Free Dark Woods by Steve Voake Page B

And he just kept staring at me and all the blood was in the river and then he pointed at me with those shears. He wants to kill me, Eden. I know he does.’
    Eden took her hands from his face and rested them on his shoulders.
    ‘No one’s going to kill you, Cal. Not if I’ve got anything to do with it.’
    She looked at the rays of morning sunlight filtering through the trees.
    ‘Do you think he followed you?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe. I was too busy running.’
    ‘You don’t think he was just some ordinary guy? Like a hunter, cleaning his knife in the stream, and you got freaked out because you weren’t expecting it?’
    Cal shook his head.
    ‘I know what I saw, Eden. And he’s out there. He’s out there looking for me. For us.’
    ‘All right, listen,’ said Eden. ‘Maybe you should tell me about those pictures.’
    ‘What pictures?’
    ‘You said you’d done some drawings of him.’
    Cal looked over his shoulder, afraid that the man might already have tracked him down.
    ‘When we were travelling in the camper van,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘I kept having these nightmares. And I kept doing this same drawing of a man in a long green coat with a top hat, carrying scissors all covered in blood. And that’s the man I saw just now. Down by the stream.’
    At this, Eden seemed to relax a little.
    ‘Cal, how much sleep did you get last night?’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I’m just asking.’
    ‘Oh no.’ Cal got up and shook his head. ‘You think I’m making this up, don’t you?’
    ‘No, I don’t think that. I just think sometimes when you haven’t had much sleep, your mind plays tricks on you. And you said yourself, this guy looked exactly like some drawing you’d done.’
    ‘I know, but—’
    ‘You’re exhausted, Cal. We both are. But think about it for a moment. How likely is it that you’re going to go walking through a forest in the middle of Montana and find some guy dressed up like a character from a storybook?’
    ‘But it’s the guy from the cell. I know it is.’
    ‘It was dark, Cal. And we’ve both been drugged, remember? Stuff like that can really mess with your mind.’
    ‘All right, then,’ said Cal, ‘think about this. You go for a walk in the forest and a guy drugs you and puts you in a van. You wake up and you find yourself wired up to a machine and the guy says he’s just doing it because he wants his dog back. He shows you an old teddy bear which you’ve had ever since you were a kid, complete with missing eye and he tells you that he fished it out of your dreams. How am I doing so far?’
    Eden shrugged, but didn’t say anything.
    ‘Then you pick up the guy’s shotgun and threaten him with it. You have an argument and then agree to wire him up to his machine so you can use it to get his dog back for him. But because of the argument he’s angry, which affects his brain and means that the dog comes out crazy. Then you go to a concrete building in the middle of nowhere and the dog’s there, and you hear whispering and then you see a crazy guy in the shadows and you make a run for it. Did you imagine all that too? Or do you actually believe that some of it might be real?’
    Eden leaned back against a tree and sighed.
    ‘I’ll tell you what I do believe,’ she said. ‘I believe that right now, I don’t know anything about anything. Except that you and me have to find a way of getting out of here and finding our way back home. And as far as I’m concerned, I’ll do whatever it takes to get there.’
    Cal looked up through the trees at the sun as it climbed into a clear blue sky. He listened to the birdsong and the insects chirping in the heat.
    ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Whatever it takes.’
    Then they turned and walked deeper into the shadows of the forest.

Twenty-Four
    Jefferson woke to the hum of computers and the striped shadows of the window blind falling across his sheet. Pulling the discs from his temples, he sat up and rubbed his eyes in an effort to push