Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 84

I hear Yates before I see him. A drone of mutterings reaches my ears from the next room. It not sure if the sound emerges from the kitchen or the living room. It feels like it's all around me, like the man's thoughts have become trapped in the walls of the house.

I turn into the living room. The floor is covered in books, ripped from their spines, the pages laid out and scribbled on. Yates has made maps with some of them; yellow old pages sit side by side hanging on the wall. The rest is on the floor, some screwed into balls and cast aside, others kept for importance sit beside him in the epicentre of the explosion of pages.

'He's saying something,' he mutters. 'It's a message through time.'

'Yates,' I say, reaching out a hand to him. 'Yates, get up.'

His face is covered in ink marks. Some of them are fingerprints. 

'Easton,' he says. 'You have to see, he wrote so much down in here.'

Elle is behind me. Graham starts to look around the edge of the room, reading the spines of the stacked books. For once I'm glad he can't see. 

'You have to get up, Yates,' I say. 

'But there's no time,' he pleads. 'There are secrets, I have to find out where he went. There's a path!' He gets excited, gesticulating wildly with his hands. 'See on the map there on the wall, there's a way to the great beyond.'

'Beyond?' Elle whispers. 'I thought we were beyond. There's more?'

'What are you talking about, Yates?' I ask, trying to keep my voice calm. There's something very unsettling about seeing someone you know in such a state.

'This isn't all there is, there's a life after this. I think Thacker followed it.'

'You think there's a life after the afterlife?' Elle says, skeptical.  

'Who's this?' Yates asks surveying her. His voice turns stern. A slice of the old Yates creeping back.

'This is Elle,' I say. 'I ran into her.'

'So you just collect women then,' Yates snaps. 'Leave some for the rest of us.'

'We're not a cake you know,' Elle remarks. 

'Yates, you're never going to meet anyone at all if you stay locked away like this?' I say, feeling like I'm repeating myself. The cold grip of guilt seizes my chest. This would have never happened if I'd stayed with him. 

'Some things are more important.' He raises his voice. 'I'm interested in the secrets of the universe,' he says. 'Not girls.'