John Marsden - Circle of fight

I eased myself quietly out from the photocopier and went back to the door behind me. With all the stealth of a burglar I turned the handle, then gently squeezed the door open an inch. Nothing happened, so I pushed it open a little further. The air felt cold and dry. Somehow, although I had never noticed it before or thought about it, the air in a room where someone is sleeping or living or just being is moister. I opened the door further and slipped inside.

Again, the silence and emptiness told me no-one was there. I closed the door behind me, scrabbled for the light switch, turned it on for an instant, then off again. It wasn’t a bedroom at all, but a storage room.

Most storerooms hold, I don’t know, old towels, suitcases, preserved fruit. Piles of paper, your parents’ old tax returns. This one didn’t. What it held got my skin crawling and prickling again. This one held guns, more guns than I’d ever seen in one place. More guns than they’d use in a Hollywood movie even. Most of them in pretty good condition too, I thought, from the quick look I’d allowed myself.

Well, there was no getting away from it now. I’d found the right house. I didn’t know for sure whether Gavin was here, but this was the kind of house where I could expect him to be, and these were the people I needed to interview about him.

At least the knowledge gave me confidence. I went back to the door, eased it open again, and peered down the corridor. Dark and deserted as before. The thin strip of light at the base of the door opposite was no longer there. Either the guy had left the room again or, more likely, he’d gone to bed.

I groped my way to the window and drew the curtains. Then I took off my jacket and laid it along the floor, to block any light going through. Only then did I think it was safe to turn the light back on. There sure were a lot of guns, but I’d been a bit over the top in my first guesses. There were probably forty altogether. More than enough to blow holes in Ellie, Gavin and quite a few others. I wanted to sabotage them in some way but couldn’t think of how to do it. I opened a few cupboards. Ammunition, heaps of that too. It reminded me and I took out the magazine from my jeans and shoved it behind some of the boxes. Then other things, more like you’d expect in a storeroom. Boxes of tinned food. It made me feel very hungry. Slabs of Coke. Coke. A memory came back to me, of putting a tooth in a glass of Coke, years ago, to see if it would rot away like everyone said it would. Then Dad came along and drank the Coke, tooth and all, before I could stop him, so I never found out the result of my experiment. Instead I found myself in a different experiment: observing the effect on your father when you tell him he’s just swallowed one of your baby teeth.

Yes, Coke should do the trick. Fill each barrel and I reckon it would do them terminal damage. I opened a can, took a swig, then went to work.

Mission Coke took quite a while. I gave each weapon a couple of applications. It didn’t necessarily matter that I took a while, because I figured that the longer I stayed in the house the safer I’d be. The later it got the less chance there’d be of people wandering around the corridors. I was hoping the guy I’d seen had gone to bed and that there weren’t too many more after him.

But also I was a little afraid to open the door again. It sounds crazy, but for half an hour or so I felt quite secure. In that short time the room almost became my space. A little world where I could work away secretly, without interruption, and forget what was on the other side of the door, and even forget why I had come to the house in the first place.

Reality’s always waiting for you though. Even when you think you’re hiding from it really cleverly, it still ambushes you sooner or later. The time came when, with a sigh, I turned off the light, opened the curtains and went back to the door. ‘Here we go,’ I thought, except that there was no we, only one poor I. I took a breath, thought of all the people who were sustaining me right now, Bronte and Jeremy and Homer and Lee and Fi and even Jess and probably the spirit of Robyn and Corrie too, and slid out into the corridor again.

There was now a strip of light under a second door, the one next to the guy I’d seen earlier. I ignored that and turned to the door just down a little way and on my right. The thought of opening every door in the house disturbed me, but I couldn’t think of any other way to go about this. I squeezed the handle and nudged it, listening carefully. I decided on the spot that I’d try a new policy. I’d open each door and see if I got a Gavin vibe. If not I’d close it and continue. I just had to trust that when I opened the right door I’d know it.

This room was much darker than the previous one. There was no way I could tell what was in there but I thought that I could probably tell what wasn’t in there, and what wasn’t in this room was Gavin.

I went on up to the only other room at this end of the building. I hoped to God he was in here. I really didn’t want to be in this house much longer. I hoped we weren’t operating on Murphy’s Law, or whoever wrote the law that the last room you look in is the one where they’ve stored the hostage. But this room felt cold, like no-one had been in it for a long time.

Time to go to a different part of the house.

The other light had gone off again. I didn’t feel like exploring those rooms now that I knew at least two of them were occupied, and at least one of those by a non-Gavin. Would have been funny if the guy’s name was Gavin. Funny but irrelevant. I suppressed that thought and moved down the stairs. They seemed to creak more going down than they had going up, and that’s saying something. Again I tried to take big steps, and I waited a long time between each one in the hope that anyone listening might have gone back to sleep before I made another of these awful rusty-hinge noises.

At the intersection I looked down the corridor to the right. Nothing. I got to the three doors up the other steps without too much drama. Those stairs didn’t creak nearly as much. Of course Gavin could easily have been in either of the rooms where I’d seen lights. But I gambled that he wasn’t. I wouldn’t like to share a bedroom with Gavin, and I figured they might be feeling the same way.

That left the door straight in front of me. I put my ear to it for a few moments but could hear nothing. I knew I wouldn’t, but I was trying to delay the awful moment when I would have to open the door. I was much more nervous with this one than I had been with the ones behind me, because I knew the odds of someone being in here were much higher. If two out of three were occupied, it raised the chances for the third one.

My throat was now so dry that I could have driven a Landrover down it. It wasn’t just my throat though, suddenly it was my whole mouth area, from somewhere up in the nostrils, and it went right down into my chest. My tongue felt so huge and thick and heavy that if someone had spoken to me I don’t think I could have answered. I already had one hand on the doorknob, but now I took a firmer grip, turned it and, for the fourth time that evening, squeezed a door open.

Someone was in there. I knew that at once. Mostly it was the feel of the air, which was heavy and humid. The kind of atmosphere that only a human can create. As well, I thought I could hear breathing. But I’m not sure if that was just my sixth sense, which was working pretty hard by then.

Now my problem was even harder. I’d found out that someone was in the room, sure, but I realised that had been the easy part. The real problem was now beginning. Who was it?

I honestly didn’t think it was Gavin. If I was relying on my senses, well, I had to trust them. Somehow the room felt too heavy. A little kid like Gavin — something in me felt that the air, the atmosphere, would be lighter. But I still had to be sure. I didn’t want to have to come to this room a second time. The trouble was that I didn’t trust my instincts enough.