Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [93]
It’s not a nightmare. However you explain it, it is not a dream of any kind. It is all simply there. And so were we.
Vinaldi slumped in his seat, shaking his head, whether against the crash or Rapt or The Gap I couldn’t tell.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “No, I’m not fucking all right.”
I shook his shoulder gently. “We’ve got to go now or well never catch up with him.” Vinaldi reached blindly for the gearshift and pushed at it, but it was like moving a rotting stick in a stream; it didn’t make any difference to anything. “I don’t think the truck is really here,” I added. “Come on. Get out.”
I grabbed as much ammunition as I could fit in my pockets, together with one of the pump-actions Vinaldi had thoughtfully provided, opened my door, and climbed down from the truck. On the other side Vinaldi did the same, and we stood for a moment, looking around us.
The darkness in The Gap is strange. It is like the lack of any light at all, because our sun has never shone on it, and yet sometimes it is like a slanting sunset or twilight in the corner of your eye. As you move your head you see different things, changing lights. For a moment I thought I saw late-afternoon sun glinting off the roof of the truck, and then all was silky evening and the truck was only colored space in front of me. The light in there is blue, for the most part, a blue which I have only seen in one place since.
In all directions, as far as the eye could see, were the trees. A forest of unimaginable age, rank upon rank of thick trunks shooting up into infinity. Sometimes it seems as if they are entirely separate from each other, at others as if they were all extrusions of the same thing. The forest floor was covered with leaves so densely that it seemed like there were no individual leaves at all but only a carpet of moleskin, covered with a fine and shifting mist.
“Which way did he go?” Vinaldi asked, rubbing his hand across his face. “Not that it makes much difference.”
“That way,” I said, joining him. “I think I can still see the clothes, out in the distance.” I couldn’t, but we needed some impetus. To stand still in The Gap is to stop swimming for a shark. You sink to the bottom, and can’t start moving again.
We started off quickly, both of us giving the vehicle a backward glance after a few yards, as if we knew that leaving it would commit us to being here. The truck was gone, which didn’t surprise me. You can’t carry large objects across all in one go. The vehicles used in the war—which were in any event few and far between—all had to be ferried across piecemeal and assembled in The Gap; even the machines which ultimately enabled us to be sideslipped back again.
“Are you Rapt yet?” Vinaldi asked.
“No, but it’s coming,” I said.
“Good. It had better. Because I’m getting The Fear.”
“Perhaps we’d better run.”
“You know something? I think you could be right.”
We started trotting then, hopefully in the direction Ghuaji had gone, but I was already none too sure. For now the forest seemed quiet; as if ignoring us, but we both knew that wouldn’t last. Leaves started running beside us then, like children playing. Vinaldi kicked out at them, but I stopped him.
“Little fuckers,” he said.
“Better them than the trees.”
We ran, faster and faster, as The Fear came. Its coming was like a return to everything you thought you’d left behind. Not just our memories, but everyone’s, until we were no longer really following Ghuaji but just fleeing from everyone and everything. Men, dead and wounded, spread in pieces around the floor and their blood not lying still yet. Children, jerking spastically toward us. None of this was here now, but it had been, and The Gap remembered. The Gap was full of ghosts, of the thousands whose bodies had disappeared before anyone had a chance to grieve or offer thanks.
Vinaldi’s face flashed white beside me, our breaths labored and ragged; both