Free Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! by Douglas Lindsay

door. In a strange environment such as this, a closed door can also be a comfort. It's keeping things out, it's enclosing you in your cocoon. An open door let's you out, but it's also a portal to uncertainty.
    That phrase came to me as I stood beside the door. A portal to uncertainty . It sounded so utterly preposterous that it had me pulling the door fully open, so that I could face the guard with as much annoyance as determination.
    The guard wasn't there. I hesitated, and then stepped out into the corridor. There were no guards at all.
    Deep breath, then I walked to the middle of the corridor, leaving my door open – was I worried that I wouldn't be able to find my room again? – and looked up and down the hallway. Door upon door, in either direction, all of them on the same side of the passage as my room. The opposite wall, the wall where the guards should be standing, was completely blank. A long grey wall of nothingness.
    Now facing my room, I looked along the corridor to the left. That was where they'd taken me to the bathroom. A couple of times now, but I had been too discombobulated to think, or to count. It wasn't too far. Five, six or seven doors.
    With a glance in the other direction, I started walking. One unmarked door followed on from another. I was wearing flat, simple, grey plimsolls, which made no sound on the floor.
    I got to the sixth door along and stopped. I looked at the door, and the ones either side, to see if there might be some sort of clue. How did the agents and the guards tell the difference?
    I stepped forward and opened the door. The room was identical to mine, and there was a single man sitting at a desk. His hair was short, his cheeks were hollow, his eyes dark. He had a moustache, but hadn't shaved for a few days so it blended into the rest of his facial growth. He was wearing an old worn and dirty suit, so rundown that it was hard to tell what colour it had once been. Yellow? Lime green perhaps. We stared at each other. There was something about him I recognised.
    I thought of the haunted man who had stuck his head into my room. Perhaps he had awoken to find the same thing I'd just found. An open door. It was likely that everyone was subjected to the same experiment. How did you pass? How did you win?
    Except, when the haunted man visited my room, he had been shot shortly afterwards. As far as I could tell, there were no guards out here to shoot me. Perhaps that was what the haunted man had also thought.
    'You all right?' I asked.
    He stared at me. I knew he wasn't going to speak.
    'There are no guards out here,' I said.
    There was a slight twitch of his mouth. Maybe he was an old hand. He knew what no guards meant. No guards was worse than a guard on every door for some reason, although I couldn't imagine what that would be.
    I held his eyes for a while longer, and then pulled the door closed as I backed out into the corridor. I looked both ways to see if anyone had appeared. There was still no one. I moved along to the next door. It wasn't terribly comfortable intruding into a prisoner's private hell like this, but I did really need to go to the bathroom.
    This was the right one. I entered. There were two toilet cubicles and no urinals. I peed for a long time, washed my hands, splashed cold water on my face for about a minute, then took a drink, cupping water in my hands. Dried my face and stood looking in the mirror.
    Were they behind there, recording my every move?
    Back in the corridor, I took another look in both directions. It was literally so long that I could see neither end. However, it was a building. It couldn't go on forever. I set off to find the very end of the passageway, and hopefully a door or stairs to some other part of the building.

12
    ––––––––
    A nd that was how it happened. The cry of the gulls.
    I leapt out of my seat. Instant, total confusion. I wasn't in the seat. I was on East Beach at Nairn. The water's edge. I'd been curled up in a ball. The