Adam walks through the woods to the stables. He goes there to think, sometimes. It’s peaceful when there’s no one but the horses, like right now. The top doors to the six loose boxes are open. The horses move leisurely in the dimness. Adam glimpses shining hide, dark eyes, pricked ears, soft muzzles. He likes it. The horses don’t care about people business. They carry on with horse things.
His favourite is Daria, a clever chestnut with a bright yellow mane. The mare bows in Adam’s direction over her stall door. She knows him and wants a carrot. He strokes her velvet muzzle. She nudges his pockets, hopeful.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I forgot, today.’ He frowns, shaken by thought. Adam’s finger traces a name over and over again in Daria’s copper hide.
Adam still shakes a little when he thinks about last night. He hadn’t understood what it would be like. He thinks about Leaf’s face hanging over him, grieving over his cold body. Adam felt dead. He saw, with a terrible wave, that Leaf liked him dead.
He thinks about Officer Lloyd. He thinks about a deactivated alarm and rooms that should not have been lit at that time of night.
He thinks about Leaf’s question. ‘Where do you think I was?’
Leaf was in the house that night, Adam is sure. Maybe Adam also knows how to find it, Leaf’s secret place.
Leaf, Leaf, Leaf, he writes on Daria’s sleek coat with his finger. She tosses her head, annoyed, then moves into the depths of her stall.
Adam feels the great give of fear in his heart. He had thought there was nothing more terrible than love, but he is beginning to realise that this is not true.
Adam sits on his bed staring into space. He realises he’s staring at the wardrobe and turns away. He feels that the strangers’ clothes look back at him, even through the wood. He knows he is being watched, not just by the clothes. He feels Leaf behind the wall.
Adam made Nowhere House into a many-eyed monster. He should not be surprised that it feels monstrous. Sometimes horror comes on him, a suspicion that there is no person at the peephole but something else, crouching in the walls, breathing gently in its great leathery chest, red eye fixed to the peephole.
He readies himself for bed, giving no sign that he’s aware of Leaf’s presence. Adam crawls under the sheets and turns the light off. He gradually makes his breathing heavy. He lets his body go still. After a time he feels the eye move on to another part of the house – searching, always searching.
Adam stares ahead, wakeful. The trouble with darkness is that it lets your mind roam free. His child may have been born now – might be out in the world. Adam has hurt the people he should have loved. He has thrown away his life. For a moment he can actually see it in his mind’s eye. A sheet of paper held in his own hand, abruptly crumpled to nothing in a closed fist. Waste.
That doesn’t matter right now, he tells himself.All that matters is the truth.He has been under a spell but the spell is broken.
He waits until the house is quiet and there is only the sound of wood relaxing after the heat of the day. From the forest can be heard the faint call of an owl.
Adam lowers silent feet to the floor.
You could not find them without the three plans for Nowhere House in front of you, without studying them carefully with knowledge – almost with love. But there are spaces on the blueprints that do not exist, which lie between past and present – which are nowhere. Few people can read architectural blueprints properly. It is like a superpower. You can find panic rooms, safes, even bodies buried in drywall – if you know how to read a building. Adam has studied all the plans of Nowhere. He knows its bones, its foundations. He probably knows more about Nowhere House than anyone else in the world.
Adam knows where Leaf’s secret place is.
The long gallery is quiet. The jukebox stands against the wall, glowing neon in the night.
There are two things in this house that are not marked on any plans, but their existence is clear, if you know how to look. The way the foundations are structured and arranged don’t make sense – unless these two places exist.
The first one is a room. The second one is a tunnel.
Adam’s first concern is the room. He needs to see the secret heart of Nowhere, the one that Leaf keeps hidden.
He feels gently around the back of the jukebox. There is something, a space, behind this wall that should not be there. Adam’s fingers brush against something on the jukebox and there is a click. The jukebox swings aside to show a doorway, spilling warm light.
Adam goes in quietly, heart thrumming.
The room is clean and clinical-looking. It has the appearance of a mortuary, or maybe an operating room. The walls are shining white tile and the cement floor slopes to a drain at the centre. There is a metal table like a gurney. Metal instruments gleam there, neatly and evenly spaced.
The tile walls are covered with photographs. Adam looks. His heart stops. He takes another look and then another. Time and space rearrange. He feels as if it were his own body, what’s happening to the young men in the photographs. Flesh, bone, wide mouth, a glossy terrified eye. The person who took the photographs loves eyes.
All the pictures are the same. Red and black and white – teeth parted, mouths stretched wide and screaming. In some of them Leaf’s face is visible. In some of them he holds a little silver knife. Adam knows he should run but he can’t.
Adam sees a river of auburn hair, the colour of fall leaves. He reaches for the photograph. Adam last saw him in Leaf’s wallet. Rick McFadyen’s eyes are so wide that Adam can almost see the image of the photographer reflected, the flash of the camera. How can a person have so much of their insides laid open to the outside, and still live?
Adam starts to cry. There are other things mounted on the wall – Adam’s mind will not understand them.
So he feels it too late, the movement of air. Arms wrap around him in a strong lover’s embrace. Leaf isn’t holding him hard enough to hurt, not yet.
