Dangerous Games

Chapter 15 part 1

I ran my hand over the surface of the door. It was smooth, painted as were all the others, but seemed slightly lighter in colour. In spite of the uniform low light level, it was just slightly possible to distinguish one door from another. My hands encountered something standing up on the surface. Dark lettering, maybe. I squinted hard at the markings. "72". This was flat number seventy-two.

My hands moved down to the door handle. I called out.

"I don't want you to panic, but I'm going to try the door handle."

"Okay." There was a note of reassurance in her voice.

My hands moved down to where I expected the handle to be. No handle. Instead, they encountered a Yale door lock and a letter box. Of course. What was I thinking? This was a front door so there wouldn't be a door handle would there. Get a hold on yourself, Tim! I pushed the letter box open to look through, but all I could see was blackness. Not even swirling fog this time.

"No handle. Can you open the door from your side?"

"No" She started crying. "No, I can't."

"Look" I called out again. "Move away from the door. I'm going to kick it in."

Silence. I listened for some sort of response, or some sign that the woman was moving to a safe distance, but the silence, like the darkness, was so thick it was almost palpable.

"Have you moved away from the door?"

Still no answer. Clearly sound didn't carry in this place. "Look, I don't know if you can hear me, so I'll count to ten and then I'm kicking in the door."

I counted out loud as slowly and deliberately as I reasonably could, then raised my foot and kicked at the door. Now, as a police officer I've kicked in my fair share of front doors, although we tend to use the standard issue enforcer – we call it the "big key" as it opens any door. This one was completely different though. For a start it was almost totally silent. You'd expect a loud grinding crunching sound, a splintering of the wood and a clattering as the assorted shards hit the ground, but all this produced was a dull thud that died the moment it left my foot.

A sudden thought occurred to me. Was I breaking the law by kicking this door in? I didn't have a search warrant, but there is a clause in police law (don't ask me for chapter and verse) that allows an officer to enter a premises by any means he deems necessary if he believes a crime is taking place or a person is in danger. Well, after hearing those screams, I could well believe that someone was in danger, although she was probably screaming because of me. Either way, I could probably justify what I was doing.

There was no sound from the other side of the door, so either the woman was too terrified to make a noise or she had indeed moved to a safe distance. I aimed another swift kick at the door and this time it gave way. Again, there was barely a sound, but I knew the door had given in as I could feel the pieces slide away in front of my foot.

Years of training and experience in the force took over, although I resisted the urge to charge into the room mob-handed. This woman was terrified enough and I didn't want to scare her any more. Instead, I moved slowly round the door, now clearly in two halves although it was still on its hinges.

Immediately that I showed my face there came one of those screams, much louder this time as it wasn't being muffled by the door, and coming from deeper inside the apartment. For some reason, the light seemed a little brighter in here, although there was no lights as such that I could see, and the illumination was no longer simply a dull grey. No, it had a reddish tinge.

"Don't be frightened. I'm here to help you," I called out. There was no reply so I added "I'm a police officer, and I'm not going to do you any harm. Look, I'll reach into my jacket and show you my warrant card."

She must have been able to hear me, but there was still no reply, so I carried on. "I just want you to know, I'm not carrying a gun or anything like that, so I'll reach into my pocket very slowly and take the warrant card out."

I extracted the card, slowly as promised, and held it out at arm's length. Not that anyone could see it in the Stygian gloom, but I didn't know what else to do. I was vaguely aware of someone in the darkness ahead of me, the screaming woman presumably. I couldn't see her, but my instinct was telling me she was there. Perhaps I could half hear her, I don't know. I tucked the card safely away again and advanced, very slowly.

"There you are. Don't be scared. I'm not going to hurt you. I'm here to help." I had indeed heard the woman, as her form gradually became clearer in the darkness ahead of me. She was slumped in a corner of a room in the middle distance – it was so difficult to judge how far away things were there – sobbing quietly.

As I moved, I cast my eyes around the apartment. Not much was visible, but various objects loomed at me out of the darkness, forming a bizarre combination of the mundane and ghoulish. I was in the hallway of the apartment, but the internal doors were open, and I could just about make out the contents of the rooms. There was a front room – a sofa, a dark object in the far corner which was presumably a television set. Next to that was a bathroom. I was startled by a large light-coloured object that suddenly came into half-view, only to realise that I'd been half frightened to death by a toilet! The whole thing was so strange that if it hadn't been so macabre, it would have been laughable.

I was getting close to the woman now. She took the form of a huddled mass in the corner, but as well as the gentle sobbing, I could see her rocking slightly backwards and forwards, clearly in distress. Or perhaps it was my eyes starting to play tricks on me. They still hadn't got used to the permanent twilight, and I was starting to doubt that they were telling me the whole truth.

"Look, don't worry. I'm not here to hurt you."

She lifted her head. "Who are you?" she managed to get out between tears.

"I'm a police officer. My name's Tim Pritchard. Please, you can call me Tim." I sat down next to her, having switched automatically to comfort mode. "What's your name?"

"I'm Anita."

"Ah, I think I know who you are. You're Anita Patel, aren't you."

The whole thing had taken on a slightly cosy feel to it. Two frightened people sitting down close to each other, one trying to reassure the other. Looking back on it now, it was like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music trying to comfort the children during the thunderstorm. Or at least it would have been like that if there hadn't been the distinct possibility that we were both lost souls destined to spend the rest of eternity in this other world that wasn't a world. At least we could be lost souls together, if that had indeed been our destiny.

"Yes"

"Well, Anita. I've got some news for you. You're world famous. People have been looking for you for about a week, and you're name has been mentioned in news bulletins from Canada to New Zealand."

"I'm not just missing. I'm dead."

"No, no. Don't think like that. You're not dead. Well, not unless I'm dead too." For God's sake, Tim, I thought. That was not a helpful thing to say at all.

"And I'm confident that we are very much alive," I added quickly. "I know I definitely was about half an hour ago, anyway." That was more whistling in the dark. I had no idea how much time I'd spent there, if any at all. Like light, and sound, time seemed to be one of the things that had been sucked out of this alternative existence.

"I thought I was dead. I was scared."

I put my arm round her shoulder. "Well, if it's any consolation. I was scared too, and I'm a grown man." I still was scared, but I wasn't going to tell her that. Be confident and above all reassuring, that's the secret. She still sounded distressed, but at least she'd stopped sobbing now – progress, surely. Apart from that, I was at a loss to know how to behave. I'd never been beyond the veil of existence before. What are you supposed to do in that situation? Strangely enough, there's nothing about it in the police training manual. Time to fall back on a tried and tested formula.