by Tom Graham
The farmhouse burned away. The smoke was released up into what was now open sky. Sam dragged himself to his feet and stared about.
I know this place … I’ve been here before … In dreams, I’ve been here before …
It was a bleak terrain of broken buildings and burnt-out cars. From where Sam found himself, at the top of a low hill that was all smashed rubble and pulverized concrete, he glanced for a moment at the pale disc of the sun, then tripped and stumbled his way down into a dead valley where overturned lorries smoked and smouldered. Brick dust kicked up and clogged his nostrils. An icy, acrid wind gusted along the valley, stinging his eyes. Half-blind and choking, Sam sought shelter in the skeletal remains of a building that rose ominously from the wreckage.
I’ve dreamt all this before …
He found himself inside a roofless ruin, all broken walls and empty, gaping windows. And yet, something in the layout of this place stirred up memories. This building had once been familiar to him. It had buzzed and thrived with life. He recalled uniforms … and desks … mountains of paperwork … banter, and bullying, and a rough camaraderie. Had it once been his school?
‘No, not a school,’ he said out loud. ‘Not a school in the regular sense – but I learnt a lot here anyway.’
He pointed, though he knew nobody was watching him.
‘My desk was here. And Chris’s was here. Ray sat somewhere over there, and the Guv’s office was along that wall. And right here –’ he stood on the spot ‘– right here was Annie. Desk, typewriter, filing cabinet, lamp.’
Was that it? Was that all that now remained of her – a set of disjointed memories? An empty space where once she had sat, with her desk and her typewriter, her filing cabinet and her lamp?
Sam sank to his knees.
‘So, I’m dead again, am I?’ he called out. His voice was swallowed up by the ruined shell of CID. ‘Is this where the dead souls come? Is this their little corner of hell?’
And what corner of hell was Annie in? Had she died in the fire, along with the rest of them? Had Gould found her and dragged her back across time and space with him? Or had she escaped?
I have to believe she got away. I have to. I couldn’t bear to think otherwise …
‘She didn’t make it, Sam,’ said the Test Card Girl gently, her voice coming from behind him. The sound of it did not surprise him in the slightest. This, after all, was her manor.
‘He got her?’ he asked, his voice husky and dry.
‘Just like I said he would, Sam.’
‘You’re trying to make me despair again. It’s what you always do.’
‘I told you it was hopeless, Sam. I told you it would all end very badly.’
‘Yes. Yes, you did.’
Sam sank forward until his face pressed against the hard ground. He could smell and taste dry brick dust. He waited for the tears, but they did not come. His heart was so broken that crying was beyond him. He did not know he could feel this desolate, this broken inside. His mind was like the blasted terrain that surrounded him. Empty, shattered, lifeless.
Dimly, through the numbness of devastating grief, he felt the Test Card Girl’s ice-cold hand rest against the back of his neck.
‘No arguments this time, Sam,’ she said gently. ‘No discussions. None of that. You just come with me like a good boy, and I’ll take you somewhere where the pain will go away. You’ll forget. You’ll forget everything. You’ll forget Annie, and your friend Mr Hunt, and all your other little friends. Ray. Chris. Maya. Your mother. Your life. You’ll forget all of it. And you’ll forget yourself. It will be like you never existed. Like you never existed, Sam … wouldn’t that be nice?’
Sam could not move a muscle. His body seemed to be devoid of life, though his heart was still beating, his brain still working. Every limb felt cold and dead.
‘Oblivion, Sam. It’s all you have left. It’s your only escape from how you feel now.’
What was Annie enduring, right at this moment? Where was she? What was Gould doing to her? Sam’s imagination began to torture him with terrible suggestions, and he fought to blot them out.
‘No …’ he murmured. ‘No, no, don’t do it to yourself, Sam. Don’t think. Don’t even imagine!’
‘But you will imagine, Sam,’ the Test Card Girl corrected him softly. ‘You can’t stop yourself. It will drive you mad. You’ll imagine, and you’ll go on imagining, Sam, over and over again, for ever. Because you’re dead now. Properly dead – not like last time. This is the real thing. No going back. You’re dead dead – and to prove it, you get one of these.’
He felt her icy hand brush against his own, gently closing his fingers around something. Opening his eyes, Sam turned his head, and saw that he was holding a piece of string that stretched upwards. It swayed slightly from side to side.
‘Come on, Sam. Let’s get this over and done with. Up you get.’
Sam sat up. The string in his hand was attached to a black helium balloon bobbing three feet above his head. His new badge. His passport to oblivion. The mark of a dead soul.
On his feet now, Sam stood and looked down at the upturned face of the Test Card Girl. Her cheeks were paler than ever, but her eyes were darker and deeper than he had ever seen them, as if each one was a pit that plunged down into cold infinity. The Girl tilted her head to one side. The corner of her mouth curled into a slow, sly smile.
‘All roads led to this point,’ she said. ‘Right from the start, this was where you were headed. I told you. This was always your fate. Annie has gone to her allotted place, and now you must go to yours. It’s all very sad, but that’s the way it is.’
Her smile widened for a moment, and her eyes glittered. There was a dull green light visible in the depths of those eyes that brought to mind the inscrutable stare of a cat.
‘Off we go,’ she said.
The Girl turned and led the way, and Sam followed, the black balloon bouncing sadly on the air above his head. His legs felt numb. His heart seemed to have slowed right down, and every beat was laboured and heavy. He could feel his internal organs sitting stodgily inside him, like vile heaps of frozen offal. When he blinked, his tired lids scraped across the hard, dry surface of his eyes. Every breath was a conscious effort, as if his lungs had forgotten how to do it.
Sam followed the Girl back out through the ruined doorway and along a dust-blown valley strewn with dead cars and shattered masonry. The overcast sky was growing very dark, the grey clouds lit dimly by the dying rays of the sun. A cold wind gusted down through the gulley, whipping up short-lived tornados of dust that writhed for a few seconds before breaking apart and vanishing for good.
Up ahead, a light was flickering. As he drew closer, Sam began to make out the square, round-cornered shape of an old TV screen. The boxy set, with its huge buttons, tuning dial and indoor aerial of circular wire, sat at the far end of the valley, resting on a low, wood-effect coffee table. It was pure seventies, a little slice of George & Mildred transplanted to the crumbling brink of Death.
The image on the screen became clearer as Sam got nearer. He saw figures, many hundreds or even thousands of them, walking away sadly towards a shadowy blackness that swallowed them whole as they stepped into it. Each figure held its own bobbing black balloon, carrying it with them into oblivion. From time to time, one of these dead souls would turn and look directly out of the screen at Sam, and when they did he glimpsed faces that he recognised. He saw Peter Verden, the self-styled leader of the Red Hand Faction, with his cold eyes and Jason King moustache; moments later, his pretty young protégé Carol Waye glanced back and then passed on. He saw Spider the boxer from Stella’s Gym, and the huge, lumbering form of bare-knuckle gypsy brawler Patsy O’Riordan. He saw Mr Fellowes from Friar’s Brook borstal. And he saw others; Brett Cowper, who had used his John Lennon glasses to slash his wrists in the cells, Denzil Obi, the murdered boxer – more, and still more, passing by in an endless parade.
‘Did you know that death had undone so many?’ the Test Card Girl said.
‘Such a crowd of dead souls … But they’re all going to oblivion, Sam. And that’s for the best. Everything will be forgotten – every pain, every regret, every loss. But every love, too, and every happiness, and every hope. It all goes. It’s all wiped away, and nothing remains. Go on, Sam. Join them. Go into nothingness. You’ll forget Annie, you’ll forget the agony she is going through, you’ll forget Mr Hunt and all those others … you’ll forget it all, because you will forget Sam Tyler. You will unexist. You will be nothing. Better that way. Too painful to go on existing, thinking of Annie, knowing what’s happening to her at the hands of Mr Gould – for ever.’
‘I could find her,’ Sam said in a dry, colourless voice. He was staring ahead at the TV screen, zombified with misery.
‘Find her, Sam? You couldn’t possibly do that.’
‘I could try. I could find her and save her.’
‘And where would you start? Where would you look? How would you reach her? You’d never manage it, Sam. And even if you did, what would you do when you got there? You can’t even imagine what that place is like. It’s not nice. And there all sorts of people there … rather horrid people … and they’d not be very welcoming, I can assure you. And they’re all bigger than you.’
‘Maybe …’ muttered Sam. ‘But still … I could try …’
‘No,’ the Girl said softly. ‘You’ve got your little balloon. All you have to do is walk forward. Your life’s over and done with now. Time to go.’
‘Time to go …’ Sam echoed, in a dead voice. And with that, he stepped forward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: YELLOW BRICK ROAD
Time to go.
The words echoed dully through Sam's broken mind as he stepped towards the TV set.
Time to go.
He felt the Test Card Girl gently, oh-so-gently nudging the small of his back with her tiny, frozen hand, urging him forward, prompting him not to turn back. Even though he could no longer see her small, pale face, he knew she was smiling.
Time … Time to go …
Time. The dying embers of his mind latched onto the word. Time. It mattered. Why? Why did it matter? How could anything matter now, here, on the edge of Oblivion?
And then something inside him clicked. A thought. A memory. Groping clumsily with numb fingers, he reached into his pocket. And there it was – the familiar gold-plated casing with the delicate chain wrapped around it. The fob watch. The last relic of Life.
Sam suddenly realised he could sense the ticking of the delicate mechanism inside the metal casement. The nerve endings in his fingers, dead and cold moments before, had enough life in them to detect the spinning of the tiny cogs, the shuddering of the tiny springs, the remorseless action of the tiny hands as they worked their way round the face.
Time. Time was ticking on. And life. Life was ticking on too. Not everything was cold. Not all souls were dead. Not all hope was lost, not while there was still the barest spark of life residing in Sam’s heart. If that battered little fob watch could carry on, then so could he.
The Test Card Girl nudged him again, but this time Sam turned on her. He felt a sudden rush of heat burst upwards though his body. It was rage. It was a refusal to die, despite all the odds stacked against him. It was defiance. It was life.
‘Keep going, Sam,’ the Girl urged him. And then the smile faltered on her face as she watched Sam’s black balloon go sailing upwards, released, discarded. Her young face clouded over, the brows pulling together into a frown. She opened her mouth to speak, to continue her exhortations for Sam to embrace oblivion, that he had no choice, that Annie was beyond all help and there was nothing he could do … but this time, Sam decided he’d heard more than enough. His fist caught the Girl square in the face. Like a professional, he followed through with his body, throwing his whole weight behind the blow. He knew that appearances could be deceptive, that that last thing this little girl was was a little girl, that she was old – very old – and that she had had this coming to her for a long, long time, the conniving, lying, evil, ice-cold little bitch.
But she was gone. Sam's punch sailed through empty air, almost unbalancing him. He span round, looked in all directions, but saw only the blasted landscape with its heaps of rubble and burnt-out cars. Glancing up, he saw that damned black balloon bobbing away against the darkening sky, sailing rapidly upwards.
He grabbed the watch from his pocket and clenched his hand around it.
‘I knew this thing mattered!’ he said out loud, kissing his fist. ‘I knew it, I knew it!’
It was life, and it was hope.
‘Annie!’ he bellowed, his voice swallowed by the cold wind. ‘Annie, it’s not over! I’m still here! I’m coming for you!’
Sam turned to the TV screen, with its sad host of dead souls marching into oblivion. He shouted at the screen, banged on the sides of the set, yelled, Don’t go in there! You don’t have to go in there! But if they heard him, those drab grey shades made no sign. In they went, into the enveloping darkness, each one carrying their little black balloon – unless it was the black balloon that was carrying them.
They were lost, all of them. Sam punched the TV in frustration, and then raced off along the valley. He had no clue where to go, how to cross the vast void that separated him from Annie. All he had was hope. And that, he realised now, was enough.
‘You always wanted to snuff out hope, didn’t you!’ Sam cried out to the Test Card Girl, wherever she might be. ‘That was always what you were about! Well to hell with you!’
He raised his fist defiantly as he ran, holding aloft the small, delicate pocket watch and the ticking, whirring, living mechanism that drove it.
‘I have a future! We have a future – me and Annie – together!’
The ground under his feet became less rough and uneven, and now Sam found he was racing along a paved pathway. He stopped to look down, and saw flat, yellow slabs beneath his feet. Looking ahead, he saw now that he was following a road of yellow bricks that plunged ahead straight across the dark wilderness. As the light failed, the road seemed to glow warmly.
‘You see?!’ Sam shrieked, almost hysterical. ‘You see that?! I did that! My hope did that!’
Sam was running again, running full pelt along the yellow brick road, yelling and whooping as if he had already won the day and rescued Annie and hurled Clive Gould back into the abyss forever. He felt invincible. He had turned back from oblivion, scorned death, chosen life, and even now was defying all the forces of darkness that stood between him and his beloved Annie.
And as he ran, he heard music, drifting in out the gathering night as if from a distant concert. It was song, mushy and echoic at first. But then, as it became more distinct, Sam recognised it – and burst out laughing.
‘You can’t plant me in your penthouse!’ he sang along, at the very tip of his lungs. ‘I’m going back to my plough!’
It was Elton. Dear, showy, flashy, gap-toothed, balding Elton with his silver jackets and star-shaped glasses and his gibberish song about dogs and toads and yellow brick roads. The music came in out of nowhere like an anthem of hope and life. It had spoken to him before, back in Joe’s Caff when he had been waiting for Annie, mingling with the hymns coming from the church across the road. Even then it had been trying to get its message through to him: don’t give up – keep on fighting – your future really does lie beyond the yellow brick road.
Perhaps the music was all in Sam’s mind. Perhaps the bleak landscape that surrounded him, and the road beneath his feet, and the TV screen with its sad parade of lost souls were all just in his mind too. Perhaps the Test Card Girl was nothing but the projection of his fears, and Annie the projection of his hopes, and the mighty Gene Hunt had been the embodiment of all his confused, contradictory, post-twentieth century concerns about manhood and masculinity. Perhaps it was all nothing but images on the movie screen of his own mind, a sunken dream though which he passed, oblivious to outer reality. Perhaps everything Sam saw and heard and felt and encountered was just
the product of a mind that was mad, or dead, or in a coma.
What did it matter what he was anymore? This shifting, insane kaleidoscope of 1973 kitsch seasoned with touches of existential horror was the world he had pitched up – the world of Gene Hunt. And that world was now Sam’s own. It was his home – his manor – his life, and nobody was going to take that away from him, not without one hell of a fight.
He strode on, his head up and his shoulders back, following the yellow brick road. In time, Elton John faded away. All he could hear was the moaning of the wind as it gusted in off the desolate, open plains, and the tip-tap of his boots striking the road. The sky grew darker as the light faded along the distant horizon, until the only illumination came from the dim, golden glow of the road itself. It plunged ahead, a yellow streak cutting across an infinite darkness, and Sam followed it.
And then something inside him, some sixth sense, told him he was no longer alone. He glanced back over his shoulder as the road stretched out behind him. Far away, almost lost in the distance, there were signs of movement. Something was coming up the road behind him, following him.
Sam’s instinct was to run. But run where? He had no choice but to follow the glowing path, and as far as he could see it led on interminably. All he would do is exhaust himself. And yet, he could not bear to stand and wait, delaying his search for Annie, prolonging her agony at the hands of Gould, simply to face whatever it was that pursued him.
Maybe whatever it is back there isn’t pursuing me, Sam thought. Perhaps it’s just another traveller on the road, like me – another rebellious soul who has refused Oblivion and struck out across the void.
It was an encouraging thought. But Sam knew he couldn’t afford to drop his guard, not out in here in this strange, wild zone that was off all the maps and far from help. If he was following the yellow brick road of his own psyche, he knew from experience that any denizens he might encounter along the way could well be bigger and uglier and far more dangerous than the villains he went up against in CID. And if what was happening to him now was no dream, no inner vision, but actual reality, then God alone knew what horrors inhabited this dreadful place.
