Grime caught in my throat, and my breaths grew unhealthily harsh while they kept appearing in front of my face. Darkness lurched at me from every room I passed. I would have taken several stairs at a time if I hadn’t been afraid of falling. Even running down them one by one meant I had to keep thumping the unstable wall with my free hand. I dashed across the lobby, to find that the door wasn’t open nearly as wide as I’d left it. I had to drag at it, bunching up the carpet that must have settled into place, before I could struggle past. Once I was outside I didn’t immediately think to switch the flashlight off, because the sunshine felt like a pretence that I’d escaped the dark. I stumbled across the gravel into the trees and dodged doggedly along the path to the gap in the wall. There was my car outside the houses, and surely this ought to reassure me that some of my life remained normal, but even having reached the driver’s seat and locked myself in, I couldn’t drive by any means at once. I was desperate to think how I could use what I’d learned at the hotel – desperate to understand what I’d seen.

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-One

A Disappearance

“Semple.”

“Mr Semple.”

The librarian said my name a good deal louder than I had. He might almost have been announcing my arrival. Remembering when you were expected to be quiet in libraries, I glanced about the long white room. None of the readers at the tables appeared to have been disturbed, but I was looking for Julia too, although it was her day off. As I turned back to the desk beside the glass door in a wall of the same material, the librarian said “You were worried about your son.”

I took this for a means of identification, but perhaps his long tanned extravagantly hirsute face was offering sympathy as well. “You’ll be Mr Lister,” I said.

“Mister Lister, that’s my cross.” Having acknowledged with a pout how the name sounded like a joke, he said “If you could put yourself in the book.”

He meant the ledger lying on the nearest table. I added my name and date and place of residence and the reason for my visit – research. The process reminded me of the visitors’ book at the derelict yet inhabited hotel, and I turned the pages until I found Roy’s entry and Bella’s. I didn’t realise how much I’d been hoping to be proved wrong until I saw her handwriting, the same old-fashioned script I’d found in the hotel register. She and Roy had given research as the excuse for their visit too. I was nowhere near dealing with my thoughts as I asked Lister “Were you here when my son came?”