Boy X

  A MESSAGE FROM CHICKEN HOUSE

  I’ve always loved jungle thrillers – here, the forest becomes a character of its own, dangerous and wild. The sense of threat is heightened in Boy X as frightening animals prowl in the corners of your eyes, flitting between the trees . . . The mystery and excitement are pitch-perfect and, like Dan’s readers everywhere, I feel it’s me caught up in the adventure, trying to outguess the twists and turns in the plot. Get ready to be excited and intrigued!

  BARRY CUNNINGHAM

  Publisher

  Chicken House

  Contents

  Also by Dan Smith

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Copyright Page

  This is for you.

  You are stronger than you think you are.

  Also by Dan Smith

  My Friend the Enemy

  My Brother’s Secret

  Big Game

  Light.

  Bright. White. Light.

  Ash’s eyes snapped open, bringing intense pain, making him close them again and put his hands up for protection. A sharp ache bored through his skull and he lay still, trying to remember where he was.

  For a moment his mind was blank, then his stomach heaved as an image leapt into his head. He had been at Dad’s funeral – all those black suits and sad faces. People he hardly knew, talking about what a good bloke Ben McCarthy had been. There was something else, though. There had been something wrong. Something to do with that scruffy pot-bellied man. Whatever he’d said to Mum had sent her into a panic and she had dragged Ash away, and . . .

  And now he was here, in this firm bed, beneath crisp, clean sheets.

  As soon as the pain started to ease, Ash pushed himself up on his elbows and squinted at the unfamiliar room. The ache of panic stirred deep inside like an awakening beast.

  As everything came into focus, he saw that the room was bare. White walls reflected light from a fluorescent tube set behind a frosted glass panel in the white ceiling. Attached to the wall on the right-hand side of the bed was a panel with three touchscreens displaying digital numbers in glowing orange and green. A clear tube sprouted from the centre of the panel, running down to a blue plastic connection that was stuck to the back of Ash’s right hand by a large piece of clear tape. Beneath the tape, the needle that entered his skin was just visible. The sight of the shining steel piercing his body sickened him. For some reason it made him think of spiders in the dark.

  ‘Mum?’ His throat was dry and his voice croaked. His mouth felt as if it were filled with cotton wool, soaking up every last drop of moisture.

  On a small bedside table was a plastic cup, and next to that was Dad’s identity disc. The leather cord was coiled like a small black snake. Ash looked at the disc for a moment, trying to remember what had happened. His thoughts were muddled though, prodding the panic-beast harder, so he kept his eyes fixed on the identity disc; the one thing that could make him feel strong.

  He reached out and took hold of the leather cord that uncoiled as he lifted it. The tag swung from side to side and he sat up further, using both hands to slip it over his neck. It was the only familiar thing in an unfamiliar room, and having it lying against his chest made him feel safer.

  When that was done, he took the cup, drank half the water, then replaced it on the table and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floor was white, with faint flecks of green running through it. It was cold on his bare feet.

  He felt even smaller than usual as he sat there and looked around the room, trying to remember everything that had happened since the—

  He injected you, said the voice in his head.

  It was the same voice Ash had heard all his life. It had always been there to taunt him and doubt him; to make him feel useless and afraid.

  Don’t you remember that little syringe? He drugged you. A slender man without any expression and a smooth, deep voice. And now you’re dead. All alone.

  The voice made his stomach queasy, so Ash touched the identity tag for reassurance and glanced down to see he was wearing pale blue, light cotton pyjamas. He felt an uncomfortable flush of anger and embarrassment; someone else must have put them on him. Maybe he was in some kind of hospital or something. That would explain the white sheets and white walls.

  ‘Mum?’ His voice was flat in the small white room, and panic tightened its grip. He waited a few seconds, then called again, this time louder. ‘Mum?’

  Nothing.

  She died, sneered the voice in his head. It came from somewhere dark and out of reach. They stuck a needle in her neck and she got what she deserved. She’s dead and gone and you’re all alone.

  ‘No.’

  It wasn’t true. He would know, wouldn’t he? He would feel it.

  Ash pushed to his feet and put a hand on the wall to steady himself. Without even thinking about it, his fingers went to the tag round his neck, and a hollow ache nestled among all the other terrible feelings. He shook it away and looked down at the needle in his hand. If he were going to leave this room, search for Mum, he would have to remove it.

  ‘I have to.’ He peeled back the tape and the needle fell to one side, almost sliding out by itself. Clear liquid oozed like venom from the tip as he dropped the needle onto the bed and rubbed the back of his hand.

  The numbers on the digital panel began to change and Ash was afraid something terrible was about to happen. Maybe the drip was keeping him alive and now his brain would cloud over, or his heart would stop beating, and—

  There was no change at all. Nothing.

  Ash stayed where he was for a few more moments, staring at the numbers, then turned towards the door set into the far corner of the room. Taking a deep breath, he padded over to it.

  It’ll be locked.

  He knew it straight away, as surely as he knew his name was Ash McCarthy and that in three weeks’ time he would be thirteen years old. Whoever had brought him here would have locked the door.

  Preparing for the worst, he reached out and took the handle firmly in his hand, then twisted and pulled.

  The overhead door-closer made a sucking noise as it opened, and Ash stepped back in surprise. The voice had been wrong. With his fingers still on the handle, he listened, hardly daring to cross the threshold. He wanted to know where he was and what was out there, but at the same time he didn’t want to know.

  His fingers curled harder round the handle and his stomach cramped as if the panic-beast had breathed ice. He was tempted to call out, but something told him it was better to be quiet and unnoticed, so he took a step, leaning forward just enough to peek out.

  The corridor ran in both directions. Long and white, with the same green-flecked floor. It was silent and empty. No nurses or doc
tors hurrying here and there carrying clipboards and clicking pens. No trolleys, or visitors.

  Just a long, white, empty corridor, and the steady hum of air conditioning.

  See? You’re already dead. You’re in hell.

  The corridor was lined with doors on both sides, spaced evenly. Each one had a Roman numeral on it, close to the top. He turned and looked at his own door, seeing a little, black, plastic ‘X’.

  Without warning, another flash of memory sparked in his mind – of a woman injecting his mum the same way the man had injected him. And the woman had said something.

  Kronos needs to be resurrected.

  Ash didn’t know what that meant, but he remembered the look on Mum’s face.

  It had filled her with terror.

  Ash wanted more than anything to be safe and warm; to slip back into the room, push the cupboard across the door and climb into bed. But he had to find Mum.

  He stepped into the corridor and the door-closer made that strange, airy sucking noise as it swung shut behind him.

  Ash had never felt so small and alone. His only protection was a pair of flimsy pyjamas, and his soft, bare feet padded on the vinyl floor, sticking with each step, reminding him how vulnerable he was.

  Pad-shtik. Pad-shtik.

  When he reached the next door along the corridor, he stopped and stood for a long time, shivering.

  A strange smell settled in his nostrils; not the smell of hospitals or dental surgeries, but something else. At first, it was as if the air was dead, but when he breathed deeper, filling his lungs, he tasted the odd tang of metal. There was plastic and paint, cleaning fluids, oil, chemicals and . . .

  Smells flooded into him, overwhelming him.

  His head spun and he put out a hand to support himself against the doorframe. He had never experienced such a powerful rush of odours. They slammed into him as if someone was raining punches on him. He put his free hand to the tag round his neck and spoke under his breath. ‘I am Ash McCarthy. I am strong. I can do this.’

  Whenever they went on one of Dad’s days out, trying to get Ash to do something that scared him, Dad said it didn’t matter how difficult or scary things were, if you could stay positive and be confident you could overcome anything. He told Ash that it helped to have some words to give you strength. He called it ‘the McCarthy Mantra’, even though Ash wasn’t exactly sure what that meant.

  ‘I am Ash McCarthy. I am strong. I can do this.’ He repeated the words over and over, picturing each one in his mind, using them to push away the overpowering mixture of smells. And as they began to fade, one smell remained, heightened above all the others. Perfume. Mum!

  Mum might be in there. She might be in danger. Ash gripped the door handle and turned until it clicked, then crept into the room, but there was nothing to see other than a bed, a cupboard and a bedside table. Just like his own room.

  There was something, though. The smell of Mum’s perfume grew stronger as he approached the bed, as if someone were holding the bottle right under his nose. It was so clear. There was something else too, something even harder to explain. When he stood beside the bed, looking down at the disturbed sheets, Ash could smell his mum. It made him think of shampoo and shower gel, fresh air and, of course, that perfume. Ash could pick out each odour – it was the strangest sensation, but what really mattered was that Mum had been here. There were even a few strands of her dark hair on the white pillowcase.

  In that moment, Ash felt so close to her and yet so far away and so helpless that the panic-beast almost became uncontrollable inside him. He wanted to collapse onto the bed and put his head in his hands and let the tears come, but he crushed that feeling down inside him; told himself not to be so pathetic. Maybe Mum needed his help. What use would he be to her if he just sat there and cried?

  Crushing his fear into a hardened nugget and pressing it deep inside, Ash slipped back into the corridor and continued searching, Mum’s scent fading until there was no sign she had ever been there.

  Pad-shtick. Pad-shtick.

  Ash tried every door, checking each identical room, but found all of them empty and unused. When he finally reached the end of the corridor, he peered through the narrow glass panels on either side of the exit, and into another corridor beyond. It ran perpendicular to this one, making a ‘T’ shape, disappearing in both directions. Immediately in front of him, on the other side of the glass, was a wide set of stairs heading down.

  After hesitating for just a moment, Ash pushed through the exit and darted across. At least now he was going somewhere. Ten steps down, there was a small landing and the staircase came back on itself. Ash descended further into what looked like the lobby of some kind of office building.

  Inside the enormous domed space, he was surrounded by tinted glass that reached high overhead. And right in the centre of the tiled floor below it was a large, round reception area, like an island: a waist-high wall of dark wood polished to a brilliant shine. Just behind it, standing on a slab of similar coloured wood, were a number of imposing stainless-steel letters, each of them at least one metre high. They spelt a single word:

  The letter ‘O’ was made to look like a black sun with eight rays radiating from it, but Ash thought it looked like a fat spider with short legs. He had always thought that, for as long as he had known the logo; it was the name of the company his mum worked for.

  See? It’s her fault, the voice said. This is all her fault.

  What was her fault? None of this made any sense. Mum had a boring job. She was some kind of researcher at the pharmaceutical place outside town.

  Ash ran his hand along the surface of the counter, breathing in the scent of wax and leather. The acrid tang of electricity. The different odours were vibrant and individual but didn’t overwhelm him like before. It was strange that each smell was so clear – as if they were enhanced.

  He passed an entrance cut into the back of the reception area, like an old-fashioned shop counter, and saw that within this circular island of wood four empty chairs stood behind four computers with blank screens. Everything was switched off and there were no papers on any of the surfaces. No pens or paperclips or photographs. It looked unused.

  But that wasn’t what demanded his attention. It was what he saw through the tinted glass that surprised Ash the most. He wasn’t in England any more, that was for sure.

  ‘Where the hell am I?’

  Beyond the front door Ash could see a large clearing surrounded by a fifteen-metre tall chain-link fence. On the other side of it, there was nothing but trees. But they weren’t oak and sycamore and horse chestnut. They weren’t the kind of trees that lined the grey, rain-soaked street he lived on.

  These trees were thick and green and leafy. They grew close together and were topped with fronds and fans. Some had strange, grotesque roots, some had trunks spiked like medieval weapons, while others were fat, with contorted faces hidden in knotted bark. They sprouted unfamiliar fruits, and many were hanging with vines.

  Ash couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It looked like jungle, and even through the tinted glass of the dome he could tell it was bright out there, because light glittered among the leaves like jewels, and in the centre of the clearing a large, black helicopter gleamed in the sun. Almost without thinking, he crossed the lobby and padded towards the exit.

  As he came closer, the sensors detected him and the doors swished open, letting in a blast of hot, humid air. It took his breath away, rushing down into his lungs and making him gasp, bombarding him with a sensory overload. The world was alive out there.

  Ash put his hands to his ears and closed his eyes as the powerful jumble of sights, sounds and smells flooded his senses. It was like a TV on full volume, flicking from channel to channel, never pausing on anything for more than a split second. Everything was amplified, as if someone had turned all the dials up to eleven inside his head. There was a continuous chirping of insects, the bright and cheerful call of birds, the rustle of the breeze in the treetops.
Ash could hear the hum of electricity from the chain-link fence – a high-pitched, irritating whine that veiled everything like a thin cotton sheet. And after all that white inside the building, colours exploded in his vision – a million different shades of green, splashes of red, snatches of yellow and purple and pink. There was the scent of dark earth too, the strong perfume of flowers and the cloying stink of helicopter fuel.

  In blind confusion, he dropped to his knees and curled into a tight ball, trying to clear his mind. He had to make it go away. He opened his mouth to scream, but a single image jumped into his head.

  Dad.

  Dad was telling him not to be afraid. That he was strong.

  ‘I am strong,’ Ash whispered to himself. ‘I can do this.’ He focused on those words, and instead of trying to push the smells away, he accepted them. Instead of trying to shut out the sounds, he took his hands away from his ears and let himself hear them. And when he eased open his eyes, he allowed the colours to flood in.

  He reached again for the tag round his neck and squeezed it between finger and thumb. ‘I am strong,’ he said, louder now, daring to look around. ‘I am strong.’

  The sounds and smells and sights began to settle. He found that he could control it better, choose the things he wanted to hear, although there was still that high-pitched whining that made his stomach queasy.

  Ash scanned the forest. Everything was so clear. He could see each individual leaf on the trees beyond the fence. He could spot the movement of the birds in the branches. It was as if he had spent the past thirteen years looking at the world through a greasy window that had just been cleaned. And now that he had accepted the sounds, he could pick out the song of each individual bird.

  It was confusing. Frightening. Amazing.

  He got up and moved out into the clearing as if it were a new world. The heat wrapped around him like a comfortable blanket. The doors swished closed behind him as he walked onto the wide-bladed grass, warm and spongy under his bare feet. He approached the helicopter that sat like a sleek animal, reaching out to touch it, wondering if he had travelled here on it. The paintwork was blistering hot and he snatched his fingers away, thinking it must have been sitting there a while beneath the intense sun.