Suddenly, silhouettes started forming in the light.
Alex yanked me forward and through the first door on the right. Inside, it was similar to the room I’d seen before: two sets of bunk beds and a table. He closed the door and switched on the light. On the back of the door hung two green training tops with hoods, and two pairs of green tracksuit trousers. On the floor were two pairs of slippers.
‘Put these on,’ he said quietly, and pressed a finger to his lips as the voices passed the door. He glanced at his watch, and sat me on one of the bunk beds, handing me the training top. ‘You’ll need it. It’s freezing outside.’
I looked at him. He was incredibly focused, decisive, so different from the person I had imagined. Perhaps being on the run for so long changed you like that.
He looked at my left hand.
‘Do you want me to put it on for you?’
I shook my head and took the top. When I raised my arms, the scourge marks burnt, as if alcohol had been poured into the wounds. I fed my arms through the sleeves and pulled it down over my body. Above the line of the cling film, where some of the cuts were still open — deep, dark tears of flesh — I could feel the training top stick.
He put on the second one and grabbed both pairs of trousers off the hook. I looked down at my boxer shorts. At my legs. The scourge mark on my thigh was starting to bruise.
‘These are standard issue,’ he said, then quietened again as more voices passed the door. When they were gone he turned back to me. He looked at his watch. ‘The alarm will go off again in sixty seconds. Once it does, we make a break for it. Understood?’
I nodded.
He pulled on the pair of tracksuit trousers and watched as I did the same — slow, tentative movements, like an old man. When I was done, he pushed the slippers across the floor. The lining was soft, like fur, and it felt good against my skin. I still had the cuts and bruises on my toes, on the arches of my feet, where I’d run for my life in the forest.
He opened the door a fraction and looked through. Opened it a little further and flicked a look both ways. He glanced once more at his watch.
‘Five seconds,’ he said.
Then the alarm burst into life. This time it sounded different: a long drawn-out wail rather than the short, staccato beeps of the first one.
‘Okay,’ he said, grabbing my wrist. ‘Let’s go.’
We moved out into the corridor and towards the stairs. As we did, he flipped the hood of the training top up over my head, and pulled up his own too. At the bottom of the first step, I looked up. In the block of light, shapes began to form: others, dressed like us, coming down towards us. Three of them. They all glanced at us as we passed, their eyes firing as they tried to recall who we were and what part of the farm they might have seen us in before. I looked back over my shoulder and saw one of them, a girl, stop on the steps. She was following Alex as we headed up.
‘Alex—’
‘Just keep moving.’
‘She knows you.’
‘She recognizes me.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s two different things. She recognizes me, but she doesn’t know me any more.’
At the top of the stairs, in hazy grey light, I could see the side of Bethany: the A-shape of the roof, the bathroom window under it, flowerbeds beneath that. There were people next to the flowerbeds, also dressed like us. They were digging — ten, maybe twelve of them. I could hear the sea, could see the fields of heather running all the way down to the beach.
‘Are we in Lazarus?’ I asked.
Alex was behind me, further back in the shadows.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Part of it, anyway. The house is new. This underground part isn’t. This used to be a training facility for the army in the fifties. They built the farmhouse on top.’
I glanced at the people digging.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Turning over the soil.’
‘Why aren’t they following the others down here?’
‘I don’t know. But we haven’t got time to find out.’ He stood next to me and glanced at his watch. ‘Okay. The first alarm was because someone broke the locks on the Red Room.’
‘The Red Room?’
‘Where they keep all the memories.’ He turned to me. ‘That’s where all your stuff is: your gun, your wallet, the bullet, the photos of your wife. Your wedding ring. I broke the locks on it before I came down here for you. That was the diversion.’
‘And this alarm?’
‘This is the compound alarm. It goes off if the door to Calvary is left open for more than five minutes.’
‘What’s Calvary?’
‘Calvary was where Jesus was crucified,’ he said. ‘But in this place, it’s the crucifixion room.’
The Calvary Project. What they’d called the dummy corporation that all their money was fed through. Now it made sense.
He looked at the diggers, a few of them glancing towards us. An army of faces in their late teens and early twenties.
‘Follow me,’ he said.
We angled left, out of the darkness and into the light. It was freezing cold, snow still on the ground. It must have been late afternoon — in the distance, the sun was starting to drop in the sky, melting away behind patches of thick white cloud.
The mouth of the compound was built into the extension on the side of Lazarus. We moved past a blacked-out window. Then a second. Finally we reached a red door at the back of the house. Next to it was a small car port. It curved around to the side of the farmhouse and joined up with the main track back up towards Bethany. Parked underneath were a Shogun and a Ford Ranger.
Alex had split the lock to the Red Room with a chisel. It was hanging out of the side of the door, and the door was ajar, moving slightly in the breeze. Inside was a small storage room, probably ten foot square, with floor-to-ceiling shelving on three sides and dull red walls. On the shelves were long rows of shoeboxes, stacked one after the other, covering almost all the space. Countless surnames were scribbled on their fronts. Some I recognized — Myzwik, O’Connell, Towne — but most I didn’t. I took Alex’s down and looked inside.
‘There’s nothing in there,’ he said.
‘How come?’
‘I had nothing when I came back.’
‘Came back? Came back from where?’
He glanced out through a small gap in the door, and back at me. ‘I’ll tell you, but not now. We haven’t got time. Get your things.’
I looked for my belongings. Further along the middle shelf I saw a box with ‘Mitchell’ on it. I leaned in a little closer. Underneath the surname was a Christian name: Simon. Simon Mitchell. Alex’s friend. The one Cary said had also disappeared, never to be seen again.
‘Is that your friend Simon?’
He nodded.
‘He came here too?’
A noise outside. Someone at the Shogun.
I pushed the door closed, leaving only a sliver of a gap. Through it, I could see Myzwik reaching on to the back seat of the car for something. He pulled out a jacket and pushed the door closed. When he turned around, his eyes passed the door.
And zeroed in on us.
He’d seen movement inside, through the gap.
His eyes narrowed. He took a couple of steps forward. I looked around the storage room for something to arm myself with, and saw Alex doing the same. But there was nothing except shoeboxes.
Then I remembered my gun.
I searched for my box, glancing back over my shoulder to see Myzwik about six feet from the door. He was unarmed, but his hands were balled into fists at his side. I scanned the rows of boxes, one after another, trying to spot my name among them all.