Chapter 2: Burger Dreams

Bill was dreaming.

Or at least he thought he was dreaming. He'd have quite liked some confirmation on that point, ideally from a reliable source, ideally before things got any further along, but nobody in dreams ever hands out a certificate of authenticity, do they. You just have to muddle through and hope for the best, same as everything else in life.

It felt like a dream in that odd way you sometimes actually think inside a dream, that strange half-aware territory where things have weight and detail and texture, where your mind keeps almost catching hold of itself and then slipping again, like a clutch that won't fully bite. One moment he was in bed, in the dark, listening to the house do its usual nightly impression of a ship at sea, creaking, settling, the radiator ticking somewhere downstairs like it was counting down to something. The next moment he was standing at the end of that same scrubby little farm road, facing the same off-white caravan.

Except now, Bill noticed with the particular clarity that only dreams seem to grant you, the van was doing something to the space around it. Bending it, ever so slightly, the way heat does over a road in summer, except this wasn't heat. It was more like, and Bill hated that his brain reached for this comparison, but there it was, like a badly Photoshopped picture of some desperately try-hard influencer standing in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza, except the influencer in question had never actually left Swindon. The edges didn't quite agree with each other. The proportions were doing a job, but not a convincing one. Reality, in the vicinity of the van, had the faint plastic sheen of something composited.

There it was, though, sharper now than it had any right to be against that unconvincing backdrop: BurgerVan.

The sign was the same. Red on yellow. One word, CamelCase, that same small, needling wrongness that had bothered him that afternoon. Somehow it was crisper here than it had been in real life, as though the dream had reached out and put a thumb on that specific detail and pressed. Notice this, it seemed to be saying. This matters. Pay attention, Bill, for once in your life.

But everything around the sign had changed. It was night now, properly, thoroughly night, the kind of night that has opinions about itself, and the road wasn't just dim, it was drowned, soaked through with moonlight the way a bar towel gets soaked through with spilled lager. A full moon sat low over the fields, huge and faintly red, like it had been left too close to a fire and nobody had thought to move it. Bill had no idea what sort of moon that was supposed to be, a wolf moon, maybe, some phrase he was fairly sure he'd half-read in a magazine at the dentist's and retained purely out of spite, but it had that look. That January look. The look of something that had been hanging around a bit too long and knew it.

The fields lay flat and utterly silent. The fences stood as thin black lines, rigid, exact, and beyond them the land rolled away into darkness like the surface of a frozen sea, something that had once moved and had since been told very firmly to stop. There was no wind. No rustle. Not even the faint, distant hum of traffic that you get everywhere in this country now, that background static of other people's lives. It was as if the whole night had been sealed shut, like a jar. Vacuum-packed. Bill, despite himself, thought about the burgers, and did not enjoy the association.

He found himself standing at the serving window, looking in. Again.

That was the first thing that properly unsettled him, in the specific, itching way that only dream-logic can unsettle you, because in his memory of the actual afternoon, over three hours, his mind interjected, unhelpfully, unprompted, gone, somewhere, still unaccounted for, Bill had approached the van slowly and then walked around it. Looked. Shouted uselessly into an empty field like a man auditioning for the world's smallest search party. Opened the side door. In the dream, all of that had been edited out. He was simply here, already in position, the way a photograph puts you somewhere without ever showing you the walk over. Like someone had set the scene and then placed him in it, and hadn't much cared whether he remembered arriving.

And on the little serving ledge, the metal shelf where, in a functioning universe, you'd get a polystyrene tray, a paper napkin that dissolved on contact with grease, and a burger buried under far too much fried onion, there were two burgers.

Not travelling from raw to burnt on an unmanned hotplate. Just two finished burgers, sitting neatly side by side, buns aligned like they'd been arranged by someone with a ruler and a mad-head-chef-at-the-pass level of OCD. And they were waiting for him.

For one glorious, idiot second, Bill felt something that could only be described as relief. Properly stupid relief, the kind that arrives before your brain has caught up with the situation. Oh, there we go then. That's all this is. Someone was here after all, they've just nipped round the back for a minute, stop being so bloody dramatic, Bill, honestly.

Then he looked properly.

At a glance they were fine. Bun, patty, a slice of something that could pass for cheese, a red smear that could pass for ketchup. But they were too perfect. Showroom perfect. The kind of burger you see printed six feet tall on the side of a bus shelter, glossy and lit from an angle no actual kitchen has ever achieved, all shine and zero substance. No steam rose off them. No smell drifted up, and God, there should have been a smell, even a bad one, even a wrong one, but there was nothing, just cold, still, scentless air. No warmth radiating into the night. Just two perfect burgers, sitting there like museum exhibits.

Every part of Bill's head, the sensible bits and the cowardly bits and the bit that just wanted to go back to sleep and wake up somewhere with a kettle, was screaming at him not to touch either of the things in front of him.

He reached out and picked one up anyway. Because apparently that was the tour he'd booked.

It felt awful. Immediately, unmistakably, awful. The bun did not compress under his fingers the way a bun is supposed to, that small forgiving give that tells your hand, subconsciously, yes, this is food, this will not hurt you. This had none of that. It was light, far too light, weightless in a way that made his first thought, absurdly, that he was holding a toy. The sort of thing you'd find in a children's plastic play kitchen, wedged down the back of a sofa, sticky with three-year-old spit and unknown syrup. The surface wasn't bread at all. It had a faint squeak to it under his fingers, like the lid of a cheap laptop case, or the dense grey foam in which they packed electronics. Bill turned it over, his brain still bellowing objections from somewhere in the back row, and began, God help him, to take the thing apart.

The two halves of the bun were hard, flat, beige discs, sanded smooth. The patty wasn't meat, had never been within several postcodes of meat; it was a stiff brown circle stamped with fake grill-marks, the sort of pattern a machine presses into things that will never see a grill in their lives. The cheese was a rigid square, too thick, too clean, its edges perfectly true, like it had come off a laser cutter rather than a dairy. The whole thing was made of some substance that wasn't quite plastic and wasn't quite polystyrene, but sat in the queasy, undefined space between the two, something dead, and manufactured, and never, at any point, intended to be eaten. He put the thing down and rubbed his hands over his shirt.

Bill's first thought had been of a toy, but it definitely was not a toy. Not unless you hated kids. This was pure unadulteratedly creepy fakery.

He looked at the second burger without touching it, because his eyes had now been thoroughly educated and he saw no reason to put his hands through the same lesson twice. It was identical. Two fake burgers, laid out like offerings, and something in the precision of it made Bill think, with a lurch he didn't much appreciate, like something that has heard of burgers, third-hand, but has never once seen one.

His stomach turned but not with hunger. That specific, low-grade nausea you get when something achingly familiar is wrong by the smallest possible margin, when your brain keeps trying to slot the thing into the correct category but the thing keeps sliding straight back out, refusing to fit, refusing to be filed.

Bill sighed and lifted his gaze to the interior of the van, not because he wanted to, but because there was no way for him to not do it.

In real life, he'd been able to see the hotplate clean through the serving window. The red meat, the sizzle, the first threads of char. Here, there was nothing to see at all. It was black inside. Not unlit black, not shadowy, hard to make out black. Proper black. The black of the inside of a shut cupboard, the black of a hole in the ground you're not meant to look into. The kind of black that has thickness to it, that suggests depth even when logically you're staring at a flat wall three feet away.

Bill leaned in, squinting, doing the thing everyone does where you narrow your eyes as if that's ever once helped anybody see in the dark.

Nothing. The black didn't shift. It didn't catch the moonlight, didn't throw back so much as a glint of chrome or the outline of a fridge unit. It was as though the van had been scooped hollow and refilled with night, poured in and left to set.

That was when he became aware of the cold. It started at his feet, a damp, patient chill, the sort you'd get standing barefoot on frozen ground, and then it began to climb. Ankles. Shins. Slow, steady, unhurried, in a way that felt less like weather and rather more like decision-making. Like something had chosen to start at the bottom and was working its way up with a plan.

Bill looked down.

His legs were there. His feet were planted on the gravel, present and correct. He told them, quite firmly, to take a step back.

Nothing happened.

He tried again, pushing with his right foot, the way you might lean your whole weight into a jammed door.

Nothing.

His legs still felt like his. He could feel the pressure of his own weight through them, the cold working into the bone, the small ordinary aches of standing too long. But he could not move them, not an inch, as though the road itself had reached a decision about his evening plans and simply wasn't taking further requests.

His chest tightened. A shout climbed his throat, uninvited, and he swallowed it back down, because shouting in dreams never achieves anything, it comes out thin and delayed, like radio static, and besides, there was nobody out here to shout at except a field and a possibly sentient sandwich.

Then, from underneath the van, he heard it.

A scraping. Slow. Deliberate. Metal dragged over stone, or, and he hated, hated, that his mind went there immediately, like a child checking under the bed, claws. It was a stupid, primitive, campfire-story sort of thought, exactly the kind of thing a grown man in his thirties with a mortgage and a laminated ID badge shouldn't entertain for a second. And yet the sound was real, insistent, coming from beneath the caravan, from that dark shelf of shadow where the wheels and the axle housing lived.

Scratch. Scrape. Scratch.

It moved as it went, the sound sliding along the underside of the van as if whatever was making it was dragging itself along the ground, or up out of the ground, his brain offered, entirely without being asked, in the unhelpful, know-it-all tone of someone who's read one too many message boards at three in the morning.

Bill's mouth had gone completely dry. He stared at the black window, at the two glossy fake burgers sitting there like they were waiting for reviews, and the cold kept climbing, past his knees now, and the wrongness of the whole scene pressed into him like a held breath, like a wave building somewhere just out of sight.

Then, abruptly, his feet let go.

Not him deciding it. Not him forcing anything. They simply released, the way a hand opens when it's finally told to.

Bill did not hang about to question the mechanics of it. He stepped back from the window fast enough that the gravel barked under his shoes, and the relief of movement hit him so hard it made him briefly, gloriously dizzy, like standing up too quickly after a long shift.

He moved round the side of the van. The moon followed him, dragging its pale red light along the metal skin of the caravan in a long, slow smear. The sign hung behind him now, out of sight, but he could still feel the word, BurgerVan, sitting between his shoulder blades like an itch he couldn't reach.

The scratching carried on beneath him as he moved, but as he rounded the rear corner it seemed to sink away, thinning out, retreating from wherever he happened to be heading, as though it preferred him at a distance. Which, frankly, suited Bill fine.

At the back of the van, the world dimmed further. The moon was still up there, huge and faintly menacing, but it seemed to withhold its light here, keep it for itself, and the fences pressed closer, the fields leaning in around him like nosy neighbours.

And there, just past the rear corner, was a small mound of dirt.

Bill stopped walking.

It wasn't a big mound. Not a grave, nothing so dramatic, not even a proper heap of the kind you'd get if someone had dug a hole and shovelled the spoil back on top. It was closer to the sort of thing you see with molehills, earth pushed gently upward from underneath, a shallow, uneven hump, except this one was glowing.

Not brightly. Not like a torch, nothing that cast a shadow on the ground around it. It was a low, eerie blue-green, sitting within the soil itself, as though the dirt had been laced with something that only remembered, in a distant, secondhand way, what light used to be.

Bill stared at it. In the dream, he did not think this is impossible, in the way you might expect a rational adult to think it. His brain was far too busy shouting the much simpler, much less useful message of leave, leave now, leave immediately, on a loop, to no effect whatsoever.

He was compelled. That was the only word that fit. The specific, syrupy compulsion of dreams, where you walk toward the door you already know you shouldn't open, where your own will is still technically present in the room but has clearly been outvoted.

He stepped closer.

The cold no longer felt like it was pinning him in place. Now it moved with him, curling around his ankles as he walked, and this was the worst part, gently. Like it was leading him by the hand.

He crouched.

The glow didn't brighten as he neared it. It became more apparent, the way a pattern hidden in wallpaper suddenly resolves once you tilt your head just right. The blue-green sat in the gaps between the grains of soil, in the tiny black interstices, as though something underneath the dirt was shining directly through the cracks.

Bill knelt, and his hands moved without waiting for permission, fingers sinking into the earth. It was loose on top, cold and damp, and grit lodged instantly beneath his nails. He scooped, scraped, pulled clumps away in fistfuls. The mound gave with almost no resistance, as though it had been dug before, more than once, as though it had simply been waiting, patiently, for him to arrive and finish the job.

Scratch. Scrape.

The sound from under the van answered him, or echoed him, or mocked him, it was genuinely impossible to say which, continuing at its own slow, unbothered pace.

Bill dug faster.

His hands had gone numb. The soil was colder than any soil had a right to be, not frozen solid, but carrying a bite that worked its way straight into the skin, past the point where cold usually stops and starts to feel like something closer to burning.

The glow grew steadier as he worked, still not brighter, just more present, more insistently there, as though he were peeling back a curtain rather than digging a hole.

His fingers struck something hard.

He flinched and yanked his hand back. Whatever it was, it wasn't stone. It was smooth, and it was cold in a way that had nothing to do with weather, a cold that stung, properly stung, not metaphorically, the way dry ice stings, the way a metal railing in January grabs the skin off your palm if you're daft enough to grip it bare-handed.

Bill sucked in a breath. He did not want to reach for it again. His hand went anyway, hovering, reluctant, drawn downward by something that wasn't quite his own decision-making process. Every sensible part of him wanted to stand, to run, to get back to the car and drive somewhere with streetlights and a chip shop and other, ordinary humans in it. His hand didn't consult any of that.

He touched it again.

The sting shot straight up his arm, a spark jumping from the object into him, and then...

BANG BANG BANG.

Bill's eyes flew open.

He was in his bed. Dark room, familiar ceiling, the faint orange smear of the streetlamp through the curtains that he'd meant to fix for two years now. The sound was real. Loud. Violent. Someone was hammering on his front door.

Not a friendly knock. Not the neighbour-borrowing-a-ladder kind of knock. This was a policeman's knock, Bill thought, instantly and with total conviction, and his heart gave a lurch like it had been specifically trained, at some point in his life, to recognise that exact rhythm and panic accordingly.

BANG BANG BANG.

He threw the duvet back and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, already half upright, the dream still clinging to him in wisps, like cobweb dragged off a shelf.

Then he saw his hands.

And the very unwelcome story they had to tell.

Not a smudge. Not the vague, deniable grubbiness of a man who'd been gardening and forgotten to wash properly. Proper dirt, dark and damp, worked deep into the lines of his palms, packed under his fingernails in tight little crescents, like a row of small, joyless, grinning mouths.

Bill froze.

The knocking came again, harder, rattling the letterbox downstairs, and some distant, sensible corner of his brain noted that this was, genuinely, a terrible time to be sitting perfectly still on the edge of his bed, staring at his own hands as though they'd been swapped out for someone else's while he slept.

But he did not stand. He did not call out. He sat, and looked, and the dirt stayed exactly where it was, real and cold-smelling and utterly, undeniably there.

There, on the pad of one finger, was a faint white ring in the skin, ghost-pale under the grime, exactly where the cold had bitten him.

The knocking did not stop.

Bill sat and stared.

And stared.

And stared.