He sat up in bed, not even tempted to try and drop off again just yet. Let a few minutes pass in the darkness. It's time for his brain to occupy itself with fresh thoughts, to dismiss the image of the gunshot wound in a woman's head, unfurled like a Valentine rose. Let him, instead, think about the here and now. About how he and Sophie might find their way home.

  "Hmm… tell me about Sophie." Rebecca was seated in the corner of his room. Not really, of course, that would be lunacy rather than imagination – but he had pictured her strongly in his mind and now she was here. As always she was asking questions.

  "Nothing to tell," he whispered, feeling foolish to have given the fantasy weight by speaking to it.

  "This constant fear that you're not a good man," she said, "this conviction that – despite the opinion of your peers – you are in some way an unpleasant individual, unworthy of respect, friendship or love. You wouldn't be trying to assuage it, would you? The kindly father to a special-needs child… you couldn't get more worthy could you?"

  He ignored her this time. He wouldn't validate that opinion with an answer, however close it might be to the truth.

  "Who couldn't respect such a man?" she continued. "What a good, kind, wholesome man. What a worthy man."

  He stared at her, if only to make her vanish. Fantasies never bear up to scrutiny, not in the waking hours.

  Now he had the room to himself he got out of bed and walked over to the window. He'd forgotten that there was nothing to be seen, no light to illuminate the water they sailed on. He rested his head on the sill, desperately tired and yet determined to stay awake long enough to wipe his brain clean of the dream that woke him. What to do? That was still the only pertinent question. He had surprised himself by enjoying the day spent playing a sailor, everything driven by simple reasons and purpose. There was much to be said for it. Now he was worried that it wasn't getting them anywhere, it was just a way of filling his time. They needed to find a way home but, adrift on this unreliable water, how exactly were they supposed to go about it? They couldn't navigate, all they could do was fight against the whims of the water and hope they stumbled upon something. How long might that take? Years?

  Something had just occurred to him in his thoughts. He was brushing against a realisation of importance but was unable to pin it down. A phrase suddenly occurred to him and with that, all hope of sleep was lost…

  "The water knows." Alan paced the deck, shaking with the weight of this thought.

  Hawkins watched him, trying but failing to share in Alan's excitement. "The water knows what?"

  "The water knows the exit!" It was all Alan could do not to shout it. "The sea is sentient, right? It has a consciousness? A sense of its own self?"

  Hawkins nodded. "It seems so, yes."

  "Then it knows everything about its environment! What sails on it, swims in it, what shores it touches."

  Hawkins began to follow. "It is aware of everything around it, yes, I see that… if it can feel us it must feel everything."

  "Precisely! So, on the understanding that there is a route through the water, the sea knows it."

  "How does this help us?"

  "I was in the water for a few hours and it was a part of me, I shared my thoughts with it, nearly became part of it. In a subconscious sense I communicated with it."

  "Enough to know the way?"

  "No, because I didn't ask the question."

  "You're losing me…"

  "I need to become part of the water again…" Alan held up his hand, aware that Hawkins was about to protest. "Not for long, just enough to try and ask the question."

  "To ask where the exit is?"

  "Yes!"

  "Have you any idea how mad that sounds?"

  "Of course I do! But I also know that we're unlikely to get anywhere just drifting around. This is a part of the house that we can talk to, however dangerous it may be. How can we not try it?"

  Hawkins fell silent. He moved to the bow of the ship and looked out at the wall of the bathroom they had anchored themselves alongside. The checkered pattern of its black and white tiles was like a vertical chessboard, stretching as far as the eye could see. "There may be no exit," he said.

  "No, there may not, but there's no harm in hoping, is there? And with the whole crew on hand to fish me out should things go wrong…"

  "I don't like it."

  "You think I do? But having thought about it I need to try it. What if it works? There's a possibility, and there's so few of those here that I can't ignore one, however much I might wish to." Alan put his hands on Hawkins' shoulders. "Don't worry," he said. "We'll be as careful as possible."

  Hawkins nodded. Every sailor knows that sometimes careful just isn't enough.

  They lowered him into the water in a net, the better to fish him back out again at the first sign of trouble. He poked his wrists and ankles through the mesh, coiled the rope around him and did his best to relax as he touched the sea's surface. A few years ago he had broken his arm, slipping on the ice outside the faculty building and earning a swan-neck fracture – and no few laughs from the gathered students. Later, at the hospital, he had laid back in the operating theatre, a cannula inserted into the back of his hand, and immersed himself in the sensation of the anaesthetic. The hot surge crept up his arm, riding the vein to the heart, knocking him out by the time he had felt it reach the top of his bicep. This was like that, a thick, liquid sleep that folded itself over him and rendered him as limp as a corpse. He closed his eyes, took a breath and dipped his head back into the water, offering himself to it.

  He did his best to push away physical sensations. He remembered how it had felt to be part of the water, dissolving into it, evaporating until every ebb and flow was a muscular twitch, a sensation he was part of rather than just subject to. The water was happy to receive him, buzzing effervescently over his scalp, stroking and massaging him.

  "This, of course, is a perfect example of a death wish." He opened his eyes to the voice, not in the least surprised to see Rebecca sitting cross-legged on her office chair on the sea bed. The water splayed her long hair around her head like a cartoon electric shock, and her blouse rippled with the investigation of fish as they explored cotton coral, tasting this new part of their landscape. "If you could only die in this brave attempt to save them all, what a glorious martyr, what a hero…" She spoke in air bubbles, the words popping out like marbles from between her lips.

  "I'm beginning to think I pay you too much," Alan replied. "All you ever do is patronise me."

  "But I'm the closest you come to a real relationship," she said, uncrossing her legs to let a small eel escape from the dark cave offered by her pencil skirt, "and you find me far too attractive to let me go."

  "There is that," Alan admitted, "though I would never admit it to your face."

  "Which just goes to show how unproductive our professional relationship is. What are you searching for?"

  "Escape."

  "Aren't we all?"

  "Are you my subconscious or are you part of the sea?"

  "Soon there'll be no difference."

  "Are you here to help me or distract me?"

  "I always want to help you."

  "So how do we leave here?"

  "I can't tell you, that's not how therapy works – you have to find your own answers."

  "Some help you are."

  "Let go of all of it, your fears, your perceptions, your flesh…" She arched her head back in the water, a small crab scuttling across her cheek and tapping her eye with its claw. "Go with the flow."

  "I didn't hold with that in the Sixties, let alone now."

  "The Sixties? I was under the impression you didn't remember them."

  "I don't, I was being glib."

  "And yet, when you dream of your life before it's not the Sixties you remember, is it? It's much earlier…"

  "They're just dreams."

  "You would love to believe that."

  "It's what you've always said."

  "Ah… but here I know better. How can you have memories of a time before you were born, Alan? How can that be possible?"

  "It isn't. I'm just fantasising, imagining… That's not me I see when I close my eyes, it's the man I'm afraid of being."

  "And you do right to be afraid, don't you? He's a terrible man, isn't he, Alan? A cruel and selfish man."

  "It's not me."

  "Of course it is. He's the man you were born to be before you locked him away in a box, in a house, and refused to let him back out."

  "It's not me."

  "You said you wanted escape, so… escape!"

  "It's not me." Alan could say no more; he refused to go along with the this line of conversation. She reached down beside her in the chair and pulled out an old leatherbound book. She held it up so he could see his name on the front cover. "Your notes?" he asked.

  "Not mine, I don't keep such a full account as this." She opened the book and showed him the torn first section. "Though I'm afraid it hasn't been well preserved, as you can see: whole years are chewed away. Is it any wonder you can't remember? It doesn't become really legible until you find yourself waking up alongside a country road in 1976. Before that it's just fragments, the odd word here and there, the odd image… not that there's anything wrong with a bit of mystery. Who wants to know everything in life? Where would be the fun in that?"

  "This is getting me nowhere." He closed his eyes, tried to push her from his thoughts.

  "And that's the problem: you're offered the route to escape and you don't take it, you run back into your heavy, repressed cage to rot."

  He ignored her, trying to reclaim the feeling he had experienced when last here. He tried to imagine what it felt like to have a boat floating inside you, a foreign object, a splinter you wanted to expel. After a few moments he felt the intrusion in his solar plexus, shifting and rolling as he tried to dislodge it with his tides. He held fast to that feeling, imagining his splayed fingers were part of the water, part of this house. He stroked the cool tiles that surrounded them. He tickled the bathroom shore with his toes, reached out and touched the wooden bench, pushed his big toe into the pile of Sophie's clothes. He moved his hands, running them along the wall on his right, sending them through the open expanse of water on the left. He felt fish dart between them and grabbed hold of that sensation, that feeling of the things invading his being. He stretched his hand, tapped the wall behind his head – oh, so many miles away – and the wall on his left, further still. He tried to differentiate between it all, the swimming of fish, the bobbing of the boat, the feel of the walls. He acknowledged those sensations and then blanked them out, seeing what was left. Something was buzzing in his ear, like a persistent wasp at a summer picnic, dancing just inside his awareness. That buzzing, that tingle of the other lying just on the edge of awareness, that was the door, and he now realised he had been hunting in the wrong direction. He reached for it, felt the coil of metal chain between his fingers, the soft edge of rubber. He reached for it and yanked it free.

  "Alan! Can you hear me?" The crew pulled him out of the water with such vigour it was like being born; yanked from somewhere warm and safe and brought out into the bright, white cold of the real world.

  "How long?" Alan gasped, spitting some water from his mouth and trying not to imagine it as a finger or toe of their nighttime attackers.

  "A minute," Hawkins said. "I wouldn't risk any longer."

  "Felt so long…" Alan suddenly remembered what he had done. "We need to take shelter!" he shouted, "and hope the anchors hold."

  The boat was beginning to rock violently, the sea whipping up a storm around them.

  "What did you do?" Hawkins asked, helping him out of the net.

  Alan smiled. "What else do you want to do when you want to get out of the bath? I pulled the plug out!"

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The creature had a firm hold on Chester. As Tom and Pablo tried to tug him free, its arm stretched like the limb of a gooey children's toy, distending and becoming translucent in the torchlight. The skin, bone and muscle spread out to little more than a flat sheet. Chester had begun to panic, mindless of the weapon in his hand as the creature unhinged its wide mouth and took both the gun and his forearm into its throat.

  "Shoot it!" Elise shouted, cutting through Chester's blank panic. He did so, and the bullet punched a gelatinous hole between the creature's shoulders. More in confusion than in pain, it let go of him, spitting out his arm and reaching behind itself to explore the wound with rubbery digits.

  The creatures surrounded them, rolling their pipetongues around thin lips, wanting to suck on a warm morsel or two. They reached out glutinous hands and fingers, tugging at the humans' clothes and hair, trying to grab the piece of meat they wished to lay claim to.

  A noise began to build from the tunnel: the rush of water being forced along the narrow passage. It grew louder and louder. The creatures glanced around, distracted from the hunger in their bellies. A curtain of warm, foul-smelling air pushed before the wave like the early warning of a tube train. When the water emerged, it did so with enough force to send all of them flying backwards. They were thrown on to solid ground as the water fanned out to fill the space. Tom fought for breath as he was sent spinning across the flagstones, and desperately tried to keep hold of Elise.

  "Keep moving!" Pablo shouted. He was the first to his feet. Chester scuffled behind him, his leather soles slipping on the wet stone as they ran across the chamber and towards a far tunnel. Tom and Elise followed, hoping that the size of the chamber would buy them enough time to get clear. There seemed no end to the flood as it bounced off the ceiling, dislodging the rubbery creatures that still clung to the brickwork. Like the spout of a giant pressure hose, it was relentless as it forced itself through the narrow opening. The water had a life of its own, whipping into shapes as it sought to grab and absorb every living thing within reach. This was no ordinary water, this was water haunted by the many travellers absorbed into its waves. Human figures formed on the crest of the flood, shimmering surfers riding into the darkness of the drainage pipes.

  Tom, Elise, Pablo and Chester ran through a tunnel that led off from the main chamber. The water gurgled around their feet, nipping at their toes as they tried to keep some distance ahead.

  "It just keeps coming!" Chester shouted, "we need to gain higher ground."

  "You're the cat who knows the tunnels," Tom replied. "Give us a dose of your wisdom – how do we get up a level?"

  Chester was still too close to panic for clear thought, spinning around in the tunnel as he tried to remember the closest routes leading up to the house. "I know!" he shouted, like an enthused child who's just come up with a new game for the day. "There's a–"

  The water exploded around him, elevating him several feet off the ground inside its translucent fist. The end of his sentence burst from his mouth in a series of air bubbles as he thrashed to pull himself free. Pablo jumped up, shoving his hands through the surface of the water, and grabbed hold of Chester's ankle. Elise did the same with the other leg. They dangled from his feet, tugging him down with all their weight. Tom grabbed hold of Elise's waist and pulled. That was all the extra weight that was needed and Chester dropped, the bubble bursting and showering them with water as they fell to the ground.

  Chester lost all control, thrashing around, trying to rub the water from his face and hair. "Fucking thing, fucking thing," he repeated, panic rioting through him.

  "It's all right!" Elise shouted, grabbing hold of him, forcing him to stand still and look her in the eyes. "No harm done, we're still here, let's keep it that way, OK?"

  "Saved my life," Chester muttered. "If you three hadn't have been here I would be dead, no question…"

  "It's all cool, Chester," said Tom, patting him on the shoulder.

  "Is like ice cream," Pablo agreed "but we need keep running before it melt!"

  "Taught the cat everything he knows," said Tom with a grin. "Where were you about to suggest we ran to before being so rudely interrupted?"

  Chester snapped out of it. "An elevator!" he shouted, "It's small but we should fit!" He ran through the tunnel, the others keeping pace behind him, all the time aware that the water was deepening. "I've never used it," Chester shouted over his shoulder, "but anywhere's better than here." He ran up a short ramp that led to the cabin of an oldfashioned cage elevator, just big enough to accommodate them.

  "Press the button! Press the button!" Chester shouted, squeezed into the far corner of the cabin. Pablo stabbed the button that would begin their ascent and then gripped the mesh sides so that he could secure the gate behind him. The elevator groaned under the weight, climbing jerkily as it struggled under the load.