Boy X (2 page)

A
sh wanted more than anything to be safe and warm; to slip back into the room, push the cupboard across the door and climb into bed. But he had to find Mum.

He stepped into the corridor and the door-closer made that strange, airy sucking noise as it swung shut behind him.

Ash had never felt so small and alone. His only protection was a pair of flimsy pyjamas, and his soft, bare feet padded on the vinyl floor, sticking with each step, reminding him how vulnerable he was.

Pad-shtik. Pad-shtik.

When he reached the next door along the corridor, he stopped and stood for a long time, shivering.

A strange smell settled in his nostrils; not the smell of hospitals or dental surgeries, but something else. At first, it was as if the air was dead, but when he breathed deeper, filling his lungs, he tasted the odd tang of metal. There was plastic and paint, cleaning fluids, oil, chemicals and . . .

Smells flooded into him, overwhelming him.

His head spun and he put out a hand to support himself against the doorframe. He had never experienced such a powerful rush of odours. They slammed into him as if someone was raining punches on him. He put his free hand to the tag round his neck and spoke under his breath. ‘I am Ash McCarthy. I am strong. I can do this.'

Whenever they went on one of Dad's days out, trying to get Ash to do something that scared him, Dad said it didn't matter how difficult or scary things were, if you could stay positive and be confident you could overcome anything. He told Ash that it helped to have some words to give you strength. He called it ‘the McCarthy Mantra', even though Ash wasn't exactly sure what that meant.

‘I am Ash McCarthy. I am strong. I can do this.' He repeated the words over and over, picturing each one in his mind, using them to push away the overpowering mixture of smells. And as they began to fade, one smell remained, heightened above all the others. Perfume. Mum!

Mum might be in there. She might be in danger. Ash gripped the door handle and turned until it clicked, then crept into the room, but there was nothing to see other than a bed, a cupboard and a bedside table. Just like his own room.

There was
something
, though. The smell of Mum's perfume grew stronger as he approached the bed, as if someone were holding the bottle right under his nose. It was so
clear
. There was something else too, something even harder to explain. When he stood beside the bed, looking down at the disturbed sheets, Ash could smell his mum. It made him think of shampoo and shower gel, fresh air and, of course, that perfume. Ash could pick out each odour – it was the strangest sensation, but what really mattered was that Mum had been here. There were even a few strands of her dark hair on the white pillowcase.

In that moment, Ash felt so close to her and yet so far away and so helpless that the panic-beast almost became uncontrollable inside him. He wanted to collapse onto the bed and put his head in his hands and let the tears come, but he crushed that feeling down inside him; told himself not to be so pathetic. Maybe Mum needed his help. What use would he be to her if he just sat there and cried?

Crushing his fear into a hardened nugget and pressing it deep inside, Ash slipped back into the corridor and continued searching, Mum's scent fading until there was no sign she had ever been there.

Pad-shtick. Pad-shtick.

Ash tried every door, checking each identical room, but found all of them empty and unused. When he finally reached the end of the corridor, he peered through the narrow glass panels on either side of the exit, and into another corridor beyond. It ran perpendicular to this one, making a ‘T' shape, disappearing in both directions.
Immediately in front of him, on the other side of the glass, was a wide set of stairs heading down.

After hesitating for just a moment, Ash pushed through the exit and darted across. At least now he was going somewhere. Ten steps down, there was a small landing and the staircase came back on itself. Ash descended further into what looked like the lobby of some kind of office building.

Inside the enormous domed space, he was surrounded by tinted glass that reached high overhead. And right in the centre of the tiled floor below it was a large, round reception area, like an island: a waist-high wall of dark wood polished to a brilliant shine. Just behind it, standing on a slab of similar coloured wood, were a number of imposing stainless-steel letters, each of them at least one metre high. They spelt a single word:

The letter ‘O' was made to look like a black sun with eight rays radiating from it, but Ash thought it looked like a fat spider with short legs. He had always thought that, for as long as he had known the logo; it was the name of the company his mum worked for.

See? It's her fault
, the voice said.
This is all her fault.

What was her fault? None of this made any sense. Mum had a boring job. She was some kind of researcher at the pharmaceutical place outside town.

Ash ran his hand along the surface of the counter,
breathing in the scent of wax and leather. The acrid tang of electricity. The different odours were vibrant and individual but didn't overwhelm him like before. It was strange that each smell was so clear – as if they were enhanced.

He passed an entrance cut into the back of the reception area, like an old-fashioned shop counter, and saw that within this circular island of wood four empty chairs stood behind four computers with blank screens. Everything was switched off and there were no papers on any of the surfaces. No pens or paperclips or photographs. It looked unused.

But that wasn't what demanded his attention. It was what he saw through the tinted glass that surprised Ash the most. He wasn't in England any more, that was for sure.

‘Where the
hell
am I?'

B
eyond the front door Ash could see a large clearing surrounded by a fifteen-metre tall chain-link fence. On the other side of it, there was nothing but trees. But they weren't oak and sycamore and horse chestnut. They weren't the kind of trees that lined the grey, rain-soaked street he lived on.

These trees were thick and green and leafy. They grew close together and were topped with fronds and fans. Some had strange, grotesque roots, some had trunks spiked like medieval weapons, while others were fat, with contorted faces hidden in knotted bark. They sprouted unfamiliar fruits, and many were hanging with vines.

Ash couldn't believe what he was seeing. It looked like
jungle
, and even through the tinted glass of the dome he could tell it was bright out there, because light glittered among the leaves like jewels, and in the centre of the clearing a large, black helicopter gleamed in the sun. Almost without thinking, he crossed the lobby and padded towards the exit.

As he came closer, the sensors detected him and the doors swished open, letting in a blast of hot, humid air. It took his breath away, rushing down into his lungs and making him gasp, bombarding him with a sensory overload. The world was
alive
out there.

Ash put his hands to his ears and closed his eyes as the powerful jumble of sights, sounds and smells flooded his senses. It was like a TV on full volume, flicking from channel to channel, never pausing on anything for more than a split second. Everything was amplified, as if someone had turned all the dials up to eleven inside his head. There was a continuous chirping of insects, the bright and cheerful call of birds, the rustle of the breeze in the treetops. Ash could hear the hum of electricity from the chain-link fence – a high-pitched, irritating whine that veiled everything like a thin cotton sheet. And after all that white inside the building, colours exploded in his vision – a million different shades of green, splashes of red, snatches of yellow and purple and pink. There was the scent of dark earth too, the strong perfume of flowers and the cloying stink of helicopter fuel.

In blind confusion, he dropped to his knees and curled into a tight ball, trying to clear his mind. He had to make it
go away. He opened his mouth to scream, but a single image jumped into his head.

Dad.

Dad was telling him not to be afraid. That he was strong.

‘I
am
strong,' Ash whispered to himself. ‘I
can
do this.' He focused on those words, and instead of trying to push the smells away, he accepted them. Instead of trying to shut out the sounds, he took his hands away from his ears and let himself hear them. And when he eased open his eyes, he allowed the colours to flood in.

He reached again for the tag round his neck and squeezed it between finger and thumb. ‘I
am
strong,' he said, louder now, daring to look around. ‘I am
strong
.'

The sounds and smells and sights began to settle. He found that he could control it better, choose the things he wanted to hear, although there was still that high-pitched whining that made his stomach queasy.

Ash scanned the forest. Everything was so clear. He could see each individual leaf on the trees beyond the fence. He could spot the movement of the birds in the branches. It was as if he had spent the past thirteen years looking at the world through a greasy window that had just been cleaned. And now that he had accepted the sounds, he could pick out the song of each individual bird.

It was confusing. Frightening. Amazing.

He got up and moved out into the clearing as if it were a new world. The heat wrapped around him like a comfortable blanket. The doors swished closed behind him as he walked onto the wide-bladed grass, warm and spongy
under his bare feet. He approached the helicopter that sat like a sleek animal, reaching out to touch it, wondering if he had travelled here on it. The paintwork was blistering hot and he snatched his fingers away, thinking it must have been sitting there a while beneath the intense sun.

How long had he been asleep? How long had he been in this place?

Once again, Ash looked at the solid wall of jungle beyond the fence, no more than a hundred metres in front of him. He remembered when he had visited Mum's family in Trivandrum, and Dad had taken him into the forest a few times. He'd wanted to show Ash different ways to make a fire and how to build a shelter, and they had even spent a whole night in there, surrounded by the intense darkness and the terrifying noises. Ash hadn't got much sleep, but Dad had been pleased with him – told him he'd make a good jungle survivor one day.

Ash hadn't been so sure; sleeping in a comfortable bed was much better than an unstable hammock under a leaky poncho. Roasting chunks of Mum's tandoori chicken over the fire had been good, though, and at least the mosquitoes had left him alone, even though they'd feasted on Dad.

Ash wondered if maybe that's where he was now. India. Maybe this
was
all something to do with Mum.

He saw that the building he had come from was a large, concrete dome-like structure with the glazed lobby area protruding like the entrance to an igloo. The glass was mirrored on the outside and the sun blazed from every surface of it. Trees curved around the whole area, following
the line of the fence as if the building was inside a massive clearing. And Ash didn't like the look of that fence. The way it hummed with electricity made him shiver when he realized it must be there to keep something in.

Or to keep something out.

Over to his right, he spotted a gap in the fence. It was difficult to tell from this angle, but there appeared to be a fenced-off path leading into the jungle, which—

A noise.

It was faint, but unmistakeable: footsteps.

Ash froze, unsure what to do, and a moment later a pair of startled birds rose from the trees. With black and white markings like a magpie, they squawked and clattered their wings as they flew high and separated, disappearing over the forest. Ash wondered how he could have heard the noise before the birds.

The footsteps came closer, and he saw movement through the links in the fence. His instinct was to get away from whoever was coming. But this was the first sign of life he had seen since waking. Maybe they could help him.