Ducie by Chris Freeman

  Chapter 20. Adam escapes

  By the time Joe and Harrison were standing in Kate’s room breaking the news to her, Adam had made it about a quarter of a mile away from the Institution. It was only at this point, after 20 minutes of disorientated staggering that he finally deciphered where in the world he actually was.

  The basis of his escape had come with relative ease, having pocketed an unlabelled set of keys from the security office when he and a semi-conscious Kate were left alone in there for a short while the previous day. Adam had noticed one of those flimsy drawer keys that looked like it belonged to a suitcase padlock, rather poorly hidden behind the computer monitor. After using it to open the lock on the top drawer, which was so delicate that he could have probably broken it with a quick yank anyway if required, sitting in the drawer he found a set of 6 or 7 more substantial looking keys.

  The night before he’d broken out, Adam had made a list of 6 potential doors around the Institution that he believed the keys could belong to: The main entrance, the external gate to the smoking quad, the kitchen, the store room, the shutter door of the adjacent goods entrance and the door between the male and female toilets in the east wing, which appeared to be a janitor’s closet, but was one of the many things around the Institution that Adam harboured a paranoia about. At around 6am, he’d begun his creep around the building, working his way through the list of potential exits he’d drawn up. To quench his own curiosity, he began with the supposed janitor’s closet. By far the least logical option in terms of an escape route, but also the option that most stoked his penchant for a conspiracy theory. Even he wasn’t sure what exactly he expected to find in there. Dead bodies? A stock of weaponry? The entrance to another realm? After fiddling unsuccessfully with 2 keys that appeared to be the right size for the lock, the third one made a satisfying clunk as it shifted a quarter rotation to the right and disengaged the lock. At first, darkness veiled whatever lay beyond the first few feet of the entrance. Opening the door a little further allowed moonlight to seep through the corridor window, revealing the contents of the room. A blue plastic mop and bucket, 2 wooden brooms, a host of cleaning fluids and around 15 tins of white matt emulsion paint stacked against the right hand wall in three equal piles. Adam stared a while, amazed at how unamazing the contents of the room were. He peeled back the lid of one of the paint tins slightly and sniffed inside, as if still clinging to the vague hope that even the paint tins themselves hid something sinister and exciting inside them. To his disappointment, the tins contained nothing but cheap, standard-issue, clinical, corridor-covering white paint. Adam finally conceded that paranoia had gotten the better of him this time and closed the door quietly.

  His next visit would be to the kitchen and for no other reason than it was closest by. Generally, Adam’s logic was never centered around anything more intricate than convenience. The only time his reasoning strayed from this simplistic approach was when he was caught up in the self-made hysteria of his latest attempt to prove that all authority and structure in the world was one big conspiracy.

  The kitchen was accessible directly from the dining area, which itself was never locked. One too many expensive meals had found their way onto the floor courtesy of a hastily opened door over the years, which had led the kitchen staff to request that it be removed completely. The door on Adam’s mind however was at the back of the kitchen. He’d never actually been allowed into the kitchen, but he knew that the staff disappeared out of that door for long periods, so he knew something was back there. He’d have probably been more curious in the past if it weren’t for the fact that people came and went through the door quite indiscreetly. There seemed very little to be suspicious of.

  Sometimes, hiding in plain sight is the best camouflage of all.

  Adam walked into the kitchen and patrolled his way around the different workstations. He ran his hand across the smooth metal counter and opened the serving hatch doors, looking out onto the empty dining hall. He felt a certain fascination with the unfamiliar view from the opposite side of the same counter he’d stood at every day for years. There was no time for this though. The grey, digital clock that sat on the shelf above the cooker advised 06:15. He walked over to the door and weighed up his options on the key ring. It was a Yale lock, so he narrowed it down to three identical looking keys. Picking one at random, he forced it into the keyway and felt it jam before the bow of the key could fall flush against the lock. He released the failed key with a tug and immediately tried another. This time the blade slid all the way into its rightful home. A rotation to the right produced a satisfying click and the door opened outwards without as much as a creak. Adam stepped through and noticed a concrete stairway to the left, leading down into darkness and uncertainty. There was no light switch offering relief from this temporary blindness. Adam allowed the weight of the door to push his hand back and shut of its own accord. There was no banister and the descent was steep, so Adam took the first few steps with his arms stretched wide, touching both walls for guidance. After a while, he accustomed to the gradient and depth of each step and descended with slightly more grace now. As he neared what he sensed was the bottom of the staircase, a light became apparent at the end of what seemed to be a long corridor. Adam stopped at the bottom of the staircase and considered what might lie ahead for a brief second. Though the adrenaline was to be expected, he actually felt no fear. Living in the safe confines of the Institution for so long had numbed most of his primitive responses to danger. He knew that if his previous encounter with Institution security was anything to go by, being caught snooping around like this would end in much unwanted pain and confusion. He also knew however, that he wasn’t the one with anything to hide here.

  Adam continued towards the light, one hand stretched out in front of him as his guide. As he drew closer to the lit room, its brightness illuminated the last few yards of the corridor, revealing uneven surfaces on both walls and floor, void of any décor or character; essentially, a tunnel. He entered the room with scant regard for potential occupants and scanned his new surroundings. A bare cavity with uneven rock perimeters. It’s only notable feature a suspended electrical light bulb hanging below a ceiling rose; essentially a poorly lit cave. Directly opposite him was another opening, which on closer inspection revealed another staircase, identical to the one he’d walked down when he left the kitchen. He briefly entertained the idea that the corridor had brought him in an unexpected full circle, but dismissed it on account of the fact that he hadn’t seen this light or this cave before. Adam began climbing the stairs that felt identical to the set at the other end of the corridor he’d came down, still half expecting to see the kitchen door when he reached the summit. After 20 or so steps, he looked for differences between the two staircases, before his legs quickly screamed the answer to him. After around fifteen steps, the lactic acid burned his calves and with no end in sight, it became obvious that this staircase was longer. Twice as long in fact; perhaps more. The stairwell again had no light switch, but the light from the room below was just sufficient to reveal another door. The door was identical to the one he’d exited the kitchen through, which seemed to throw Adam into complete disorientation. He fumbled the bunch of keys from his pocket and ran through the Yale keys again. At the third attempt, he found success. The Yale keys were identical, so he had no idea whether it was the same key that had opened the kitchen door. One thing he was sure of was that this wasn’t the kitchen. Another corridor now, fully lit this time. Much shorter than the first one. No opening at the end of this one either. A dead end. Adam scanned his claustrophobic surroundings and quickly noticed two pieces of rope about half a foot long, hanging from the ceiling. When put in a situation with such limited visual scenery, the mind obsesses with the few things it can see. As such, Adam’s paranoid mind returned, offering him visions of what might happen if he were to pull one or both of the ropes. An explosion? An alarm? An apocalypse? With an effortlessly small jump, he was able to grab both ropes and ins
tinctively, he tugged at them. There was some resistance there, but certainly a bit of give too. He pulled again, harder this time. The rope lengths became a little longer. A third tug, full force now. Adam tumbled backwards as his force won over whatever was resisting at the other end of the rope and he hit the floor with a force that his body wasn’t prepared for. Wincing, he gazed up at the sky above him, as his eyes struggled to process the sudden transition between tiny dark cave and infinite blue sky. It was a dark blue. An early morning dawn blue, but a blue nonetheless. Adam’s focus turned away from the sky and back to his immediate surroundings. He was on the floor of an underground tunnel, a rope ladder dangled before him, leading up to a small square opening that leaked daylight. The hole had revealed itself due to the opening of what Adam could only describe as a trapdoor. A trapdoor that he had unknowingly opened with 3 tugs on what he now knew was the rope ladder. The door now hung downwards and Adam could see the outside cover of it, which was coated in something he could more easily describe; grass! Clearly the trapdoor was not meant to be seen from the outside, which stoked Adam’s curiosity towards what or where the outside was exactly.

  The thin rope ladder was flimsy and the skinny rungs put enough concentrated pressure on Adam’s feet for him to feel it through his slip-on shoes. At around 8 and a half stone though, Adam’s body weight was never going to threaten the ladder too much. He climbed 5 or 6 rungs before he could get a grasp on the edge of the hole to hoist himself up. As he did, the smell of damp soil hit him in a way that he’d never appreciated before. He exited the hole and managed to roll his whole body clear of it. Fresh morning dew gave his clothes a modest coating of water, sending a cold shiver through him. A harsh wind careered into his ears with a howl, as each aspect of nature seemed to be introducing themselves to him one by one. Light, water, cold, now wind. Adam surveyed the trapdoor and struggled to replace it, given that there was nothing to grip from the outside. He succeeded eventually after getting a fistful of the grass attached to its outside cover, the door clicked back into place and Adam was free. After a quick glance around and an examination of his geographical options, based on nothing whatsoever, Adam picked a direction and began running. He eventually began following the noise of traffic for guidance, which in his disorientated state was often misleading.

  From what he could tell, he seemed to be in a park of some sort. Staggering away from the trapdoor, he encountered at least one early morning jogger, a couple of dog walkers and a cyclist. Wherever this magic door had led him to, it certainly wasn’t a secret place. Joe Public was out in force! To these passers by, Adam probably looked like the local lunatic, on the run from his latest drug-induced demon, not a sight uncommon in most parks up and down England. And for this reason, Adam didn’t turn a single head.

  And so as his friends back at the Institution slept soundly, Adam had successfully escaped through the tunnels that connected the hidden underground Institution to the front lawn of Pype Hayes Hall; the eerie looking, disused mansion in the middle of Pype Hayes Park. The cold, misty Birmingham park he now sprinted away from quickly as his spindly, aching legs would carry him.