Each of the buildings looks the same. Ugly and square and unyielding. Not a curved line to be seen. One main front door to each and rows of evenly spaced windows, bars and heavy locks on every conceivable thing that might open.
Looking around, Seth wonders for a moment where the man who took Owen was kept. The prisoner whose name he still can’t quite bring to mind, no matter how many ways he tries to approach it.
Had the prisoner ever been in this square? Almost certainly. And had no doubt spent his empty time in one of these very cells. When he escaped, maybe he had hidden behind this same corner where Seth now stands.
Seth remembers that the prisoner hadn’t been regarded as a flight risk. The police said that even though he had occasionally been kept in solitary confinement, that was for his own protection, not for what trouble he might cause or that he might try to escape. He’d been a model prisoner. That’s what the officers kept saying to his parents on those awful nights when Owen was still missing, as if it was somehow supposed to be comforting rather than what it actually was, an apology for taking their eye off him at the most important moment.
Seth orients himself in the dark, mentally placing the train tracks on one side and looking up toward what must be the direction of his house.
The prisoner had been given a pass that day, that’s the story that emerged, one that allowed him to move freely from one part of the prison to another, to tend to the grounds, as he’d shown a talent for gardening. Yes, the memories are coming back to Seth now (but his name? What was his freaking name?). The prisoner had arranged it somehow so that one set of officers expected him to be in one place and another expected him to be somewhere else, so that for just long enough, no one was looking for him.
The police assumed he must have had help, but Seth can’t remember anything ever being explained beyond that. The prisoner had created a hole in time, a shaded, hidden chain of moments that allowed him to go – Seth turns a bit more, getting it right – that way, and sneak through fences and duck past guards (who may or may not have been looking away on purpose) until there was only one more fence to climb.
The fence into Seth’s backyard.
Seth spits onto the grass, his stomach sour. He had opened the door to the man. No matter what happens in the rest of his life, he will always have opened that door.
It wasn’t your fault, Gudmund had said. You were eight.
And oh, how Seth wanted to believe him.
He stares into the darkness, up toward where the prisoner had entered Seth’s life and taken Owen from it, returning him injured and broken.
Seth is angry now, remembering it.
Angry, and suddenly a whole lot less afraid.
He steps into the square and heads for the door where the Driver emerged.
It looks the same as the doors in the other buildings. No light comes from any crack or seam, nor through the windows on either side. Seth holds the torch up as he approaches, ready to swing it if he must at anything that might sneak up on him.
But there’s nothing, still. Just empty space and silence. All those barred windows looking down on him. Deserted, dirty buildings watching his progress.
The door is up a few steps and recessed a little, and as he moves to it, the moon is angled so that he’s stepping into shadow. He hits the torch a few more times, fruitlessly, then feels around in the darkness for some kind of handle on the door, finding one, never expecting in a million years –
It opens.
With a simple click of a lever, the door swings under his touch, pulling outward with an easy silence that seems as strange as the smoothness of the van’s engine. If ever a door should creak loudly, it should be one on the front of a darkened, empty prison, but it glides open like something hydraulic and modern.
Before he’s ready, before he ever expected, Seth is standing in front of an open doorway.
A doorway so dark it might be an entry on to deepest space.
He thumps the torch again, but more out of nervous energy than expectation.
He squints, trying to see something, anything in the black.
But there really is just . . . emptiness.
Nothingness.
A blank on the world.
Seth goes back down the steps. He walks to the window to the right of the door and peeks inside. The shadows are deep here, too, but he can see a little bit, enough to suggest that this building is like the last one, corridors and cells and the dust of years.
But the doorway to the entrance is still just deepest black, unnaturally so, like the rules of light and space are suspended in that single rectangle.
He can see nothing beyond it.
“It’s a trick of the light,” he whispers to himself. “A trick of the moon.”
But he stands for a moment longer, the world holding its silent breath, the empty nothing of the doorway staring back at him.
He reaches for the anger in him again. The anger at the prisoner who just walked away from here and ruined everything. It helps. He goes back up the steps, nearing the darkness, nearing the doorway.
The silence is almost deafening now, so solid that Seth begins to almost doubt it. Surely he should hear something. A breeze. The shushing of blown grass down the hillside. A creak as the building settles.
But there is only this void. Waiting for him to step through.
There could be anything beyond it, anything at all. It could be an entryway to a whole other world, for all he knows –
“Which is stupid,” he whispers, still staring into the blackness.
But out here, alone, in the dark, his mind begins to reel with possibilities.
Because maybe this place is a journey.
And maybe this door is its final stop.
Because if there is death anywhere here, it can only be beyond this doorway.
Maybe it is this doorway.
And if this place really is a kind of hell, maybe you have to die to leave it.
Maybe it’s as simple as walking through a door.
As long as it’s the right door.
And almost without trying, he begins to think about that day on the beach –
No, a voice in his head says. No.
But still, he thinks of that day, that last day, when he had calmly walked into a freezing, wild ocean and had uncalmly been battered to death against a rock.
And woken up here.
Stop this, he thinks. Stop it –
But he thinks about this morning, too – though that it’s still the same day he left to go running toward Masons Hill seems ridiculous, it was weeks ago, lifetimes.
He thinks about that feeling again.
It’s dangerous to do this, to think this way, he knows. Dangerous to revisit a place that most people never got to, most people never wanted to get to.