Page 112 of The Man Made of Smoke

I realized that it’s the killing that brings me peace now.

I signaled and took the turning for the rest area.

A part of me expected the place to be as dark and dead as the fields around the motorway behind me, but of course, it wasn’t. The hotel to one side and the building ahead were both brightly illuminated, and the car park was swathed in an artificial light that washed the other vehicles of color and painted them all sickly shades of amber.

I drove in slowly, remembering what the man had told me.

You’ll know what to do when you get there.

A moment later, I spotted the old camper van. It was parked on its own, far off to one side, in one of the few small pools of darkness the car park offered. A shiver of recognition ran through me as I approached it and then pulled in beside. It was impossible for it to be the same vehicle I had seen here as a child. The Pied Piper’s van had been found in a country lane two decades ago, the man dead behind the wheel. When the investigation had run its course, it would have been either locked away or destroyed. It would certainly never have seen a road again.

But the similarities were uncanny. Streaks of mud obscured the license plate. There was the same black window in its side, the same dirt coating the metal. I couldn’t see if there were little handprints pressed into the muck below, but I could picture them there. As I drew level with the cab, I had the sensation that the vehicle beside me had passed through time somehow. That it had winked out of a moment in the past and then arrived, intact and unchanged, in this one, here in the present.

I could hear the sound of its engine rumbling softly.

The driver’s window was dark, the cab full of shadow. I could just about make out the vague impression of a figure seated motionless behind the wheel.

Thump!

A bright white face appeared suddenly against the glass, and I flinched. The cheeks and forehead were smooth and unlined. A thin line for a mouth. Black hollows where the eyes should have been. It took me a second to realize that I was looking at a mask that the man in the cab was holding up against the window. He tilted it to one side, as though it was turning its head to peer out at me. I could see the tip of his finger in the center of one black eye socket, like the pale smudge of a retina.

I waited, my heart beating hard.

And then my mobile buzzed beside me on the passenger seat.

I read the message he had sent me.

turn off your phone throw it out of the window make sure I see.

I hesitated, unsure what to do. On the one hand, he wasright there. But the van’s engine was running, and I was sure the doors were locked, so there was no guarantee that I’d be able to get to him before he managed to drive away. Even if I did, I couldn’t be sure that Sarah was even inside. He could have left her somewhere else. Somewhere that she’d never be found.

I looked up from my phone.

The mask—still tilted—stared implacably at me.

Waiting for my decision.

I switched the phone off. Then I put the window down and threw it out, listening to it clatter away across the tarmac. Perhaps Fleming or Rampton police would trace it eventually; if so—if it came to that—then it seemed right that this would be the last place they could track it to. If I was going to disappear, it was appropriate for it to be from here.

The mask continued to stare blankly at me for what felt like an age.

Then it ducked away out of sight.

The camper van began moving forward. Not racing away, just crawling steadily out of the parking space beside me.

The implication was clear enough.

I released the handbrake and headed after it. Keeping a little distance. Following it around the perimeter of the car park, toward the exit back onto the motorway. The van accelerated up the exit that led out of the rest area, and I matched its pace. And then, a minute later, we were both part of the traffic there, the taillights ahead of me like a pair of red eyes staring unblinkingly back from the night.

I had no idea where we were going, and no idea of what was going to happen when we got there. But as the overhead lights began to wash over and through the car again, I had a sensation that reminded me of what happened all those years ago. The feeling that I was leaving the real world behind and heading toward an entirely different one.

Somewhere out of time where anything might happen.

A place where there would be monsters.

Thirty-Three

Come on, old man, John tells himself.

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