Talk about timing. These people were making no effort to help me at all. I waited there, suspended, knowing that if you don’t make a movement you can be amazingly invisible. On the other hand a faint tremor of your eyelashes and you can be spotted a k away. That’s how it worked in the bush anyway, and I had to assume it’d be the same here.
Then the ivy pulled out by the roots and I fell backwards into the garden.
I landed on the hydrangea. I don’t mind hydrangeas normally but now I realised just how strong and hard those branches are. Spiky even. The ivy was on top of me and I lay there for a moment too shocked to move. The fall had knocked the wind out of me. I was wondering who’d catch me first, the people in the car or the people in the house. I started to struggle. Humans are so stupid at times like that, well at least I am. Caught between the minor pain of being spiked by the hydrangeas, and the major pain of being splattered into pieces by high-velocity bullets, I was pretty much six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. Cursing the hydrangeas and feeling some really sharp, horrible pain in different places, struggling to get out of the bush, and at the same time listening for an opening door, running footsteps, shouts of alarm, rifles rattling as they were lifted into position… with one eye I was looking at my left arm to see if it was bleeding, with the other I was looking at the house to see if lights were coming on.
The amazing thing was that no-one appeared from any direction, running or walking, questioning or shouting, no-one with guns and no-one without them. The silence of the district continued unbroken. I heard the car going on down the street and a truck changing gears in the distance, and I heard all the little creaks and rustles that hydrangeas probably always make when someone’s fallen into them and is getting out again, but that was it.
It seemed incredible, but I wasted no more time thinking about it and took full advantage of the second chance I’d been given. Trying to ignore the sore bits all over my body I limped to the darkest corner of the little garden and stood there for a moment trying to work out a new plan.
Despite my certainty about Gavin being close, I still did wonder if I’d come to the right house. Where were the sentries? The place seemed so normal, so quiet, so suburban. But one thing I’d learned in the war, if I hadn’t known it already, was that ultimately people always slip up. I’d done it myself often enough. It doesn’t matter how organised you are or how important the situation is. It didn’t matter that my dad had all the joined ewes so neatly separated from the unjoined ones, and that for year after year nothing had ever gone wrong. Sooner or later some idiot slipped up and left a gate open and you had a big problem. I knew that idiot all too well.
Sooner or later a guard goes to sleep or nicks off to have a cigarette or to visit the toilet. Or you forget to have someone on sentry that night. Or you’ve rented a great DVD and everyone wants to watch it and you agree you’ll go back on guard straight afterwards. Or you’re on the phone or you’re with your girlfriend. Or you’re drunk.
They’d had Gavin for a while now and maybe they were getting casual. No human in the history of the planet has stayed alert and focused 24/7, more like, well, I’d guess, about 3/7.
That didn’t help me formulate a plan though. I couldn’t see any way into the house. It was only out of desperation, and a sort of Monty Python sense that anything lunatic is possible, that I did what I’d thought briefly about before. I snuck over to the front door and turned the handle.
It turned smoothly and easily. That still didn’t prove anything. I turned it to its fullest extent and pushed slightly. The seal that a closed door makes with the doorframe pops like a whisper. I heard it and I felt it and in the dim light I even saw it. I still could hardly believe it. Maybe the door was held by a loose kind of lock that would make itself known in the next few centimetres. I pushed a little, to see. Nothing. No resistance at all.
The aches from simultaneous multiple hydrangea pokes dropped away suddenly. My skin felt so hot I thought it might blister. I hoped the door was as smooth as it felt so far, that it wasn’t going to creak and groan as I squeezed it open. I hoped the person in charge of oiling the front gate wasn’t also in charge of this door. I hoped someone oiled this one frequently, like daily. Most of all I hoped there was no-one waiting for me on the other side. I stopped breathing. The door had become my heart. All my energy was now out of me and in it. I pushed it open.
It did go pretty quietly, that was the good news. I got it open to about sixty degrees, and stared down the corridor. It was long, a sort of pale orange with a square wooden table halfway down, and a dim light showing at the far end. Not very attractive I gotta say. The light was coming from somewhere round the corner; the corridor light itself was off. I could see at least two doors, but there might have been a third one. At the end of the corridor you could either turn right or go up a staircase. The good news was that there were no soldiers standing there. There was no-one at all.
I did the only thing I could and went in, closing the door behind me. Jesus, sometimes as I write this stuff the hair on the back of my head stands up like I just had a crewcut. I won’t go on about it but it was not easy for me to go into that house. The hardest thing though was when I closed the door. I had to do it so no-one in the house would feel a draught blowing through the place and get suspicious, but there was a finality about doing it that had me wondering if I were coming to the end of my journey.
The journey of my life that is.
As I went through the door I pulled out the thing that had been a heavy weight in my pocket since I got it from Toddy. I don’t care what anyone says, there are times when a gun is very comforting to have. There is something cold and sinister and cruel about hand guns, but I didn’t want to go through that house without one.
I was half-a-dozen steps down the corridor before I realised something was leaning against the back of the square wooden table. In a way it was a good thing to see, in another way it was the most horrible of sights. There may have been families who liked to have a couple of firearms lying around in their front corridor for the kiddies to play with, but I didn’t think it was very likely. Not a high-powered automatic rifle, so new it looked like it had just been unpacked.
For a moment I debated whether it was best to leave it there or do something with it. Every second that I wasted in the corridor increased the chances of someone finding me. On the other hand, if this thing was loaded and ready for action, it might be in my best interests in the long term to do something about it. So I crouched, put my own gun on the floor and, with the stealthiest movements I could make, eased out the magazine. From the weight of it I’d say it was jampacked. There was nowhere to hide it, so I shoved it down the front of my jeans.
Picking up Toddy’s handgun I went on my merry way. The doors were closed and there was no light underneath them. It was possible Gavin was in one of these rooms, but for some reason I assumed he was upstairs. For the sake of security, surely that would be where you kept a prisoner.
I reached the end of the corridor still not able to see the source of the light coming from the right-hand side. I assumed there would be a kitchen and probably a dining room out there. But I heard the murmur of voices, and the scrape of a chair, so it seemed like people were awake, even at this hour of the night. I had to take the staircase, even though I was scared to do so. I don’t know what it is about staircases, but they always creak, and I knew it would be impossible for me to get to the top without making some noise. But it seemed better than the alternative, of bursting in on a couple of terrorists as they enjoyed their late-night coffee.
So I started up the stairs. I did it really heavily and slowly, putting all my weight on each step, trying to suffocate any noise the steps were tempted to make. That seemed to work OK. There were creaks, but they were reasonably minimal, and I didn’t think they would bring anyone from the kitchen or the back of the house.
It took me about ten minutes to get up that staircase, or that’s what it seemed like. I knew it was important to go slowly, for the sake of silence, but my problem was to make myself move at all. The higher I got, the slower I went, because it became a mental battle to get up to the next step. I’ve never climbed Everest, and don’t have any immediate plans to, but those stories of people battling their way to the summit, metre by weary metre, as blizzards smack their bodies with snow and hail and ice probably go pretty close to what I was feeling. But with me it was all in the mind. There was no blizzard, just the one in my head, bombarding me with fearful advice. Reaching the summit brought no feelings of pride or delight, just made the fear worse, so that I stood on the top step diseased with it. There were no lights up here, but there were too many choices. Another staircase ahead of me led to the next floor, and a staircase behind seemed to go to a couple of rooms at about the same level. But there was also a corridor to the right, which I thought probably went to the next house, as though they were joined. My instinct was to go further up, as far away from the voices below as I could. Trying to put myself into the minds of these guys, and wondering where they would store an abducted kid, I decided going up further was probably the smart thing to do.
It seemed like the staircase behind me was the less important, the less impressive. It was like it went up to
