Page 46 of The Man Made of Smoke

They had.

But it wasn’t necessary for me to read the on-screen text too carefully. Just as I didn’t need to look at any of the photographs of the boys that ran down the right-hand side of the screen.

Because I knew everything that had been written here already.

Even after all this time, I still knew it by heart.

A memory.

I was sixteen years old. I was in my room in the attic, lying on my back on the bed, with a book held open awkwardly over my face.

It wasn’t a heavy book, but for some reason my arms still ached from the effort. Which was silly, really. I didn’t need to lie down; there was a chair I could sit in. And yet I always chose to read the book that way. Perhaps a part of me believed that it should be an uncomfortable experience.

That I deserved to suffer.

Robbie was something of a child prodigy, I read.

At the age of 9, he was already showing an aptitude for chess and had started a club at his primary school.

The book wasThe Man Made of Smokeby Terrence O’Hare, and I had read it more times than I could count. The front cover showed a man’s face composed roughly of misty jigsaw pieces. The blurb on the back gave a lurid account of the contents, teasing atrocities that were provided in several of the more speculative chapters inside. But in some ways, it was the sections focusing on the victims in life that were the hardest for me to read.

Following his disappearance, Robbie’s friends and family joined the—

I was distracted by the noise from downstairs. My father was shut away in his room, hitting the punch bag, and the sound of his blows reverberated up through the floorboards.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Heavy. Repetitive. Mindlessly angry.

I kept reading.

Following his disappearance, Robbie’s friends and family joined the local community in searching the woods for the boy. They were committed and remained hopeful. For a day or two, it was almost as though the game of hide-and-seek begun by Robbie and his friend was still being played.

The photographs in the book were all in the middle, printed on slightly thicker pages. I held my place but flicked through to one of the pictures of Robbie. It was a portrait from school: one of those ones taken close to Christmas so that your family can order a print for a frame or a keyring. Robbie had a side-part and a sweet smile. He appeared very young, like a little brother you wanted to protect. But there was nothing distinctive about him. He looked like any child, or every one.

I returned to the previous passage.

Like many boys his age, Robbie was fascinated by dinosaurs. He would have his parents test him, asking them to question him onthe pictures. Which dinosaur is this? He would always answer without hesitation.

Reading about Robbie helped me to visualize him as a person, which was also a way of punishing myself for what I had failed to do. The two of us would always be connected—weallwould be. Because in a strange way, the victims of the Pied Piper had become more real to me at that point than the boys I walked past in the corridors at school. There were even times when I might have thought of them as brothers. Except that I had been in a position to save one of them and I had failed, and my cowardice in the face of their killer would mean that they would surely have rejected me.

The dinosaur names were often long and obscure. They were creatures—monsters in a sense—that Robbie’s parents might also have recognized when they were children, but whose names they had forgotten since. The nature of adulthood, after all, is to leave childish things behind.

But it was an interest that Robbie would not be allowed to grow old enough to grow out of.

There was a creak on the staircase outside my bedroom door.

I flipped over quickly, closing the book and sliding it under my pillow in one smooth moment.

My father had already made me throw the book away once, and he would be angry to discover me with it again now. He hated the fact that I tortured myself by reading it. He knew how much it hurt me to do so, and he wanted to rescue me from it—protect me from what had happened—but he could no more do that than I could bring myself to throw the book away myself.

The stairs creaked softly again.

I stood up and walked quietly across the room to the closed door.

After a moment, I could sense my father there, standing on the other side. We were deep in the trenches at that point, he and I. It wasn’t justthe book. It felt like we were sharing a house but living separate existences that were diverging more and more by the day. We had nothing to say to each other, and whenever we tried it went wrong.

And yet a part of me yearned for him to knock and ask to come in. I would ignore him or say no, of course… except that, right then, it felt possible that I might say yes. That I would open the door. And perhaps the two of us could talk in a way that the words actually met in the middle rather than drifting past or drowning each other out.

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