Chasing Tomorrow

CHAPTER 23

JEFF WAS IN THE house in Eaton Square. He was naked in bed, with Tracy lying next to him. Only, when he leaned over to kiss her, it wasn’t Tracy. It was another woman, a stranger.

Tracy was standing in the doorway shouting at him.

“How could you?”

Jeff felt sick. He ran to the door, but when he got there Tracy had gone. Now it was Jeff’s mother, Linda, who was talking. She used the same words Tracy had: How could you? But she was in another house, in another time, and she was shouting at Jeff’s father

. Linda Stevens had caught her husband out in another affair.

All her inheritance money was gone, squandered on Dave Stevens’s latest get-rich-quick scheme.

“Get off me, you bitch!”

Cowering outside their bedroom, Jeff heard the crack of bone on bone as his father’s fist smashed into his mother’s cheek.

Linda screamed, “Stop it, Dave! Please!”

But the beating went on: thwack, thwack, thwack.

THWACK, THWACK, THWACK.

Something hard and cold slammed again and again into Jeff’s back.

He was lying on the floor, a metal floor, being thrown around like a potato in a sack.

I’m moving. Where am I?

He heard a sound like roaring engines and felt the shaking intensify.

A plane? A cargo plane?

Then he slammed down hard on the floor. The blackness returned.

THE BED WAS WARM and soft but Jeff had to get out of it. His stepmother wouldn’t leave him alone.

“Hold me, Jeffie! Your dad won’t be back for hours.”

Her breasts were like pillows, soft and enormous, suffocating him. Rolls of smooth, feminine flesh pressed down on him like dough. He couldn’t move! Panic rose up within him.

Jeff ran to the window and jumped out, naked, into the snow.

He started to shiver. It was so cold. So deathly cold.

Some instinct told him, Don’t fall asleep. If you sleep you’ll die.

Wake up, Jeff. Wake up!

“WAKE UP!”

The voice was real. The cold too. Jeff wasn’t moving anymore, but he was still on his back. The stone beneath him was like a block of ice.

“I said ‘wake up!’ ” A sharp kick to the ribs made Jeff scream and writhe in agony.

The voice was distinctive, masculine yet oddly high-pitched, and with a distinct note of hysteria. Jeff recognized it at once, and a flood of memories came back to him.

Seville.