Page 19 of The Man Made of Smoke

A little, she says. She tells him that the woman still hasn’t been identified, but it doesn’t seem like she was anyone from the island, and so the police are looking at missing persons from the mainland. Apparently the woman had been dead for some time, and they can tell she was still alive when someone set fire to her.

“But she’d been hurt before that,” she says.

“How so?”

“There were knife marks on the bones.”

John closes his eyes at that.

What he told her was true: hehasseen things like that body before. But only in the most mundane and everyday sense. Accidents; tragedies. As far as he knows, he has been in the vicinity of actual evil only once in his life, at the rest area all those years ago, and it remains impossible for him to comprehend such gratuitous cruelty. He knows what Daniel would say to that, of course. It’s never gratuitous for the perpetrator; there’s always a reason; they’re human beings, not monsters. But John can’t bring himself to go there. He can’t get far enough past the suffering the victim must have endured in order to visualize the man behind it.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Sarah says.

“I don’t think Liam should be telling you it either,” he says.

Time passes.

He does what he does, continuing to wear his path into the landscape of the world like an animal pacing back and forth in its cage. He tries to cling to the small moments of beauty in the world. A sunrise here; a well-cooked meal there. But it feels like wearing a heavy mask that he’s only putting on for himself now, and the question keeps occurring to him. Why make the effort?

One afternoon, he drives to the Reach.

He parks and walks close to the edge. The sea stretches out far ahead and he can hear the water crashing against the rocks far below. The wind is cold enough to sting his face. He kicks a pebble off the edge and imagines it disappearing into the maelstrom below.

What would the world be like without you?

Not so very different, he thinks.

He spends a while standing there, hoping for a different answer to arrive, but none does. There have been moments over the years when he’s come here and asked himself the same question. On those occasions, he was driven by the feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred that have flowed inside him his whole life, erupting uncontrollably from time to time. Days and weeks when the air he breathed was nothing but red mist. His inner land feels so much calmer right now, and yet for some reason the answer remains the same. It makes him wonder what he was ever expecting.

It wouldn’t be so difficult, would it? Just a few steps farther and then nothing at all.

It’s something to think about.

He drives home again. As he’s closing the front door, he notices the envelope lying on the mat. The post arrives first thing here and today’s delivery has already been, so this must have been put through the letterbox afterward by hand.

He picks it up.

There is no writing on the envelope. It hasn’t even been sealed. He slides the contents out and finds a single sheet of paper. When he unfolds it, he sees that it’s a photograph that someone has printed out. But while he recognizes what he is looking at, it makes no sense. How can this be? And then, as the image settles, a shiver runs through him.

There he is, standing in the woods that day.

With the dead woman in the undergrowth at his feet.

Six

Please help me.

I woke up suddenly. The room was dark, and it took a moment for me to remember where I was—that I was back on the island in the attic of my father’s house—and then a moment longer for me to realize that a little boy was standing at the side of my bed, leaning over me and peering down from a bright white face.

Please help me.

I sat up quickly. As I did, he skittered away backward across the room, disappearing into the shadows by the door. I watched him fade away like mist, and sat there for a few seconds, my heart pounding hard.

Fuck.

I attempted to rub some life into my face, then checked the clock on the bedside table. Just after four in the morning. But the anxiety told me there was little point in lying down and trying to go back to sleep. It felt like I’d forgotten to lock a door downstairs and something dangerous had crept into the house without me knowing. So after gathering myself together, I got up, showered and dressed, then made myself breakfast and sat with coffee in the kitchen for a time.

Keeping the blinds on the window closed against the darkness.

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