Trauma: a gripping psychological mystery thriller
Trauma
Dylan Young
Copyright © 2020 Dylan Young
The right of Dylan Young to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Bloodhound Books
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
Print ISBN 978-1-913942-12-0
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Author’s note
A note from the publisher
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Also by Dylan Young
The Appointment
The Operation
To E, who started to read it and then couldn't stop.
1
The bar is half full. Over to his left sits Ivan. He’s in a booth with three girls. Ivan is not his actual name, but it’ll do. He’s Russian, Cameron knows that much. The repeated ‘Nyet’ when he’s offered water is what gives him away. Already he and Cam have discussed a tunnel under the Bering Strait and West Ham’s prospects of staying in the Premier League. Ivan’s a lounge lizard. His hair is too long and dyed an improbable black. He’s dressed in a white shirt over a bronzed belly with buttons open to his navel. Underneath he wears a big gold chain and his shorts are tie-dyed. All the girls are blondes in short dresses and heels. They drink champagne out of coupes and chair dance in time to the steady beat of music.
Cam’s not sure what’s playing. Could be ‘Barbie Girl’, could be ‘Macarena’. Could be any one of several Europop clichés. Sneaky tunes that crawl into your head like a parasitic nematode.
The night is warm. Cam can’t feel the heat directly, but he makes the judgement from the way everyone is dressed. They’re up on a rooftop bar with garish lights strung from poles and cocktail waitresses in catsuits. Someone is smoking and a heady mix of tobacco and cannabis drifts over on a breeze with a seaweed hint of the ocean on its breath.
Not England. Not London. The warmth, the smells, the stagey music all give it a definite European flavour. But Cam never knows where this bar is. Not exactly.
The detail doesn’t matter.
He clutches a cold beer in his fist. A bottle with a quartered lime in its neck. The dark leather of the booth he sits in squeaks like a squeezed mouse when he moves. Away on the far side of the bar, in a corner, someone else sits with their back towards him. Just a vague shape. Impossible to tell if it’s a man or a woman because a deep, thick darkness cloaks all detail in that part of the bar.
Opposite, in the same booth as his, is a girl. Her face is candlelit. Cam doesn’t know her name, but he calls her Emma because… well, because something tells him he ought to. She has inky hair, pink lips and a great smile. That’s all he can make out. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to focus on her other features. But her mouth is wide and her teeth glimmer unnaturally. As does her blue-white dress and her tanned arms in the bar’s black light. It’s as if she’s illuminated from within like some ethereal sea creature from the depths.
‘Are you ready?’ asks faceless Emma.
‘No. I don’t see why we should,’ Cam replies.
‘Because we must. It’s already happened, silly.’
‘What if we don’t? What if we just sit here?’
Emma turns towards the vague shape sitting in the far corner. There’s movement. A face turns towards them, featureless, shifting, as if it can’t decide what form to take. And as Cam stares, the shadow surrounding it thickens and deepens like boiling miasma, masking the figure’s features except for a vague glint where there should be eyes. The overall impression Cam gets is that if he did ever see the face, he’ll end up wishing he had not. Its presence hints at a wrongness difficult to define. It reminds Cam of abominations from his dreams. Like monkeys with wings or spiders that can swim. It doesn’t belong here.
Faceless Emma seems oblivious. She gets up and smiles at Cam over her shoulder as she moves through the tables. They’ve been there an hour. They’ve talked about the beach, toadstools, the value of the pound and a dozen other irrelevancies. Sometimes with Ivan included. Sometimes not. Now, there’s nothing left to say.
‘Wait,’ says Cam, but she’s gone. He follows her towards the edge of the rooftop bar. The wall there is low, barely knee-high.
The dark figure is watching them.
Emma turns to Cam. ‘Ready?’
‘No,’ he replies, but he doesn’t object when she takes his hand.
Over her shoulder, a hundred feet below, light from the moon reflects off a thousand tiny waves. Ships bob further out towards the harbour mouth. Cam’s eyes drift back to Emma’s smile. Then he senses someone behind him. The shifting figure is approaching. Still the details blur because its shadow comes with it, defying the laws of optics, preceding it, billowing around it like smoke in a jar.
Emma lets go of Cam’s hand and touches his face before she steps onto the wall and, still smiling, falls into the void. There’s no scream as Emma hits the water. Cam turns towards the dark figure, the shadow man who moves with an odd stuttering stealth towards him. Yet Cam feels no fear. Only sorrow and inevitability as he, too, steps up on the parapet.
A dark shadow-hand reaches for him but it does not connect. It can’t because Cam is no longer there. Ther
e is no hesitation as he steps off and follows Emma into empty night. But he doesn’t make it to the water. Instead, there’s a crack and blackness as his head hits hard metal and stone.
There is no pain.
Not then.
But it will come.
2
MONDAY 9 March 2020
I’ve been living alone for almost four months. Finding my way back into a world of unbelievable complexity. Buses, the Tube, mobile phones, Netflix, contactless payments, Deliveroo. If I wanted to, I could cocoon myself. Not leave the flat. Order everything in. Tesco home deliveries for the essentials, HelloFresh or LetusPrep for every single meal. There’s online banking for sorting out finances. Hell, even dentists do virtual consults now.
But I don’t. Of course I don’t. I need to get out. Reacclimatise me to the world. Essential for my rehabilitation.
Lunchtimes I have a sandwich, usually tuna, sometimes marmite and cheese toasted in an English muffin. I’ve even tried a ciabatta, but it was far too much. Before I eat, I get my drugs ready. I rummage in the cereal cupboard for my pillbox. Mornings and teatime I take modafinil. Lunchtime and before I go to bed, quetiapine. Sometimes I mix them up. Easy to do even though they’re for different things.
Stop and go. Or rather go and slow down.
Modafinil is the ‘go’, developed to treat narcolepsy. It helps me from falling asleep during daylight hours. In my case it’s prescribed to counteract the sedative effect of the other stuff I pop. Quetiapine, the ‘slow down’. That one’s actually a catch-all because some patients with my degree of damage can become manic. Both prescribed because they’re ‘essential in helping with mood swings and the way you react to your brave new world’, according to Dr Adam Spalding.
He should know. He’s the boss. The doctor. Well, my doctor. One of them.
The doses are low, I know that much. I fill a glass with hard London tap water and sluice the pill down. Two swallows. That do not make a hummer.
Summer, you fool.
Today’s a tuna with mayonnaise and tomato day. Then I make a cup of tea and eat a biscuit. My sister, Rachel, says to make sure only one biscuit, singular, because I am now not far off what she calls my fighting weight and I do not want to become a ‘lard-ass’. I had to look that up. I don’t think I will become a lard-ass, but she knows about that sort of thing so I listen.
When I finish my sandwich, I return to the living room, to my reminder wall which includes a calendar. Today is a Monday and at 2pm I’m meeting Leon. I throw my kit into a bag, grab car keys, exit the flat and head to the green VW Golf that I inherited from Emma. I start it up and drive out, once around Spa Gardens and then back to the same spot. It takes about four minutes.
I park up, pocket the keys and head off to meet Leon, happy that I have not forgotten how to drive since yesterday.
Leon’s gym is on the other side of Bermondsey but still within walking distance. A repurposed canning factory of red brick and pitch-treated wood outside, glass and chrome inside. I do this twice a week. I started working with Leon as soon as I moved back to the flat. The rehab consultant told me it was way too early to start strenuous physical activity. I reasoned that if I was going to get out into the world I should try to be as fit as I possibly could be. So I ignored him.
The first couple of personal fitness ‘experts’ I approached weren’t interested when I emailed them and detailed my medical history. About my limp and the various fractures now all healed up with the help of titanium screws. They replied that they specialised in body forming and that I might be better off seeing a physiotherapist.
Body forming then. Not body fixing. Thanks a million.
But I persisted. I didn’t email Leon. I went to see him. Face to face. He says that the first time he saw me I was hanging on to a door frame for support and he almost called an ambulance because he thought I was on the point of collapse. When I told him the healed tracheostomy in my throat had left me with a bit of a cheeze (meaning wheeze), he smiled, bought me a juice and sat and listened to everything that I had to say.
Then he asked me what I wanted.
The answer was to be as fit as I could be and not to become a lard-ass. He laughed hard when I said that. He asked if the physiotherapist at the clinic would object and I explained they probably would but that they were only interested in strengthening certain muscles and had no anti-lard-ass programme. That made Leon laugh even more, though I hadn’t meant it as a joke.
There were quite a few fitness posters on the wall of the office we chatted in. Lithe black men and women modelling clothes or equipment. One of them looked a lot like Leon. When I asked him if he thought he could work with me although I was a frail white man that would not turn out anything like the athletes in the posters, he almost fell off his chair.
There are technical terms for the way I say things. One is disinhibition. Another is dysphasia. Happens when your brain gets thrown about like a tennis ball in a tumble dryer.
From that first meeting we never looked back. Leon calls our work together ‘Cam’s workout à la Leon Samuels’. The ‘à la’ stands for anti-lard-arse. But only we know that.
The gym is on the top floor of a converted office block. All the running machines line up like upright sardine cans with a view out to the street below so those inside can see what they’re not missing. I get changed and join Leon in the fitness room. He’s younger than me and trim in a black vest and tight training pants that define his leg muscles even though they’re not on show. He used to greet me with a hug. Now, thanks to the virus, there is no physical contact. All that is definitely infra dig, man. That’s Leon’s term. I had to look that up, too. The online dictionary said it was ‘below what you consider being socially acceptable’.
Sodding virus.
‘Cam, man, good to see you. You’re looking sharp.’ Leon is full of vim.
‘And you.’
‘How’s your leg?’
I shake my leaden left leg. The one that feels like it has a sack of water around it. It used to feel like a sack of concrete, so water is a considerable improvement. ‘Good,’ I reassure him. ‘I think it was only cramp.’ I limped away from our last session after giving up on some squats.
‘Cool. Okay. Warm up.’
Fifty minutes, sixty press-ups, chin-ups, squats and leg presses later, I’m soaking wet and huffing like a broken accordion. The gym clock says 2.55pm but Leon takes me through to a chill-out zone and fills an aluminium bottle with water from a cooler before sitting down at a table with me. Once a week he insists on a debrief. Today is debrief day. In all honesty there’s nothing much to talk about given that he is the taskmaster and I do as I am told. Leon’s a genuine guy so he’s keen to ask me if anything we’ve done is too much.
I want to say everything, but that was only funny the first ten times or so, Leon tells me. I suspect that there’s another reason for these chats. Leon trains all sorts of people in this gym. There are two women actors – I always say actresses, but Rachel told me it isn’t woke to say that – and at least one retired footballer in his stable.
I, I suspect, am his lame horse. But one he refuses to give up on. Cameron Seabiscuit, that’s me. And I have a sneaking suspicion he enjoys chatting with me because, as he once said, ‘You keep it real, Cam, man. You keep it so real.’
I answer his questions truthfully. I didn’t enjoy the leg presses on the machine with eighty kilos. I did enjoy the boxing session he did with me last Monday.
He writes it down on a clipboard. ‘That’s cool. We can do more boxercise. Good for balance and strength. But no headshots, right?’
I put my fists up and go into a stance in my seat.
Leon grins. It’s like a sunrise. ‘Woah, there he is. Remember when we first started this? You couldn’t lift a ten-kilo kettlebell or even walk in a straight line.’
Leon’s right. We started out by doing basic exercises. Co-ordination and function mainly. Balance balls, kettlebell swings. Movement and strength. At firs
t, I wasn’t even breathing in the right places so I sounded like I might explode at any moment. Not anymore. Leon’s à la training works wonders, but I’ve still got a way to go.
I’ve set myself a goal. I can now use the treadmill for twenty minutes at a good pace. And not solely to prove to myself I can do it. I have other irons in the fire.
‘I suppose I’m lucky to be alive,’ I say. Sometimes clichés do the job perfectly.
Leon lifts his aluminium bottle and tips it towards me. ‘True that,’ he says. He takes a sip before asking, ‘You taking your meds, Cam my man?’
I give him an exaggerated nod.
‘How’s the driving coming along?’
‘Good,’ I reply. ‘Weird thing is that I could drive as soon as I got into the car. Funny that.’
‘Yeah, but driving’s like riding a bike. You never forget–’
‘I did,’ I remind him, grinning. ‘I had to take another test, remember?’