The Nearest

7

Kate cut her hair and dyed it black, then bought some cheap earrings, a battered phone with no SIM card and an assortment of clothes from a charity shop. It took a while for her to find the right look, but at the end of the day she emerged from her room, satisfied that at least she wouldn’t be taken for a cop or a social worker.

She walked into the city, and made her way to one of the homeless shelters. As Leila, the volunteer, showed her the ropes, Kate took out her phone and brought up a picture of Suzanne Reyes, a missing woman a few years younger than Kate. “You haven’t seen my sister, have you? When she’s off her meds, I don’t know what she’ll do.”

Leila regarded her warily. “Sorry, no.”

In the dining room, Kate showed the photo around, but all she got was a few grunts of sympathy. She wished there were some way to seek all eight of her targets at once to better the odds, but it would be stretching credulity to claim a connection with even two of them, and Rowan’s parents had already done the rounds of the shelters. In the dormitory, she lay awake half the night, listening to the other women coughing.

She spent the next day on the streets, finding the places where the homeless congregated and asking again after Suzanne. It was close to nightfall when a thin, twitchy woman with a crumpled face squinted at the picture and announced, “Yeah, love, I’ve seen her. Just a few days ago.”

Kate closed her eyes for a moment, genuinely overcome with relief. “Thank God. Do you know where she is now?”

“She talked a lot of nonsense,” the woman complained. “I’m not surprised what you said about her medication.”

“Yeah, that’s Suzanne. Do you know where she went?”

“She tried to recruit me,” the woman recalled irritably. “Like a missionary. Like a fucking Mormon Scientologist.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted me to join her fight against the devil.”

Kate shook her head forlornly. “My sister said that? She thinks she’s fighting the devil?”

The woman thought it over dutifully. “Not the devil, exactly. She said she’s fighting the hollow men, the ones who’ve lost their souls. Raising an army of the… I don’t fucking know.”

“Do you know where I can find her?”

“Not really. I told her to piss off and stop bothering me.”

It was growing dark. Kate crossed town and tried a different shelter. “She might not look the same now,” she warned her fellow diners as she helped ladle out the night’s stew. “But maybe you remember her talking about the hollow men?”

No one could help her, but the next morning, as the shelter was closing, a young woman with long, plaited hair approached Kate. “I don’t think I’ve seen your sister,” she said. “But there was a man I met, talking like you said she talked.”

“In what way?” Kate asked.

“He was warning me about the hollow people. He wanted me to join the fight.”

“Where was this?”

“You know that spot in South Bank where all the buskers play?”

Kate nodded, but this wasn’t much help; she could probably stand there for a month without the same man reappearing, let alone approaching her.

“I told him I was busy with other things,” the woman continued, “but he said that if I ever wised up and changed my mind, there was a place where I could find him.”

Kate hardly dared breathe, but when the woman said no more she had to ask. “Asgard? Middle-earth? Hogwarts?”

“An old warehouse that’s used as a squat.” She gestured at Kate’s phone. “If that thing’s got a map, I can show you.”