Page 82 of The Man Made of Smoke

There’s a click as the man pulls on a cord. The single bulb flickers on and buzzes gently, illuminating a small, makeshift storeroom.

James looks around. Every visible surface is thick with dust, and cobwebs trail down from the wooden ceiling. There are bags stuffed full of old clothes against one wall. Open cardboard boxes against another, filled with an assortment of random objects. Crumpled handbags. Broken toys. Indistinct photographs curling at the edges.

Souvenirs, James realizes.

The wall directly ahead is lined with rusted filing cabinets. Above them are a series of handmade wooden shelves the man has nailed into the brickwork. James’s gaze moves over the items there. An old kerosene lamp and a crumpled box of matches; the rusted handles of wrenches and hammers; an ornate silver picture frame with no photograph inside. Metalhooks have been screwed into the fronts of the shelves, keys hanging from them at intervals all the way along.

The man opens one of the drawers. It makes a rasping, scraping sound.

“Come and look,” he tells James.

James steps across and peers down. The first thing he notices is the money. It has been a long time since he has seen money, and there is almost too much of it here for his mind to make sense of. Hundreds of rolled-up banknotes, held in tight coils with dirty rubber bands. James has no idea where the man got it from, but the implication of what he’s being shown is clear.

Look at how powerful I am.

How powerful I can make you be.

His gaze moves to everything else in the drawer.

“Take some of it out,” the man tells him. “Look through it.”

James hesitates for a second, then reaches in and begins to pick items out at random, one by one. Passports; bank cards; birth certificates; driving licenses. The blank faces of strangers stare back at him, and the details begin to merge as he looks through them. But again, the implication is clear. The man has dark magic. He can change his name, his age, his face. There are so many identities in this room, each one a door that the man can step through, moving from one to the next at will. He is anybody and nobody. He is whoever he wishes to be. He is hurt and trauma passed on from body to body.

And that is what James can be too.

Nobody sees. And nobody cares.

The man has spent so long convincing him of that, and he’s proved it to James today. But down here, finally, he is teaching him something else as well.

Nobody except me.

James hears the familiar tune whistled softly in the air.

It takes a moment for him to realize that it’s coming from him now.

PART FOUR

DESPAIR

Twenty-Three

Michael Johnson lived in a tower block not far from the canal where Rose Saunders had moored her boat. Aside from a handful of miles at the end, in fact, the route I drove us on was almost exactly the same as I’d taken yesterday, and passing the exit for the rest area brought the same frisson of panic it had then.

But it also occurred to me how close most of us had stayed to the scene of our encounter with the Pied Piper. Darren Field and Rose Saunders had both lived nearby; Michael Johnson still appeared to. Oliver Hunter had moved a little farther afield, but the stretch of canal on which he had vanished was part of the same system where Rose had made her home. And while Sarah and I had moved away, circumstances had brought the two of us back again. It was as though we were all tethered to the place by a cord that could never be broken, only stretched for a while until eventually it pulled us back.

After leaving the motorway, I didn’t drive directly to Johnson’s address. When I estimated that we were ten minutes away, I pulled in and parked on a residential road.

“What are you doing?” Sarah said.

“Nothing.”

I eyed the rearview mirror. When she realized what I was doing, she craned her neck and looked back over her shoulder.

“You think we’re being followed?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just being careful.”

Ever since the ferry, I’d had the sensation that we were being shadowed. A tingle of attention was itching between my shoulder blades. Which made sense, of course; the photograph I’d received proved that someone reallyhadbeen watching me. But I hadn’t noticed anything suspicious on the ferry, and I’d kept a constant eye on the traffic around us after we disembarked and drove away. There had been nothing. Even so, I was still watching carefully now, making a mental note of the color and model of the cars around us. I tried to catch glimpses of the people driving them and remember parts of the license plates.

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