Voices shouted orders out of the dark. English turned into French, then German, then Russian, then Chinese. Williams realised he could understand all of it, and somehow knew what he was supposed to say to each command, barking his responses in time with everyone else in the infinite line.

At some invisible signal, the two men on either side of Williams stepped out of the line, faced each other, and started yelling. They got louder and louder, their shouts echoing deafeningly in the void that had replaced the bunker, until one of them lunged at the other, grabbed him in a chokehold, and pulled his arm tighter and tighter across his windpipe until he crushed it and the man collapsed dead on the floor. Then, as the attacker silently returned to his place next to Williams, the walls started to rematerialise, cutting off the line of phantom people and leaving Williams falling slowly backwards onto the sofa.

The third time was a completely different kind of horror. This time, the man who woke up wasn’t really Williams. He wasn’t really a person at all. He was a beast, driven by a single, bloody desire: to kill.

He wanted to break out of his bricked-up cage. He wanted to prowl the rooms above it and hunt the people who had trapped him. But most of all, he wanted to kill. To snap bones, break skulls, slit throats, and slice arteries.

He tore at the sofa, ripped its cushions, and stamped on the frame until it cracked. He clawed deep scratches into the concrete lining of the walls. He hit the locked door over and over, ramming it with his shoulders, kicking it with his feet, and punching it with all his strength until his knuckles were bruised and bloody.

And through all this, a face hovered above him. A twisted visage of a man with ashen, bruise-marked skin stretched across his skull, screaming silently from a mouth full of blood and cracked teeth.

It was only when Williams’s energy was completely drained, when he had no more feeling in his fists or air in his lungs, that his desperate mind forced his body to stop and compelled him to pile some of the sofa cushions next to the door, curl up on them, and fall back into an exhausted sleep.

Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Knox lay in his bed in Kemp House the next morning thinking about being careful what he wished for. He’d wanted change, and now he had it. He’d also wanted his best friend back, and now he was. But neither of these things had happened the way he’d hoped they would.