Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

My recovery was a long, slow and agonising process. The drugs became a constant friend. I had to re-learn how to speak, how to hold a pen, write. The physical therapy was excruciating. My brain had to re-wire itself, shifting the functions from the part that was missing to what remained, nestled under the metal plate. Just to cap things, the nice zipper scar up my stomach itched like hell.

They let me leave the hospital two years later and it was another year before I could rejoin the world. Things had moved on – rockets on the moon, bands I’d loved long gone – but the Vietnam War ploughed on regardless. The Americans hadn’t won. Nobody had as far as I could see. But I still had one thing to give me comfort: the photo of that happy, drugged-up night before I fell off the ride, reminding me of the best friends a man could ever have. It was time to look them up.

England was nothing like Vietnam: wet, cold, quiet, safe. I’d only heard from Justin once in all the time of my recovery. That upset me; we’d been so close for so long and when I really needed his support he was no longer around. The one letter I did get from him didn’t sound like Justin at all. He told me he’d given up photojournalism and had gone back to living with his parents in their rambling old pile in Surrey, but there was an undercurrent to all the banal statements that suggested he was scared. I’m not stupid. Someone had got to him, and it had to be one of the spooks. The mission we’d muscled our way in on was top secret and those kind of people had long memories. I’d probably been written off because of my injuries – nobody expected me to be thinking never mind walking around. But Justin and the others had probably all been warned off.

I turned up at his parents’ house late one Saturday night. It took a few seconds for his mother to recognise me – my injuries had made me haggard – but she welcomed me warmly.

She’d heard about what happened to me in ‘Nam from my own family and I spent a few minutes making small talk about my recovery. Then I asked her if I could see Justin and she grew puzzled and then agitated.

“Who’s Justin?” she said, kneading the palm of one hand insistently.

I laughed. “Justin. Come on! Your son!”

Her uneasy gaze ranged across my face. “I have no son, you know that Will. Derek and I never had children.”

I laughed again, but it dried up when I saw she was deathly serious. You can tell when someone is pretending, especially if it’s something as big and obvious as that. My first thought was that she was covering for him. He was hiding out after the spooks’ threat, making a new life for himself.

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll go along with you. But let me show you this.” I dipped into my worn backpack that had followed me halfway round the world. The photo was crumpled after months of travelling. I handed it over. “Far right.”

She glanced at it, shook her head, handed it back. “That’s you.”

My stomach knotted when I looked at the picture. She was correct – I was on the far right of the group. Of three young men. Chet, Alain and me. No Justin. My head spun; I was still shaky after the injuries and the sheer act of comprehending made me feel queasy.

“I have no son,” she repeated in a strained voice. Another thought broke on her face. “An old man was round here a few weeks ago asking the same question. What is going on, Will?”

I looked around the antique-stuffed study. Photos were everywhere, on the sideboard, the mantelpiece, the wall. They showed Mr and Mrs Glendenning, Justin’s aunts and uncles, family gatherings. But no Justin in any of them. There was one photo taken on our last day of school; in it, I now stood alone. It made no sense that a photo of me alone would be hanging on the Glendenning’s study wall, but when I pointed that out to Mrs Glendenning she became even more agitated.

I went out into the rain with a shattering sense of dread and the desperate feeling that my mind was falling apart.

I visited my father, but he didn’t recall Justin at all. None of my own photos showed him. Every reference to him in my childhood diaries no longer existed. They hadn’t been erased – the writing was mine, the content too, but whenever I had done anything with Justin, I had now experienced it alone. It was as though Justin had never existed.

Frantically, I booked a flight to Paris to see Alain. I held the photo in sweating hands all the way, staring at it so hard my head hurt. If only I could pierce the illusion and Justin would materialise in his familiar place.

Just before we touched down in Paris-Orly, I looked out over the rooftops of the City of Lights and when I looked back at the photo Alain was gone too.

The story was the same. At Alain’s flat and in every one of his familiar haunts, no one had heard of him.

I slipped into a deep depression for a month during which I was convinced my so-called recovery had been a lie and my brain had been damaged irreparably. I tried not to think about what was happening, but it haunted my every moment. Finally, I could bear it no more. Chet was my last hope for some kind of understanding.

At least he was still on the photo: the two of us, arms around each other’s shoulders. The best way to get to him was through his work, so I rang the Picture Editor on Life magazine, an irascible man with the hard-edged tones of a New Yorker. He said he had a number for Chet and disappeared from the phone, but when he came back with his contact book he asked me who I was after.

I mentioned Chefs name again, but this time I only got a blank silence. The Picture Editor had never commissioned Chet, had never even heard of him. I asked a secretary to check particular issues that I knew featured Chefs work, but all the pictures were now different to what I remembered, all by other photographers. And when I hung up and examined my snap, I saw only my own face staring back at me.

Beyond everything that was happening, one other thing disturbed me immensely: why was I the only one to remember these people? But that wasn’t true, I realised. At least one other person knew. He had visited Justin’s parents, and with a little digging around I found he’d asked questions in Paris and called Life . Van Diemen was the key, and I started to wonder if he wasn’t perhaps the cause. The spooks had decided to tie up the loose ends, and their cat’s-paw had been set the task.

Over time it came to me. Somehow it was linked to whatever had been uncovered in that mysterious stone corridor in the heart of the Iron Triangle. Van Diemen knew what it was: I think he had always known. When we ran from the tunnels for the chopper and we couldn’t understand why there were no pilots . . . failed to get a handle on the number of troops that came with us . . . they had all been wiped out like Justin, Alain and Chet. We couldn’t remember them because they never existed.

A sizeable portion of my US dollars buys me a trip to the airport in a ten-year-old car loaded with chicken coops. Somehow we make our way through streets packed with people carrying beds from the houses of the rich, or siphoning petrol, or making fluttering paper rain with their now-useless South Vietnamese money.

I fight my way through the crush at the airport gates – people screaming for blood, shouting for help, wanting to know why they’re being abandoned. The MPs let me by when they see my press accreditation, and I run across the tarmac amid the stink of fuel and the hell of engine noise, wondering when I’ll wink out like a star at dawn. Will I feel something coming for me? Cold talons on my neck? Will there be something beyond that instant? Or just a nothing and a never-having-been?

Searching back and forth along the ranks of men in short-sleeved white shirts and black ties and the very few women, make-up free and tear-stained, I start to think Van Diemen has already made good his escape. But then I see that silver hair shining in the sun and he turns and sees me as if I’d shouted him. But he doesn’t run. Instead his face grows briefly bright, and he smiles before becoming deeply sad. He holds out his arms for me.