Chapter 15
The shoes he’d stolen were more like slippers. Paper ones. Flimsy. His feet were cold. His torso too. He crouched down behind a bush and waited for the guard to amble past on his midnight round.
He’d timed this from his window on the third floor. He only had a few seconds before the people in white would notice he was gone and sound the alarm. The seconds ticked by. Finally the guard appeared, whistling as he walked. The moment the man was out of sight he darted towards the wall and swung himself up into a tree that brushed up against it. He scrambled along a branch until he was at the same height as the top of the wall and then he hung over the side and jumped, landing in a crouch on the sidewalk below.
He stood up quickly, scanning the street. It was eerily quiet. The avenue of trees spreading their thick branches overhead buried him in shadows. Headlights suddenly swept across him. He bowed his head and started walking, trying to look inconspicuous – which was hard given that he was wearing only a pair of bright-green scrub trousers.
He knew he needed to find out where he was. But, more importantly, he needed to figure out who he was. Before the monsters with the fangs and the tails came after him. Because, though he couldn’t remember much of anything else and didn’t even know his own name, he did know that they were coming.
As he rounded the corner he saw the sign next to the front gate of the place where he’d been locked up for what felt like years. Gateways Hospital, it said. And underneath, Community Mental Health Centre.
He paused for a moment, the word Gateways stirring something in his subconscious, but then he shrugged to himself and kept walking. It was just one more thing he couldn’t remember.
In the distance he heard a siren start to wail and he upped his pace, breaking into a jog and then into a sprint, the green scrub trousers he was wearing flapping uncomfortably. At the bottom of the hill he turned onto a main thoroughfare, blinking in the sudden glare of shops and the eye-shattering headlight beams of dozens of cars.
Nothing about this place looked familiar, but then again it didn’t look unfamiliar either. He wasn’t scared by the noise or the traffic or the cars weaving in and out across four lanes. A sense settled over him that he belonged here. That this had once upon a time been his city – his stomping ground. He knew that if he gave in and trusted his instincts he’d figure it all out. In the same way he knew that the monsters the doctors had dismissed as figments of his psychotic mind were real.
He was aware that he was drawing stares. People were openly gawping at his dirt-streaked feet, naked chest and hospital trousers. He should have taken a doctor’s coat but, hell, knocking out the orderly and managing to pull his pants off him had been all he could manage in the timeframe.
He ran across the street, ignoring the angry honks of oncoming traffic that had to swerve to avoid him. He kept moving, following his gut instinct, letting it take him somewhere, though he didn’t know where. He just kept running, dodging past late-night revellers, almost smacking into a lamp post that he didn’t see coming, hearing the yells of people behind him and a whistle blowing in the distance.
He couldn’t let them take him back there and lock him up. He couldn’t let them keep sticking needles in his arm and pumping him full of drugs that made him pass out and the days drift into one long vivid streak of nightmares. If they weren’t going to listen to him about what was coming – about the monsters – then he was going to have to take matters into his own hands before it was too late.
He ducked down a narrow alley running between two buildings. It looked familiar, as though his feet were following a well-trodden path. The sound of sirens faded into the background and he slowed his pace, coming to a halt at the far end of the alley.
He stepped out onto another street and scanned it. The building over the way jarred something in his memory. It looked out of place, like someone had transplanted it from another country, even from another century. Its windows were blacked out, and yellow and black tape stretched across the blackened doorway. It looked like it had been destroyed in a fire. A car cruised past and he slunk backwards into the alley, sliding down a wall behind a dumpster and resting on his haunches. Now he’d stopped running he had started shivering. He wrapped his arms around his body and stared at the scars marking his upper chest and arms. Most looked like knife injuries, though there was one that looked like a burn on his right forearm. He had been in fights – that much was obvious – but he couldn’t remember when or how or against whom.
The doctors had checked his fingerprints against some police database but he had never been arrested. And no one had reported him missing. Which was strange, because somewhere in the fogged-up recesses of his brain he could remember someone.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, trying to stir up something, anything at all from the muddled images resembling a Dali painting in his head. With the drugs still heavy in his system he was having trouble trying to piece everything together. There was a tall blond guy in his memory. And he was coming at him, attacking him, but a girl with long dark hair and eyes the blue of a summer sky stepped between them. The girl haunted his dreams – with her dark lashes and fierce gaze. He had no idea who she was but he knew he had to find her.
Find her before the monsters did.
He didn’t know what they were but he knew they were bad. Vampires. The doctors had called them that after he described them but he had argued with them. That wasn’t what they were called. They weren’t the black-caped, pale-faced creatures portrayed in films and in books – they were something else entirely. They were something real. As were the things with tails.
The scar on his back – it wasn’t a knife wound as the nurse had guessed. It had been made by a tail. He was sure of it. And the mark on his arm, where the skin was tanned darker, was a burn, though from what he didn’t know. Creatures shifted into animals in his dreams, things flew, hands burnt, voices whispered and none of it, none of it, made sense.
He leant out from behind the dumpster and peered out into the street. There was something about that building. His feet, his instinct, whatever you wanted to call it, had brought him here for a reason. Did he know something about the fire? How many weeks ago had it been? How long ago had he been brought into the hospital?
He slunk back against the wall suddenly, his hearing pricking. He seemed to be able to hear more than other people. He knew the doctors hadn’t meant for him to listen in on their whispered diagnoses in the corridor outside his cell – all the heated debates about upping his doses and scheduling him for shock therapy – but he had. He’d been able to hear the nurses too, chatting at their station at the far end of the corridor, giggling about the good-looking patient with no name and a body to die for, pulling straws to see who got to bed bath him. Fortunately for him it had always been the blonde one with the spectacular chest.
Right now he could hear footsteps heading towards him and all of a sudden his heart was beating strong enough to burst clean through his ribcage. He rested the flat of his hand over it, panicking that maybe it was the result of missing his meds. His palms were sweating too. He wiped them on his scrubs and tried to heave himself upright. The adrenaline rushed through him, making him light-headed and spinning him out when he stood.
Over the street across from him he could make out four shapes. He already knew that they weren’t people. He didn’t know how. He just knew these were the monsters that haunted his dreams.
On automatic, without stopping to think about what he was doing, he stepped out of his hiding place in the alley and into a patch of light cast by a streetlamp.
Four heads flew up, four bloodshot sets of eyes staring right back at him. And then, there – the glint of razor sharp teeth.
Well, what do you know, he thought triumphantly. I was right. Monsters do exist.