Dark Woods (4 page)

‘Here,’ said Jefferson, sitting opposite him at the table. ‘Two glasses of iced water.’

‘Thank you,’ said Cal.

Jefferson chuckled.

‘What’s so funny?’ asked Cal.

‘You English – you’re so polite.’

Cal wasn’t feeling very polite. He leaned over and took the glass that Jefferson had placed nearest himself.

‘Don’t trust me, huh?’ said Jefferson, still grinning. ‘Well, I can’t say I blame you.’

Cal tipped his head back and drank deeply. He stared at the blue sky and wondered if he would ever see Sarah and Michael again.

‘I used to be a research fellow at Harvard University,’ said Jefferson. ‘My subject was physics.’

He took some papers from a brown leather satchel and pushed a black and white photograph across the table. It showed a much younger man standing on a lawn in front of a very grand looking building. He wore a suit and tie and a shirt with a button-down collar. He was fresh-faced and smiling, like a man who knew he had his whole life in front of him.

‘I was twenty-three,’ he said. ‘Twenty-three years old and I thought nothing could touch me.’

‘So what happened?’ asked Cal, partly because he was interested but mainly because he wanted to keep Jefferson talking while he decided what to do.

‘I was working on a new theory, working sixteen, seventeen hours a day, but I didn’t care because I felt I was on the edge of something, ready to make a breakthrough. But then, two days after that photo was taken, there was a fire at my apartment. I got off the bus that night, saw the flames above my block and knew I’d lost her.’

‘Lost who?’

‘Tansy. My dog.’

Jefferson passed another photograph across the table.

‘That’s her, right there. Beautiful, isn’t she?’

Cal looked at the picture of an Alsatian, sitting by a flowerbed in the middle of summer. Then he looked at Jefferson and was surprised to see that there were tears in his eyes.

‘Best dog that ever lived, was Tansy. That’s why I need your help, Cal. I want you to help me bring her back.’ He put the photograph in his shirt pocket, next to his heart.

And at that moment, although he knew that Jefferson had done a terrible thing in bringing them here, Cal began to feel sorry for him. He knew what it was like to want something you could never have.

Still, the man was obviously deluded. If she had been in that fire, his dog was long gone. Cal decided it was safer to play along for the time being.

‘But we looked for her,’ he said. ‘We looked all over and she wasn’t there.’

‘I know,’ said Jefferson. He stared at Cal and tapped the side of his head. ‘But that’s because she’s in here. And I want you to help me get her out.’

Cal shook his head.

‘That’s impossible,’ he said.

‘That’s what everyone thinks. But you saw the teddy bear, right? You picked it up and held it.’

‘Yeah,’ Cal said slowly, ‘but I don’t see—’

‘All right, look.’

Jefferson was animated now. He picked up a sketch pad and began to draw with quick, flowing lines.

‘You see this?’ He pointed to a rough drawing of a human brain. ‘This is where you keep all your thoughts, your memories, all your images of the things that exist outside of your body, out in the real world. You understand?’

Cal nodded.

‘OK, good. You ever watch TV?’

‘Yeah, we have that in England.’

‘And d’you think there are little men and women running around inside your TV set?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘No. But the people you see are real people, right?’

‘I guess so.’

‘No, you don’t guess so. You
know
so. They existed in a TV studio or on a film set and then they were made into little packets of digital information. Then they were beamed into space so that they could bounce off a satellite and end up in your living room a couple of thousand miles away. Pretty incredible when you think about it, huh?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Trust me, it is. But go back a while. If I’d told people a hundred years ago that such a thing was possible, they’d have locked me up as a madman. It was too advanced for them and they weren’t ready to believe it. Whereas nowadays we just accept it as ordinary. That old thing in the corner? It’s just the TV.’

‘Right,’ said Cal. ‘With lots of little digital people in it.’ When Jefferson had started to tell him about his dog, he’d thought it might be the beginning of a normal conversation, but now he was just rambling.

‘Cal!’ Jefferson reached across the table and gripped his arm. ‘This isn’t a game. I need you to listen. It’s important that you understand this.’

‘I am listening,’ said Cal, pulling his arm away. He had been staring into the shadows of the forest, wondering how far he would get if he ran. ‘You were talking about TV.’

Jefferson reached for the sketch pad and hurriedly drew a stick figure with an arrow pointing towards the brain and another pointing back again.

‘The images in your mind have their own reality, Cal, although they correspond to another reality in the physical world. But like anything else, they need energy for their existence. It was my belief that this could work both ways.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that if our brains can use energy to convert the reality of the physical world into an image that exists in the mind, then there had to be a way to do the opposite. To convert these images into something that exists in the physical world. Do you see?’

‘Turning dreams into reality, you mean?’ asked Cal.

‘Exactly. Or the things in them, at any rate. No one believed it was possible, of course. But that’s because the idea is way ahead of its time. Like TV, remember? People thought it was impossible because it didn’t fit with their view of the world. The world is flat, the world is round – what you believe depends on the science of the time. But then someone comes along and discovers something so incredible that people’s views of the world are changed for ever.’

‘And you think that’s what you’ve done?’ asked Cal, interested now in spite of his fear.

‘I don’t
think
I’ve done it, Cal. I
have
done it. And what’s more, you saw me do it with your own eyes.’

Jefferson opened his satchel, took out the small brown teddy bear and placed it on the table.

‘You saw this in her dreams, didn’t you? You saw me take the image from her mind and turn it into something solid, something that exists out here in the real world. Don’t you understand, Cal? We’re making history here. This is one of those things that will change the way people see the world for ever.’

Cal looked at Jefferson and saw the way he stared at some imagined future, saw the intensity in his eyes and wondered whether the things he said could possibly be true. He knew the images on the monitor could just have been some pre-recorded piece of film, that Jefferson could have bought the bear in any one of a thousand toy shops.

But what would be the point of that? Why would Jefferson go to all the trouble of setting everything up and bringing them out here if it was simply some elaborate trick?

‘Is it true?’ he asked, scratching at a splinter of wood on the tabletop. ‘Can you really do that?’

‘Of course,’ said Jefferson. ‘I had to bring you out here because I needed someone young, someone with an open mind who would help me do this thing. When you’ve got something so huge, so important, then the normal rules don’t apply. Do you see?’

Cal nodded.

‘Kind of.’

And that was the strangest thing. Cal realised he was starting to believe that maybe Jefferson was telling the truth after all, that maybe all he wanted was for someone to help him with his experiment. He had a pretty extreme way of going about it, that was for sure, but then maybe if he got what he wanted, he would keep his promise.

‘So now you’ve done it,’ said Cal, ‘are you going to take us back?’

Jefferson frowned.

‘The thing with the teddy bear was just to prove to you that it works,’ he said. ‘The reason I brought you here is because I need you to do something else for me.’

‘What?’ asked Cal. ‘What can I do?’

‘Like I said,’ replied Jefferson. ‘I want you to find my dog. And then I want you to bring her back to me.’

‘Watch carefully,’ said Jefferson. ‘You just press this button here, on the side of the monitor, and that gives you the picture. It’s a wireless system that uses the alpha-waves the brain creates when a person is dreaming. It converts them into a different form of electrical energy which the computer system recalibrates as pixels of colour. These become the picture you see on the screen, which is an exact copy of what the person is dreaming about.’

Cal glanced across to the bed in the corner where Eden was still fast asleep. Then he turned back to the monitor which showed some kind of fairground scene and a woman whisking candyfloss onto a stick.

‘That’s what she’s dreaming about? Candyfloss?’

‘It would seem so, yes.’

Jefferson moved the mouse so that the cursor was positioned over the image of the candyfloss. ‘When you find the object you’re looking for, you just click on the mouse and it gives you the option to isolate it. See? You try it.’

Cal clicked on the YES option and an image of the candyfloss filled the screen. Despite the weirdness of the situation, Cal’s fingers tingled with excitement.

Could he really take something from Eden’s dreams and make it exist in the real world?

‘All right, see now it’s giving you the option to save or delete,’ said Jefferson, as if he were teaching an ordinary, everyday computer class. ‘When you’re happy you’ve got the image you want, all you do is go for the save option and the computer will do the rest.’

Cal looked at the swirl of pink candyfloss on screen.

‘I just click SAVE?’

‘Simple as that.’

Cal clicked the mouse and heard the whirr and hum of the computers as they processed the information. He looked at the screen and saw that the candyfloss had disappeared.

‘You see, Cal?’

Jefferson smiled and put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Now you know what it feels like to make a dream come true.’

‘Are you telling me there’s now a stick of candyfloss lying in that cage?’

‘Of course.’

‘But how? How does it work?’

‘In some ways it is very complicated, Cal. So complicated, in fact, that even the finest scientific minds have been unable to comprehend it. But in another way, it is really very simple. Just think of it like an idea.’

‘An idea?’

‘Yes.’

Jefferson removed the metal discs from Eden’s temples and placed them beside the bed.

‘Imagine that you wake up one morning and decide you want to bake a cake. You have an idea of the cake, but at this stage the cake only exists in your mind. It does not yet exist in the physical world. So you get up, and you go to the pantry, and you find all the things that you need, eggs, sugar, flour, all the ingredients that are required to bake a cake. Then put these things together in the right amounts, and you put them in the oven, and then suddenly a cake exists in the world where before there was no cake. In the morning the cake was just an idea, but in the afternoon it is a real thing that exists in the real, physical world. And so it is with dreams. All you have to do is take the energy created from the image and use it to organise the molecules in the physical world in its own likeness. The energy is the cook, and the whole world is its pantry. It contains all the ingredients it could possibly need. Do you understand?’

‘Sort of,’ said Cal. ‘But why has no one thought of it before?’

Jefferson smiled. ‘Partly because it is way more complicated than baking a cake,’ he said, ‘and partly because the idea is so simple. All I’m asking from you is that you help me to bring my dog back.’

‘People are going to be looking for us,’ said Cal. ‘And when they find us, they’re going to come looking for you.’

Jefferson shrugged.

‘That doesn’t mean they’ll find me. I’m pretty good at disappearing when I have to. I’ve been disappearing all my life.’

The image on the monitor was flickering now, its bright colours fading to grey.

‘She’s waking up,’ said Jefferson, walking over to the door. ‘Maybe I’ll just leave you two alone for a while so you can, you know, explain things to her. I wouldn’t want to frighten her when she’s coming around.’

Cal watched Eden moving beneath the sheets and wondered how Jefferson could possibly believe that all this was somehow going to turn out all right. But he thought that, right now, convincing Eden to play along with Jefferson’s crazy scheme was probably the best chance of survival they had.

‘Tell me something,’ said Jefferson suddenly. ‘Who is the tall tailor?’

Cal turned to see Jefferson leaning against the door frame with a strange look in his eyes, as though he was the keeper of some terrible secret.

‘I— I don’t know,’ said Cal, but the words sent a chill through his blood, as though they had stirred something long forgotten. ‘Why do you ask?’

Jefferson looked away.

‘No reason,’ he said. ‘No reason at all.’

Then he stepped backwards and pulled the door shut, leaving Cal and Eden alone in the room.

Eden began to breathe more deeply, then gasped several times like a diver coming up for air.

‘It’s all right,’ said Cal, standing by the bed and holding her hand. ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’

Eden’s eyelids flickered and then she sat up and pulled her hand away.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Cal. ‘I didn’t mean—’

Eden put her hands to her face and pressed them against her eyes. Then she let them fall into her lap and stared at Cal, as if seeing him for the very first time.

‘Where am I?’ she asked. ‘What’s going on?’

‘We were brought here,’ said Cal. ‘By the guy with the van. We were in the woods, remember?’

Eden sat on the edge of the bed, her feet dangling above the floor. She stared at her scuffed trainers as if trying to work out why she had worn them to bed.

‘Right – there was a guy,’ she said. ‘A guy looking for his dog. He was going to drive us back.’ She screwed her eyes shut and Cal remembered how much his own head had hurt when he’d woken up.

‘But he drove us here instead,’ he said. ‘This is where he lives. Right slap-bang in the middle of nowhere.’

Eden opened her eyes again and tried to stand, but her legs were too weak and she sat down again.

‘That guy brought us here?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘How . . . ? Oh God, the lemonade. He spiked the lemonade, didn’t he?’

Cal nodded.

‘Cal, we have to get out of here.’ Eden looked at the window blinds and the lights flickering on the wall of computers. She saw the metal discs on the table beside the bed and pressed a hand to her temple. ‘Cal, what is going on? Is he still here?’

‘He’s in the living room. He wanted me to try and explain things to you.’

‘What?’ Eden stared at him incredulously. ‘He was in here with you while I was asleep?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And he wants you to
explain
things? What are you, his new best friend?’

‘No. I just—’

‘Cal, this guy spiked our drinks and kidnapped us. For all you know he could be out there sharpening his axe, getting ready to chop us into a thousand pieces.’

‘He’s not like that, Eden.’

‘What? Cal, are you out of your mind? We have to get out of here.’

‘Yeah, well it isn’t as easy as all that. Like I said, we’re in the middle of nowhere.’

Eden sat up gingerly, peered through the blinds and swore.

‘See?’ said Cal.

‘We didn’t fly here by helicopter, Cal,’ said Eden, lowering her voice. ‘He brought us here. In a van. So if there’s a way in, there has to be a way out. It stands to reason.’

‘But we’re miles from anywhere.’

‘Says who?’

‘Says Jefferson.’

‘Who’s Jefferson?’

‘The guy.’

‘Oh yeah, right. That would be the same guy who drugged us and threw us in the back of a van. No way
he’d
lie to us.’

‘Look, I just think if we help him to get what he wants, he’ll take us back and then this whole thing will be over with.’

‘You do, huh?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. And what makes you think you know what he wants?’

‘Because he told me, while you were asleep.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Eden, holding her head and pacing up and down. ‘You’re as crazy as he is.’

‘Just calm down and listen for a minute,’ said Cal. ‘I know this must seem a bit weird to you. But just hear me out.’

‘“A
bit
weird”?’ Eden stood by the shutters with her hands on her hips. ‘Where in England are you from – Never-Never Land? Are you going to tell me if I sit here doing nothing, my fairy godmother’s gonna sweep in and take me home in a coach made out of pumpkins?’

‘No,’ said Cal. ‘But I am going to tell you about a teddy bear you used to have.’

‘What?’ Eden shook her head. ‘Now I know you’re losing it.’

‘It was brown, wasn’t it? Brown with one eye missing.’

Eden looked at him and swallowed.

‘How could you possibly know that?’

‘Because you dreamed about it. Because I watched your dream.’

Eden looked at the computers and the monitor and the metal discs beside the bed.

‘Give me a break.’

‘I’m not making this up, I swear. I saw into your dreams, Eden. And it gets weirder. Jefferson says he’s found a way of turning dreams into reality.’

‘What?’

‘He can take things from your mind and make them real.’

‘Cal, I don’t want to hear about it,’ said Eden. ‘That freak drugged me, dragged me out here and stuck things on my head. He should be locked up.’

‘But if we help him . . .’

‘What? No way, Cal. I ain’t helping that creep. I’m gonna find him and tell him exactly what I think of him, that’s what I’m gonna do. And when I’ve done that he’s gonna drive us back home and I’m gonna make sure he spends the rest of his life eating prison food in some maximum security jail. And maybe while he’s sitting there he’ll think, “Oh wait a minute, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to go round kidnapping people after all.”’

‘I can see you’re upset,’ said Cal.

Eden stared at him.

‘What is
wrong
with you, Cal?’

‘I just think if we help him, it’s our best way of getting out of here.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s where you and me differ,’ said Eden, walking towards the door. ‘You stay if you want. Me? I’m out of here.’

She pulled open the door and then hesitated. As she stepped back into the room again, Cal saw why.

Jefferson was standing in the doorway, his face white with fury.

And in his hand, he held a shotgun.