Stuffed rabbit, wooden stacking clown, metal spring which walked down stairs with a name he could not recall, lion glove-puppet…he observed the different toys as he walked down the central aisle.
On the bed before the one with the hunched figure sat a wind-up monkey with cymbals in his hand. Could a grown man of fifty flee the scene? Aleksey reckoned he might—if he had any confidence he could actually leave. Nikolas had owned a toy just like that one. It even had the same fez hat. You wound up the big key in the back and the monkey, grinning manically with reddened lips, hopped as it clacked the cymbals, the vibration of the mechanism presumably lifting it and animating it.
Aleksey had loathed that monkey. Sharing a bed with his twin, as he had, it had been a torment to him, because Aleksey Mikkelsen aged six also wasn’t afraid of anything and certainly not a toy that occasionally came to life in the middle of the night and woke him with a tiny hop of glee. He knew it was Nikolas sneakily winding it and then pretending to be asleep, but the pretence had been pretty authentic, given his twin had cried when he’d been thumped sleepily awake.
But here it was once more. He pointed at it and held its gaze. He wasn’t six anymore, and it needed to learn who now held all the power. One twitch of those hairy little hands and he’d rip it in two. It stayed very still.
Keeping one eye on the monkey, Aleksey tore the coverings off the body. He should have known, he supposed. But it still made his heartbeat ratchet up and his mouth fill with saliva.
It was Phillipa’s Steiff bear.
Lifting the old sleeping bag had made the pompoms swing and the toy resembled a child pretending to be asleep given away by the drifting movement of hair.
Chink.
He swung around, felt his neck crick, stared accusingly at the monkey.
‘Ben!’
He strode back out into the short hallway and began to jog once more. If there were no stairs at this end, there had to be some at the other.
When he got there, he was at a T-junction into a much longer corridor. He was fuming now. ‘Benjamin!’
‘Fuck! I can’t work out where I am. Where are you? Have you seen Squeezy?’
‘Just stand still and keep shouting. I’ll find you. I’m on the top floor…somewhere.’ He went to a window, looked out through a broken chink in the glass and wasn’t at all surprised to find he was once more on the ground floor. He pulled at the bars, more than willing to go out that way if he could.
‘Ben? I said keep shouting!’ Nothing.
He stood for a while, running the fingers of one hand through his hair. He could not deny an uncharacteristic slither of unease and disgust creeping in under his habitual calm. For a moment, the space around him seemed to expand, or he to shrink, and the consciousness of being six once more made him shudder. Then a memory came to him, sharp and clear, and one that had up to this point in his life been entirely repressed. He’d been in a place like this before. He was sure of it. No, he’d beenbroughtto a place like this—long corridors of tile which he’d run down, terrified. He looked down and felt Nikolas’s tiny hand in his. They’d run together.
They had been brought to visit their mother. Nina had been in a place like this but with blue and white tiles. They had been with their grandmother, had come from her huge house outside Copenhagen in a sleek black car, and she had brought them. Not six. Younger. Four? Perhaps this is why he had forgotten the entire episode until the memory had been jolted loose by this place.
He didn’t like the conclusion that seemed obvious now. His mother had been in an asylum, and they had visited her and something had terrified them and they’d run. In those days they held hands and ran together like the wind, and he let nothing hurt his little brother.
As he was staring into the depths of the corridor, sorting this through in his mind, he suddenly heard a noise behind him. All the hair on the back of his neck prickled and he whirled around, crouching instinctively as a clanking, metallic, dragging screech sounded in the swelling darkness by the barred window at the end of the hallway. Something moved in the shadows—some change in the light, but then it was gone.
He stood. Shook himself. He wasn’t four years old and this wasn’t Denmark. He fumbled his phone, however, as he fished out another cigarette and lit it. His hand was shaking. Fascinated, he held it up and studied it. Then he closed his eyes as challenge to the gods and took a vast lungful of smoke, slowly expelling it as the nicotine flooded his system.
When he opened his eyes his hand was steady. But studying the phone gave him an idea. ‘Ben?’
Ben’s voice when it came sounded distinctly less angry and more concerned. ‘I can’t find the exit.’
‘Put some music on your phone. Loud as you can and keep it on.’
‘Okay. Good idea. Squeezy! Did you hear that!’
Once more there was nothing but silence.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Two
Aleksey continued on towards what his excellent common sense told him must be the right direction and came to an open gap in the corridor. Another room, which had at one time had double doors, but these were now broken off and lying out in the hallway. They looked to him as if they’d been blasted out from the inside, but allowed that his imagination was beginning to run away with him. He stepped into the room.
It had another operating bed.
This one had stirrups and straps and a green sheet draped over it.
