Page 3 of The Man Made of Smoke

My father turned back.

“You okay, Daniel?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I glanced behind me, back up the concourse. To where the crowds were sparse and the lights were flickering.

“I think I might just go to the toilet first,” I said.

Coins clattering in the arcade; shouts from behind the food counter; mingled conversations. All that noise disappeared as I closed the door to the men’s toilets and started down the corridor beyond. There was only the unsettling hum of the bulbs flickering overhead.

Old trails left by a dirty mop had dried on the tiled floor like swirls of faint, ghostly hair, and the air smelled stale. The hum from above me grew louder as I walked, and my heart started beating a little harder. It felt like I was entering a place in which I didn’t belong yet, and I had to fight the urge to turn around and head back out. But that was stupid; I wasn’t a little boy anymore. There was nothing here to be frightened of.

And then I heard someone whistling.

I faltered. The sound was coming from ahead of me, around the corner. It was neither casual nor mindless, clearly a deliberate and purposeful tune, and I recognized it from somewhere without being able to name it. It was familiar in an odd, unnerving way, as though I’d heard it in a dream, or a nightmare, or in some different life altogether.

Everything is fine, I told myself.

There’s nothing to be scared of.

I reached the end of the corridor and turned to the right. The toilets were long and narrow, with four cubicles on the right-hand side, a urinal along the wall opposite, and a sink and mirror on the far wall. The doorof the cubicle farthest from me was closed. The whistling was coming from whoever was in there, and a little boy was standing outside it.

The atmosphere had already put me on edge, but the sight of the boy made my breath catch in my throat. Because I felt it immediately: something wrong was happening here. The boy was small and skinny, wearing old clothes that were at least a couple of sizes too large, and which hung loosely off his thin frame. One of his cheeks was streaked with dirt. As he turned his head to look at me now, it seemed to move in slow motion. Along with the otherworldly whistling and the flickering light, I was suddenly convinced I was looking at a ghost.

Then I registered the expression on his face.

Terrified. Desperate.

His eyes begging:please help me.

The two of us stared at each other for what felt like an age, that whistled music continuing from behind the closed door. I held the boy’s gaze, unable to break it. But I had no idea how to react. What to do or what to say. Nothing in my life so far had prepared me for the strangeness of this encounter.

I could see the fear on the boy’s face.

Please help me.

And I wanted to. The boy was small and emaciated, and his expression reminded me of how I felt facing the bullies in the schoolyard, desperate for someone to come and help me, rescue me, make it stop. I had the uncanny sensation that I was looking into a fairground mirror, in which the reflection was only very slightly distorted. And I felt an immediate, deep connection to the boy. I knew that I had to help him.

But then the whistling stopped.

The silence lent an instant charge to the air. The urge to help shifted inside me, like an animal that had been frozen in headlights jerking back to life. All I knew for certain right then was that there was something dangerous on the other side of that closed door. That a monster was about to emerge, and I needed to get away from it as quickly as I could.

It was blind panic. I reacted without thinking, stepping into the nearest cubicle and pulling the door closed quickly. I clicked the lock down just as I heard the door at the far end of the toilets creaking open on its old hinges.

Then nothing aside from the hum of the lights.

I sat down as quietly as I could on the toilet seat, then lifted my feet off the floor, brought my knees up to my chest, and wrapped my arms around them. It was dark in the cubicle, but the door didn’t go all the way to the ground. At the bottom, there was a letterbox of pale green light flickering weakly on the tiles.

I waited, my heart beating hard.

For a few seconds, there was nothing. But then I heard slow, purposeful footsteps, and I held my breath. A shadow broke the light beneath the cubicle door and stopped there. I stared down at the muddy tips of a pair of enormous, weathered work boots.

I heard slow breathing from the other side of the thin wood.

And then what sounded like fingernails tracing lazy circles on it.

“Nobody sees,” a man’s voice said.

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