Page 35 of The Man Made of Smoke

“Hello?” he tried to say.

And realized there was tape covering his mouth.

Panic flared inside him at that, and he tried to fight against his restraints with more urgency, pushing and pulling with all his strength. But there was no give in them at all. His mumbles from behind the tape became muffled screams, which continued until he felt like he was about to vomit.

If he was sick, he would choke to death.

Whoever was behind him seemed oblivious to his distress. The trolley carried on at the same speed, rattling like a shopping trolley with a broken wheel that wouldn’t stop spinning and stalling.

He forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose, and after what felt like an age the nausea subsided slightly. But his heart was punching hard inside his chest, as if it were trying to find a way out.

Think.

How had he got here?

It was hard to gather his thoughts. Dim recollections drifted through his mind, the way threads of smoke in the air might—but that image brought a sharper jolt of memory.Smoke in the air.He remembered that. He had been in the outside area of a bar with a cigarette, watching the smoke he exhaled swirling in the air beneath the light of a heater and then disappearing away into the night. He remembered thinking that it was kind of beautiful to see the air made real like that.

Marie wouldn’t have approved of him smoking, but he was a couple of drinks down by then, and she wouldn’t have approved of that either. He didn’t care; that was the point of being in the bar in the first place. It was a stupid habit he’d fallen into. A lot of the time when he was at home, it felt like he couldn’t do right for doing wrong, and so a couple of nights a week he’d taken to pretending he was working late, but stopped instead at whatever brightly lit bar happened to call out to him from the side of the road.

Just a little me time.

Marie probably thought he was cheating on her. The thing was, he never had and never would. It was like he used to tell her: even if they weren’t always great together, they were always good. But she was the jealous type, and that had got worse recently. And if he was going to end up doing the time for a crime he hadn’t committed then he figured he might as well commit one of some kind.

The gurney’s spinning wheel caught a snag of undergrowth. Whoever was behind grunted softly and pushed harder to get it moving again, but the moment’s stillness gave Darren Field a chance to glance to either side and see that the world was no longer as dark as it had been.

And then they were moving again.

But that brief moment had been enough for him to see that there were loops of small fairy lights strung between the trees. The sight was so incongruous that, for a few half-delirious seconds, he imagined that the man had taken him out of the real world, and that the two of them were now in a different one entirely.

“Do you think you were abducted from the bar?” John says.

Field nods cautiously.

“I left my drink inside when I went out to smoke,” he says. “Someone could have spiked it then. I don’t remember much after that.”

“Why did you leave your drink?”

“You don’t worry about it as a guy, do you? The place wasn’t all that busy, and I had a table out of the way round a corner that I wanted to keep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone there.”

There’s a helpless expression on his face.

“I just wanted to sit with my phone. That was all Ieverdid. Catch up on the news a bit; read a few updates on social media. Maybe play a few games of chess if I couldn’t get reception.”

He spreads his hands, the question clear.

Is that too much to ask?

The answer, John thinks, is that it shouldn’t be, but that’s not the way things work. If you let your guard down once, the chances are that you’llbe okay. But if you do it a hundred times, the odds are going to catch up with you eventually. Which to his mind is more than enough reason to keep your guard up the whole time.

“Can you remember the name of the bar?” he says.

“No. I didn’t even look at the sign when I parked.”

“You could drive the route. Check in a few places. You’d recognize it if you were there again.”

Field shakes his head. “No.”

“It could help. There might be security footage.”

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