CHAPTER 6

Oscar. Davey. The drugs .

Oh, fuck, the drugs.

Even then, with that creature behind us, I felt the pull. The stomach-churning, cataclysmic realisation that I was going to have to explain to Davey - and to Oscar - that I'd lost twenty grands worth of gear. My pace slowed, almost like it had back in the alley and I'd been stuck fast in the moving, shifting tide of air, only this time I was the one forcing the world into slow motion.

The man tugged on my hand, glancing towards me with irritation.

'Come on,' he urged.

'Wait... my bag.' It was pathetic. Reckless. I knew it was even as the words left my mouth. Back there, thundering down the alley behind us was something terrible, something that clearly wanted to hurt me and yet I was still thinking about the bloody bag. About Davey banging Star. Seeing Oscar's hand on my thigh.

'I have it,' the man replied. 'Now just keep fucking running.'

He did have it. I saw it then, the black designer holdall slung over his other shoulder. I hadn't seen him pick it up. I just remembered him grabbing my hand and pulling me away.

Saving me.

I gripped his hand tighter and ran, feeling strangely elated as we broke free from the alley and hit the main road.

Weaving in and out of pedestrians, I could see them all, the way they stared as we ran, hammering the pavement, me in my barely-there dress and with nothing on my feet. The streets were alive. Music pumped from shop doorways. People laden with shopping from the January sales milled here and there, cramming what little space there was on the busy street with bag upon bag of bargain-price loot. Everything was loud and crazy and my head whirled as we jostled amongst them, desperately trying to cut a path through the crowds of people.

The man tugged me towards the road and I stared wild-eyed, my heart in my mouth as he pulled me into the oncoming traffic, narrowly dodging cars as we streamed across the road. Horns blasted loudly, brakes screeched, but still he didn't stop.

Reaching the other side, he tore down a side street, never slowing for one second and my feet were burning now, every pounding step like torture. The effects of the coke I'd shoved up my nose before I'd entered the club had worn off ages ago and reality, or whatever the fuck this was, was coming right at me hard and fast and so unrelenting that I was struggling to breathe.

'Please,' I gasped. 'Please, I can't, I need to stop.' I pulled on his arm and slowed, the stitch in my side spiking pain up my body and making me double over.

He yanked on my wrist hard and I yelped. 'We can't stop now,' he said. 'We have to keep going.'

I stared wildly around. 'We're practically on the main road, there's a shit load of witnesses, what can he possibly do?'

Grabbing a handful of my jacket, he pulled me roughly towards him. 'You think you're safe, huh? You think all these people are going to help you?'

He was so close I could feel the warmth of his breath on my skin, could see the tiny scar on his nose and the anger and frustration boiling under a sea of blue in his eyes.

'Being in a crowd big enough to fill Wembley Stadium wouldn't help you now, trust me.'

'Trust you?' I said. 'I don't bloody know you!'

He cocked his head to the side, one brow arched. 'You want to take your chances on your own? Because I can do that. I can leave you here.'

My ears popped, a thunderclap of sound that sent me plunging underwater and I swayed slightly, feeling disoriented and dizzy.

At the end of the side street, the other man stood in the middle of the black storm, with people passing him by like he wasn't there, like they couldn't see what I could see. How could they not see him? Why were they not fleeing?

'What the Hell...' I whispered, terrified.

'Now will you start bloody running?' the man said.

He didn't need to ask me again.

We took off again, cutting down another road, with the panic binding me tighter and tighter the further we went. The fear was ballooning inside my chest with every second of the chase, threatening to burst through my rib cage and tearing every single breath to shreds. Just when I was starting to believe the nightmare would never end, we turned a corner and I suddenly realised exactly where we were.

Addi's car sat at the end of the road, still waiting in the exact same spot that I'd left him.

Letting go of my hand, the man flung the bag into my arms. 'Go now,' he ordered. 'Don't stop for anyone, no matter what, okay?'

'W-what?' I stuttered, as he turned back in the direction we had come. 'You're leaving me? What about that thing?' My voice sounded more screechy than I'd intended and he winced, his face rippling with irritation and his fists clenched as he looked back at me.

'Why don't you just let me worry about that, yeah? Now get in the fucking car and just go, will you?'

There was so much rage there then, so much furious heat, that I recoiled instantly, stumbling backwards, still clutching the bag to my chest. For a moment, I had visions of him raising his arm, of forcing the air at me, like he had done to the other guy in the alley, because the anger I saw in him now was exactly like what I had seen in him then. I could even feel it, rolling off him in torrents and suddenly, my mysterious hero became something darker, threatening.

Clear crystal clarity hit me hard.

'I remember you,' I said, stunned. 'From New Year's Eve...'

It was him. The one who'd watched me as I'd fallen. The one whose face I'd seen as I'd slipped into the darkness.

'Do you have a bloody death wish or something?' he snapped.

He stepped forward, a tight coil of fury, and the air around him blurred, seeming to fold in on itself and without another word, I turned and fled, only looking back when I finally reached the car.

He'd gone.

Addi, who must have seen me running towards the car in the mirror, was already getting out, his 9mm Baikal pistol grasped in his hand, held tight against his thigh.

'Case, what the fuck?' he said, but I motioned quickly for him to get back in the car.

'Get in,' I gasped. 'Get in and bloody drive, Ads.' Grabbing the handle of the car door, I threw myself into the passenger seat, shoving the bag into the footwell and desperately pulling on the seat belt.

Addi was already in the driver's seat, hitting the ignition and slamming his foot down onto the accelerator and the car screeched away from the kerb in a furious spin of tyres and smoke.

'What the fuck is going on?' He glanced down at my feet. 'And where are your shoes? Case, what the Hell happened back there?'

'I have no fucking idea, Ads,' I whispered, my hands trembling. 'I really have no idea at all.

I grabbed the pistol resting between his thighs and gripped it tightly in my lap, glancing back through the rear window and checking the side mirror as London sped by in a furious, kaleidoscopic whirl.

Same streets. Same people. Same city life. Everything was just the same as it had always been.

And yet everything had changed.

I leaned in close and inhaled.

Deep. Hard. Again.

Closing my eyes, I tilted my head back, my hands braced against the wall on either side of the mirror.

Breathe, Casey, breathe.

And I did, inhaling and exhaling slowly, knowing that it would take a while to hit, but feeling calmer already, the trembling in my limbs finally easing up, even if the pain hadn't yet.

Bloody footprints caked the floor, a macabre map of my movements that trailed all the way from the front door, up the stairs and into the bathroom where I now stood.

It had been inevitable I suppose that my first point of call as soon as I had arrived home was to head straight to the bathroom and cut some lines on the flat-top of the basin unit, using Davey's razor blade to slice up three perfect little rows. I'd probably lost a few layers of skin on my feet and was bleeding all over the tiles, but what did a bit of blood matter when I needed to get high?

And I needed it so fucking much. I opened my eyes and remembered watching my hand disappear into the void, felt the air sucking voraciously on my flesh and immediately leant down and inhaled the last one. One more for luck. One more to forget.

How much would I need to forget everything?

Brushing away the last powdery specks from my nose, I hobbled over to the shower, reaching in and turning the dial until a wispy cloud of steam rose from the water hitting the tiled floor of the cubicle. Unzipping the dress, I threw it into the corner of the room, feeling the weighty shame once again when I remembered Oscar's hand on my thigh and hating myself for wearing it, hating Davey for making me. With the hand-towel, I rubbed half-heartedly at the stains on the bathroom floor, doing little but smearing them in a wide bloodied arc and in the end, I just lay the towel out to cover the blood while I showered.

I stepped into the warmth of the stream, letting the flow hit me on the back of the neck, watching numbly as the smoky tendrils of blood and dirt snaked out from under my feet, making swirling patterns in the water as it drifted closer and closer to the plughole. I might as well have been standing on hot coals, but I bore the pain, relishing the sting and just praying, hoping, that the coke would kick in quick and make everything okay again.

Because everything would be okay. It would.

I'd read once, having had a leaflet shoved into my hand during a visit to my doctor's surgery accompanied by the usual look of weary disgust and despair, that long-term abuse had numerous side-effects. Read it, Miss Brogan the doctor had said, it might just save your life .

Yawn. Whatever.

But I had read it, skulking just inside the park entrance and probably looking like one of the junkies that queued up outside the drop-in centre in town. I'd love to have said it had been a riveting read, but there was nothing in the two-page glossy pamphlet that inspired me.

Paranoia.

Anxiety attacks.

And the plot twist? Full-blown psychosis.

The individual can lose touch with reality and experience visual and auditory hallucinations.

I'd thrown the leaflet in the nearest rubbish bin that day, but I never threw away the words, despite how much I tried to convince myself it was meaningless twaddle for do-gooders and losers. I was glad I hadn't now, I was glad that somewhere inside, I'd stored it all up, because there had to be a reason for what had happened. I needed a reason, because without one, what the fuck was I meant to do? How was I meant to process it?

No. It was a hallucination. Just my mind's way of saying, you want an escape, Casey? I'll give you an escape that will blow everything else out of the bloody water. And it had. In fact, it had blown me so far off course from reality, that I was no longer sure how to find my way back from it.

But of course, that didn't explain away my mysterious hero. He hadn't been a hallucination. Couldn't have been. I could still remember the heat of his hand in mine, the fury in his eyes. Had I hallucinated how he could manipulate the air too, just as I'd hallucinated the creature?

It terrified me to think about it, because either way it meant everything was truly fucked up.

Davey hadn't been in when Addi and I had got home, but I heard him thundering up the stairs now, calling my name as I stepped gingerly out of the shower, and I knew Addi must have phoned him. I wrapped a towel around myself and winced as he hammered on the bathroom door.

'Case? Babe? Open the door, yeah?'

My hand hesitated over the lock before opening it. It had barely clicked when he was already pushing his way through the door and I had to step back, in fear he'd step on my already-tortured feet.

'Case?' He grasped my shoulders, but his gaze swept over the bathroom, eyes-widening when he saw the bloody stains on the tiles, the remnants of my last hit, the razor blade.

'I'm sorry,' I mumbled. 'I'll clean it all up.'

'Never mind that now,' he said, pulling me against him.

I hated it sometimes when he did that, because no matter what was going on, no matter how I was feeling or how pissed off I was at him, the crook of his neck always felt like a safe-zone. If I stayed there, with my face pressed against his skin, everything would be okay. I inhaled instinctively, breathing in his scent, feeling the heat of his embrace mingling with the heat of the coke as it started to embrace my veins.

'Addi said someone was chasing you, was it someone we know? Did you recognise his face?'

I stiffened.

That face.

Goose bumps rose on my skin, prickling down my back.

'No,' I said, taking a deep breath. 'I've never seen him before.'

'You're sure? I mean, you're sure you haven't seen him hanging around, at one of the club nights, maybe?'

I frowned against his throat. 'What? No, course not. Why? Do you know who it might have been?'

This could be good. If Davey was worried about someone hanging around, everything would become real. A real person distorted by my hallucinating, coke-fucked mind and not some air-shifting ghoul with the power to pull me into an invisible void.

'No one in particular,' he replied, kissing the top of my head as he wrapped his arms tighter around me, which was a good job considering the much-needed buzz was about to deflate as quickly as a week-old party balloon. 'But I've spoken to Oscar, told him to check his CCTV out back of the club and see if he can recognise the bastard.'