Page 113 of The Man Made of Smoke

Keep going.

He rests his shoulder against the wooden post, then drives down with his feet, grits his teeth, and pushes as hard as he can. His shoes skitter in the dust a little, threatening to slip and only just holding.

Is the post shifting a little?

It’s hard to tell.

He keeps pushing, staring blankly down at his hands, shackled together at the wrist, and ignoring the pain coursing through his body, and he counts silently to five before finally allowing himself to step back and rest.

Deep breaths.

Shivering in the cold night air.

The wooden pen around him is small and square, three meters to a side by his estimate. The post stands in the very center. A metal plate has been screwed tightly into the side of it, and a short chain connects that to the shackles that bind his hands.

Come on, he tells himself.

He remembers little of the hours after being drugged at the Reach. There is the sensation of having been in an enclosed space, perhaps in the boot of a car, and a dim memory of hearing the horns at the ferryterminal. But the first moment he recalls with any clarity is when he woke up here, however many days ago that was now. He was alone. There was no sign of Aspinall, and when John shouted out the man’s name, his calls had gone unanswered, disappearing into the trees. Something about the quality of the silence told him that he was in the middle of nowhere.

Nobody was coming to help him.

The next thing he did was test the limits of his prison. If he could reach the fence, he reasoned, perhaps he could break off a switch of wood to use as a tool or a weapon. But the chain was too short. One by one, he attempted to pry apart the links, but that was no use either. They were much stronger than he was.Brute forcewas not going to help him here. He had then tried to use the little hand movement available to him to pull the post out of the ground. But once again, he had realized very quickly that wouldn’t work. The post had been driven in too deep.

Because Aspinall was good at building and fixing things, wasn’t he?

The man had spent years now traversing the island, carrying out repairs on the trails and at the beauty spots. The whole time, John had thought of him as being almost part of the landscape. Just a man you saw without seeing, talked to without really listening to. Aspinall was such a reliable part of ordinary, everyday life that it had never occurred to John to imagine he might be building something in a different place, intent on fixing something inside him instead.

For a time, he had succumbed to despair.

But also—shameful to admit—to fear. He was trapped and helpless, subject to whatever Aspinall’s whims might be when the man eventually returned. John had remembered the story Darren Field had told him.

He was so angry. He’s reds and blacks. He’s fucking screaming.

And while he found it hard to square that with the picture he had of Craig Aspinall in his head, he knew now that image had always been wrong. Whatever else Aspinall pretended to be, in his own mind he was James Palmer’s father.

He hated himself. And he hated the people who had failed to save his boy that day.

You are going to die here, John had told himself.

But then another idea had occurred to him.

Perhapsbrute forcewas not out of the question after all.

Come on, he tells himself again now. And then he edges monotonously around to the opposite side of the post. He gathers his strength and leans into it from the opposite direction, pushing as hard as he can. A minute ago, he wasn’t sure, butthistime he’s certain he feels it. The post moved. It’s tiny, imperceptible, barely there. But itisthere. He has to believe that. The post just moved back to correct the minuscule effect he had by pushing from the other side.

He grits his teeth, determined to push the postever so slightlypast the point it was at before. Then he’ll gather his strength, trudge back around, and repeat the process. Over and over again.

Because that is what you do. You—

Keep going.

He stumbles as he circles back around the post. There’s a jolt, confusing him. It takes a second to realize that he’s carried on the wrong way this time and taken the chain to its limit.

Stupid. Worthless. Old man.

But that won’t do any good.

Deep breaths.

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