Page 115 of The Man Made of Smoke

The longer I followed the camper van along the motorway, the more the real world seemed to be falling away around me. The darkness of the countryside and rhythmic sweep of the overhead lights had the effect of a slowly swinging pendulum. The intermittent signage above began to lose coherence. The place names listed there meant nothing to me, the words appearing to be written in an alien language. While I should have been able to keep at least a vague grip on where we were, I was disorientated and lost, divorced from geography and adrift in time.

All the while, the red lights ahead stared back at me.

I kept a steady distance.

After however many miles, the van indicated and took a turning off the motorway. I followed. Within minutes, we were driving down country lanes. At first, the roads were wider, surrounded by dark fields, but soon they began to narrow, with trees pressing in on both sides. The man was taking us into woodland, and it was far thicker even than that on the island. The trees here were so tall that, looking up through the windscreen, only a thin stretch of night sky was visible overhead. It created the strange sensation that I was seeing a black road inverted up there. That a vast distance above there were two tiny vehicles making a mirror journey.

The red eyes of the camper van rounded a corner ahead.

And when I rounded it a few seconds later, they were gone.

I slowed down immediately, a flare of panic cutting through the wooziness. If I lost the van, what would happen to Sarah? The road ahead stretched out into the distance, and there was no way the van had been traveling fast enough to disappear from view so quickly. So where had it gone? I glanced to my left and caught a glimpse of red light flickering between the trees there, and I pulled my father’s car to a stop just as I passed a break in the tree line. A dirt trail led away into the forest there. The entrance was thin and overgrown, and the angle was so tight that I had to reverse back and round slightly before driving awkwardly in. The wheels undulated on the ground, and the branches of the trees to either side began thwacking and scratching at the sides of the car.

The camper van’s red eyes were lost ahead of me now, but the trail snaked along without any turnoffs the vehicle could have taken. I drove carefully, my headlights occasionally picking out the sharp tips of branches where they had been cut away. At some point, the killer had widened this route to make it more accessible. Perhaps he had even carved the whole trail out by hand. It was hard to imagine the act of willpower that must have taken, but this man had willpower, didn’t he?

I might not know everything about him, but I knew that much—

The back of the camper van appeared out of nowhere. I pressed down hard on the brakes, bringing my father’s car to a stop only just behind it. My headlights illuminated the dirty metal door in the back of the vehicle. Its engine was silent and all the lights were off.

Dust from the trail swirled gently in my headlights.

I waited for thirty seconds.

Nothing.

Okay, I thought. I opened the glove compartment and took out the knife I had picked up from my father’s house before leaving. When I turned off the engine, the world fell dark for a moment. But then, as my eyes adjusted, I realized it wasn’t as pitch black as it should have been. A faint glow was coming from somewhere beyond the camper van.

Little dots of light flickered on the trees there.

I stepped out of the car, holding the knife casually down by my side, slightly behind my leg. The place we had come to a stop in was a little wider than the trail directly behind me, the tree line a short distance away on both sides. I stood still, listening for a moment. The forest was silent. But the man had brought me here and must have known exactly where I was right now, so there was no point in being quiet.

“Sarah?” I called loudly.

No response.

I moved quickly down the passenger side of the camper van, banging on the side once as I went.

“Sarah?”

Nothing.

When I reached the cab, I peered into the window. There was nobody inside. Through the dirty glass, I could see the flickering lights from ahead playing over smudges of leather and plastic. As I moved to the front of the vehicle, the source of the illumination became apparent. The trail continued ahead of the camper van, and the path there was lit by strings of white fairy lights that had been draped between the trees on either side.

It’s the lights in the trees I remember most, Michael Johnson had said.

They seemed so out of place—like a fairy tale.

I watched as the tiny bulbs flicked on and off in a steady, repeating pattern. Perhaps they were supposed to create the impression of a magical path in a forest, but there was nothing enchanting about them. They looked more like the kind of decorations a child might encounter at some cheap outdoor Christmas grotto.

I turned the knife in my hand.

Regardless, the lights created a corridor of sorts, one that it was obvious the man intended for me to follow. But I didn’t have to do what he wanted me to. I could get back in my car and reverse out of here; try to find a phone and lead the police to this place. But there was no guarantee that the man would be here when they arrived, or that Sarah would still be alive by then either.

The man’s voice in my head again:

You’re good at running, aren’t you?

I moved forward cautiously.

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