Excerpt:

Suddenly a giant black off-road car pulled up behind me. Someone papped the horn, and I almost jumped right out of my coat. I turned around to see the man from yesterday staring at me from behind the window. The door clicked open automatically. I looked at the door for a while, bewildered by its automaticness.

"Come on then."

I opened the door wider, pulled myself up into this unnecessarily large car, sat in the passenger seat, and shut the door behind me. Then I sat and waited for something to happen, my whole body tense as though I was waiting for my mother to slap me in the head.

The man drove the car for miles and miles, over motorways and through winding country lanes, and I silently watched the landscape rush past. I hadn't been in a car for years, and I have never been in one this big. I wasn't used to the light feeling that you're no longer weighed down by your body, being carried along by a machine under the control of someone else. I wasn't used to the whole country blurring into a long stretch of green and grey. Usually I had enough time to stand and stare. Usually I could stare for long enough that I grew to resent the thing I was staring at. Now it all flew by so quickly that it was all the same to me and didn't seem so bad.

Of course, it wasn't the landscape flying by so quickly but me zooming along in a giant car. But I forgot that, because the journey was so smooth I couldn't feel myself move.

The country lanes got smaller and smaller, until we were on a dirt track leading up a hill. For ten minutes We rounded a bush and found ourselves in front of a house that was four floors tall and about a dozen windows wide. It seemed to stretch right into the edges of my field of vision. You couldn't see it all at once in the windscreen of the car, you had to crane your neck. It was an overcast day, and the clouds looked like they were about to touch the tips of the four chimneys on the roof. The light behind the windows on the top floor was an ominous yellow colour.

The front garden was littered with cold pebbles and stones and along part of the outer wall of the house was a set of dangerous-looking garden tools, including a shovel and a scythe. I didn't dare wonder what sort of garden requires a scythe.

The door clicked open automatically again, but I would have to push it for it to be open enough to leave through. I couldn't move. Again. So the door didn't open further. The man kept watching me, but I didn't dare turn to look at him. I didn't understand who he was or why he had brought me here, but I was now quite fed up of being awake enough to even wonder these things. Maybe if I didn't move then time would stop and I wouldn't have to endure this awkward silence anymore.

Eventually he asked me why I wouldn't go in the house. I didn't answer him. He asked me again and still I didn't answer. The third time he asked me I heard myself say, "Because if I go in that house I'll never be able to leave, will I?" He sighed gently, before opening his own door. He walked around the front bonnet of the car, his feet crunching the gravel beneath him. He shut my door for me and then returned to his own side of the car and started the engine. He took me back through the ever-widening country lanes, onto a motorway and eventually back into town.