‘Who?’ Pan added.
The man let go of her wrist and motioned towards the street.
‘Everyone,’ he said.
Pan turned from those eyes with difficulty and forced her vision to focus on the street. This time she saw what had passed her by before. How had she missed that? How had she missed the car with a man hanging out of the driver’s seat, his face like a bruise, eyes wide and unseeing? And the bodies in the middle of the road, surrounded by blood? The woman sitting in a chair almost opposite her, leaning back as if examining the sky, arms dangling by her side, her chest stained red? A bird was perched on her shoulder. As Pan watched, it darted a beak into a staring eye socket. Something burst and Pan looked away.
The police officer shuddered and sat in the chair next to Pan. He coughed a couple of times, covering his mouth with a sleeve. When he stopped, there was a broad and sticky band of blood on his arm.
‘My wife and baby. Both dead,’ he said. He started to cry, but made no noise. Pan watched as the tears rolled down his cheek. ‘Drove home,’ he continued. ‘I can’t tell you what I saw on that drive. Too many horrors. Too many. Found them in bed. Dead. My wife. Laura. She had the baby in her arms. So small. She had barely started living and now she’s dead. I was too late, you see? You understand? I was too late to die with them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Pan.
‘Me too,’ said the policeman. He fumbled with something at his side, but Pan was still fixated on his haunted eyes and didn’t see what he was doing. ‘I came here,’ the man continued. ‘I have no idea why. Maybe to see if anyone survived. Who knows?’ He looked into Pan’s eyes. ‘There will be no one to bury us, you know? You know that, don’t you? We’ll rot here.’
‘I’m alive,’ said Pan.
‘Not for long,’ said the policeman. ‘We’re all dead, but some of us don’t know it yet.’ He raised his arm and put something into his mouth. It was long and dark, but Pan took a few moments to realise what it was. Even if she’d had the energy to try she wouldn’t have been able to stop him. The gunshot was loud and immediately the air filled with the bitter smell of burned flesh and gunpowder. The back of his head exploded in a mist of blood and bone fragments. For a split second he sat there, his eyes still fixed on Pan. Then he fell off the chair.
‘I’m sorry, but I have to get home now,’ said Pan. ‘My mother and my brother are expecting me.’ She couldn’t remember her brother’s name, but was confident it would come back to her in time.
~~~
Gaps. Whole featureless areas of memory. A plane crashing? Had she seen that? Something about a screaming noise that caused her to raise her eyes to the sky. A wing clipping a skyscraper, fragments of metal twisting and fluttering in the clear air. An explosion and a billowing column of dark smoke. Was that a memory?
The bodies littering an area of parkland. Someone with a gun staggering down a street, shooting into empty shops, laughing at the sound of windows smashing. A car speeding into a stanchion of a bridge, the vehicle disintegrating on impact, something flying through the windscreen. A girl in a white dress sitting in the road, playing with a doll and coughing. Holding onto the hand of a woman lying motionless next to her. A body dangling from a first floor window, knotted sheets around its neck. Pan didn’t know what was real and what was the coinage of her fevered mind.
She had no recollection of how she got there, but suddenly there was a familiar street and a familiar house. The front door was open and part of her registered that as strange. Pan staggered from one room to another but no one was there. The television was on, but there was no picture. Only a hissing storm of white static. She went to the local park. Her mother sometimes went to the park and there was nowhere else Pan could think of to go. It was as if, having decided to go there, she immediately found herself among trees and winding footpaths. The sun bathed everything in dappled light. Something attracted her attention – a distant noise, familiar yet elusive. It resolved itself into the creak of chains. She headed towards the sound, crossed in front of the lake and pushed through a barrier of low-hanging branches.
A playground. The creaking of chains was the passage of a child’s swing. A boy swung himself back and forth, his legs flexing as he shifted weight, gaining greater and greater height. A woman sat on a bench close by. She had her hand to her mouth. Pan thought the woman was her mother, the boy her brother. But she couldn’t be entirely sure. She took a few more steps towards them.
The woman was obscured regularly by the passing form of the swing, but she glanced up and smiled. It was a smile soaked in weariness.
‘I knew you’d come,’ she said.
Then she coughed. A couple of barks, her hand covering her mouth. The woman recovered, looked up at Pan apologetically. The swing passed across her face, regular as a metronome.
The second coughing fit was more intense. She doubled over, her head almost touching her knees. The cough this time was racking, painful. And it didn’t stop. She tried to get her breath, but the next wave came too quickly. Pan watched her face turn red, swollen with blood, her hands cupped over her mouth, body convulsing with the strain of bursting lungs.
Pan moved past the boy on the swing. She sat next to the woman on the bench, took her in her arms and thumped her hand on the small of her back. Nothing changed, except the coughing redoubled in intensity. It was as if the woman was being shaken apart. A drop of blood oozed between the woman’s fingers, dropped to the ground, a crimson coin between her feet. It was followed by another and another and yet another. The splatters were separate bright circles. Then their edges merged, puddled. Before Pan’s eyes, the area of red spread, the drops no longer falling from the woman’s hands individually, but in long strings. She glanced up at the boy on the swing.
He was describing a slower, lazier arc through the air now. He coughed, but she couldn’t hear him. The woman was making too much noise. The boy took one hand from the chain of the swing and rubbed at his mouth. He was coughing all the time now. When he took his hand away, it was smeared with red. Pan stood, torn between the two – the woman on the bench and the boy arcing through the summer sun.
~~~
Perhaps Pan lay down in the park, caught between two deaths. Perhaps she stretched out onto the grass and let the sun play on her face. After a while, she was aware only of silence. Possibly she fell asleep. Or passed out. Nothing made any sense. She couldn’t remember when anything had ever made sense. The silence wrapped her like a blanket and she surrendered to it.
Time had no meaning. But some time must have passed because she became aware, by degrees, of a change in the quality of the silence. Something buzzing. Another familiar sound, but she was far too tired to identify it. Pan just wanted it to go away, an annoying insect disturbing her dreams. It didn’t go away. It became louder, the buzzing resolving itself into a drone. A small part of her conscious mind was aware of a wind against her face. It wasn’t a sweet breeze. It smelled of oil and dust and made her cough. Then one final memory. Being lifted. Someone talking in her ear, though she couldn’t make out any individual words. A sense of movement, the drone of rotating blades and the certainty that she was lifting further and further into the sky, the park shrinking beneath her, taking her away from the world.
Her mind was full of horrors and wanted nothing more than to shut down. But one image nagged away at her, like a dull toothache. Not her mother tearing her lungs apart on a park bench, nor her brother’s blood-soaked hand. Not the spray of brains as a bullet tore through the back of a policeman’s head. None of those curiously fragmented pictures of death.
She thought about the man in the pedestrian precinct, the one she believed had been following her. It was the most unremarkable of memories, but she felt it was important. More than important. Crucial.
But Pan gave herself up to the dark.
Chapter 1
A garden. Of sorts.
Flowers were growing from multicoloured pots. The ground was rough and solid rock. Here and there, small patc
hes of lichen had found a foothold in a crack and struggled for life, but otherwise the terrain was barren. The garden lay on a fairly flat area on the summit of a mountain. It was as if someone had roughly chopped off the very tip of a pyramid, to leave an irregular patch a couple of hundred metres square. Standing in the centre of the garden, it was only possible to see that patch of stone, dotted with flower pots from which a variety of plants bloomed. They were mainly pink heathers in the pots, hardy plants to withstand cold and freezing winds, but there were also other flowers she couldn’t identify, reds and greens and yellows. It was a grey canvas splashed with dots of brilliant colour at irregular intervals. The garden was an abstract painting.
Pandora Jones stood at the centre. The cold seeped into her bones and a thin wind slipped like a scalpel through her light ankle-length smock. It pressed the fabric against her body. Bare feet burned against the ground. She had no idea how she had got here. There was nothing in her head, no memory that connected the coldness of the present to anything before. She came to life slowly, senses clicking one by one into place. The knife of the wind, the solidity of the rock beneath her feet, the colours pressed against her eyes.
She moved without conscious thought. Her right foot lifted, took a step. And her left foot flexed at the ankle, lifted as the right settled on the rock. Her body obeyed commands she was not aware of issuing. She moved towards a grey horizon where stone met mud-coloured sky. As she did so, the scene was gradually exposed, each step revealing further details. Five paces from the edge of a cliff, she stopped and looked around. Her mind was beginning to process, but in a mechanical way. Her eyes took in details but she could relate them to nothing. At the centre of her consciousness was a series of horrendous images, but they seemed distant somehow. Like a nightmare dimly recalled, from which her mind shied away.
The mountain she stood on was dizzying in its height, but now she realised its true scale. Behind was a range of other mountains which made the one she stood on seem tiny in comparison, a child of the vast mass at her back, nestled up as if for protection. Their pinnacles were lost in cloud and there was no way of knowing their height. They punctured the grey sky and disappeared. Nothing moved against their sheer faces, except occasional swirls, tiny dots of birds against patches of snow or ice. The range defied understanding, so she turned her eyes towards something more easily understood. Something smaller. Pan gazed down at the world spread beneath her.
The mountain ranges hugged the scene as far as she could see from left to right, impossibly steep sides to a bowl that led to a distant sea. She fixed her eyes on that. Even from this distance she could see the faint ripple of waves against a rocky shore. Small flecks of white, the tips of swells, changed constantly so that the grey expanse of water seemed somehow alive. Then she noticed a place where the coast curved into a bay, a thin sweep of land that protected the waters within its embrace. Dotted in the bay was a fleet of boats, maybe a dozen in all. They looked like children’s toys. And close up against the shoreline was a cluster of shapes, maybe huts and other larger buildings. A village of some kind, built around the port. The scene was familiar, yet at the same time utterly alien.
She moved her line of sight further up from the sea. The sense of cold was becoming more sharply defined with every passing moment. The next feature of note was puzzling. It was not something she immediately recognised. Her mind had to work on it. A strange structure had been built about one kilometre, maybe two, inland of the village. Her first thought was that it was a wall, but if so, then it was truly huge. It stretched from the mountain range on her left all the way across to the range on the right. It blocked off the sea and the village nestled up against it. There was no way to reach the water without crossing this structure. At regular intervals, slim towers sprouted from the building and pointed towards the sky. There was something strangely unsettling, disturbing even, about it. Was it designed to keep things out? Or keep things in? She didn’t have the energy to explore the thought in more detail. But she filed the questions away for closer examination later.
On her side of the wall were a bewildering variety of buildings clinging to every patch of exposed rock. Strange buildings, some vast and sprawling. It was almost impossible to put things into perspective. The plateau she stood on towered above the buildings beneath and the height played tricks with her vision. Her eyes flickered over them, tried to find points of reference. The layout appeared chaotic. Some places were clustered together as if part of a specific community. Other buildings sprawled apart from the others. Thin tracks wove between the structures, forming maze-like paths that must serve as roads. Off to her left was a river, houses packed along its banks. A few patches of green here and there relieved the monotony of buildings. A forest, small and lush, crouched in the foothill of the mountain where the river seemed to have its source.
Pan was almost unaware of the coat being draped around her shoulders. Her mind was so occupied with trying to make sense of her surroundings that she scarcely noticed. But the sudden warmth made her start. She turned.
The man smiled at her. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You must be cold.’
She pulled the coat around her and nodded. The wind still numbed her face, but she could already feel her body warming inside the new covering. She was dazed, as if waking from a long and deep sleep. There were questions she needed to ask, but it was too difficult to pin them down. So she simply nodded again and turned her eyes back to the view.
‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’ said the man. Pan said nothing.
‘It’s why I’m so pleased this is the Infirmary,’ the man continued. ‘The best view you’ll get anywhere around here, in my humble opinion. I come out here as much as possible, provided the weather is good, which, to be honest, it hasn’t been so far. And the flowers provide some colour. Living things. Beauty in the bleak terrain. The Garden on Top of the World. Cheers me up.’
The words buzzed in Pan’s head. They were annoying and she wanted to wave them away. Instead, without thinking about it, the word spilt from her lips. It left a strange, metallic taste in her mouth.
‘Infirmary?’
‘Yes. A hospital. It’s behind you. Where you were sleeping. At least where I thought you were sleeping. Until I came in to do my rounds and found your bed empty. I’m glad you’ve woken up. But I think it’s time you got back to bed. You’ll catch your death out here. In my professional opinion.’
Pan watched a speck in the sky swirl and ride the wind. It was too far off to see what type of bird it was.
‘What is this place?’ she asked.
‘All of this? What you can see below you? This is The School.’
She absorbed his words, but they made no sense. She nodded and hugged the coat closer. The man moved in front of her and looked into her eyes.
‘Do you remember your name?’ he asked.
‘Pandora. Pandora Jones.’
‘Excellent,’ he said and smiled. ‘Sometimes our patients experience residual amnesia. I’m glad you remember.’
Pan said nothing.
‘Pandora,’ the man continued. ‘A classical name. The bringer of mischief into the world.’ He chuckled. ‘I only hope you don’t bring much mischief into this world. Can I call you Pan, for short?’
‘Fine,’ she said. The speck in the sky had disappeared. Pan tried to spot others but failed. The cold was invading the coat. She hugged it even closer.
‘What happened to me?’ she asked.
The man took her hand and Pan focused on his face. It was crisscrossed with wrinkles, around his eyes and across his brow. A face made for laughing, Pan thought. He was small and overweight, a pair of half-moon glasses perched on his nose, cheeks ruddy and bulging, hair parted in an unsuccessful attempt to hide a wide bald patch. When he parted his lips she caught a glimpse of discoloured teeth. He shifted his fingers onto her wrist, felt for her pulse. Pan glanced down at the white bandage on her forearm. Her hip ached.
‘Do you remember what happened out ther
e?’ he asked.
Pan considered the question. Sudden images flooded in and she closed her eyes against them. She took a quick intake of breath and tried to close her mind to the memories.
‘I see you do,’ said the man. ‘You have been through a lot, Pandora Jones. Like everyone here. But there will be time to come to terms with it. If that’s possible. In the meantime, you need warmth and rest, my dear. Come on. Come with me.’
Pan allowed herself to be turned and led away from the cliff’s edge. A low, brightly lit building nestled against the mountain face behind. In front of the building was a paved area, with plastic tables and chairs dotted around, but it was deserted. Directly behind the area was a set of French doors, one side open and rocking slightly in the wind. The man led her past the cluster of outdoor furniture and through the open door.
A hospital ward. She let her eyes roam the room. Eight beds were ranged against the far wall, facing the French doors and their flanking windows. All were empty. The man led Pan to what was apparently her bed. The sheets were rumpled, presumably thrown back when she got up. She allowed herself to be helped back in. She was tired. A sudden weariness swept over her as he tucked the sheets in and fluffed the pillows.
‘I think you might need a little something to help you sleep,’ said the man. He opened a leather bag at the side of the bed, and took out a small case. Pan glanced at the window. From here she could see the white-shrouded mountain peaks against the muddy sky. The image blurred as she looked. Her eyes were too tired to correct it.
‘No!’ She sat straight up, back pressed against the hard bedhead. ‘Get it away from me.’
The man paused. He had been tapping the syringe to remove an air bubble. The girl’s eyes were wide and staring, her arms trembling as they braced against the bed, pushing herself back. He glanced at the syringe, hid it behind his back.
‘Pan,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. You don’t have to have an injection if you don’t want. It’s fine. No one will force you to do anything. Here. I’m putting it away.’
Pandora Jones: Admission Page 2
