Page 44 of The Man Made of Smoke

It’s close to midnight.

Andrew Sanderson is supposed to be off shift by now, but he was called out to a domestic violence incident late on and still has to sign the car back in at the department before heading home. The call was a nothing. He was well acquainted with the couple in question by now, and also with the concerned neighbor that kept phoning. The visits always ended the same way. Everything calm by the time he arrived; a few things thrown and smashed, but nobody physically hurt; neither of them wanting to talk to Sanderson. And everyone, including the neighbor, ending up resenting him being there almost as much as he did himself.

He’s driving back now along a curling country road, hungry and tired and eager to get home. Sally will probably be in bed by now, but she’ll have left him dinner, and there’ll at least be a sleepy cuddle on the horizon when he finally slips into bed beside her. Which makes him think of the couple he just left. He and Sally never argue; he can’t imagine either of them even getting angry enough to shout, never mind throw anything at each other. Thirty years on the job and some people still baffle him.

He glances out to the right.

About a mile away, he can see the gridded lights of the airport. To his left, at a similar distance, are the lazy yellow floodlights of the college campus. But right here, in the middle of nowhere, everything is dark. The fields directly to either side are black expanses. There are no streetlights, and no other vehicles out at this time of night. Anything oncoming, you always see a good few minutes before you reach each other.

His own car headlights play on the road ahead, the tarmac flashing along like static.

It’s the kind of road on which you could really put your foot down if you knew the turns, and given his desire to get home the temptation is there. But Sanderson keeps his speed steady. It’s easy to imagine a deer darting out suddenly in front of the vehicle; he’s seen that happen before. Always better to be careful.

Regardless, it’s this caution that saves his life. He glances down for a second as he rounds a corner, and then up again just as his headlights illuminate something small and bright in the road ahead, and heslamson the brakes more out of instinct than anything else. A pale shape is speeding toward him, resolving a second later into the back of a camper van, stopped in the middle of the road. His tires screech desperately on the tarmac, and he comes to a stop just a nose away from the back of it.

And then sits there for a moment, staring down at his hands. They’re gripping the steering wheel, and his heart is pounding.

Shit, he thinks.Shit.

But then he lets out a nervous laugh and looks up. His car’s headlights form bright white circles on the back of the camper van, revealing dents and scratches in the metal, and dirt that seems to be smeared everywhere. There is a door in the back, with a little black window and an old steel handle. Perhaps it had been the handle that had reflected the light and saved him. It certainly wasn’t the number plate, which is so thick with mud that it’s impossible to read.

Sanderson flicks on his hazards, then grabs a torch and opens the door.

Outside, the night is silent and still, with just the faintest rush of air from the open field to his side. The airport and college are out of sight behind now, and he imagines himself as a single speck of light at the heart of a pitch-black void. But for some reason, standing there in the empty road, he doesn’t feelalone. There’s a crawling sensation inside him, as though something is out there in the darkness watching him.

He shivers.

Get yourself together.

The camper van is backlit by his own headlights, and enough of that light creeps around the vehicle for him to see it’s half off the road, the front angled into a thorny hedgerow.

He turns on the torch and walks forward slowly, playing the beam along the side of the van as he goes.

He stops halfway down. The metal here is as dirty as the back, but there’s what looks like a series of small, smeared handprints close to the ground, as though a child has knelt down in the mud and pawed at it.

He moves the torch beam up.

Here is a window, the black glass protected by a screen of rusty iron mesh that has been screwed into the metal. He can’t see in properly. Is there something covering the window on the inside too? It looks like it’s been papered over. Standing on tiptoes, he angles the light down, illuminating a little of the sill between the glass and whatever has been plastered on the inside. The sill is coated with what appears at first to be lumps of dirt but which, as he stares closer, moving the light here and there, reveals itself to be a ridge of dead flies.

He stands still for a moment, listening.

There’s a soft tapping coming from inside.

Sanderson breathes in, and realizes there’s an unpleasant smell leaking from the vehicle: a faint trace of something rotten and vile escaping through the cracked seams of its metal.

He feels a cold fingertip tracing up the length of his spine. Almost real enough for it to flick the hair at the nape of his neck.Certainlyreal enough to make him turn quickly and angle the torch into the field behind him.

The light moves over the tangles of gray grass and shadow close to him, dissolving into darkness farther away.

Again:get yourself together.

He turns back to the camper van. None of its own lights are on. The thing looks dead. It can surely only have been here for a handful of minutes without causing an accident, but a part of him can imagine it has sat long abandoned for years in some mirror version of this road, and has just now passed through a veil and shimmered into existence here.

He continues slowly down the side, toward the driver’s door.

The window is smeared with more dirt, and the inside of the cab is thick with darkness. But there issomethingthere, he can tell. A shadow close to the glass. Almost pressed up against it, but not quite.

Sanderson’s heart begins thumping harder in his chest.

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