Page 4 of The Man Made of Smoke

I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut but I didn’t dare. Instead, I looked down at the tips of his boots, not blinking. My vision began to sparkle.

Please, I thought.

Little dots of light danced in front of my eyes.

Please.

“And nobody cares.”

The boots moved away.

I kept staring down at the gap. A few seconds later, a weaker shadow passed across the tiles: the boy, presumably, following silently and obediently behind. I waited until I heard the distant sound of the door back to the concourse opening and closing. Until all that remained was the pounding of my heart and the hum of the lights above.

Finally, I opened the door to the cubicle.

The toilets were empty now. But whoever had been outside the door had left something behind. There was a small square of white paper on the tiles of the floor, and without understanding how or why, I was sure that it had been placed there for me.

I reached down carefully, my hands shaking.

It was heavier than paper. Some kind of thin card. The back was perfectly white, but when I turned it over I realized it was a photograph.

It took me a second to make sense of what I was seeing.

And when I did, I began to scream.

PART ONE

DENIAL

One

Richard Barber’s basement was cold and dimly lit. The redbrick walls were lined with old cobwebs, the air was filled with the slow, constantplinkof dripping water from somewhere in the shadows, and rusty pipes ran down one wall from the ceiling to the floor. Between those pipes, set into the stone, was a wooden door with a metal handle.

He was staring at that now.

“I want you to know that you’re safe, Richard,” I said.

“I know.”

“Nothing here can harm you. It’s all in the past.”

“I know,” he said. “I trust you.”

Richard was one of my patients. An average man in many ways, the type you would walk past on the street without giving a second glance to. The two of us were in the room at the hospital that I used for my one-to-one therapy sessions. Budgets were tight, but I had done my best to make this particular room as reassuring as possible. The walls were painted a calming shade of blue. The carpet was softer than the ones out in the halls. Years earlier, I had struggled into work with a plant pot balanced under each arm. Those now rested in the corners of the room, the plants having grown in the time since until they almost reached the ceiling.

There were two leather chairs, both of which reclined. As usual, I wassitting upright, with my notes on a clipboard on my knee, and Richard was practically horizontal. He was in a hypnogogic state right now, halfway between sleep and waking, with his eyes closed and his hands resting protectively over his stomach. It was important for him to be as relaxed as possible. Because whatever I’d achieved with the real life surroundings, I knew the room he was seeing in his mind right now was far from comfortable.

At the beginning of our therapy, I had asked him to imagine his mind was a house. In the months since, we had walked through many of its rooms together, discussing the memories he found there.

I was conscious that he would only open the easy doors at first: the ones that led into rooms that felt safe for him to be in, and to show to a guest. But like most people, Richard had much darker memories: ones his mind kept locked away out of sight. As we gradually established trust over time, he had allowed me deeper into his house, into rooms filled with abuse and trauma.

And finally, today, all the way down to the basement.

“Can you picture the door?” I said.

He nodded.

I glanced at the clock on the wall, the second hand moving silently. There were only ten minutes of our scheduled hour left, which left me with a dilemma: push forward or pull back? It had taken eight careful months to bring us this far, and if it took the same again for a breakthrough then that was fine. We both had all the time in the world.

---