He wonders if they were worried when they found out someone else was here. Frightened, even. For him. Of him. And what had they thought when they found him showering? In an intimate way. He feels himself blush, though Regine had seemed as embarrassed as he was and Tomasz took it in the same enthusiastic stride as he did everything else.
Seth feels a pang again at letting Tomasz go. He pictures him now, waiting at their house, cheerfully expecting Seth along any minute. And Regine, thinking she knew better. And maybe she did.
Tomasz and Regine. A boy and a girl come to stop him before he reached Masons Hill, before he ran straight into the arms of something dangerous. A boy and a girl to give him answers to all the questions he might have, though leaving just enough unexplained to let the mystery seem plausible –
“You need to stop this,” he says. “This kind of thinking will drive you crazy.”
Her slap was sure real. The hug from Tomasz and the faint, familiar stinkiness of a boy that age was tangibly real, felt on Seth’s skin and smelled through his nose.
And yes, okay, Tomasz was a lot like Owen, just like a helping figure his brain might have conjured up to help him . . . accept death or move to a different consciousness or whatever the point of this place was, if it even had a point, then that might have made sense.
But he wouldn’t have made Regine up. She wasn’t like anyone he knew, not anywhere. Not that accent, not that attitude.
No, they were real. Or real enough.
But then Gudmund –
“Stop it,” he tells himself again. He keeps on walking. Through the trees between the tracks and the prison, he can see that he’s nearing the corner of the fifteen-foot-high brick wall. The outermost of the prison defenses.
He’ll take it as it comes, he thinks. If it’s a big opening and he can see through it, he’ll have a look. If it seems safe enough to enter, well, then, maybe that’s what he’ll do. If it doesn’t, he can always come back another night. All they’ve got here is time, don’t they? There’ll always be another chance –
A hundred feet along the brick wall from where he’s standing, he sees a light.
Electric light. For that’s clearly what it is, an odd, blank whiteness different than flickering firelight and much too strong to be coming from a torch or a gas lantern. It’s filtering through some trees, through what should be – if the wall continues through the foliage – solid brick. It’s shining out, low enough not to have been seen from his house.
Seth listens all around him, for other footsteps on the brick, the thrum of an approaching engine, even the snuffling of the boar. But there’s nothing except him and his breathing. The light is silent, too, no rumbling of a generator, no whine of burning filament. The harsh shine of it comes on him unexpectedly through the leaves as he continues on. He squints into the glare, holding up a hand to shade his eyes. He’s reached the break in the prison wall.
Regine was right. The opening here is huge. The outer wall has been ruptured, but so has every row of fencing inside it, including the wooden walls of what look like some kind of holding room, now nearly flattened. From this point, there’s a straight open line, right into the very heart of the prison.
The light itself is nothing more remarkable than a streetlight-size bulb attached to what he can see now is an inner fence, torn open and collapsed. The light illuminates bricks from the outer wall tossed in almost casual piles and the twisted chain link of the fences within fences behind it.
It looks as if something enormous broke through. As if something rose up from the center of the prison and went straight through everything in its path to get out.
But how? Seth wonders. What could have done this?
Whatever did it, though, whenever it might have happened, now there is only quiet, and the single light showing the way to the heart of the prison.
He stands there, unsure. The ground angles down through the broken walls and fences. He can see maybe a hundred feet before it returns to blackness.
There could be anything down there. Anything at all. People sleeping in their coffins. Or no people, just empty rooms. Or there could be a single figure, dressed all in black, waiting for him.
If it’s a test, Seth doesn’t know what the right answer is.
To go in, or to leave it all unknown.
He grips the torch firmly again.
“I’ll just see,” he says. “That’s all I’ll do. I’ll just see what’s next.”
He steps forward into the darkness.
44
He moves through the first random scatters of bricks. Some roll and tumble as he bumps them but settle immediately back into silence once they fall.
The outermost wall, the brick one, is the tallest, which makes obvious sense. There are three rows of chain link next, all with barbed wire – of a sharper, uglier kind than on regular keep-out fences – stretching across the top. He has to take great care to get past a particularly messy tangle of it, but after that, he’s through and next to the light itself, hanging down, almost broken off, from the third stretch of chain link.
Other light fixtures hang along the fence to either side, but this is the only one still working, a heavy plastic housing attached to the fence with a burning bulb still inside. No hint of where the electricity to run it is coming from. Seth wonders, in momentary panic, if the fence itself might be electrified, before remembering he’s grabbed it several times on the way through.
He heads farther in. The light is behind him now, facing the other way. It starts to grow darker, everything turning to shadow. The trees have all stopped, as it’s obvious they would. Why would you give prisoners something to climb? The ground keeps angling down, the prison built at the bottom of what Seth thinks must be meant by a “dell.”
He can see a bit of it in the moonlight, a complex of buildings spreading down the hill in front of him, some behind farther rows of fences, others stretched along a little service road. There are also wide expanses of empty space, covered in weed-broken asphalt, which might have been prisoner exercise yards. The three main buildings at the bottom are five stories high, marking off three sides of another empty square. It’s too dark to see them clearly.
Dark, he thinks. As in no other lights.
The rest of the prison is quickly resembling everything else in this world. Abandoned, silent, still. He walks through thick grass again, though it isn’t as tall as in his own back garden. As ever, there are no rustlings of birds or nighttime creatures.
He stops on the last of a little rise. He’s well inside the prison grounds now, and the row of breakages in the fences has ended. The moon is still bright and clear, and his eyes adjust enough to let him see it all before him.