As he flipped the bolt shut inside his shed, he found he had to think about drawing in air and pushing it out. The kernel of anguish that had ruptured inside his brain had swollen to the size of an orange and painkillers had done nothing to ease it. Although he was quite alone in the shed, he began to feel that the knots in the wooden walls were eyes watching him. In the muddy light of the winter’s afternoon, the shed, which had once felt like a barricade against the world outside, had turned on him. He sat down on a three-legged stool and saw that the walls were littered with faces that he’d never seen before. A bearded profile of Christ peered sadly into the centre of the shed. A pair of eyes with a thin nose but no mouth or chin stared directly at him. A face distorted by weeping howled silently above his head. He closed his eyes briefly, to shut them out, and felt violated. He tried to fight the light-headedness that had started as he drove away from the police and the ghost of his father and the blind man and the terror that 777 Croxteth Road had become, and the faces in the wood seemed to be moving.
