The Happier Dead Read Free Page B

carriageway guided Oates’s rusty old car towards the gatehouse. As he approached a checkpoint, a guard emerged in the rain. His face and shoulders were concealed by a waterproof poncho, and an automatic weapon hung at his side. Oates slowed the car and wound down the window. A second guard came out with a dog on a leash, and walked around the car. Flecks of cold rain spattered his cheeks. The first guard leant down, a dripping bill above eyes and an unexpected smile. Oates showed him his police pass, and he took it and pressed it against a machine he held under his coat. He returned the card to Oates and waved his arm at someone in the guardhouse, causing the metal barrier to rise.
    “What’s with the dog?” Oates asked.
    “Mortal Reformers. In case they put a bomb in the boot,” the guard said, and laughed. There was nothing particularly funny in that as far as Oates could see.
    He passed underneath the raised arm and through the steel membrane of the perimeter fence. As he approached the smooth mountain of Avalon he slowed his car, and then stopped completely. The surface of the road simply vanished into the blank wall. He stared at it, and to his astonishment the whole structure seemed for a moment to lift up from the earth on a cloud of orange light. A blink and a toss of the wipers revealed a shutter coming up in the wall, and Oates drove through into the garage beyond. The air smelt of diesel, and the concrete floor was piebald with oil stains. The shutter closed behind him, and he expected someone to emerge from the little office up a small flight of stairs to the side of the room, but no one came. For a few moments he waited, then opened the door of his car and shouted, “Hello?”
    He listened, and could hear the sound of music playing on a stereo in the office. He sat back down on the driver’s seat, and was just wondering whether to leave his car and head into the office when a movement caught his eye near the striplights hanging from the garage ceiling. A Painted Lady butterfly.
    It was so cold in the garage that Oates could see his breath as he watched. The butterfly descended from the ceiling. It paused for a few moments on the bonnet of his car, the surface beaded with rain. It flexed its wings once, twice, and then, seemingly refreshed, it rose to rejoin its gentle battle with the light.
    Oates was still watching it when a door in the opposite wall began to open. He climbed back into his car and shut the door, and so he did not at first feel the warm breath of scented air that came from inside the dome. When the door was still only half way open, the sunlight streaming through made Oates blink, and by the time his eyes adjusted to the brightness the gate had slid up into the ceiling, disclosing the entire scene beyond.

 
     
     
    20:30 HOURS
    THURSDAY 18 JULY
    1976 (THE GREAT SPA)
     
    A S O ATES GAZED out through the opening in the wall, he was reminded of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, a book his father had read to him as a child, and which he had read to his own kids. He thought of the moment the children push through the fur coats in the back of the magic wardrobe, and find themselves in the snow-covered forest of Narnia.
    Outside the garage with its gulp of winter night, there was a summer evening. Gone were the motorways and floodlights, and in their place was a long avenue of trees, the shimmer of a breeze turning the silver undersides of their leaves to the setting sun. Fields stretched away on either side of the avenue. A bicycle with books in the basket stood propped against a tree. Dotted across the fields were groups of young men and women in whites, playing cricket whilst their fellows lay in the shadows under the trees. A man rode on a bicycle along the towpath beside the river, calling instructions to an eight as their blades dipped in unison into the sparkling water.
    Beyond the river rose the red brick walls of a courtyard, and a bell tower with the purple sky framed by the