It was dark, and it was cold.
That was all he was aware of to begin with, and both those realizations came gradually. He was drifting awake, and for a few seconds he found it hard to distinguish between reality and the unconsciousness he was emerging from. Dark and cold. What else? His body was juddering slightly, and a quiet rattling noise filled the air.
Where am I?
All he could tell was that he was horizontal and in motion. When he tried to move his arms and legs, they were held in place. There was something restraining him. He was strapped down on a gurney of some kind, and even his head wouldn’t turn; all he could do was flick his eyes from side to side. The darkness and the shuddering movement of the trolley beneath him made the world hard to make sense of. He caught flashes of what looked like foliage, and there was a dusting of stars above him. The night sky. So he was outside somewhere.
Had there been an accident? Was he being taken to hospital?
He was moving feetfirst. While he couldn’t tilt his head back to look, he was aware of a presence just behind him, pushing the trolley along.
He could hear a ragged breathing sound, as though they were struggling with the effort.
A doctor perhaps. “Hello?” he tried to say.
And realized there was tape covering his mouth.
Panic flared inside him at that, and he tried to fight against his restraints with more urgency, pushing and pulling with all his strength. But there was no give in them at all. His mumbles from behind the tape became muffled screams, which continued until he felt like he was about to vomit.
If he was sick, he would choke to death.
Whoever was behind him seemed oblivious to his distress. The trolley carried on at the same speed, rattling like a shopping trolley with a broken wheel that wouldn’t stop spinning and stalling.
He forced himself to breathe slowly through his nose, and after what felt like an age the nausea subsided slightly. But his heart was punching hard inside his chest, as if it were trying to find a way out.
Think.
How had he got here?
It was hard to gather his thoughts. Dim recollections drifted through his mind, the way threads of smoke in the air might—but that image brought a sharper jolt of memory. Smoke in the air. He remembered that. He had been in the outside area of a bar with a cigarette, watching the smoke he exhaled swirling in the air beneath the light of a heater and then disappearing away into the night. He remembered thinking that it was kind of beautiful to see the air made real like that.
Marie wouldn’t have approved of him smoking, but he was a couple of drinks down by then, and she wouldn’t have approved of that either. He didn’t care; that was the point of being in the bar in the first place. It was a stupid habit he’d fallen into. A lot of the time when he was at home, it felt like he couldn’t do right for doing wrong, and so a couple of nights a week he’d taken to pretending he was working late, but stopped instead at whatever brightly lit bar happened to call out to him from the side of the road.
Just a little me time.
Marie probably thought he was cheating on her. The thing was, he never had and never would. It was like he used to tell her: even if they weren’t always great together, they were always good. But she was the jealous type, and that had got worse recently. And if he was going to end up doing the time for a crime he hadn’t committed then he figured he might as well commit one of some kind.
The gurney’s spinning wheel caught a snag of undergrowth. Whoever was behind grunted softly and pushed harder to get it moving again, but the moment’s stillness gave Darren Field a chance to glance to either side and see that the world was no longer as dark as it had been.
And then they were moving again.
But that brief moment had been enough for him to see that there were loops of small fairy lights strung between the trees. The sight was so incongruous that, for a few half-delirious seconds, he imagined that the man had taken him out of the real world, and that the two of them were now in a different one entirely.
“Do you think you were abducted from the bar?” John says.
Field nods cautiously.
“I left my drink inside when I went out to smoke,” he says. “Someone could have spiked it then. I don’t remember much after that.”
“Why did you leave your drink?”
“You don’t worry about it as a guy, do you? The place wasn’t all that busy, and I had a table out of the way round a corner that I wanted to keep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone there.”
There’s a helpless expression on his face.
“I just wanted to sit with my phone. That was all I ever did. Catch up on the news a bit; read a few updates on social media. Maybe play a few games of chess if I couldn’t get reception.”
He spreads his hands, the question clear.
Is that too much to ask?
The answer, John thinks, is that it shouldn’t be, but that’s not the way things work. If you let your guard down once, the chances are that you’ll be okay. But if you do it a hundred times, the odds are going to catch up with you eventually. Which to his mind is more than enough reason to keep your guard up the whole time.
“Can you remember the name of the bar?” he says.
“No. I didn’t even look at the sign when I parked.”
“You could drive the route. Check in a few places. You’d recognize it if you were there again.”
Field shakes his head. “No.”
“It could help. There might be security footage.”
“It wasn’t the kind of place with CCTV.”
Which is just a stupid excuse, and John feels frustration rising inside him. The familiar anger is probably only a short distance behind. On one level, he gets it: returning to the place he was taken from would be traumatic for Field, and it’s the last thing he wants to do. But the woman in the woods deserves justice, and he finds it hard to control the urge to grab Field and shake him until he sees sense.
He can’t do that, of course, but how else can he persuade him? Daniel would be so much better at this than he is, John thinks. What would his son suggest?
Keeping calm, probably.
“Even so,” he says. “Someone there might have seen what happened?”
“He’s not the kind of man other people see.”
And John is about to reply—maybe even give into the frustration and reach out the way he knows he shouldn’t—but Field’s choice of words give him pause.
He’s not the kind of man other people see.
A beat of silence in the study.
“Okay,” John says. “Let’s leave that for now.”
Field looks down at the carpet. He knows what’s coming next.
“Tell me about the woman,” John says.
__________________________________
From The Man Made of Smoke by Alex North. Copyright (c) 2025 by the author
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