Jack Milner

Target/Home

Novel extract

Chapter One
Post-Memory Arrival

His eyes were already open when he woke up. It was as if grey fog had cleared from them, and they came into focus like a camera lens. He was sitting on a park bench. Before he could even begin to think, he gasped and groaned as a searing headache punctured his brain. The heat inside his body rose rapidly, until he could taste spit building up in his mouth. He panicked and darted his head around, but before he knew it, he had thrown up on the floor.

There were tears in his eyes; he coughed and wiped them as he looked at the puddle of sick in front of him. He breathed heavily through his mouth, wondered what he could have eaten to cause this. But as he stood up and took a look around, both the nausea and the headache soon faded. He felt clear. In body, at least. Then his name came back to him. ‘Hugh’ appeared vivid and clear like a logo superimposed in his mind’s eye. Then it vanished. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he had forgotten it, but in those few seconds after he woke up, there was nothing. He was nothing. 

He started to piece together just where he was. 

He looked down. Concrete, light grey concrete. Next to him were empty train tracks, leading into a great tunnel inside a hill. He was on a platform, if one could call it that. There was the bench that he had been sitting on, and sleeping on apparently. Next to it was a lamppost. No signs, no maps. Just a bench and a lamppost. Trees surrounded the place, with no obvious path out. It was like a lost station, not fully built. The sun was getting lower in the sky. Hugh rejected the idea that he could have overslept this long. He fiddled in his bag for his phone, but stopped when he realised he couldn’t feel it. He took a proper look, rustling around all the random objects he happened to have in his bag. It was nowhere to be seen.

Fuck, he thought. Must have been stolen when he fell asleep. As this reasoning played out in his head, something occurred to him. He remembered being on the train, and he had remembered falling asleep, but he had not remembered getting off the train. It was as if he’d been carried off and placed on the bench without stirring even a little bit. Had someone stuck a needle in his neck or something? He waved the thought away. He was in a daze, and felt almost too tired to be panicked. He just wiped his hand over his face and tried to think. 

Fifteen minutes later the lamppost turned on, and he had gotten nowhere. Hugh’s mind felt irregularly blank. He could feel the light leaving the sky, and had no way of knowing when the next train would come. He wracked his brain, wondering what kind of train would stop in a place like this. What kind of conductors would let some kid get lost in the middle of nowhere? The nerve. When he got home, someone would be hearing from him. Not that he was the type to usually complain, but this was beyond cruel. 

He stared at the tracks. They stopped here. Did he get on the wrong train? One that forked in the road, and terminated at some nameless place out in the country? Hugh steadied himself. He could admit that his head was in a number of places earlier that morning. The lack of sleep hadn’t helped. But he’d got on the train to Bath, he was sure of that. He could remember the train conductor checking his ticket. Nowhere in that interaction had he stopped Hugh for being on the wrong train, or told him he would need to get off and change. After that, it started to get hazy. Hugh got angry at himself. Why couldn’t he remember? 

He began to pace up and down the platform. The sun was getting low now, and more shadows began to swallow up the concrete. Hugh walked into them and then out of them again. In the shadow, in the light.

He stopped and turned as if looking at somebody, but there was no one there. This was no good. He shifted his focus to the hill and had the idea to climb up it. Nothing could be seen from behind this dense forest of trees. And there was still a shred of light in the sky. This could be a chance to find help.

The climb, however, was not an easy one. The grass was smooth and slick; it made Hugh slip numerous times. It was also fairly steep, which meant Hugh had to hold onto patches of grass to avoid falling. He bunched them up in his fist, and they crunched. With a little perseverance, he reached the top, where two trees were planted. He leaned on one of them, out of breath, and considered his regret the moment he looked up.

The forest bordered a sea of grassland, the proportions of which baffled Hugh. Its borders faded into the horizon, now burning with the red of the Sun. Hugh was expecting a different view; farmland, clearly marked by lines and fences. Maybe he would spot a small village in the distance, or even a neighbouring town to Bath. His hopes were mistaken; it was a place unadorned by mankind except for a single house in the distance. Hugh felt faint. It was like he was dreaming, but far too aware.

He scrutinised the house. It had a rusty pickup truck next to it. But no roads in sight. The lights were on inside, and smoke came from its chimney. Someone was there. 

Hugh looked down the hill, then back at the house. Without thinking he started walking. Then walking turned into running. He was fucked if another train wasn’t coming. A vague combination of words formed in his head to create what he would say to whoever opened the door. He realised he didn’t have the entire picture on what his situation was, but that didn’t stop him. No phone. Lost. Keep it brief. He was already halfway there when…

His feet stopped moving, but the rest of his body wanted to keep going. The top half of his body was thrust forward, and he just barely kept his balance. He looked down. It was some kind of pond that was only ankle deep, but it was not water. It must have been mud or something – it had his feet in a vice grip like setting concrete. Hugh groaned and grabbed his right leg, and heaved to try and get it out. He could see it start to give, but it was so thick it felt like something was pulling against him. It took most of his strength to yank it out and when he did, he swayed back and forth. He awkwardly kept his right foot up, and regaining his balance he planted it onto dry grass just outside the pond. He grabbed hold of his other foot and counted to three in his head to heave. He expected it to be just as hard as the other one, but it came out straight away. That was the problem. His left boot was gone. Hugh gawped at his feet, then his face scrunched up and he started grumbling through his teeth. He considered that he might have to put his hands in there to fish it out, weighing it up with the idea that his hands might also get stuck. So, he found a small branch and knelt. But just as he brought the branch closer to the surface, the boot emerged from under it. The pond made a subdued groan as if it had been regurgitated. Hugh did not like that. He fished the boot out, dropped the branch and ran.

When he got to the door, the lights were out. The sun had gone; he could just barely make out what was in front of him. He could smell smoke from inside. A fire. He touched the door, it was warm. It couldn’t have been long after the fire went out. Now or never, Hugh thought. 

He raised his hand and knocked. When the sound stopped and the silence began, Hugh felt he would collapse before the door opened. One moment felt stretched out to infinite length, a vast space of nothingness. He heard footsteps, but they were reluctant, irregular. Thousands of images raced through his head. He feared the worst; that whoever was on the other side was some detached psycho hermit that would kidnap him or worse. A minute had gone, and he turned on his heel to leave, when he heard a sound. The unmistakable meow of a cat. He then heard muttering, stern whispers. Someone was trying to usher the cat away. Hugh knocked again, and he heard scratching. Then footsteps. Before he could take another step, the door creaked open ajar. He saw an eye look up at him through the crack. Hugh flashed a desperate smile, at which the door opened a little more.

Squinted, scrutinising eyes with wrinkles around them. A man with a beard. That was all that stood before him. But Hugh lost all he thought to say; the man’s stare seemed to squeeze the air out of him.

‘You lost?’ A gravelly voice murmured from behind this man’s beard; his mouth barely moved. 

‘Pardon? Oh, yes. Yes, sort of. You see, I was trying to get to Bath and must have fallen asleep on the train, because I woke up on the platform over there–’ 

The man’s face became resigned, and before he could get another word in, the door was shut. The sound gave Hugh a bit of a shock, but he couldn’t quite process what had just happened. He investigated the darkness around the house. It seemed to move and stir. He knocked again. 

‘You go away,’ said the man from behind the door, ‘I don’t have the time for insolent crooks like you.’

‘Insolent crooks?’ Hugh muttered under his breath. ‘Look,’ he said, loud so the man could hear, ‘I really am lost. I’m very sorry to disturb you so late, but I would really appreciate it if you could give me some help, or directions, or when the next train is coming. I don’t have my phone on me at the moment… so…’ he stopped short, as he wasn’t sure the man could hear him anymore. ‘Hello?’ He sighed, arms akimbo, and looked around.

The door swung open.

‘What are you playing at, hmm?’ said the man. He spoke rapidly, and his tone was confrontational. ‘You trying to get a rise out of me? You come here, talking absolute gibberish, you know I almost have to laugh, it’s so ridiculous. A train? A train over there!’ He pointed over to the forest, and then he did laugh, almost manically. Hugh thought that perhaps his fears about this man were true. 

‘You know what,’ Hugh said as he raised his hands up, ‘Don’t even worry about it. I’ll be going now.’ He started to walk away, even though it was so dark he only had a faint idea of which direction to go. 

‘Oh, so you think you can just come here and terrorise me and just expect to get away with it?’

Hugh sighed as he heard this. ‘I think there’s just been some big misunderstanding, sir.’ He called out into the darkness, his head half turned back. The man had started to follow him. Hugh could hear his footsteps nearby. But couldn’t see him. He started to panic a little. He didn’t know what this man was capable of. ‘I won’t be bothering you anymore.’ 

‘You’re a damn liar. You’re probably going to come back tomorrow, aren’t you? You’re a pest.’ He spat out the last word from his core, and something about it felt personal to Hugh.

‘You know what, sir?’ said Hugh, ‘I’ve been nothing but courteous to you this entire conversation. You clearly aren’t willing to help me, which is fine, but if you could just let me be now, that would be super. Goodbye.’ 

There was a silence as Hugh continued. A silence, and the sound of his feet on the grass. He thought that was the end of it. Surely.

‘How… dare you?’ The man’s voice was filled with indignation, to a degree that Hugh thought was completely unreasonable. ‘How dare you speak to me that way? Where are you? Get back here!’ 

‘Nope, nope nope,’ Hugh said to himself as he sprinted away from the man’s voice. This man had turned from some grouch into a predator with very little provocation. Why couldn’t it just have been a normal house? As Hugh ran further away he began to cry, overwhelmed by the flurry of bad luck that had hit him in just one day. The more he thought about it, the less he could bear it. It weighed down on him and nearly choked him. 

The plain, empty darkness moved past him. More and more, and at a certain point he started to believe he had taken a wrong turn. But then he felt the slightly spiny leaves of a pine tree brush his arm. It hurt a little, but he was relieved. He darted his head around, then he found it. Like the moon in the sky, the lamppost’s light shone through above the trees. 

Just as he reached the platform, his heart sank and he hid behind one of the trees. The man was there, looking confused. He was just staring, bewildered by everything. He looked around, slowly turned his head like a security camera. Hugh held his breath. As the man’s gaze passed over Hugh, he relaxed. 

Hugh took a deep breath and stepped back onto the platform, keeping his distance. He stared at the man, and the man stared back. 

‘You did this, didn’t you?’ the man asked. Hugh didn’t quite know what he was referring to.

*

As I watched this play out, I couldn’t help but chuckle a little. If I could jump in there and take the blame for Hugh I would. I felt his pain, felt the confusion course through me. And yet, I typed, I clicked and noted these feelings objectively. I scanned through all that occurred today. Pages and pages of thoughts. Lots to mull over. The first day is usually the worst, they have told me.