Necessity drove him on, past the fear, past the nausea. Necessity took his foot off the brakes and put it back down on the accelerator.
Thoughts crowded in on him, a vortex of madness swirling around in his head.
All he wanted to do was run. But where?
Necessity took the wheel and steered.
Necessity flicked on the indicators and followed the lines laid out by the GPS.
Necessity brought him to his destination
Without anything but the faintest recollection of having driven there, he pulled up out front of Potrevski’s house and switched off the engine.
His hands stayed fixed on the wheel as he continued to fight off the urge to vomit. The sight of the emptiness held inside the Black Car had left a mark on him.
But necessity would not relent.
Now that he was here, he had no idea what he was going to say.
He briefly thought about calling Scott and asking him to come. Scott was much more confident in situations like this. Scott had a habit of taking charge of a situation, always capable of responding to anything that arose with an unshakable confidence.
But time was short. The police would be here soon, and he needed to get this done.
He opened the car door and stepped out onto the footpath.
Potrevski’s front lawn was like something out of a magazine, for a brief moment, it shook Patrick out of his present state of mind.
The whole thing was groomed to an absurd perfection that made it seem almost unreal. Each blade of grass was cut to a precise length across the entire yard so that not a single stray blade stood above the rest; it looked like a putting green. The garden beds framing the lawn were lined with a simple border of large white river rocks that, if not for slight differences in contour, could have been poured from the same mould.
In the garden beds, a variety of colours assaulted the senses. Most of the plants were in flower, and the sights and the smells were insistent with their demands for attention. But on closer inspection, he saw that it was the small sculpted hedges that were the true stars of this garden. They had been pruned to perfection and shaped with great care into a managerie of small animals.
He crossed the garden via the path to the door, his attention moving from one hedge to the next, and was about to knock when his phone rang.
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He paused before answering. He wasn't sure he had the strength to handle another conversation right now. But he couldn’t ignore it. If it were the police calling with more information, he would need to know it before going in.
He pulled the phone free from his pocket and pressed the receive button.
“Hello.”
He waited for a response from the other end of the line, but was greeted by silence. He waited for some sign of life.
He was about to hang up, but then he heard a sound.
At first, it sounded like nothing more than static coming down the line, but then the sound cleared, and he heard a woman speaking.
“The number you have called is not available. Please check the number and try again.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear to check the caller ID. Four lines of numbers lit up the screen. The phone number had over 50 digits.
He lifted the phone back to his ear to find that the recorded voice had been replaced by the low mumbling sound. It took a moment for him to realise that he was listening to hundreds of voices speaking over the top of one another.
A cacophony of sound rang out through the receiver, like a microphone left in a crowded hall.
Patrick listened, the garden forgotten.
When he focused his attention, he found he could tune in on any conversation he chose.
“…real or not, it’s all a matter of perception. If you believe it’s happening and you suffer the same emotional response as a result of any 'real' action which occurs, then what’s the difference?”
“…these things are all segments of the whole. It is one’s duty to decipher each segment and integrate that knowledge into the overall knowledge of the whole in order to understand existence.”
“…it’s a question of free will. If the past is fixed, then the future is fixed. The brain can't alter the path of an electron flowing along synapses that form a thought. On thought leads to the next in a predetermined path...”
The number of conversations grew until it seemed as though there were tens of thousands of voices discussing as many thousands of topics.
He stumbled and steadied himself on the porch rail with one hand while the other continued to press the phone firmly against his ear.
Then he noticed it, a low rumbling accompanying the voices. At first, it was almost imperceptible, a vibration just below the sound of the voices. But steadily, the rumbling grew louder and louder until it began to drown out the voices.
No, he thought — not drowning out. Absorbing.
The thought sent chills up and down his spine.
The vibrations coming through the phone began to pass through him, and his whole body began to shake in time with the rumbling.
With each second, the sound of the engine grew, and Patrick felt himself become weaker. The wheels were turning faster, and the engine surged. The world began to spin around him, and he had to struggle to keep his balance.
And still the engine grew louder.
The phone fell as he flung his hands out aimlessly, searching for support. The porch rail slipped from his grasp. The phone hit the ground in fast forward, its case smashing on impact, scattering fragments of plastic across the ground.
His legs came out from under him, and the concrete at the bottom of the porch steps came rushing up to meet him.
He hit the ground hard.
He could feel himself slipping into unconsciousness.
With the last of his strength, he lifted his head and looked towards the road, sure that he would see the black car bearing down on him, the roar of the engine still ringing through his whole body.
But instead, it was the garden hedges that came for him. The topiary animals all turned their faces to look at him with blank, lifeless expressions.
He watched in horror, unable to move, as each plant ripped itself free of the soil, snapping their roots and shaking loose the dirt as they moved menacingly towards him.
Then darkness.
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