Read Dreamwalkers Book One - The Intruder. A Markland Garraway Paranormal Mystery Thriller Page 58

  Chapter 57

  M4 Motorway

  Eastbound

  12.23 p.m.

 

  James sat behind the steering wheel of the three Axle Caetano Levante, which was the primary coach type of National Express’ fleet. He’d just passed the exit for Windsor and was making good time as he headed towards London.

  It hadn’t taken long for James to master the art of coach driving. He thought he’d done well, considering until recently the largest thing he’d driven was a Transit van. The first day he’d sat behind the wheel there had been lots of angry customers. James had hit curbs, stalled the engine, crunched gears and even failed to work out how to close the doors.

  National Express had received several complaints about his driving and he’d been given a written warning.

  But now, he was doing pretty well. He was hardly ever behind schedule and had even mastered the knack of reversing the huge vehicle out of the parking bay. Slipping into the shoes of James, the qualified coach driver, had been a steep learning curve.

  There were a lot of things to which he needed to adapt. Another thing he soon discovered when he appeared in Exeter, was that in this world he was supposed to be diabetic. He had learned to feign injecting insulin, be careful about what he ate and regularly test his blood sugar levels. Especially when driving for a living. Faking diabetes was a small price to pay in return for a life with Helena.

  This afternoon, as he sped down the motorway, something played on his mind. It was something that Helena had noticed about him that was different. It had taken four weeks until she’d spotted it, and it was something he was totally unaware of until she’d pointed it out.

 

  The previous evening, the two of them were having a cosy time cuddled up on the settee. Helena had stumbled across the photo album from their wedding. She was enjoying thumbing through pictures of the special day and admiring a close up of her and James, when she’d noticed it.

  She’d pulled the album closer to inspect the scar beneath her husband’s eye, then turned and looked at his face. Her head danced between the album and James, as she tried to understand what she was looking at.

  ‘The scar beneath your eye, it’s on the other side of your face,’ she’d exclaimed.

  James had been lost for words as he examined the picture.

  He’d suggested that the picture had been printed negative. Helena dismissed his suggestion, when she pointed out that her wedding ring was on the ring finger of her left hand.

  Earlier in the month she’d noticed that James had been writing with his right hand. As far as she could recall, her husband had always been left handed. She dismissed the thought and put it down to her memory. But now she wasn’t so sure.

  After seeing the wedding photograph with the mysterious moving scar, and his ability to change the hand with which he wrote, she’d become inquisitive about her husband. But she had no idea of the swap James had managed to accomplish.

 

  James was daydreaming as he drove. He was brought out of his trance like state when an ambulance sped by in the middle lane blaring its sirens and flashing its lights. The ambulance’s blues and twos snapped him back to reality. He slammed on the brakes when he saw the trail of red lights ahead of him. There was a chorus of grunts and groans from the coach full of angry passengers.

  He waited for the traffic to move and thought about what had happened last night, without knowing he was holding his breath. When he eventually exhaled, the passengers behind looked at him with alarmed expressions.

  Whatever James didn’t know about the alternate character he’d swapped with and whatever the small differences between the two men, he was convinced Helena would never find out that he’d managed to rewrite his past and jump from one world to another.

  The past few weeks had been a crazy, but there was one thing he found difficult to accept, and very hard to deal with. He missed his best friend Howie Doyle. James found it almost impossible to digest when he’d found out that Doyle didn’t exist in this world. James found it even harder to believe that the reason Howie didn’t exist was because Han, his father, had killed him.