Box Set - Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Six

            I look at the words on the screen. The words stare back at me with glib defiance. Despite our very best efforts, we have returned home, but to a home none of us ever dreamed of visiting.

            For a moment none of us speak. We all stare at the screen, all keeping our lips sewn shut. The first thing that strikes me is that, at first glance, not a lot has changed in the world. There are no flying cars or spaceships. No aliens or desolate nuclear landscapes like some doombringers might have us believe. The world has continued spinning, and all that appears to have taken hold is digital media.

            ‘How is this possible?’ Yates asks.

            ‘What’s wrong?’ Sandra adds and her eyebrows lean to meet in the middle. 

            I turn to her. I feel breathless. I’m part afraid and part excited. We’ve essentially travelled to the future. I don’t know if that was by intention, if we’re the first or we’ll be the last, but somehow, by skipping between worlds we’ve become travellers in time. I dare not say the words out loud in case they sound far to inexplicable to support. ‘We weren’t from this year,’ I say. ‘The last time I checked it was 2015. I think anyway, it’s not like we keep calendars.’

            ‘It was,’ Yates replies. ‘I keep a diary,’ he adds as though the admission of that fact was embarrassing.

            I consider the image of a diary floating in the air with a feverish fountain pen skipping across the pages. It’s no wonder that people used to think Yates’s house was haunted.

            ‘But this is unbelievable,’ Sandra exclaims. ‘People always said they used to think they were in the desert for weeks, I remember one poor man said a month. But of course only minutes go by.’

            ‘Maybe time behaves differently between the plains?’ Yates suggests.

            ‘Plains, I like that,’ Elle says. ‘So much better than worlds.’

            ‘But sixty years?’ I reply.

            Elle takes on a peculiar expression. I know what she’s thinking, I’m thinking the exact same thing. If sixty years have passed, then, in lieu of extreme old age, our parents might have joined us among the dead. It’s strange that only a year ago, or apparently sixty now, the dead conjured such a frightening image in my mind. It was the unknown and the unknown must be quashed and rarely spoken about. Now, death is just another stage of life.       

‘My dad,’ she says quietly. ‘He might be looking for me.’

            ‘We can go and find him,’ I say, happily. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to help Elle for a change. My quest to find Penny has so often left her needs aside. Now they can take the forefront.

            Sandra buts in, ‘Excuse me, don’t you think you should let everyone know what’s happening before you go gallivanting off. Teague’s fault this all may be, but these people need direction. They’ve been robbed of their home and dumped in an alien world, plain, however you want to put it.’

            ‘Sandra,’ I say. ‘I want to help, really I do, but I’m not a leader. I can’t tell these people what to do with their lives. I don’t even know what to do with mine.’

            Sandra wasn’t for convincing. ‘But you must know somewhere where they can go?’

            I wrack my brains. I look to Elle and Yates. Both of them look back, clearly searching for answers themselves and finding none.

            ‘Look, Easton,’ Sandra says. ‘I’m not asking you to find a solution. But a lot of people were willing to follow you out of the town. I hear things, people don’t keep secrets there…wherever there is now. Like it or not, whoever did this to them, you were going to leave the desert, now you have and we’ve all followed you here. You know this world…’

            ‘But I don’t!’ I respond. ‘This is sixty years from the world I knew.’

            ‘Then we can all find it together,’ Elle says. ‘But I have a suggestion. Why don’t we get away from the scorchmark and the roadblocks and all of this mayhem before people start coming.’ She looks me in the eye. I know she’s trying to tell me something and I have to search for a second before I realise what. We’re back in the real world now. Who’s to say Windermere and her friends aren’t still in a position of power. They’ll know this has happened and they won’t leave it lying for long.

            ‘We’d better move then,’ I say.

            ‘The house?’ Yates says. ‘If it’s still standing there.’ His voice is sad and I realise how much the old cottage meant to Yates, despite the years of misery he spent there. 

Elle looks at me. I notice the eyebrows pressed together and the way she absently pulls on her cardigan sleeves. ‘What’s wrong?’

            ‘Don’t you think that’s going to be the first place they look for us?’

            ‘Who?’

            She raises her eyebrows as though it should be obvious. ‘Windermere and her people. How do we know they’re not already coming?’

            ‘It’s sixty years in the future,’ I say. ‘How do we know they’re even still around.’

            Even as I say it I know I’m silly to even think the words. The dead have no life expectancy.

            ‘Well where can we go? Somewhere with a lot of space.’

            We think for a second. Sandra waits with anticipation. She expects us to come out with the perfect place to support a hundred people all at once.

My mind draws a blank. The commotion is raising all around us. There are more police now, and fire engines. The woman we saved from the car is still speaking to someone, though she seems to have calmed somewhat. Where can we go? An abandoned apartment block? That’d be nice – Ghost Towers we could call it. Or Spooky Heights. I wish I could ask Benjamin. I start and think he might be in Central Park even now. Has he continued the same routine? Has he been waiting for me for our game of chess for the past sixty years?

Just as I’m drawing a blank, Yates perks up.

‘Where’s the last place Windermere will come looking for us?’

‘Pet home? Refuge centre? Anywhere with nice people,’ Elle grumbles.

‘Thacker,’ he replies. ‘We go to Thacker’s house.’

Yates greets my stare with a sense of enthusiasm I’m not accustomed to finding in him. Thacker’s house was big, but it also contained Thacker, the woman who sent us to the Doldrums in the first place. What if we get there and she responds by sending us back?

‘What if she’s waiting there?’ I ask.

‘Then we face her,’ Yates says. ‘She has to answer for what she did.’

‘So who’s side are we on?’ Elle asks. ‘Because it’s starting to sound like we’re with Windermere?’

‘We’re on our own side.’ I reply a lot quicker than I expect of myself. ‘We’ve got involved in a lot of stuff and we have to stop it all one way or another. I’m sick of people sending us places, making us do things. This woman killed us when we were already dead. I think we should get some payback.’

‘Excuse me,’ Sandra explains. ‘Your revenge mission sounds very exciting, but what about all these people here? Are you really going to be dragging them along with you?’

‘I’ve already thought of that,’ Yates says. ‘We can’t do this alone, Easton. We’re going to need some help.’

‘I think I know where he’s going with this,’ Elle groans, placing her hand against her forehead. ‘Are you sure we should be doing this, Yates. After everything he did?’

‘Oh God,’ I say. ‘Not Graham.’

Yates goes to jump to his boyfriend’s defence.

‘Is he still you boyfriend?’ I ask. ‘What’s the relationship rule when one of the parties is kidnapped after a big argument? So much has happened since then? Sixty years of things have happened.’

‘But we have to try. You said yourself Graham could be brilliant if he applied himself. This could be a chance for him.’

‘I’m sorry, who’s Graham?’ asks Sandra.

‘Yates’s boyfriend,’ Elle explains. ‘He was alive but figured out how to switch to the dead side and back again.’

‘Sounds like an impressive boy.’

‘He’s an idiot.’

‘An impressive idiot,’ Yates defends.

‘Impressively idiotic,’ Elle mutters.

‘He did have a lot of equipment lying around,’ I say, acting the mediator. ‘If he still has it that is.’

‘Be that as it may, you can’t drag a hundred people around a world they don’t know,’ Sandra says. ‘They’ve been through enough.’

‘Sandra’s right, Easton,’ Elle says.

I press my fingers to my temples. Another decision. And once again I’m asked to decide people’s futures when I don’t even know my own.

‘How about this,’ I suggest. ‘We take everyone to Yates’s house. We can travel a couple of miles down the road so Windermere doesn’t notice any activity there if she’s watching or she can in fact do that. Then us three go to find Graham.’

Sandra nods. She still frowns but her nod shows some sign of agreement.

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Elle says. ‘Now, who’s going to explain to this lot how to travel?’

‘How about you explain it to me and I’ll show them?’ Sandra suggests.

I launch into the explanation of travelling, how we can step through the fabric of the universe as if we were crossing miles in less than a second.  I explain the Edge and how you can be falling and know you’re moving forward at the same time. I don’t mention that we can revisit our own memories. One step at a time.

‘And you’re sure this is safe?’ she says.

‘Everyone does it,’ Elle replies.

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s safe or a good idea.’

‘Trust us, it’s safe. We’ll all go together the first time.’

Sandra looks dubious. ‘Are you sure there’s no other way? We all just got here in a similar way and lost most of our party.’ She looks down for a second as though she’s just realised what she said. ‘It’ll be hard to convince people to do the same thing again.’

‘It’ll be this or walking,’ Yates says. ‘And it’s a long way from here.’

            Sandra acquiesces and we cross to the group. As we reach them, Sandra picks up the pace.

            ‘Where are Richard and Beth?’ she asks. She casts around. ‘And Fernando?’

It strikes me how well Sandra knew all these people, how much she must be hurting inside after losing so many.

‘They got tired of waiting,’ explains one man with an arm around his partner. ‘After everything, I can’t blame them. Where’s Teague? A lot of us would like to talk to him.’

‘We’ll be finding Teague, you mark my words,’ Sandra replies with fire in her eyes. I’d like to talk to the man myself. Still the knot of quilt squirms in my stomach and I don’t think it will go away. But then, should I feel bad? I mistrusted Teague with good reason. It didn’t mean he had to switch back to his old ways just because I thought he might. Even so, my excuse doesn’t help me unclench.

‘We’re going to go somewhere safe,’ Elle explains. ‘Just while we find out what’s happened.’

‘We want to go back,’ someone shouts, a woman’s voice from the back of the crowd. ‘We didn’t choose this.’

My anger rises at the injustice of it all. I didn’t choose this for these people either and now they want me to fix it. They’ll stand there like sheep waiting to be led, and then complain when they don’t like the direction they’re taken in; never considering that they could lead themselves.

‘By all means, feel free to leave,’ I say before I stop myself. ‘I didn’t want this for any of you, but we’re going to do our best to make sure you all find a home where you want it.’ I pause before saying. ‘This world isn’t perfect, but no world was. I was forced to become a member of yours but I met some brilliant people. Isn’t that all that matters?’

Elle reaches over and squeezes my arm. In that second I consider how far I’ve come. From the day I died in a car crash to now. The Easton of a year ago would have never stood up for himself, or even spoke in front of a crowd of people. I’ve grown. And not through easy means, but then I guess no one does. If this isn’t alive then I don’t know what is.

Slowly, we convince everyone to join hands. We make jokes about this being like a hippy sit in. Some people are won over. There are some more grumblers, some more leavers, but eventually we all band together. In the end there are fifty of us, fifty brave travellers willing to fight the tide of whatever life throws at them.

Now we have a direction, a means to an end. We will end this feud with Thacker and Windermere and get on with our own lives. We’ll find the people we love and start a new life in this world shared with the living.

As I close my eyes and step into the cold black nothing, the smell of haybales and dusty books in my memories, I take a first step forwards. A step of my own accord, not dragged sideways by someone who thinks they know better.

Box Set - Chapter Thirty-Five

It takes me a long time to realise I'm conscious. Sound comes back to me first. Screams, a child's cry and a police siren. The flashing red and blue lights soon follow. I can taste the ground on my lips. For the moment, I don't care. My body aches, my head throbs.

 It's the flickering of flame that raises me from my reverie.

 I push on the ground with my fingers and haul myself to my feet. People are running all around me. I close my eyes and concentrate, holding my head to try and free myself of the stabbing pain behind my eyes. Instantly they appear, bright as stars, but dark with worry and terror. I'm home, but what's happened.

 'Elle!' I call.

 There's no reply. Who could hear me above the racket?

 I'm barged from behind and I go flying forwards. The culprit runs away before I can see their face. It was clearly an accident, everyone's barging into everyone else. Some people lie on the floor, holding their knees to their chests like this will stop people trampling them. It's like I've arrived in the middle of a riot.

 The ring of fire around us is the cause of alarm. The floor is black, scorched and charred, like an explosion burst out from the epicentre and then stopped a few hundred metres away. I can make out cars on their sides. Police and fire engines who are clearly with the living. We've burst back through and caused havoc. What else is new?

 I walk forward, trying to gain a steady rhythm in my stride. I feel sick and feel the urge to sit on the floor. But I've seen a child holding a broken leg. As I blink I see them light up. She's among the dead.

 I crouch beside her. She recoils from me.

 'Where's Mr Teague?' she cries through puffy lips and streams of tears.

 'He's helping other people,' I lie. 'But I can help you.' I grasp her hand and it seems to calm her a bit.

 'It hurts,' she sobs. 'I hurt my leg.'

 'I know it does,' I sympathise. 'But you know what? You're a superhero?'

 She just cries in response. I don't think she understands.

 'No, trust me, you're a superhero. You can heal yourself.'

 I smile and nod as if this would confirm it for her.

 'It hurts really badly,' she says. 'I've never done that before.'

 'Every hero finds her powers eventually,' I say. 'Close your eyes and concentrate on getting up and walking away from here.'

Before my eyes, the girl looks below her waist and sees her legs remade. She takes on the embarrassed look of a young child who reaches the end of sobbing. She sniffs and smiles at me.

‘Where do you live?’ I ask.

‘I lived in a house with my mum,’ she replies. ‘In the desert. We died in a car crash.’

‘Can you see her?’

She looks around, worried for a second. I pray to myself that her mum made it through too.

Suddenly the girl’s face lights up. She jumps to feet on her new legs and sprints off. Her mother sees her and throws her arms open. A family reunited. I can’t believe that a child didn’t know that she could heal herself. She was dead, she had no reason to stay injured, even if her human instinct told her she was.

I get to my feet and re-enter the fray enclosed by the fire. It seems to be dwindling. I remember the scorch Teague made on Graham’s basement floor. I expect that the energy dispels and burns out quickly. I wonder if it’s even fire as the living understand it.

I can’t help but notice that the crowd of people in the circle, running and screaming and helping, has somehow shrunk. Does that mean that some people were left behind. It seems like the entire complement of children have made it through. They’re the epicentre of the screams. I almost trample a couple of them as they wheel in front of me.

Where’s Elle, where’s Yates? And Teague. The culprit of this disaster.

Isn’t that you? The accusing voice rises from the murk in my mind and I’m forced to squash it down.

This is Teague’s fault not mine.

‘Easton!’ Elle comes running towards me. ‘There’s someone trapped.’

‘How?’ I ask. ‘Can’t they jump away? Travel somewhere?’

‘They’re alive,’ she replies. ‘And no one can reach her.’

Elle points and pulls at my clothes with her other hand. I follow the imaginary line and find the group of people around an upturned car.

A woman lies on the ground underneath one of the wheels. I can only imagine her leg is mangled beyond comprehension beneath it. She screams and looks around, looking for the aid standing invisible all around her.

‘We can move it,’ I say. ‘And then hopefully someone will come for her.’

‘But the car’s huge,’ Elle says.

‘We can lever it away,’ I reply. ‘And with the bunch of us pushing it’ll move easily.’

 We move back to the group and I explain my plan. Immediately people begin picking up wreckage, bars and pieces of wood. It looks like we emerged on this side and crushed some sort of hut by the side of the road. I can only hope no one else was hurt by the explosion.

The woman screams. I can’t imagine what it must look like to her, a group of bars and planks spontaneously deciding to push a car off of her leg.

I wish I could reassure her, but I know that’s impossible, so I place my hands against the cars greasy underside and push with all my strength.

We push forward collectively and the car begins to lean backwards.

‘Again!’ I cry and we band together with fresh determination. The car rolls backwards and slams against the ashphalt with an almighty crash. I look closer for a second and see that the wheels aren’t wheels like I knew, they look plastic and smooth with no tyre to speak of. I ignore it and turn to the lady on the floor.

There’s a commotion to our right and firefighters, the living arrive to tend to her.

‘It moved!’ she screams, hysterical, quite forgetting the obvious pain in her leg. ‘I don’t understand, how did it move?’

‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Have you found Yates? Or Upson?’

‘No,’ she replies, her voice grave. ‘God, Easton I hope he didn’t fall to that other place again.’

‘I don’t think…’ I begin but a hand grabs my shoulder. I’m pulled around and I find Yates behind me.

‘Thank God you made it,’ he says and buries his face in my shoulder. Elle joins us.

‘Easton, I think people got lost on the way,’ he spits like the words are unclean in his mouth and I know he’s mad with Teague.

‘Tarquin?’ I ask. ‘Upson?’

Yates shakes his head. ‘I don’t think either of them made it.’

My head falls. Brave Upson and true Tarquin. We erupted into their lives and now, apparently we’ve ruined them, ended them, left them lost in a place I’m not even sure we can still reach.

‘Where is he?’ I growl. ‘Teague, I’m going to wring his neck.’

‘I haven’t seen him. Maybe he got left behind too?’

‘I don’t think we’re that lucky,’ Elle says. ‘I’m sure he’ll go running off to find Thacker.’

I look around the area, surveying the wreckage. The fire has almost disappeared and people from the outside are approaching to help the living and find out what’s happened.

‘Is there anyone else we can help?’

The dead in the area are standing around in small groups, they huddle together in the face of this old place made new.

‘Only find them a place to go,’ Elle answers. ‘God I’m so angry with him, how can he do this to all these people? They were leading their lives so happily there and now they have to find a place to go all over again.’

The knot of guilt in my stomach twists to uncomfortable level. I’m compelled to come clean. I persuaded him to return to his old ways. My cowardice holds my tongue.

Some people are starting to look towards us. No one from the other side, not Tarquin, no Upson, Yates’s new friends he made in the square. That’s when I see Sandra making her way towards us. She places her hands on people’s shoulders, reassuring them, putting on the face that settled me when I was looking for Teague in the first place.

‘Where is he?’ she demands quietly. ‘Have you seen him?’

I shake my head. ‘Did a disappearing act as soon as we got back.’

She places her hands on her hips and bows her head. She bites her lip. I know she’s holding something back.

‘Be honest with me, all of you,’ she says, still not looking us in the eyes. ‘Did any of you have a hand in this. I know you all wanted to leave.’

‘Sandra, no I promise!’ Elle says, stepping forward. ‘This was all Teague, we were watching him from the start, we knew he was going to try something, there was just no way of moving in time to stop him.’

Sandra nods. ‘I don’t think we can get back,’ she looks on the verge of tears. ‘Our whole way of life, dead. Cut off from us.’

‘Sandra, I’m so sorry,’ I say.

‘What are you sorry for?’

I want to say it was my fault. Teague pulled the trigger but I put the bullet in the chamber.

‘Just…we brought him there,’ I reply. ‘Or he came with us.’

‘How did you get to the town? And the desert in the first place? It wasn’t by the usual means was it? You were never looking for the beyond.’

She’s clever, cleverer than anyone I met there. Rather than cruise along with the way of life, she understood this side too, and the people who wanted to return to it. It must have been written all over us that we had no intention of going anywhere near the Great Beyond.

‘We were sent there.’ I have no problem telling Sandra the truth. She deserves it. ‘There’s a woman hiding in a house in this world. She wants to control everything, life and death and the ability to travel between.’

‘So she’s like Teague.’ I don’t know how much Sandra believes about the way we travel. We found out so much before all this business started again. We’re photons we can control ourselves. We can exit the world in one place and reform ourselves as though the material of reality is a curtain. It’s not a matter of magic, or voodoo or the macabre. We’re not ghosts of gothic tales or fairy stories. Ghosts are a matter of science.

‘They worked together and now Teague wants revenge for what she did to him. He didn’t know where she was sending him either.’

Yates taps me on the shoulder. I turn around quickly, I’m surprised he interrupted at all, Yates is always one to be polite and stand and listen. But the look on his face is one of confusion, and I know whatever he has to say can’t wait.

‘Easton, something’s changed,’ he says. ‘A lot’s changed.’

I look where he is and take a moment to register it. We’re in London, I’m sure of it. We’re near the river. I can see it twinkling in the sunshine. There are roadblocks now, with traffic behind them and I’m reminded vividly of the day I died.

The cars aren’t normal. There’s no rumble from the idling engines. Everything’s silent and all we can here is the shouts and horns of the drivers behind them who don’t yet understand what’s taken place.

‘What are they? Hybrid cars?’ I ask. ‘There were never that many before.’

Before we left for the desert hybrids were popular, but by no means the most popular choice of vehicle. I look around again. I look closer at the river and I’m not greeted by the murky grey brown of the Thames water I know well. It’s clear and blue like a tropical sea.

‘What’s happened?’ Elle says, then she notices too.

‘This place certainly has changed,’ Sandra says taking everything in, ‘I’ve been there forty years, I’m not surprised really.’

There’s a quiet inquisitive wonder in her voice. I wonder has she swallowed her anger for a moment.

I see a newsstand beyond the edge of the scorchmark, there’s just a smoking line where the fire was. A small crowd has gathered around the the newspapers and magazines, but there aren’t paper magazines. The newsstand is a stall with locked cabinets and TV screens instead. I see someone purchasing what looks like a memory stick and he slides it into a tablet device.

The TV screens show the newspapers I know. The Reader and The Daily Review. I close in on one and read the date in the top right corner of one of the screens.

‘A little bit longer than forty years,’ I say.

The date reads 2074. 

Box Set - Chapter Thirty-Four

I cross the town in a matter of minutes, going against the grain. Crowds of excited people all with the same goal. To see happy children singing happily, led by their teacher. I may not know what to do with my new life, but I know I have to stop Teague ruining this happy place for these people.

            I reach the house in the corner of the town and notice the quiet around me. There are no children to be seen. There’s a rattling of the door and Teague emerges. There are no locks here. It’s one of the small details that makes the town different. There are no secrets here. No secrets apart from him.

            ‘Teague,’ I say. I don’t know what I’m going to follow with. I’m standing in a small square. He stands on the doorstep. It’s a standoff in the wild-west, the sand and whitewash houses complete the picture. I just hope that my presence might stop him in whatever he’s planning, or at the very least find out what he plans to do so I can put an end to it.

            ‘Easton,’ he proclaims in that saccharine voice he must put on. ‘Why aren’t you in the square with everyone else?’

            ‘You know why,’ I reply. ‘I want to make sure you’re not going to hurt anyone.’

            He smiles and shakes his head. ‘Why would I do that? These people saved me.’

            ‘And I want you to leave them alone. After this recital of yours we can go home, you me, Elle and Yates. Then we can go our separate ways.’

            ‘You don’t understand, Easton. I love it here.’

            There’s a look in his eye. Like he’s enjoying himself. He’s an obstinate bully, a big brother who enjoys mocking me.

            ‘You don’t realise how well I know you. Teague wouldn’t be happy here.’

            ‘Before I was betrayed you mean? By the smartest man who ever lived?’

            ‘Woman,’ I say.

            ‘What’s the difference?’

            There’s a glimpse of the real him. He’s always been cracked. It’s a case of pressing my fingers between them and pulling. Eventually the armour he’s put on will fall away.

            ‘You were hurt by Thacker, I get that, I was too.’

            ‘Really?’ he says crossing his arms. ‘You devoted a large portion of your life to a person and then they stabbed you in the back. That happened to you?’

            ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Teague. I’m tired of arguing.’

            ‘What’s happened to you, Easton? Where’s your fight?’

            ‘You want me to argue with you.’ I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I hate arguing with someone like Teague. He’s a person who will stray from the crux of the argument just to win on a tiny point.

            He steps closer. I don’t like Teague like this, he’s too normal. I’m torn between going home without him and cutting him from my life, but then what will he do when I leave him? He’s like a nightmare pet I can’t bear inflicting on anyone else when all I want is a holiday.

            ‘Of course I want you too,’ he says. ‘I was once like you. Being a man of science means arguing against the status quo. We find the questions and answer them, even when people don’t want to hear it.’

            ‘So you’re a scientist now?’ I retort. ‘What happened to the writer and musical prodigy?’

            ‘I care,’ he says. ‘Like Thacker never cared about me.’

            ‘But you want to stay here,’ I say. ‘In the land of no science. And the people who are at peace and have no questions for you to answer.’

            ‘They could learn in time,’ he replies. His voice has gone quiet. ‘I’m sorry.’ He looks up. ‘I have to get back to the children.’

            He barges past me and then looks back. ‘I think you’re right in a lot of ways. Sometimes a leopard can’t change his spots.’

            Teague smiles and it’s not a smile I can read. His small eyes squint like he’s been planning his words for weeks. But his lips curl in a way that looks almost regretful.

            ‘Wait, Teague,’ I call as he rushes down the street. ‘What do you mean?’

            I panic for a second. I stay still and find my feet won’t move. Does that mean that he really did care about the children after all?

            ‘Teague!’ I shout.

            My feet find their mobility again. I run on the sand and realise how difficult it is to run on sand. The street is packed by people on a daily basis, but still my feet sink and slide and I almost fall over twice before I find another person. The streets are scarcely populated now. Everyone must be awaiting Teague in the square. I need to find Elle, Yates or Upson. Hopefully they’re in the square now. I don’t want to tell them what I think I’ve just done. From what it looked like, I just convinced Teague to return to his old ways when he was in favour of changing.

            I pump my arms faster and feel the sweat gather on my brow. It runs down my forehead, around my eyes to the corner of my lips.

            I curl my fists in frustration. I’m dead, I do not sweat.

            I blink and the sweat is gone.

            I burst into the square and into the mass of people crowded to watch the children sing.

            It’s truly like a gig, with excited people squashed together in a space too small for them. I never realise how many people were here. In the moments when we arrived there was space to move, and a ring in the middle of a new townsperson to escape the doldrums. The population seems to have doubled. There’s excitement and nudges and chatting. I’m now dreading what Teague’s going to do more and it’ll all be my fault.

            I stretch onto my tiptoes and scan the heads around me.

            There, about twenty yards in front of me is a bobbing head of wild hair that can only be him.

            I prise the two people in front of me apart and squeeze into the gap. After the third time of doing this people start to get annoyed. They refuse and push back. There’s tutting aplenty and more often than not, I’m confronted by a steadfast wall of people.

            I change tact. I skirt to the side of the square and try and squeeze around the edge.

            After a few more minutes I’ve lost Teague completely.

            I press my hands to my temples.

            ‘Easton!’

            I turn and am overjoyed to find Yates parting the crowd to find me.

            ‘I couldn’t find him,’ he says as he reaches me. ‘I think Elle and Upson are with Tarquin.’

            He sees the look on my face and reads the worry. ‘What’s wrong, Easton?’

            ‘I did find him,’ I blurt out. ‘Yates, I think I’ve made a huge mistake.’

            I quickly run through my meeting with Teague. Yates’s face darkens with every passing word.

            ‘So you think he really had changed?’

            ‘Not anymore,’ I reply.

            ‘We have to find Tarquin,’ Yates says.

            I nod and follow him through the crowd. He’s a lot better at parting it than me. I don’t know how he does it. He finds gaps that I didn’t realise were there. Maybe that was my problem all along. I went after Teague single-handedly when really I should have gone to get help.

            Right now I feel more lost than ever. Sandra’s words echo in my head. I should have given this place more of a chance. What was ever wrong with a bit of peace? Now my negativity might have ruined it for everyone. I’ve unleashed the monster in Teague.

            Elle stands with Upson and Tarquin near the front of the crowd. After a few more nudges and several more tuts, we stand beside them. It doesn’t take long for Elle to read our expressions.

            ‘Oh for christ’s sake,’ she says. ‘What have you done now?’

            I relay my story for the second time in a few minutes. Before Elle can even reply there’s a cheer from over on our left. The children have arrived.

            They file in in a long line like a school play. There are toddlers to early teens and they all look happy and nervous all at once. I don’t think I can watch and put my face in my hands.

            Elle places a hand on my shoulder. I meet her eyes and find a look that seems to say everything’s okay.

            I can’t believe it. As they take their places, the chatter in the crowd rises to a crescendo. Teague stands at the front smiling and waving to his new subjects.

            ‘Good afternoon everyone,’ he calls. Everyone grows quiet. For them it’s quiet excitement, for us I can feel the tension as close as the heat around me. ‘Although it’s hard to know here isn’t it.’ He laughs, so do they.

            ‘He should take up politics,’ Elle observes.

            ‘These children have prepared some songs for us today,’ he continues. ‘Songs of love, songs of life,’ he turns to us. He locks eyes with me. ‘Songs of home.’

            And I know what he means. I can do nothing to stop him. He’s going to use the children to take them home. I look at Elle and Yates, even Upson knows what’s going on.

            ‘So without any further ado, let’s begin.’ Teague begins to clap. This starts a ripple and then an outbreak of thunderous applause.

            He steps to the side and the children begin. And it is a song of home. It’s a song of a life left behind. I’m guessing by a teenager who dreamed of the best grades in his upcoming exams. He wanted to make his dad proud of him. It’s a simple song, but the children sing in layers like a choir. On the last chorus, the town join in. I don’t think they can resist. Music keeps this place flowing. It saves lives.

            And that’s when I feel the change. The electricity in the air.

            ‘He’s doing it!’ I call over the song of the town. How can it be that simple? How can one little song written by someone so young mean so much. Teague’s taken something wonderful and turned it sour.

            And it’s all my fault.

            ‘We have to get to him,’ Upson barges through the crowd. He sends people flying and he’s halfway across the square before anyone can stop him. Finally Tarquin’s caught on too. He can feel it in the air. His world has been unsettled.

            I follow Upson but I’m soon lost. People are in front of me and behind me and everyone is singing.

            The edges of my vision blur. They sing so loud I feel the ground rumble beneath my feet. Suddenly everything is changing. The colours wash into one another. Lines of black claw at the edges of my periphery. The sky is sand, the earth is clear and I’m falling, we’re all falling away.

            In an instant, the town is gone.