Free Scare Me by Richard Parker

behind him as if he were being pursued.
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    Tam listened with lips clamped firmly shut. The air coming through the grille was cool, but the putrid smell that accompanied it stung his nostrils. He held his breath and listened.
    Nothing. He jammed his index finger in his other ear and flinched; pain from the blackened nail he’d been trying carefully not to touch anything with. He turned from the grille to examine it and took a few deep breaths before returning to his position.
    There was a sound, a faint puttering underneath the gush of air through the slats. He pushed the flesh of his ear flush against the concrete, but this blocked it and he heard even less. Tam stood up, his bare legs shaking from crouching.
    Whatever the sound, it was nothing like the one he’d heard earlier that day. He looked quickly over his shoulder, expecting to find someone looking down at him. He was in a place he shouldn’t be at a time he wasn’t meant to be awake. He examined the grille and the metal shuttered window above it. It wasn’t connected to the Eastern Wish where they made their deliveries. The dirty, mushroom-coloured building had a set of double doors that had been chained shut. Tam’s lips moved as he tried to read the sign pasted inside the dirty glass.
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    CLOSED PENDING HYGIENE EXAMINATION
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    There was some other finer print below that, but even when he squinted, Tam couldn’t read it through the grubby pane. He walked the length of the wall, away from the breakfast café, and came to a corrugated iron shed next to it. It looked small from the front, but extended the length of the long, junk-strewn alleyway beside the building. Tam could see the lights of fast flowing traffic at the end. As soon as he thought about going down there, a dog barked a warning from one of the tenements on the right. His bladder felt very full.
    Ten steps. That’s all he’d take. Ten steps and he’d turn back.
    He counted them loudly in his head, taking a breath between each one. Ten became twelve, twelve became fourteen. At sixteen he could see from the weak light shining out of the windows of the tenements that there were no doors or windows for the entire length of the shed. Up ahead of him, however, was a tripwire of thin yellow light, extending across the path about four feet away from him. He moved forward to investigate, pausing when his foot upset a hubcap full of water.
    When he reached the light he could see it was escaping from a gap in the corrugated iron. Tam put his eye to it and saw the circular blue neon of a flycatcher inside and the dark shapes of industrial equipment. Two luminous squares glowed feebly beyond. Tam guessed they must be swing doors and, from their position, he could tell they led into the main building. No other lights were on. If Songsuda were inside, now would be the time to rescue her. But the prospect of trying to find his way around in the dark contracted his bladder even further and he suddenly needed to relieve himself.
    He urinated against the opposite wall, all the time looking up at the open, second-storey window above him and the ceiling shadow of somebody using an ironing board. The pee kept coming and he looked down at it gathering up fragments of soil and dried moss the rain had washed from the roof above. It snaked and bubbled around his sandals and he stepped out of the pool as he finished and quickly zipped his shorts back up.
    Emptied out, he felt less panicky and looked back to the street he’d entered the alleyway from. Less than twenty steps and he would be back out onto the main road. No distance at all.
    The gap in the corrugated panel wasn’t big enough for him to crawl though, but after briefly checking the lit window again, he gripped its edge. Tam wrenched it and it shuddered loosely, the still-warm metal bending towards him like the upturned corner of a page. Three tugs gave him the aperture he needed. Still nobody was peering down