distressed him most. Each time he had the dream he would moan, a dull cry muffled by the leather interior, heard by no one.
Finally the grey mountain light seeped through the car windows and into his eyes. He put the seat up and stepped out of the car. His body was stiff and the chill morning did nothing to ease him. He sat on the bonnet of the car and stared into the valley where he and his family had lived for three generations.
The light came slowly. He didn’t know if he wanted it to come faster and reveal the truth or for the sun to change its mind and never illuminate his life again. At first when he saw the column above the city he thought it was smoke but the shape was to uniform for that to make sense.
As the morning gained strength he realised that what he could see was a hundred thousand tubes stretching beyond vision into the sky. Everyone was wired up to…for the briefest moment he had the word ‘heaven’ in his mind but it was gone almost before it was formed. Johnson knew that heaven had no wires. That which was above him, beyond his sight; no, that was not heaven.
He abandoned the car and walked away from the road into the hills. Finding himself somewhere in the tree line, he was cocooned for an hour or so in the damp air of pine shadow. Too soon though, the trees thinned out and ended. He was nearing one of the lower summits.
His body eased out with the walking and although the air was chill against his face, his blood was warm. He stopped for a moment. There was no one around. The forest and the hills were silent apart from the occasional birdcall. The solitude embraced him and for a short time he felt a positive surge, a thrill of freedom.
A rustling nearby caught his attention immediately in the quiet ambience. He looked to where the noise had come from and saw a fox darting for cover in the undergrowth. From the top of the fox’s head a thin black tube extended skyward. The fox was there and then gone in an instant but the image did not escape him. He knew what he had seen and what it implied. A bird flew overhead. It too had a tube connecting it into the blue. Looking back at the trees, he saw that some of them were similarly interfaced with the sky. He turned away and struck out a pace for the top of the mountain.
Half an hour later he was there, staring out across the land. Back towards his city the view was relatively normal although he could still see the waving tower of black above it.
When he looked deeper into the range of mountains, a harsher cold than any frosty morning could instill spread out from his heart. The highest peak of the range was partly shrouded in mist and cloud but he could still see the monstrous black colon that protruded from its loftiest crest. The mountain’s tube must have been dozens of metres across at least.
Nothing was free; the very land itself was invaded and ensnared. He raised his hands to the sky and dropped to his knees in the loose shale of the mountainside.
“Why?”
The tears came first. He covered his face with his hands, hiding himself from the truth of the world around him and wept. When he was spent, a rage grew in the vacuum behind his sobs.
His shaking hands reached up above his head and took hold of the tube. In response it stiffened and clung harder to his skull. He drew down some slack from the sky and with a force summoned from the core of his soul, he ripped it from its housing beneath his hair.
Two screams echoed high in the hills, one of which was not his own.
Through the cloud of pain around his head he stared into the open end of the tube and saw traces of his own blood around its opening. Inside the tube were smaller, open-ended tubules leaking clear fluids and several strands of what appeared to be wire and fibre optics. The tube pulsed in his hand with a life of its own, bleeding some kind of serum onto the barbecue apron he was still wearing. Around the opening of the tube, six thick, curving needles clawed and clenched at the air. Then, with a force he could not resist, the tube was drawn quickly upwards and disappeared into the clear morning light. He tested the wound on his crown with tentative fingers and could feel tiny holes where his skull had been penetrated by the workings of the tube. He thought he felt fine, considering the nature of the damage, but he seemed to have developed a problem with his vision; everything he looked at now appeared vaporous and insubstantial.
He walked back down to his car with blood leaking through his hair and down onto his collar. He drove the car back to his house but had difficulty controlling it, as if he were handling the wheel and gear shift several pairs of gloves. After several collisions with roadside barriers, he abandoned his car near the bottom of the hills and walked the rest of the way home with his thumb out. No one stopped.
He found Angelina hugging the children on the sofa. All of them were crying.
“It’s OK, Angie. I’m back. I’m alright.”
No one looked up.
“Angelina, kids. It’s me.”
No one with a tube ever sensed Johnson’s presence again.
Chapter 10
For a few days he wandered through the town visiting work colleagues and friends, each night returning home to his family. There was no response from anyone no matter how loud he shouted. When he tried to touch people his hands slipped through them as if they were spirits. The only things that he could touch in the world were the tubes. He discovered this when he knocked Bill Shuckman’s as he tried to touch his previous superior’s head. Shuckman had jumped in shock and shaken his head, as if to clear it, before carrying on with what he had been doing.
He understood then that it had never been his tube pulling at him. The tube, he realised, was the only real thing in the world and all it wanted was to remain a secret. He reasoned that someone else had torn free of their tube just as he had. They had been pulling on his tube to get his attention. Whoever it was had succeeded.
Chapter 11
Each night he sat with his grieving family, talking to them, trying to reassure them that he was all right. The world continued to be indistinct to him and his influence over objects remained lessened but not gone. The temptation to pull on Angelina’s tube to let her know he was still with her was hard to resist. He thought about it all the time.
Finally, one night, as she and Matthew and Rebecca watched TV, he stood behind her place on the sofa and reached out to take hold of her tube.
“I believe that would be a mistake, Robert Johnson.”
He turned around to see a face he found familiar but could not place. It belonged to a man about his own age; a man whose body, unlike everyone else’s appeared clearly defined and solid. The man stood in the doorway to the kitchen, unnoticed by anyone else despite his rather commanding tone and presence. Just like Johnson, he was tubeless.
Johnson let his hands drop to his sides.
“You can see me?” He asked.
“Yes,” said the man. “Very clearly. These others, however, are a little…misty.”
“You’re the one that caused me to do this?” Johnson leaned forward to expose the place on top of his head where his hair had begun to grow back.
“I’ve set you free, have I not?”
“No you haven’t. Not at all. This is a worse prison than the last one. Far worse. No one even sees me now. No one can touch me.”
“Isn’t that a relief?”
Johnson ignored the question. He stepped towards the man and reached out. He took hold of the man’s shirtsleeve and rolled the cloth between his fingers. It felt real. It felt good. When the oddness of such a gesture struck Johnson, he let go.
