He’d never been more glad to see home. The thought struck him that this marked the first time since living at Deller’s End that he’d considered it a home in the true sense of the word. His place of refuge where he could close the door on the fucked-up world outside. He’d get his head together, he thought, spend some time working out how best to pick up the threads of his sister’s trail. He was determined not to be diverted from that, not even by zany redheads on lonely country roads.
Gareth fumbled with the house keys, unlocked and pushed open the door to the cottage, bathing in the sense of relief he found on closing the door on the dark Pembrokeshire night. He reached out for the light switch, flicked it. Nothing happened.
‘Bugger,’ he said. ‘That damn fuse.’ It kept tripping for no reason, even though he’d had the electrician in time after time to fix it, and each time he’d suggested a more expensive remedy than the time before. In the end he thought he’d rather put up with the niggling inconvenience.
He stumbled blindly; without a moon or street light the room was in almost total darkness.
But something was wrong.
It was as if he’d picked up a signal from the very air, like a jabbing electrical shock that brought his suspicions jolting to life. Just as the urge to turn and run was being signalled from his panicked brain to his legs, his body was hit by someone bounding out of the deep shadows, forcing him backwards and sending him crashing against the wall. His instinct was to strike out with his fist, his arms flailing wildly in the dark, and he made contact with a face, eliciting a fierce growl from his attacker.
Powerful hands now pinned his arms. He struggled, tugged himself free, stumbling and almost falling over, but his passage to the door was blocked by another man who grabbed him by the throat in an iron-hard arm lock, choking the breath from him. A fist was rammed into his unprotected stomach and he slumped down, gasping in pain.
A sharp jab in the side of his neck, a needle going in deep. Liquid fire being pumped into him. And then he was released.
He made for the door, smelling the damp scent of night as he tried to run down the short path to the gate. But his legs felt as though they’d had weights strapped to them and he could hardly lift his feet. His world descended into a waking nightmare, the kind where he wanted to run, to escape the beast at his back, but his body was fighting against the pressing weight of gravity, or was pushing without effect against a soundless gale. The stars in the sky began to multiply. Then they became smudged into streaks of incandescent blue. He found he could no longer support the weight of his body, no longer control its direction.
The Land Rover’s distinct shape melted into the night, and that same night spread like a cloud of ink in water, till his entire being was swamped in a swirling, smothering blackness that seeped into his brain and turned it off.
29
The last in a long line of deeply unsettling dreams tramped towards the place from which they can never be retrieved. Only their bruising on the emotions lingered. Wakefulness crashed in like a chilled wave hitting the beach, and with it came the horrifying remembrance of being attacked.
As if an electric current had been passed through him his eyes snapped open and his body lurched forward. But he could not see a thing, not a single speck of light. Then he experienced a frightening choking sensation, his mouth blocked, stuffed with something that threatened to enter his throat. He panicked at the lack of sight and tried to move but found he could not, his arms were bound. He fought against his bindings, thrashing wildly; tried to shout out but his screams came out as a muffled whimper. He squeezed his eyes closed, opened them again, repeated the process. Nothing. He was totally blind, and that made him panic all over again.
His hands were fastened tightly at head-height and no amount of struggling loosened them, which only inflamed his desire to be free. He tried till he was too exhausted to go on anymore and stopped, his body limp, breathing laboured.
Gareth Davies let the first wave of panic subside, forcing himself to breathe calmly through the nose, attempting to overcome the intense fear brought on by the total dark, his inability to move. He forced rational thought on a raving mind.
Had they blinded him? The thought terrified him and he began to hyperventilate all over again. No, he thought, he wasn’t blind. It was cold, damp; he’d experienced something similar before, a long time ago as a kid. He’d been taken down into some caverns or other on a school trip. The guide shone a light on a rock and it cast the distinct shadow of a witch’s head. But the thing which really unnerved him was when he demonstrated what it was like when the lights were turned off. It must have only been twenty seconds or so, but it was horrible. Like a solid black wall. He wanted to scream back then; scream for the stupid man to stop messing around and turn on the lights. He remembered feeling intense gratitude when the lights flicked on, but the short experience stayed with him.
He was cold and he was sat on hard earth and stone with his back against what felt like a stone wall. He was in a cave, he thought, in the dark. He was reliving the fear all over again.
Was he dead?
He dismissed the thought immediately and closed his eyes. He found this strangely comforting; better to close his eyes and see nothing than to open them and see the same.
Why? Why was he here? Who were those men who attacked him? And where the hell was here? This can’t be happening, he thought. He must be in the grip of a nightmare from which he would surely awake.
But he didn’t and the nightmare hung on.
His logical self barged its way to the surface. He drew in a deep, slow lungful of breath to tamp down his escalating panic, then began to examine the bonds that held him. Sharp tugs told him they were made of leather or something similar, wrapped tight around his wrist, that in turn were fastened to clinking metal which must be fixed to the wall. He tried to bring his wrist round to his mouth so he could test the binding but the tether was too short for this. His legs, however, were free. He listened to the sounds his shoes made as he scuffed them on the floor. Loose stones and dirt. It wasn’t bare rock like you’d find in a cave, and it felt flat, man-made. That suggested some kind of mine, not a cave. Next he tested the air with his nose. Dry and dusty from where he’d kicked up the dirt, but not too damp. But it was cold.
‘Bet you like detective novels too,’ Fitzroy had once told him. ‘Sometimes you are too logical for your own good. You analyze things so much you miss out on the fundamental things in life.’
Gareth almost smiled at the memory; or he might have done hadn’t his lips been pasted together with heavy-duty tape.
‘Actually, no, I don’t like detective novels as it happens. Too formulaic. I suppose you’re telling me you rely on intuition, on instinct, eh?’
‘I’ve learned to trust it, yes.’
‘Feel the Force, Luke!’ he said with a grin.
‘There will come a time, Mr Spock, when logic is no longer enough. You will have to go beyond logic.’
That time was now, he thought. What had happened to him recently, what was happening right now, defied rational thought. The pieces simply would not fit neatly together.
He rubbed the side of his mouth against his shoulder, felt the tape begin to peel away at the edge. Elated with the tiny victory he set about stripping it back further, the tape sticking to his clothing and allowing him to peel enough away for him to spit out a wad of cloth that had been stuffed into his mouth. He took a deep breath and then yelled out as loud as he could. His voice did not produce an echo, he noticed; rather it felt like he was in a small, low-ceilinged room.