-vision goggles and HD digital camera, the rope and the handcuffs, until he finds what he’s looking for. A nice flask of coffee. Army issue. He pours himself a cup and drinks. Ah. Not much action tonight. A cat ambles up the empty street, finds a bush and disappears.

  There is a moment of satisfaction. Life in the costume is a form of uncomplicated bliss.

  Somewhere behind him he hears a noise. A whimpering sound. Behind the library he spies a stack of cardboard boxes. With the stealth of a professional gymnast he slides down the drainpipe to the gravel. His breath is a fog, his shoes crunch the frost as he approaches the boxes. From his utility belt he withdraws a flashlight and the frost in its beam glistens like quartz in a rock face. The whimpering continues. Something in distress. He shines the light across to the boxes. A scratching starts now too. The nervous sense of adventure tingles, and he steps on a branch. It snaps.

  Suddenly, all is silence.

  The boxes have been stacked in such a way there is a dark alley into the centre. The champion of the night halts. A black line runs down into the alley. Under the light the line turns a brilliant red. The immediacy of the blood puts a thump in his heartbeat. Slowly, he unpacks the boxes in the way a god might undo a world.

  Flashlight clenched between his teeth, when his breath is caught in the photons it billows and swirls. One box left until he will see into the heart of the cardboard alleyway. The line of blood shines with freshness. He leans in. Holds his breath. Takes the final box.

  And stasis.

  If the whole world spins around a central point, to our hero it is this moment.

  A pair of dark, almond-shaped eyes stare up at him. It is a baby fox, frozen in the flashlight’s beam, wrapped into a ball but in a strange, unnatural way. He guesses its size: twelve inches from the tip of its black nose to the tip of its white cloud tail. Its head is the size of a squash ball, its snout tiny but perfectly formed, its little triangular ears like sailboat sails covered in a soft orange fur. Two small front paws are splayed in front of it.

  A vision of woods, the fox asleep on a soft bed of moss.

  Two creatures living in two worlds, the wild and the civil, in a chance encounter. He hears his own voice: ‘It’s a baby fox.’

  It twists its body away from the light to reveal a puddle of blood, and its wound. A deep gash at the top of the hind leg. Beneath the brightness of the blood, a line of white bone. Our defender notices a small pool of vomit and considers the act of mercy killing. But it is a sacred thing, to save a life. He thinks of the Event that is his origin story.

  ‘You will not die today,’ he whispers to his fallen friend.

  He unhooks his backpack and finds his sweater, lays it inside one of the boxes and scoops the little fox as gently as he can on to its new bed. It’s too sick to struggle. But just before he releases it, he is swept by a wave of emotion and he brings the creature up. And kisses it on the head.

  Time now is of the essence. His automobile, the Black Phantom, is nearly a mile away. That’s six minutes. His digital watch beeps as he starts the stopwatch. He modulates his run to make it as smooth as he possibly can for the stricken creature. He reaches the car in good time, fires up the engine and cruises smoothly along the blacktop towards his secret lair, the baby fox in its box on the passenger seat. Autumn leaves spiral in his wake.

  He depresses the automatic garage door opener and sails into safety. Out the car, into the house and up the stairs, to the hidden chest in the closet. Secret compartment. Currency from many countries, but he needs good old-fashioned GBP. Vet’s bills don’t come cheap, he knows. £1,000 ought to do it. Back into the Black Phantom, satnav glows and the voice soothes.

  He wipes away a single tear. ‘I’m going to save you.’

  In the blink of an eye he reaches the twenty-four-hour veterinary practice. Good people doing good things. He parks away from the building; can’t be too careful with CCTV. The night is freezing and he almost slips. He sets the box down in front of the door and opens the lid. Scribbles a note.

  Please help this little tyke. £1,000 enclosed for fees. Send to RSPCA when better.

  £500 donation to RSPCA in progress.

  He places the envelope of cash in the box, presses the buzzer, and is away into the embracing arms of the night. He finds his way back to the Black Phantom and cruises through the dark, in silence, hands clenched on the wheel, fighting away the tears, the horror of his life, fighting away the darkness of his origin.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The house was quiet when he got back. In silence he stowed his costume away and tried to slow his mind. He’d known it would be hard to tell Sarah about the plane crash but this felt physical, like he’d undergone some terrible trauma. As he’d spoken to her it was like he was back there, and now, after creating that initial crack, the whole thing had split open . . .

  It was an Indian summer, the year of the crash. Long hot days ran into one another and Sam found himself more often than not in the haven of his Batcave, looking down on the quiet, secluded basin before opening his comic books and staring. He didn’t read them, couldn’t focus to that level, but he would stare at the simple coloured panels where everything was clear. Life was simpler in comic books, people drawn clearly; their trousers and shirts didn’t have shades of colour; the sky was blue and trees were green, everything as it should be.

  There is nothing more certain than the passage of time, his father used to say, and as time went on his concentration slowly returned and he found himself able to do simple things like watch the news, but still, every few minutes the shock of what had happened stabbed him and he’d lose the next few moments to grief.

  From the upstairs bedrooms at the back of the house he could look down the line of back gardens. Next door, on the right-hand side, weeds and grass grew between the paving slabs in the garden of his elderly neighbour, who’d died some months before and whose kids had yet to put the house on the market. Tendrils from the bushes snaked along gravel, and the swimming pool – the type that stands above ground level, constructed of a circle of vertical wooden slats – was empty. Cats gathered there, lying in the sun.

  Slowly, official-looking letters arrived, phone messages came from solicitors, but Sam ignored them all. Across the playing fields behind the house he watched cars speed past on the busy road, people out in the continuing world with continuing lives.

  The only contact he had was with his neighbour, Moira. She had taken to knocking on his window a few times a week to check how he was doing. Sometimes he would go into her house for tea and custard tarts, and she would offer advice on being strong and thinking about what his family would have wanted for him.

  The letters to his parents kept arriving but he never opened them, not even the ones marked as ‘urgent’, or ‘final notice’.

  One morning, he got changed and went into the back garden. The day was cool with a crisp blue sky and puffy clouds, glacier white. The green of the trees swayed in a light breeze and Sam climbed the fence into the deserted garden on the other side.

  Cats looked at him, plant seeds floated. The zone was somehow cleansed by having had no human contact. He sat on a wooden bench with flaking paint and opened his backpack to fetch a comic. It was the first Sandman collection, Preludes and Nocturnes, and he turned to the last of the eight stories, entitled ‘The Sound of Her Wings’. In it, the Sandman, maker of all the world’s dreams, meets up with his siste
r, Death. They walk together as she collects the souls of people and tells them their time is up. For that person, her visit is heralded by the sound of beating wings and then the person looks up, sees her, and she tells them it’s going to be OK. Sam found this version of death extraordinarily comforting, so much more beautiful than anything offered by religion or science. Why could it not happen like that? Or the way the band My Chemical Romance suggested: death coming to welcome you in the form of your most cherished memory. It didn’t matter, the truth. A great choice exists in life: truth or happiness?

  Sam scanned the pages of the story, Death and Dream sitting side by side on the steps of Washington Square Park, and then, all of a sudden, the light breeze flickering the corners of the pages, something happened that hadn’t happened in a long time. He began reading. He began reading the words on the pages, bubbles emerging from mouths, and as he did this there came a sensation of warm fluid flowing though him. He was reading again, as the perfect white clouds drifted across the dome and the wind moved serenely through the trees of the garden. The idea that his parents and brother and sister might not have died in horror but been welcomed by a kindly force into the void brought him tremendous comfort in that deserted garden. When he finished the story, he went back to the start of the comic. He read for hours and this time, when the pangs of loss hit him, they didn’t hold in their mass quite the same power.

  He started opening his parents’ letters. Most were unpaid bills. He needed to call all the companies and tell them what had happened, which he duly did over the course of the next week, and when he imparted the information his voice held together surprisingly well.

  The meeting with the bank was the most difficult. The manager took Sam into a small glass-fronted meeting cubicle and offered his most sincere condolences but there was still the small matter of the mortgage repayments, and did Sam know if his parents had life insurance? Sam did not know so the manager with a wave of his hand said not to worry as he would personally contact the Association of British Insurers, who would be able to find any policy that might exist, and in less than two weeks a cheque for an extraordinary amount of money arrived from a life insurance company Sam had never even known existed.