I said this was the right way. It was. But she’s hiding. Just wait.
They waited. Things came and went in the chaos – the same things again and again, although the scale changed radically. A man’s fist filled the sky, his dark eyes floating above it. It descended towards them but was gone before it hit. Then it was right in front of Jess’s face, shrunk to its proper size. At that point-blank range, she could see that the knuckles were streaked with blood, red-raw from recent impacts. The dog’s jaws gaped repeatedly, and the smell of its breath hit them like a wave. Jess could feel its teeth closing on her arm, could feel herself dragged off her feet, as helpless as a puppet, but it wasn’t happening. She was still standing there, with Alex at her side. She hadn’t moved at all.
Worst of all was her own face, regurgitated out of the random swirl of shapes and colours at least as often as the man and the dog. Her eye was bruised, her lip swollen – but her features were twisted into a predatory leer, as though she wore the damage deliberately, like a threat or a warning.
Through it all a baby cried, and the sound of the siren came and went until that sounded like crying too.
This is terrible.
I told you, Alex said. But we can use it to find her. Listen.
And again, listen wasn’t the word he used or the thing he meant. He meant that Jess had to pay attention with a different sense – one that she didn’t think she had. But as soon as he said it, she began to feel it. A sort of tension, not sound but just beyond sound, like a million split and broken fingernails drawn down a million blackboards.
It was Passmore’s pain they were hearing. Her emotion, transmuted into white noise. And Alex was right: it gave them a trail to follow. She took a few tentative steps, then stopped because almost at once there was something at her feet that she nearly tripped over.
She knelt to look at it, a sick fascination creeping over her as she realised what it was.
A cat. Not a real one, but a child’s toy. It looked as though it had been loved to death, the body squeezed out of shape and the head narrowed to a bullet like the head of a baby just coming through the birth canal. Its black and ginger fur stuck up in tufts where it was there at all: there were big bald patches on its tummy and on one of its front legs.
Its name was Cassie. It had sustained most of this damage not through years of being cuddled but in a single traumatic night when it had gone into the washing machine in the Majestic Hotel in Eastbourne, accidentally taken off the bed along with the sheets. Cassie had had a purr up to that point, which was activated by tilting her from side to side. Something had happened to the mechanism when it got flooded with water: after that, Cassie’s purr sounded like a death rattle.
Jess wasn’t sure how she knew all this, but she knew it in a way that didn’t leave any room for doubt.
A lot of other knowledge came along with that rush of second-hand recognition. This was more than just a toy: it was a shield – the last rampart Passmore had thrown up in the face of thoughts too terrible for her to bear any more.
Passmore was right here. Inside the cat, or behind the cat, or peering out from somewhere really close – watching Jess as she knelt beside the battered little toy like a paramedic beside a body after a car crash.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Hannah,” Jess murmured. It seemed to be a reasonable place to start. She said some more things after that. A lot more things. About the dog, and the man with the heavy fists, and about the baby, although she hadn’t ever seen the baby, only heard it crying. The story Shannon McBride had told about Hannah’s last suicide attempt made it clear enough how the baby had come to be a strand in all this hurt and horror.
The one-sided conversation started slow and got slower. Jess had no idea how to do this. She was trying to change the way Hannah Passmore felt about very fundamental things, including herself. She was probably doing more harm just by being here than any number of words could balance out.
And it wasn’t words that did it in the end. It was the baby. As she talked about it, as she asked Passmore what its name was and why it was crying, Jess found herself describing the shape of a baby with her hands in the air in front of her. And slowly, in stop-start increments, like water dribbling into a bowl, the baby came to inhabit that space until Jess to her astonishment was holding him in her arms.
She knew this wasn’t a real child, any more than the dog or the man or the toy cat were real. Any more than her own battered face looming out of the dark was really her. It was an image conjured up at the point where her words touched Passmore’s memories.
But it was an image with power.
The colours in the churning mass around her shifted. They didn’t lighten, but the drab greys and browns began to be broken up by other colours, and the siren sound lost its distinctness, became some other sound that Jess couldn’t make out: someone singing a lullaby maybe, or children chanting multiplication tables in shrill, clamouring voices.
Passmore was standing in front of her. Showing up at last in her own dream.
Jess stood. The legs she didn’t really have felt shaky. She held out the baby and Passmore took it. For a moment, the two women were looking right into each other’s eyes. Moulson could read nothing into that stare, intense though it was. She wasn’t even sure if it meant that Passmore knew she was there.
I’m not, she thought. I’m not here. I’m a dream. Inside another dream.
“He needs changing,” Passmore said. She was still looking right at Jess, not down at the baby. She spoke with slow, massive emphasis.
“That’s probably why he’s crying,” Jess agreed.
Passmore didn’t seem to hear. She walked away, singing to the baby in a throaty undertone they could barely hear.
The ghost of Alex Beech watched her go with a troubled, disapproving look on his face.
She still doesn’t like you, he said after a few moments’ silence.
“I don’t need her to like me. Where’s the door, Alex?”
Everywhere, he told her curtly, already turning his back and walking away. Jess ran to keep up with him. She thought he was probably right – that you could walk in any direction here and get to where you wanted to be, as long as you knew what you were doing. But she still didn’t, and the thought of being trapped in Hannah Passmore’s nightmares terrified her.
As they walked back together through the endless dark, she tried to placate Alex. “I know you thought you were helping me when you scared Hannah,” she said. “And it’s wonderful that you would want to protect me, Alex, it really is. You’re my only friend in Fellside. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” When he still didn’t talk, she tried to break down his sullen silence by another route. “How did you learn to do all these things? To find your way around in this place? It must have taken you ages.”
It’s not hard.
“It’s hard for me. It seems to go on for ever.”
The ghost shook his head emphatically. Nothing goes on for ever. If it did, there wouldn’t be anything else, would there?
56
That night also, Sylvie Stock fell asleep at her desk in the infirmary and had her very own Moulson dream – joining that party a little late, all things considered.
She dreamed she saw Moulson walking down a street in Walton, Liverpool, which was where Stock was born and where she lived until she was nineteen years old. They were on Breeze Hill, the street that led from the ring road down to Walton Hospital. Stock was walking behind Moulson, hurrying on her way to somewhere, but she had to slow down because Moulson was right in her way. Moulson didn’t seem to notice her – didn’t speed up her pace or step aside or even look around.