Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.
Gd it. Sometimes it’s annoying, being right. An idea has been forming in my mind for a while. I may be just an indoor cat, but I have seen the many faces of the lord, and I know there are strange things in the world. Lauren thinks she knows everything, but she doesn’t. We are not like a staircase. We’re like the horrible doll on the mantelpiece. Lauren and I fit inside one another. When you tap on one it reverberates through all of them.
Think, think!
When I opened the refrigerator door I was angry. Maybe angrier than I have ever been. I didn’t feel the cord connecting me to Ted. I was myself, alone.
So I make myself angry. It’s not hard. I think about Ted and what he’s done to Lauren. It’s really difficult to think about. She was right about one thing; what a stupid cat I am, really. I believed his lies, didn’t want to know the truth. I just wanted to sleep and be stroked. I was a coward. But I don’t want to be a coward any more. I’m going to save her.
My tail bristles, becomes a spike of rage. The fire begins at the tip, spreads down the length of my switching tail, into me. It’s not like the heat when Lauren hurt me. I made this feeling. It’s my fire.
The walls begin to shudder. The crashing sound begins far away, and then it is all around me. The hall shivers like a bad TV picture. The floor is a sea, tossing.
I pad to the front door, slipping and yowing. Just because I am deciding to be brave doesn’t mean I’m not scared. I am so scared. What I see through my peephole isn’t really the outdoors. I understand that now. Now, I see with a shiver that the three locks are not fast. The door is unlocked, of course. I don’t have to go up, I have to go out. And everyone knows how you get in and out of a house. I give a little row. I didn’t really want to be right. I stand on my hind legs and pull on the handle with my paws. The door swings wide. The white flame greets me. I am blinded; it’s like being inside a star. The cord is a line of fire, burning about my neck. What will happen? Will I burn up? I kind of hope so. I don’t know what’s out there.
I step out of the house. The cord burns hot as a furnace, surrounds me in a forge of white heat. The world tosses and flips. Blinding stars suck me out into nothing. Nausea rises and I choke. All the air is crushed from my lungs.
The blinding white retreats; the stars shrink to small holes in the hot dark, through which I catch flashes of movement, colour, pale light. Moonlight, I think. So that’s what it looks like.
The world tosses like a boat on rough seas. Ted’s familiar scent fills my nose. We are being carried on his back, in a bag I think, or a sack – there are small holes stabbed in it, for air I suppose. I am too big. My skin is exposed and hairless like some kind of worm. My paws have become long fleshy spiders. My nose is not an adorable soft bump but a horrible pointy thing. Worst of all, where my tail should be there is a blank nothing.
Oh Lord. I wriggle but I can’t move. I think we’re restrained, tied up maybe. All around, there is sound. Leaves, owls, frogs. Other things I don’t know the name of. It all has a clarity I have never heard before. The air is different too. I can feel that, even through the bag. It’s cooler, sharper somehow – and it’s moving.
Lauren sobs, and I feel it burst up through my unfamiliar chest, my cavernous ribcage. I feel the tears coming from my tiny weak eyes. It’s just as horrible as I thought it would be.
I made it, I tell her silently. I’m in the body.
‘Thank you, Olivia.’ She squeezes me tightly, and I squeeze back.
Lauren, why is the air moving, like it’s alive?
‘It’s wind,’ she whispers. ‘That’s wind, Olivia. We’re outside.’
Oh my goodness. Oh gosh. For a moment I am too overwhelmed to think. Then I ask, Where are we?
‘We’re in the woods,’ she says. ‘Can’t you smell it?’
As she says it, the scent hits me too. It is incredible. Like minerals and beetles and fresh water and hot earth and trees – God, the scent of the trees. Up close, it’s like a symphony. I could never have dreamed it.
‘He has the knife,’ Lauren says. ‘Can you believe it? He buried it.’
Maybe he’s just taking us for a walk, I say, hopefully. Maybe he’s got the knife because he’s scared of bears.
‘Kittens don’t come back from the woods,’ she says.
We are quiet after that. More than anything I want to go back inside. But I can’t leave Lauren alone. I have to be brave.
He walks for an hour on rough ground. He climbs steep rock faces and wades across streams, goes through valleys and over hills. Very quickly we are in the wild.
He stops in a place that smells of stone where trees speak to one another in the night, over the sound of running water. From what I can see through the tiny opening at the neck of the sack, we’re in a shallow gulley with a waterfall at the end. Ted makes camp with a lot of rustling and groaning. Light flickers through the dark fabric that contains us. Fire. Overhead, I can hear the wind stroke the leaves.
I can’t see much but I can feel the vastness of the air. Wind crashing into clouds. I wish I’d never known the truth, I say to Lauren. The outside is terrifying. There are no walls. It goes on and on. How far does it go, the world?
She says, ‘It’s round, so I guess it goes on until it comes back to you again.’
That’s terrible, I say. I think that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Oh LORD, preserve me …
‘Focus, Olivia,’ she says.
Is he going to let us out of this bag? I ask. To pee or whatever?
‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t think he will.’ I can hear her mind running furiously. ‘It’s a change of plan,’ she whispers. ‘That’s all it is. We pivot. We adjust. He has the knife. I felt it against his hip. So you get it from him, is all, and kill him. Same plan. Better, actually, because we’re in the middle of nowhere and no one will come to help. We can make his plan work for us, see?’ I wonder if she’s been at Ted’s bourbon because she sounds exactly like he does when he’s drunk. Fear can make you slur your words as badly as drink does, I guess.
I think of the body, our weak, thin body, against Ted’s bulk, his might. The wind strokes my fur with cold fingers. I breathe it in. It is both ancient and young at once. I wonder if it is the last thing I will feel.
Wind is lovely, I say. I’m glad I got to feel it. I wish I had got to taste real fish, though.
‘I wish you had too,’ she says.
I can’t do it, Lauren. I thought I could but I can’t.
‘It’s not only for us, Olivia,’ Lauren says. ‘It’s for him. Do you think he wants to be like this? Do you think he’s happy, being a monster? He’s a prisoner too. You have to help him, cat. Help him one last time.’
Oh, I say, oh dear …
‘OK then,’ Lauren says, soft and resigned. ‘Maybe it won’t be so bad.’
I think about the round world, which if you travel far enough, only brings you back to the same place.
Be a brave cat, I whisper to myself. This is why the LORD put you here. I take a deep breath. I’ll do it. I’ll get the knife, and then I’ll kill him.
‘Clever cat,’ she says. Her breath comes fast. ‘You have to be quick. You only get one chance.’
I know.
Beneath, in the dark, Night-time growls. I feel his great flanks writhing as he strains against his bonds.
What is your problem? I ask, terse. I’m busy. I don’t have time for you right now.
His answer is a roar that rings in my ears, sends shocks down my spine. It is my time, it is my time, it is my time, he roars. But I have him pinned down tight; he won’t get free.
Ted is restless. He keeps us close, tied up against his back. The fire glows hot, sending red needlepoints of light through the sack. I feel the rumble of his voice as he speaks softly to himself.
‘Mommy, are you still here?’
As dawn is about to break he drifts into an uneasy doze. I feel the deep give and take of his breath. He is at peace. Above, the sky holds its breath.
Can you see anything? I ask.
‘It’s in his left hand,’ she murmurs. I reach out with ours. It is revolting, using the hand – like wearing a glove of rotten meat. I take the knife from his loose palm. It is lighter than I expected.
I reach around and drive it into his stomach. The point punctures flesh with a crisp sound like an apple bitten into. I thought it would be soft, flesh, but inside Ted is a mess of objects and textures. There is resistance; it is hard to thrust the blade in. It is even more horrible than I could have imagined. I hardly hear myself crying, over Ted’s screaming. The sound drives a bird from a nearby bush, plummeting upwards into the sky. I wish I could go with it.
The first thing is the pain. The nerves in our body are alight with it. The black cloth drops away. Lauren and I fall face first onto the rough floor of the forest. Our cheek is thurst hard into the mess of slick leaves and twigs; we’re half in and half out of the stream; water runs cold over our legs. Our heart chugs unevenly, like a car about to stall.
Lauren? I say. Why are we bleeding? Why can’t we get up?
Dee
Dee puts the tape recorder on the table. It was not easy to find. None of the electronics outlets stock them. In the end she overpaid for this one in a vinyl store downtown.
She puts the cassette in and presses play with a trembling finger.
‘Please come and arrest Ted for murder,’ a little, anxious voice says. ‘And other things. They have the death penalty in this state, I know that …’
It’s a short recording, lasting maybe a minute. Dee listens without breathing. Then she rewinds and listens to it again. Then she listens further, in case there is another recording after this one. But it’s just some medical student’s notes. A woman with a slight accent Dee cannot place, and a voice like a clear bell.
She sits back. It is Lulu. Older, yes. But Dee cannot mistake her sister’s tones. Now that the moment has arrived and she has proof, Dee does not know what to do. She puts a hand on her heart, which is pounding. It feels swollen, likely to burst.
She should tell tired Karen about all this, take her the tape. She will, as soon as she can lift her head from her hands.
There comes a familiar sound from outside. Thunk, thunk, thunk.
Dee’s body becomes electric. She goes to the darkened window. Ted has come out into the back yard. He stands for a moment, listening. He looks around. Dee stays still as a post. She hopes the moonlight reflecting on the windowpane will hide her silhouette. Apparently it does, because Ted nods to himself, and goes to the tangle of blue elder that overruns the eastern corner of the yard. He digs with his hands.
Ted takes something from the ground. He shakes it free of earth, and then slides it briefly from its sheath. A long hunting knife. The blade reflects the moonlight. He puts the knife on his belt and goes into the house.
When he emerges again some minutes later, he has a bag on his back. He goes slowly out of his yard, towards the forest. As Dee watches, the bag seems to move. She is sure it’s twitching in the faint light.
Dee’s mind clears. Everything becomes cold and hard. There is no time for Karen. Lulu must be saved – and there is a monster to be dealt with. Get it done, Dee Dee, she thinks.
Dee runs to the closet and grabs the spray can of fluorescent paint, the claw-hammer and the thick, snake-proof boots she bought for this moment. She throws on her hoodie, jacket, ties the laces with shaking hands. She emerges from her house and closes the door quietly behind her, in time to see Ted vanish under the trees. His flashlight dances on the night air.
Dee bends low to the ground and runs after him on silent feet. This time nothing will stop her.
Fifty feet into the forest, where the streetlight can still be glimpsed through the branches, she stops and blazes the trunk of a beech tree with the reflective yellow paint. Branches brush her face and drag at her legs. The forest at night is slippery, it clings. She tries to quiet her breath.
The words she heard on the tape run through her mind over and over. Nothing but the peaceful dark. Lulu.
Ted leaves the path, and overhead the moon is obscured by reaching branches. Dee blazes a trunk every fifty feet. She keeps Ted’s flashlight in her sights, focusing on it so hard that it blurs into a starry glow. After a time she feels the woods change. Dee is no longer in the place where families walk. She is in the wild, where bears roam and hikers’ bones are never found.
The whisper of leaf to leaf begins to sound like a rattle shaken by a sinuous tail. Shut UP, she thinks, exhausted. There is no god-DAMN rattlesnake. How long has she been a prisoner of fear, she wonders? Years and years. It is time to be free.
Dee’s foot slips on a muddy branch. The branch slides under her foot in a muscular movement. At the same moment her torch beam catches it, just ahead of her right toe on the forest floor. The diamond pattern is all too familiar. The sharp, light rattle, like dried rice shaken in a bag. The snake rears back slowly with the grace of a nightmare, poises to strike, eyes reflecting green. It is about four feet long, young. Dee’s torchlight dances crazily over the cairn of rock behind, which most likely serves as its home.
Fear spreads through her veins like ink. She screams but it comes out as a slight whistle. The snake sways. Perhaps it is sluggish having just awakened, maybe it is blinded by the flashlight, but it gives Dee the moment she needs.
Keeping the beam steady, she steps forward and swings. She knows that if she misses, she is dead.
The claw-hammer hits the snake’s blunt, swaying head with a crack. At her second blow the snake drops limp to the forest floor. Dee leans over it, panting. ‘Take that,’ she whispers.
She pokes the long body with a finger. It is cool to the touch, limp and powerless, now. She picks up the dead snake. She wants to remember this for ever. ‘I’m going to make a belt out of you,’ she says. Joy rolls through her. She feels transformed.
As she lifts the dead snake, meaning to put it in her pocket, the head twitches and turns. Dee sees it happen in slow motion – the snake’s head lunging, burying its fangs in her forearm. Dee feels her mouth widen to a silent scream. She shakes her arm, trying to detach it. The long limp body shakes too, lashing in mimicry of life. Some things survive death. The pain of the bite is bad. But it is nothing to the horror of having the thing attached to her, like a monstrous part of herself.
At last Dee hooks the claw-hammer into the dead jaws and pries them open. The fangs are pale and translucent in the torchlight. She throws the mangled body into the forest, as far as she can.
Something bubbles up inside her. Don’t scream, she tells herself. But it’s laughter. She is racked with it, wheezing with it. Tears stream down her face. There was a snake, after all.
She doesn’t want to look, but she has to. The flesh around the bite is already swollen and discoloured like a week-old bruise.
Get it done, Dee Dee. Still giggling, she rips her sleeve off at the shoulder to relieve the pressure on her ballooning flesh. She is a good hour away from help. The only thing to do is go on, and finish it. Ahead, Ted’s light dances away through the trees. Unbelievably, the encounter with the rattlesnake took less than a minute. Dee stumbles after his light.
She begins to feel sick. Other things happen, too. It seems to her that the trees are becoming whiter, and there are red birds darting among the trunks. She gasps and tries to blink the image away. This is not a dream. There is no nest of human hair. Her arm pulses, like it has its own heart. She knows that if you are bitten, you are not supposed to move. It spreads the poison. Too late, she thinks. The poison got me long ago.
She follows Ted westward. She turns off her flashlight. The moon is bright enough. Ted keeps his on. It must be difficult, keeping his footing with all that weight on his back. Maybe the weight is moving, fighting him.
With her good hand she fingers the claw-hammer in her pocket. It is sticky with drying snake blood. She burns; her anger leaps and licks at her insides. Ted will pay. Every fifty feet she blazes another tree with reflective yellow. She has to believe that she will be coming back this way, with her sister.
She follows as close as she dares. Even so, she loses him. His light dances out of sight, and then he’s gone. The ground begins to fall sharply, and Dee stumbles, panics. But then logic reasserts itself. She can hear water running somewhere below. He will probably stop by water. Dawn is not far off, she can smell it in the air. Dee leans against a slippery trunk and breathes. She just needs to be patient for a little longer. She can’t risk falling in the dark. She needs dawn. She knows it won’t be long.
Dull sunrise paints the world pewter. Dee staggers down a rocky escarpment towards the sound of water. She comes to the lip of a deep defile. At the bottom, a stream runs hard and silver over the rock. By the narrow shooting water, there is a sleeping bag, open like a slack mouth. A dying fire sends up threads of smoke in the dawn-grey air.
So this is the weekend place. Now that the moment is upon her, Dee feels solemn. It seems almost holy, the end of so many things.
She picks her way down, shakily. Her arm feels heavy as stone, weighed down by venom. The rock by the stream is spattered with dark drops. Blood. Something has happened here.
She follows the drying blood into the stand of birches. That’s right, she thinks. Animals go into hiding to die. But which one, Ted or Lulu? It is familiar, the dim dappled tree light. The quiet conversation, leaf to leaf. This has happened before. Dee went into the trees and when she came out, someone was dead. This time overlays that, like a drawing on tracing paper. But of course, it was a summer afternoon, that time, by the lake. And it was pines that day, not silver birch. She drops white static over these thoughts.
She does not see it at first, the body. Then she glimpses a hiking boot, half torn off a foot, poking out from a tangle of briar. He is splayed at an angle, face down. Dark stuff leaks from his mouth. She thinks, Oh, she got away and he is dead, and joy surges through her. Then she thinks, But I wanted to kill him.
The Last House on Needless Street Page 22
