Fists clenched, teeth gritted, Sam woke with a start. For a few confused moments, he didn’t know where he was, but furtive glances anchored him back in the snug of the beach house. It was hardly reassuring. Waking life was another type of nightmare, or rather the same nightmare in a different mental state, because of late dreams and life were pretty much made up of the same crappy stuff. He might be awake, but that didn’t mean the nightmare was over. There was simply a lull in the action at this point. Hunger grumbled in his belly: another uncomfortable reality. At least it was a minor one.

  Michael – Dad? Whatever! – hadn’t thought about lunch, and all they’d grabbed were coffees and protein bars for breakfast, which was like chewing glue and washing it down with bitter disappointment. There was one of those tight coffee makers in Michael’s kitchen, all chrome and blinged out with digital displays and German engineered buttons. It probably cost more than his mum’s Nissan Mirca. Molly Micra, they called her. She was dinged up, the tracking pulled right, and she smelled like an old lady. Reliable though, except on damp days, like she really was an old biddy with arthritic knees, and it wasn’t like London was short of damp days. They took the bus a lot; maybe not as much as Michael made coffee, but a lot.

  Once they drove out of London, he and Michael had made a rest stop and picked up a couple of bottles of water from the motorway services around 9:30am. Michael got another coffee. Sam demurred, and that was it as far as food went. Mum wouldn’t have asked either; she would have packed a lunch the night before and tossed a foil rapped sandwich into Sam’s lap, while driving, fixing her lip balm, and changing the CD for anything from Northern Soul to Metallica, A Tribe Called Quest to Oasis. She used to love to tunelessly wail about how they were both living forever. These memories were splinters, shrapnel of a broken life dropped from the tenth floor into a back alley. Better to keep his mind occupied. Sam got up and fled the nook, checking his phone hopefully. He might as well have been in a black hole for all the signal he had.

  The light from the back of the house drew him. It had a different quality than city light. Maybe it was an effect of the house, which seemed to be hovering in a twilight of wakefulness. Outside was bright and the middle of the day, while the inside remained muted and subdued. That clean outdoor light cut through in bright blocks, linking the two worlds of slumber and wakefulness. Sam stopped in front of a bank of glass windows and French doors. They were locked, of course they were, but through them was a spacious conservatory draped with hanging plants, ivy, and other foliage Sam didn’t know.

  If no one lives here, why are the plants alive?

  An answer rang in his head with the same pitch as The Shining’s string section.

  Because someone is here, dumbass.

  Sam rattled the handles to the French doors again. They stayed fast and he regretted the noise.

  He spun around, back to the windows. The house was silent but for the faintest hum of the ancient refrigerator. That mechanical sound, wheezing, like the noise of something artificially clinging on to life, made Sam grit his teeth and it turned his palms clammy. Heart quickening and mouth drying out, he swallowed, feeling exposed and trapped at the same time. Side stepping to his left there was another door. This one was open. He half wished it wasn’t. How could he know if this was the room containing the phantom house duster and plant waterer? Over a thumping heart, he heard how ridiculous that idea sounded.

  Forcing a laugh, he felt lighter for it. ‘House proud psychopath kills motherless bastard with axe.’ He carried on talking aloud as he entered the next room. ‘Father, Michael Lorimer, is said to be relieved not to have to look after the boy and seem consoled that young Sam was put out of his m...’

  Sam stopped mid-flow. ‘Wow!’

  It was an office of sorts, slightly rectangular in length and windowless. The light from behind him gave enough illumination to make out the room, but he still searched the wall and found the switch just off to the side and flipped it. Soft lighting blinked on to reveal the room in all its glory.

  There was a mahogany desk, with a red leather top and matching chair, but instead of books on the shelves, which ran wall to wall and floor to ceiling, there were VHS tapes, a combination of the boxy bought type and those in thin card sleaves used for home recording. There were DVDs too, and Betamax tapes, and laser discs, but far fewer of these. And there were a lot of what Sam knew in his gut were film reels. On the wall nearest the door hung a perfect white rectangle: a projection screen. He looked up and sure enough a projector hung from the ceiling. But what played the reels? He wondered, excited at the prospect of finding it. A three-seater leather sofa and large Ottoman footrest, covered in a geometric tapestry, was positioned in front of the screen. It was a movie lover’s paradise.

  Sam ran his fingers across the tapes and discs. French films in alphabetical order. He didn’t recognise any except La Femme Nakita and La Haine. Both were hype. Italian tapes were next, and Sam quickly scanned and found the great man himself: Sergio Leone. All seven of his feature film directorial credits were in chronological order, from The Colossus of Rhodes all the way through to Once Upon a Time in the America. Once Upon a Time in the West was the one everyone said was the best. And sure, it was great, one of the greatest. Although the original script ran to 436 pages, the dialogue was practically a haiku of brevity. Four different scores, one for each main character, capturing their tonal essences. Epic wide angel shots, and close character work. But A Fist Full of Dollars, that was the best of Leone’s work. No frills, one bad guy plays off two gangs full of more bad guys against each other for a shot at redemption. That, and it was an unofficial remake of every cinema fan’s touchstone, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Same movie, but in black and white and with samurai swords, not six-shooters. That lead Sam to Last Man Standing, which sadly couldn’t make it a hattrick of great movies. It suffered from the effect Tarantino had on mid to late 90s movie violence: stylised and over the top. There were squib-exploding orgies on YouTube with titles like ‘Bruce Willis shoots everyone.’ Proper fun, but no one was winning awards on the French Riviera for it. Though that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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  That was his mother’s narrative as much as his. She’d given these stories to him every bit as much as his brown, almond shaped eyes, the tight wiry curls of his hair, and the crooked smile when he was nervous.

  Sam let his fingers trail away from the chunky cassettes. She had loved movies. They had loved movies. Past tense. All in past tense. Fucking grammar. Fucking life. His fingers curled into a fist, as if those tapes were dangerous and liable to bite. She would have flipped out about this room too. Would have. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, Sam. Don’t wait on life because it ain’t waiting on you. Tara’s words came back to him unbidden. Tears blurred the shelves like a bad 1970s scene fade, but Sam couldn’t swipe himself away into another location.

  Even if he could magically cut to somewhere else, where the hell would he go? His whole life had become a trap. You can’t run away from yourself. Wiping his eyes on the back of his hoodie’s sleeve, Sam’s vision cleared, and he spotted the players. Laserdisc at the bottom, then a DVD player. The Bettamax above that, and the VHS on top. The red standby light was on. He hit it and a greenish digital time and date came on. Pressing the eject button, he didn’t expect anything to happen, and almost jumped when the machine clunkily hocked up a tape. He pulled it out and inspected the label.

  First a small thrill tingled in his fingers as he read the words.

  ‘Across the Dunes, copyright 1977 directed by...’

  Pieces of what had previously seemed like random information clicked together.

  ‘... Jonathan Lorimer.’

  It couldn’t be. That would be like some hokey meet-cute in a cheesy screenplay. Was that why his mum fell for such a twat like Michael? Across the Dunes was his mum’s favourite movie. An obscure World War II film made by an obscure British director, who only made one movie, and a weird one at that. His mum raved about it, how it was an underappreciated masterpiece which she’d intended to write a Masters dissertation on. She’d never done that because she’d had Sam instead. He’d seen it about a dozen times. Sam was even named after one of the British soldiers stuck in the desert fighting Nazis. Only, the two sides end up forced together in a sandstorm to fight a common foe, something unseen in the sand that was picking them off one by one. It was said to be a big influence on John Carpenter when he made The Thing, and John McTiernan for Predator. Sam could hear his mother like she was next to him. Jasmine perfume and popcorn in the air. He put the tape back before tears would start falling again. It rested in the mouth of the player, waiting for him like a thing beneath the sand. It was inevitable he’d be drawn back to it, but not now. He wasn’t ready.

  Drawing away, he surveyed the rest of the shelves, scanning their many wares until he reached the corner behind the mahogany desk. There, around chest-height, a tape positioned four along from the wall stuck out from the others. It wasn’t by much, but on closer inspection there was another thing that made it seem odd. It was hovering. The tape wasn’t quite flush with the shelf beneath it. Curious, Sam stepped closer. The tape didn’t have a title either. It was wrapped in a faux leather red jacket with gold gilding, but no lettering. Nothing to determine what resided inside.

  Sam tracked the edges of the shelves’ casing, first to the side adjoining the thin wood panel in the corner of the room, and then over the other side, to the abutting unit, and then finally the one after that. They weren’t the same. The vertical sides of this particular unit were double thickness, made of two parallel pieces of wood, whereas the others were a single piece. By slowly turning on the spot, Sam compared the other units all around the room, and they all conformed to the single ply patterned between units. Why was this one different, and why was the red and gold cassette in its uncanny position? Maybe it was jammed in between the tapes either side of it. That could be it. Sam reached out to test this theory, fingertips buzzing with unseen energy.

  As soon as he gripped the VHS, aiming to lever the top corner towards him, as if selecting a codex in a library, he felt resistance. Again, nothing major, just uncanniness in relation to the thing it was imposing. That resistance wasn’t, however, immovable, and with a little tug, the tape tipped forward, like a kowtowing, clockwork butler. There was the smooth movement of greased metal in runners. With a small click, followed by a muted clunk, the whole shelving unit moved a fraction in its frame, and he knew what it was. Confirmation was written into the floor. He nearly shook his head at how he hadn’t noticed the crescent markings scored into the varnish. This was wild, a house of fun, a proper-posh-dude’s mansion, right down to the secret door, disguised as a book – well VHS – case.

  Sam anticipated the weight, gripped the tilted tape harder, added his other hand to the lip of the shelf and hauled. The action of the unseen mechanism was smooth, and as such Sam’s effort was an over-estimation. Much more quickly than expected, the unit swung inwards. He had a vision of the thing gathering speed and crashing to stop, throwing loose its cargo of films all over the floor of the library, movie room, or whatever it was supposed to be. Bracing both hands out in a traffic cop’s stop, and planting his feet, Sam took the weight. His feet slid a touch, but as smoothly as the door had opened, it came to a stop.

  The case had pivoted into the room at a right angle, and its bulk concealed what lay behind, like a barrel-chested, no-neck security guard. Eyes on the edge of the concealed door, Sam wiped his hands down the front of his jeans, bunched them into fists, flexed them open, and listened.

  The beach house lay still. Not even the refrigerator could be heard. It could have been the effect of the room. Perhaps it was sound proofed for watching movies? That would make sense, along with the lack of windows: perfect solitude to become immersed in the story playing out on the screen.

  Then the silence was broken by a scream. It was the faintest, quavering wail, way off, at the end of the secret passage.