Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [90]
“Why didn’t I listen to you, Jack?” he muttered. “Why didn’t I just stay the fuck in New Richmond?” I held the needle out to him, but he shook his head violently. “I’m not having any of that shit. It took me two years to kick it back then.”
“You’re taking it,” I said firmly. “You’re going to have to share the needle with me, but you’re taking it. We barely got out the first time, Johnny. We’re older now. You go in without this and your mind’s going to shatter right away.”
Vinaldi just kept shaking his head. I rolled my own sleeve up and jabbed the needle in. In front of us, Ghuaji was now standing bolt upright, and the rope in his hand was being tugged more insistently. The cat was evidently reaching the limits of its tether, but I didn’t think that was going to matter.
Then the Flip happened, and Vinaldi cried out. The spaces between the trees took on solidity, and it became apparent that the trees themselves were merely gaps. I turned my head slowly to look at the old Farm building, and saw that it was the same there. The building was nothing, a lack of something, and the space between it and us was now a thing which I could barely see round.
“Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” moaned Vinaldi, and abruptly held his arm out toward me. I rolled his sleeve, flicked the needle again and sank it in, injecting him with the second half of an extremely strong double dose. The noise outside was getting louder, all of the gaps between sounds becoming sounds themselves as the real sounds faded away—and only when that happens do you realize just how much silence there really is. Silences between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in-betweens and everything that isn’t an answer. All of these quietnesses and more gathered together around us, funneled into the times and places where things didn’t happen and no one was saved.
One thing has always summed up The Gap more than anything else to me. It’s a warning sign I saw, as a child, in front of a dirty lake. The sign was a perfunctory painting of a little boy who had fallen in the water. In the picture there was no one else around, just this child slipping deeper. His arm reached up, his mouth was wide with entreaty, but you knew he was going to die. “BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU PLAY,” the warning at the bottom said: “HELP MAY NEVER COME.”
Ghuaji’s arm jerked out suddenly, as the rope was pulled taut. His eyes opened, and we knew they had because they threw a beam across the trees. Not of light exactly: a different view, a sideways glance. What we saw across his vision was something not really there at all, but which might have been. The rope jerked again and Ghuaji half-stepped, half-toppled, in the direction of the cat, which had now presumably found that door for which its kind had always been searching.
“Start the truck,” I said.
“Won’t he hear?”
“All we’ll be is a patch of silence.”
Vinaldi turned the key and the engine chugged into life; sluggishly—if we’d sat much longer it might not have restarted at all. We watched as Ghuaji staggered off toward the trees. I motioned for Vinaldi to follow him.
“We can’t go down there in this,” he said.
“Just do it,” I said. “And make sure you’re exactly behind him.”
Ghuaji started to pick up speed, partly because he was reaching a steeper slope, mainly as the pull gathered momentum. As Vinaldi steered the truck off the road and down after him I felt the first twinge of Rapt, the forerunner of forerunners, insinuate itself into my system. “Christ, not again,” my brain said, but it knew it was the right thing to do, and perfect timing. The truck bumped down the slope and the Flip was stronger there, the space between things seeming to resist until Vinaldi had to push his foot down on the accelerator even though we were traveling downhill. Ghuaji didn’t turn, though we were only five yards behind. He couldn’t hear us. The line