One Must Hide

Tonight or never

She stepped out of his shadow and the light washed over her like liquid pain. She covered her face with her hands, trying to block out the caustic radiance, but it was too strong to be denied. It seeped around her fingers, leaked through her palms, and wherever it touched it seared away illusions like a laser burns cataracts from cloudy retinas.

“Isn't that what you wanted?” asked David, and when his inky shadow fell on her, she was blind again.

“Yes. No. I don't know.” The darkness was comfortable. She railed at it. “I want to see.”

“And be seen. Sometimes, Robin, boldness beats stealth. And sometimes one must hide.” He walked away, and the light devoured him.

She stretched out her hand after him, and the flesh melted from her fingers like wax.

“You won't miss it,” Marko said kindly. “Why don't you have a drink?”

The wine brimmed crimson and viscous. “I don't like red,” she said, reaching for the glass.

Marko shrugged.”It's all there is.” He turned it upside down, and the wine flowed out in a torrent, a flood, pouring onto the floor in a stream that never ended, so that she had to move her feet, and even then the widening puddle lapped at her boots.

She stepped back and stumbled, and Paul caught her. “You need to stay out of trouble, girl,” he told her, and all the while the pool of scarlet around Vince's supine form spread and spread until she could no longer avoid it.

“You see things too,” said Dwayne, and his black eyes shone gold.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“You know who we are,” he said. “Do you know who you are?”

“And now we play for keeps,” said David, revving his engine.

She heard the screams before he drowned the sound with the roar of his bike. Their laughter pursued her up the endless stairs. At every landing she paused, torn between running from them and running to them.

“You're safe with us,” he said, soft and mocking. “Just not safe from us.”

She ran, and slammed the door behind her, and put her back to it, knowing that no lock could keep them out. And then she saw it ooze under the door, thick and scarlet, an inexorable tide. She jumped away, but wherever she stepped she left footprints in shining red.

“She can't hide forever,” said a new voice, one that filled her with dread, and the door shook like a leaf with the heavy pound of a terrible hand.

Robin heard herself scream.

And woke.

“Robin!” The insistent knocking rattled the door against its catch. “Robin, you in there?”

She started up stiffly from her chair, letting her throw fall away, and trying to shake off the fleeing tatters of her dreams. Her heart still thudded with its terror. “Who is it?” she called out hoarsely.

The knocking stopped.”It's Sarah,” the voice shouted back through the door, sounding annoyed. “There's someone here to see you. Are you still in bed?”

Robin crossed the room in two strides, but she still had to steel herself to face the door. She gathered her nerve and slipped the chain.

“Chris,” she said, and couldn't decide if she felt relieved or disappointed.

He blinked politely at her, though the widening of his eyes gave him away.”Er,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“You look terrible,” said Sarah, with uncharacteristic frankness. Then, as Robin shifted her gaze across to look wordlessly at her, she said, “I mean, really. You look like you haven't slept in a week. Is everything okay?”

Robin looked at them dazedly, these two oblivious archetypes of her day-life. “I'm fine,” she managed, at last.

“Okay,” said Sarah. “I'll just….”

She sidled away, exuding an almost palpable desire to escape. Robin watched as the stairwell fire door closed slowly shut behind her, feeling completely disconnected from reality.

“Um,” said Chris. “Are you ready to go?”

“Ready?” Robin asked blankly.

“It's a quarter to three,” he pointed out.

Robin stared at him. Then she turned to look at her clock. 2:46. “Shit.” She went to the window. The sun was only a couple of handspans above the level of Wentworth's roof. “Shit!”

She spun, looking frenziedly around the room. How could she have slept for so long? The day had almost gone. She'd missed her twelve o'clock lecture. She was due at the King's Manor in fourteen minutes. And the sun – in less than two hours, the sun would go down.

She snatched up the flyer from her desk. “Chris, have you got this film?”

Chris took the page she thrust at him, looking bewildered. “Which film?”

“This film,” Robin said. “The Lost Boys.” The name sent a shiver through her.

“I – no, Jason has all the horror films.” Chris shook his head. “Robin, are you –”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yes, but –”

“What were their names?” Robin advanced on him. “What were they called?”

Chris shrank away. “Who – whose names?”

“The - them! The Lost Boys!”

“I don't…I don't remember!”

“Think!”

“I think….” Chris offered the flyer back to her with trembling hands. “I don't know, but I think Kiefer Sutherland's character was called David.”

Robin realised abruptly that she'd backed him up against a wall. She stepped away, and Chris breathed an audible sigh of relief. She wished she could share it. “Yeah,” she said heavily. “I think you're right.”

She felt sick, and knew that only part of the feeling could be attributed to the bad taste in her mouth and the pervading stink of smoke that still soaked her clothes and hair. She remembered The Lost Boys. Oh, not in any depth, not in any detail, but the half-forgotten memories that had been tickling at the edges of her mind for over a week came into sharp focus now. A fairground carousel. A ruined hotel in a cave. Rice turning into maggots. And the Lost Boys themselves.

Oh yes, you remember them.

“Robin?”

Chris' tentative query dragged her from the irresistible vortex of questions and answers that threatened to pull her under. He made an unlikely lifeguard. “I'm sorry,” she said hoarsely. “I'm not…not myself today.”

“Maybe you should go to the medical centre?” Chris suggested.

“No. No. I'll be all right.” She forced a smile from somewhere. “I'm really sorry about the lift.”

“Oh…I can get the bus.” Chris peered at her again. “Are you sure you're going to be okay?”

“I just need to…work some things out. Will you tell Bradley I'm sorry?”

“Yes, of course.” Chris looked towards the door. “Um. I'd better go.”

Robin just nodded.

Chris crossed to the door, and then paused. “You know, we're showing that movie on Friday night. You should come.”

“Thank you,” she said slowly, but thought, it won't matter by then.

She listened until she heard the fire door bang shut behind Chris. In the silence that followed the rapid staccato of her own heartbeat almost deafened her. She looked at the angle of the light shafting in through the window to calculate the time until sunset, and then realised what she was doing.

“You're not serious,” she said aloud, trying to sound convinced. “They're not really –”

She stopped before saying the word. In the daytime, in her miserable little room, in the pale light of the wintry sun, it would have been absurd. There has to be another explanation, she thought. Chris was wrong, or it was all a coincidence, or else the boys were just big fans of the movie, and probably thought it was funny that she hadn't commented….

And then she noticed her keys.

They glinted in the sunlight on her window ledge next to Ulysses, completely innocuous, except for the fact that they couldn't be there, because Marko had them. He'd appropriated them last night so he could drive, and he hadn't given them back. For them to be there on Robin's window ledge, he would have had to sneak into her room without waking her. She'd put the chain on her door last night. That left the window itself, open, but three floors up, set into a modern brick wall without hand or footholds. The nearest drainpipe was around the corner of the building. There were no trees tall enough or close enough to make scaling an option. Thus, the presence of her keys on the window ledge was an impossibility. Yet there they were: the brass key to the Yale lock on the front door, the silver that unlocked her room, the ignition for her car with the scuffed Ford fob. And a fourth of plain steel that she'd never seen before.

She reached to pick them up. For an instant her instincts screamed, warning her off. Then the keys were in her hand, cool and hard-edged. The new key was similar to her room key, unremarkable, without even a maker's mark on the fob, much less any indication of what it might unlock. She weighed it uneasily in her hand, then closed her fist around it, coming to a decision.

Shower first, then clean clothes and a cup of tea. She never functioned well dirty or thirsty. Then Wentworth computer room to see if the Internet could yield any answers. But before any of that she wanted to check on her car.

The blue Orion had been parked at the end of its usual row. Robin walked around it, inspecting for damage. The tyres seemed all right, and she couldn't see any new dents or scratches. Inside, the driver's seat was a bit farther back than usual. She pulled it forwards, and then noticed that the needle of the fuel gauge was resting on ‘full'. It normally hovered around the quarter mark, because she seldom had the money to put in much petrol at a time. And the York A-Z that she never used lay on the passenger seat.

Robin picked it up, and it fell open at a page that charted the extreme northern outskirts of the city, where the suburbs thinned out into farmland. An unlabelled road branched off the B1363 near the edge of the map, and where it crossed another unlabelled road a circle had been drawn in red. Beside it, in the same red pen, a bold hand had written the words tonight or never.

She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

She closed the book and put it back down on the seat. It was three o'clock . That didn't give her much time.

First thing's first.

It would have to be enough.

It wasn't.

They gazed out at her from the screen: four young men, three blonde and one dark, eclectically dressed; good-looking to the point of statistical improbability. One had spiky bleached-white hair and one was American Indian and one looked like a member of Bon Jovi and one wore an embroidered jacket.

But they weren't the boys.

The one with the bleached hair wasn't David. It was Kiefer Sutherland - the same actor Robin remembered from Young Guns and Flatliners and that tacky new version of The Three Musketeers - with a black coat and a dye job. The resemblance was quite striking, but it didn't pass close scrutiny. David was leaner in the face, his mouth curled more at the corner when he smiled, and his eyes were much older. And his hair was shorter. And his ears weren't so big. It was as if someone had ordered that an actor be cast to play the David Robin knew so well, and this was the closest they had found.

And while Robin accepted that she'd never observed Marko in as much detail as David, she felt fairly confident that he wasn't Bill S. Preston, Esq.

The differences with the other two didn't seem so marked, perhaps because she didn't recognise the actors. Dwayne was a bit longer in the face than the actor called Billy Wirth, but Robin thought they were enough alike that they could have been brothers. She'd found almost nothing on the last of the quartet, one Brooke McCarter, though he was very like Paul, right down to the set of the jaw and the way he sometimes thrust out his lower lip when he was upset.

Still the more she stared at them, the more they looked like pale copies, flawed representations, imprecise depictions, of the four young men she knew. It didn't make sense.

And everything else does? she asked herself savagely. The pieces just didn't fit together, no matter how she turned them: not unless she abandoned reason and credibility altogether. The glaring electric light of the computer room could have been designed to stifle unconventional thought and cripple leaps of intuition. Yet Robin's mind still quested in that direction, as she might have felt her way in a dark room: probing out gingerly, uncertain of what hazards might lie hidden, but too far in to make turning back an option.

She leaned back from the monitor, and only then noticed that the room had cleared. The on-screen clock insisted the time was still four o'clock . She checked her watch and her stomach lurched.

Variously cursing the network engineers' inattention, the architects' failure to put windows in the room, and her own trained last-minute hyper-focus, Robin stuffed the stack of print-outs into her coat pocket and logged off from the network. She half expected them to be waiting outside the computer room, and when she emerged into the normal dinnertime clamour of Wentworth she felt first a rush of disappointment, and then a chilly breeze of fear.

It stopped her in her tracks. Disappointment? Fear? Why and why? At best, she was dealing with a group of people with a serious fixation on a movie. At worst, everything she thought she knew about the possible and the impossible was wrong. And the former seemed less credible than the latter.

She kept walking, shouldering past the students jostling their way in from the cold. She didn't dare look full into that abyss. Postmodernism wasn't her thing, but her own reactions frightened her as much as the troubling possibilities unfurling before her. She should be less credulous, or if not then less acceptant, or if not then at least less calm. She had never been a believer of any stripe, neither compelled by religion nor convinced of any supernatural phenomenon, and for much the same reason in both cases: a lack of persuasive evidence. Why then this readiness to believe in something she found too unnerving even to define? But even as she asked the question of herself, she knew the answer. Her understanding of the world had its foundation in the testimony of her own senses, in what she could see and hear, touch and taste and smell. Slowly, suddenly, every odd detail, every baffling incident, was drawing together in her mind to create a whole of the disjointed pieces they had let her glimpse over the past ten days. And though it seemed as if the connection had been a long time coming, she realised that it only confirmed what she had known all along.

Robin stopped again on the bridge spanning the lake between Wentworth and James, gripping the rail until her knuckles turned white. Tonight or never. An invitation or a challenge. Or a threat. Never. The finality of the word made her stomach writhe with icy snakes. To never see them again, playful Marko and serious Dwayne and temperamental Paul and mysterious David. To never win their trust, to never learn their secrets. To never be one of them.

It was unthinkable.

She released the rail. Her fingers felt stiff with the cold. She checked herself over once. Good enough. She put her hand in her pocket, and the shape of the strange key on her key ring sent a cool shock through her. The key, she thought, the key to the answers I want. She should have known.

“Tonight,” she promised aloud, and made for the car park.

They know I'm coming .

The thought was both unsettling and reassuring. Unsettling – obviously. Reassuring, because it meant there was nothing to be gained by turning off her headlights. And as she drove along the narrow, unlit track in first gear to give her car a moderate chance of managing the potholes, with inches between her mirrors and the stone walls lining both sides of the lane, Robin could think of a great many things she'd sooner face than driving this particular road without lights. Including kidnap, torture, and swimming in the lake. Well, she amended mentally, maybe not the lake. There had to be a reason why nothing grew in there. The flippancy didn't quite distract her. Still, she felt more grateful than was strictly appropriate when she inched the car through a pair of gateposts and the tight approach finally opened up. Then she stopped.

She wasn't sure what she had expected, but the farmhouse before her definitely wasn't it.

She left the engine running, and the headlamps on full beam, though part of her still longed to turn them off. They would already know she was there, and no amount of silence or darkness was proof against their awareness of her.

Fire had once gutted the farmhouse. Not recently, not within the last twenty years, but the sooty stains soaked into the weathered York stone around the doors and windows told the tale. The slates and glass and woodwork were all newer than the building. The cracked window frames and peeling paint of the outbuilding at right angles to the main house reflected more honestly the age of the compound. She counted eight windows on the side facing her, each heavily draped from the inside. A gravel path led to the door through squares of overgrown grass and dead weeds. A thin wisp of smoke drifted from the chimney that thrust black like a clenched fist against the charcoal sky. And the packed mud of the yard was scarred and rutted with the unmistakeable tracks of motorcycle tyres.

Robin thought about turning her car around so it pointed towards the gates, then dismissed the notion as futile. There would be no quick getaways down that lane. She slowly turned the key back in the ignition and the engine choked to a noisy death. Then she finally switched off her lights. She sat for a moment to let her eyes adjust, screwing her courage to the sticking point, then unfastened her seatbelt and opened the door. The ridges of mud had frozen, stony hard beneath her feet. She hesitated. Last chance. Then she shut the door and locked it. She looked back at the house, and in the utter darkness noticed the faint reddish glow seeping from around the edges of the two lower left hand windows. She pulled her coat more snugly around herself, straightened her shoulders, and started down the path. The gravel crunched underfoot but she ignored it. And when she reached the door she didn't knock, but put the strange steel key in the keyhole and turned it. The lock snicked open and the heavy planked door immediately swung ajar. She stepped inside.

Light spilled from the wide open double doors to her right. She turned that way. The room that sprawled before her was dominated by a massive fireplace. Lumps and chunks of wood burned there, flooding the room with heat and ruddy radiance. Battered brown leather armchairs and sofas faced the hearth, interspersed with low tables. Oak beams supported the ceiling, and the lumpy walls had been painted soft cream. It was a welcoming room, a room that invited one to sit down and relax. And there was nobody there.

Then she noticed the bottles and glasses standing half full on most of the tables, as though their drinkers had simply got up and left. Robin moved into the room for a closer look. She counted seven beers, four wineglasses. One cup almost full of coffee. She didn't want to touch it, but steam rose from the surface. A hastily-stubbed cigarette end still glowed among others in a saucer.

The crack should have made her jump out of her skin. Robin turned sharply, but she knew before she did that it was just a log settling in the fireplace. She stood facing the blazing heat and light for a moment, feeling it soak out the winter cold in a way that no radiator ever could. She turned back to black and blonde. David.

He was different, different for more than the absence of his trademark coat and gloves, as much as they were his armour. Dishevelled, unkempt; his hair raked into crazy angles, the stubble of his beard longer and darker. She saw herself reflected in his eyes, a dark shape against the reddish light from the fireplace at her back. She blinked, and his eyes were green-blue again, but wide, as she had never seen them, as though he were staggered and elated at once, or else half drunk.

“You came,” he said at last, harshly.

“Of course I did,” she said. “Did you think I wouldn't?”

He stared at her, as if he could devour her with his eyes alone, and then he laughed, and shouted, “She came!”

The Boys melted out of nowhere, where they'd been all along, and they were joined by others that Robin recognised but didn't know, and all around voices rose in jubilation and congratulation. Marko shouted, “You passed the test, Robin,” and Dwayne wore a mysterious little smile. Even Paul was laughing and whooping, his aversion to her apparently forgotten. But Robin was baffled by the celebration: baffled, and then irritated. This was just another of their complicated stunts, and as usual, the joke was on her.

Her apprehension dissolved rapidly into anger. “All right,” she said. Their yells and cheers drowned her out. She tried raising her voice. “All right!” But still their clamour swamped her, and finally, Robin abandoned caution. “Just shut up! The lot of you!”

Silence fell like a dropped anvil. Surprise showed on every face. Recklessly, Robin pressed her advantage. “I've had it up to here with being messed around, David.”

His wild eyes were as difficult to read as ever. “No one's messing you around, Robin.”

She put her hand in her pocket and pulled out the bundle of folded pages she had printed from the Internet. “Then explain this.”

She didn't really intend to throw the wadded papers at him, but they left her hand with force and velocity. They would have smacked into his chest, but David's hand snaked up quicker than a striking cobra to catch them.

Robin became aware that the others had drawn closer as David unfolded the sheaf of documents. She scanned their faces in turn, marking the similarities and differences she had noticed in the photographs. She found herself studying Marko most closely. Definitely not Bill S. Preston, Esq.

“What did you want me to explain?” David asked, in his most pleasant tone of voice.

Robin bit back an angry retort. Rising to his taunts just gave him the upper hand. “That picture,” she said evenly. “It's you. All of you.”

David chuckled. “She thinks it's us!”

Marko sniggered. Dwayne shook his head. Paul snorted a laugh. “Us!”

Games again. Robin set her jaw, determined not to be baited. “I know it is.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” David said expansively. “Of course it isn't.” He thrust the papers back at her. “These people are actors, Robin.”

“My hair was never that bad,” said Paul.

“What you talking about, Paul, it still is!”

Robin hardly heard the exchange. She looked from the increasingly crumpled photograph back to David. “Actors,” she said softly. “So what does that make you?”

David smiled.

“The Lost Boys,” he said.

Then he added, “The real ones.”