Sin (30 page)

Was it an illusion? Was it all
in my mind? No, because that would mean that it was all in the mind
of Wendy as well. Or Wendy was in my mind. Or I in her's. Or this
was the Matrix and we were all in the mind of a machine, sleeping
like batteries... erm... babies. I supposed that would make the
cell I'd been incarcerated in fairly appropriate. Dry cell as
opposed to padded cell.

So what then? Was she a ghost?
Like Casper or Swayze? Were we Matthews and Matthews (Deceased)? Or
did George A. Romero have dibs on her life story?

It didn't matter. My head had
spun this little web already and I was likely to get stuck fast if
I didn't pull free and focus. Joy wasn't going to tell me and I
didn't know how to find out myself. I didn't know if she was a
spirit or a sprout. A ghost or a gherkin. It didn't matter. There
were bigger fish to fry in the chip shop of our little drama and if
we didn't sort our heads out - if I didn't sort mine out at least -
we were likely to get drowned in a great dollop of mushy peas at
best or curry sauce at worst. And we'd be battered in the
process.

The shadows had stopped pratting
about and had taken on more distinct shapes and my eyes had decided
they'd had enough of winding me up and were prepared to do what
they did best and let me see, albeit it still vague and grainy in
the low lighting.

We were inside a vast room, so
large it almost felt like were outside rather than in. The ceiling
was completely clear and apart from a very few support struts it
appeared to be made totally of glass. The smattering of stardust
across the sky could easily, I suppose, have been a splattering of
bird droppings, but either way, it had the same effect. Even being
inside, I felt exposed. I felt vulnerable. And even though, if I
didn't know where I was no-one else could, I still felt at risk. I
was an insect on a slide, and not the kind found in a playground
amongst the swings, Witches' Hats and bruised knees. The glass roof
was the microscope lens that was peering down at me, an ant
struggling to survive.

Shake it off, shake it off.
Twang the shit back into the butt-cheeks of Life.

I grabbed my composure off the
hook and wrapped it around my shoulders, slowly feeling its warmth
settling through me like a log fire in an Alpen lodge. Not that I'd
ever been in front of a log fire, nor had I visited any lodges,
Alpen or otherwise, but I imagined that's how it felt. Calming.
Dousing the chill flames of fear like frostbitten fingers returning
to life. Trying my best to keep the cloak of composure tight around
me, not quite as effective as Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility
but close, I looked around. Joy was in a semi crouch and I realised
I was too.

"Where are we?" she
whispered.

I could have laughed, but I
didn't. A giggle threatened to well up inside of me, maybe morphing
into a snicker or possibly even a guffaw on the way out, but I held
it in check. I might laugh at a funeral, but I didn't want that
funeral to be my own.

My own funeral. I wondered if I
would laugh then. If I were there in body and in spirit, though not
actually in body-and-spirit - if I had moved on, passed over,
stepped on a crack to never look back, would I laugh? Old Uncle
Alfred and his ridiculous tie? A rack of people I didn't really
know wondering why the song I wanted playing was Simple Minds'
'Alive & Kicking'? A eulogy by someone who had never even met
me waffling on about how wonderful I was? Which, naturally, was the
truth... Would there have been something to amuse? Amidst the
tears, some real and some more crocodile than Captain Hook's arch
nemesis, was a little entertainment to be gleaned?

Well, hopefully, it would be a
while before I had to find out. In the meantime...

'Where are we?' Wasn't the whole
point of me being the one to take us from the house that we
wouldn't know where we were? It wasn't as if I had a built in
satnav - a SinNav perhaps - and could pinpoint our exact GPS
position down to a whisker off a metre. Unless that tracking chip
really was in my arm, of course. I was just pleased we hadn't
popped up inside the furnace I'd picked for my original jump, all
toastie-roastie together, if Joy could actually be toasted or
roasted when she wasn't really alive. We didn't appear to be in
Outer Mongolia either, which was good because it would have been a
hell of a long walk back. We were where we wanted to be. We were
Somewhere.

Jump. Was that what we'd done?
Jumped? Was that the correct word to use? It still grated to say
we'd teleported. This wasn't science fiction. Scotty wasn't
upstairs not wanting to give her any more because she'd blow and we
weren't Jeff Goldblum in disguise. So was it a jump? Or was it...
was it a flip and a catch? Were we living (and I use the term
loosely with respect to my partner in grime) two pence coins? Had
we flipped and let the world catch us as it spun on its wobbly
little axis?

'Where are we?'

Who knew? Should we jump again?
Then again and thrice again? Let the trail criss-cross who knew
where, so much so that we were dizzy with the flipping and the
catching and the spinning and the...

But I did know.

I realised suddenly, with the
impact of a short length of two by four across the back of my head.
With the force of a bus through a post office window, I knew
exactly where we were. Was it chance, happenstance or seat of the
pants? Was it the Universe have a little giggle, or Fate's fickle
finger once again? Or was it me? Some warped, deranged, completely
bing-bang-boggley insane part of my mind that had a sick sense of
humour and thought it would be hilariously funny to drop me
slap-bang-bill-a-bong right into the lion's den?

My breath caught in my throat,
frozen as if the temperature had just dropped to a couple of
degrees above Kelvin and it was no longer today, but time had
travelled and taken us with it, maybe in hand luggage, to the day
after tomorrow.

Educational. That was what it
was called. Stimulating. Enjoyable, even. It was, supposedly all of
these things, and was, actually, none of them. To the suits and the
auditors and the mighty They, this horticultural paradise was an
essential part of the treatment for those fruit and nutters that
could go a whole ten minutes without the drool having to be wiped
from their faces or their backsides. Under Connors' loving care and
attention, that reduced the possible number of those who might be
educated or stimulated down to about four and a simple
one-two-buckle-my-shoe-three-four-give-'em-some-more kept even
those a smidgeon short of comatose.

We were at the hospital. The
mental home. The lunatic had returned to the asylum. He hadn't
taken it over yet, but hey, the night was still young.

Who sang that song...?
Hmmm...

To please those that required
pleasing, and to garner funding from those that had fat wallets and
fatter bellies, Dr. Connors had built a nursery. It wasn't the kind
of nursery where babies were taken to be looked after, although
this version wasn't so far removed from that. It was the floral
variety where adults requiring the care of babies were taken to be
supposedly looked after. Of course, once the money was banked and
the curiosities were satiated, I'd have been surprised to see even
one patient pass through the vaulted doors that led to the hospital
proper. No. It was far cheaper to hire the services of a gardener
to tend the plants once a week than it was to let loose a bunch of
shambling wastes of space and have half the workforce tied up
watching them. No. Educate? Hah! Stimulate? Why? To Connors, I'd
come to realise, the patients were a means to an end and nothing
more. He could be mean and there'd be no end.

But it looked good on paper and
it looked good to any who happened to look. So a purpose was served
and no dolphins were harmed. Oh, sorry, that's porpoise. My
mistake.

For a few seconds, I didn't know
whether to be happy or sad. Happy because I knew where we were and
it wasn't just somewhere, it was Somewhere. Happy because we were
not crispy chicken. Happy because the world had turned and we
hadn't burned. And sad? Sad because we'd returned to my own
personal hell. Well, my personal purgatory was the reason I'd come
here in the first place, but it had been the physical hell to my
emotional one. Sad because we were sitting on the tongue of the
mighty beast, waiting its mouth to close and swallow us whole.

Sad because all of my running;
the gull, the boy in the car, the farmer, his wife and their child,
and watching Jeremy die - it was all for nothing. I may as well
have stayed put and kept my mouth shut. Or perhaps I should have
tried harder when I clicked my ruby slippers together to leave here
in the first place.

Was it a blessing for Joy to not
have to breathe? On a cold December morning, when frost lay like
icing across the pathways and parks and one small slip for Man
could be one giant fall on your backside, did it please her to not
breathe in and have her lungs turn to ice? After a hundred meter
sprint did she have to worry about the breath being torn from her
lungs by a rusty garden rake as she stood bent, hands on knees,
panting and wheezing? Probably not. I hadn't noticed if my sister
breathed at all. Maybe she did and possibly she didn't. It could be
that she breathed normally. Or out of habit. Or her chest moved as
if air was being sucked in whilst carbon dioxide was being
expelled, even though it wasn't. Or it could be that none of these
were true. Either way, I didn't have that option. I needed to
breathe. My lungs were still intact and had a basic oxygen
requirement to keep on working. Hey, it might be boring being a
lung just expanding and contracting over and over in an incessant
monotonous rhythm, but someone had to do it. A job was a job,
however tedious, and they should be pleased they weren't a rectum.
Not that I could tell if they were complaining or not. They were
doing what they were designed to do. Or at least they were when I
remembered to breathe again.

My breath, once kick started
again, came in short rasping jolts, as if it wanted to stay away
and not be seen to be associated with me. I think not, I thought,
and did my best to steady myself. I wasn't suddenly centre stage on
Britain's Got Talent, my voice all nervous crackles as anxiety
strangled the words before I could squeeze them out. I also wasn't
a deer, casually crossing a road to see my friends in the forest on
the other side, a night of beer and Wii playing planned, caught in
the headlights of a gas-guzzling gargantuan that was bearing down
on me, wiping all thoughts of alcohol induced wiimote twirling from
my mind in a blaze of headlamp and radiator grill. I was simply a
normal guy, with his dead sister, suddenly teleported back into the
mental institute from which I'd escaped.

Simple.

I settled somewhere in the
no-man's land between a smile and a frown. I gave myself a mental
botox boost that fixed my face, and my mood, in a grim but fairly
relaxed mask of emotionless resignation. Not that I was emotionless
- I'd yo-yoed so much I could practically do a cat's cradle or walk
the dog with neither a canine nor feline to hand. Nor was I
resigned - the fact that I'd just popped up to say hello and
couldn't go back down below, much like a rollicking burp after a
nice cold glass of coke, wasn't here nor there. The situation was
the situation. Deal with it or don't. Do or die, tuck into a big
steak pie.

Yes indeedy.

I broke the glorious news of our
current location to my sister. She took it rather well I
thought.

"Are you INSANE??" she bellowed.
I was sure I felt a sprinkle of spit and the heat of her breath as
she brought her face close enough to mine for me to see her nasal
hairs. She'd always kept herself preened to perfection, any stray
hair or zit banished post haste, so I declined to mentioned the odd
nostril sprout. I thought that best.

Perhaps I should have returned
the bellow, standing up for myself and pointing out that location,
location, location was a Channel 4 television programme. If she'd
have wanted to go somewhere specific she should have gone with my
original idea of calling a taxi. But then I figured it wasn't
necessarily a point of going somewhere specific as it was of
not
going somewhere specific. Either way, though, I didn't
tap in an address into a control pad in my stomach and then follow
the directions. It wasn't an exact science, if indeed any science
was involved. We just went. Put your lips together and blow. Much
like a hot air balloon or a leaf on the wind, I couldn't say let's
go left or right or up or down. Before about two minutes previous,
I didn't actually realise I could properly go anywhere.

Yes, I know I deliberately
evacuated my cell at this very institute. Yes, I know I had figured
out that I could teleport. And stop, please, sniggering at that
word. It is what it says on the tin, with no preservatives or E
numbers added. That was me then and this was me now. It had all
seemed so simple - jump into a furnace and die. What was so
difficult about that? Quite a fair bit, it appeared. Now I was on
the run. Now I had my dead sister accompanying me. Now I'd seen
that the doctor who'd 'looked after' me was, in reality, a cold
blooded killer who knew all about my particular gifts and had even
tried to train me to use them. Albeit under the influence of drugs.
Now I'd witnessed a murder, killed a boy and a bird, and almost
killed a family and more. Now, I had to admit, the days of being
locked in a padded cell whilst a needle was jabbed into my arm and
sweet oblivion washed over me seemed to be the greener side of the
grassy knoll.

But anywho. The knowledge was
gone. Someone had closed that particular book, without noting down
the page number or, at the very least, turning down the page
corner. Not that it was knowledge exactly. It was more of a
feeling, and I'd lost that feeling, loving or loathing. I was
walking a blind line between me and who I needed to be. My arms
were outstretched and my eyes were closed. I was feeling my way,
stumbling and crashing into things that I couldn't see, hoping I
wouldn't trip and fall on my arse. Whilst in my cell, I had some
confidence in my 'ability'. I wanted to go and I went. But now the
hunt was on and I'd left that confidence behind in my hasty
departure. I could still hear it in the distance, calling out to me
- reaching out beseechingly. Come back! But this blind mouse was
running away with his tail between his legs while it was still
attached.