by Jo Treggiari
Proving it to the world would be difficult. I had to choose carefully, lay my plans, wait like a spider at the trap door until I found him. The very first who would truly test my skill.
Here I am, thirteen.
I know him from church. He is a reader, a dreamer. I like that. Maybe nine years old, blue-eyed and blond, with chubby cheeks and skin like milk. His head seems too big for his body, and he has the habit of sucking on his lower lip as he turns the pages. There is a small blister there, like a drop of water on a rose petal. A nervous child and full of fidgets. Still, he comes willingly once I tell him how magical the woods are at dusk. Strangers are big men in big cars, not someone you see every day, someone who smiles and says “hi” and ruffles your hair and is polite to your mother. I know I can handle him. He looks up to me as young children do to those a little older. I speak to him of monsters and fearsome beasts until his downy cheeks flush and his eyes are full of stars. I want to pluck them out and carry them in my pocket like a pair of marbles; I want to peel him like a green stick.
He follows me into the forest. There is a clearing, soft with pine needles, dotted with mushrooms growing in a circle. I tell him it is a fairy ring and that if we wait until twilight, the fairies will come and dance, and the elves will slip their twig-like fingers into our pockets and leave presents of bird eggs and walnuts.
“I don’t like eggs. I’m hungry,” he whines. “You said there’d be candy. And a gingerbread house.”
I show him the gleaming skull of a raccoon I killed, drawing his chubby fingers across the sharp teeth. “It rips fish apart with these,” I tell him. “It’s a predator.” I look into his eyes for understanding but there is none. He wants cookies. He doesn’t recognize the wolf even when it sits beside him. In my pocket I find a hard crust of bread I’d been meaning to give the hens. He gnaws on it, still whining.
The sun has reached the top of the canopy and is now on its downward plummet. The air grows cold and still. He is fractious, fussing in the way that only kids can do.
I rest against a tree thinking of how best to kill him, blocking out the small sounds he is making, as if he were one of the barn kittens mewling for its mother. My body is buzzing with anticipation. In my pack with the books I have a length of good rope, my knife wrapped in a pair of socks. All night I had plotted about method, sleeping not at all, staring at the ceiling beams, drawing my knife over the oiled stone until both edges were razor-sharp. Stringing him up on a tree branch will be difficult because he will certainly struggle. I can do it—my muscles are as hard as unripe apples from working on the farm—but he might yell and I might silence him too quickly, as I did with the piglets. I am older but he is a solid, healthy child. If I hit him on the head it will ruin the picture I want to make, the scene I am trying to set. I’m striving for peace, innocence, death like sleep, sleep like death. Sooner or later the world will break him anyway. I will be much kinder.
I will freeze him in this moment so he will always be young and beautiful and naïve.
Despite my careful plans, I have forgotten important items: duct tape, food and water. I force down the anger I feel at myself. It is my first time. I will learn from it, and the next time will be better.
But I so want it to be perfect.
I watch him so he does not know I am watching him. His mouth is downturned, a furled pink blossom. I should have brought a cloth to clean him with afterward. The blood has to be contained; it cannot spill except where I want it to. I envision a single perfect drop balanced at the corner of his full bottom lip, or a trickle from one ear looping around his ivory throat like a thread of red silk. If I can fix it in my mind, I’ll be able to reproduce the scene later in the new sketchbook I stole from the general store, and I will have him for always.
He falls asleep next to me, like a puppy, his head heavy against my knee, cheeks flushed and mouth open. He would have looked immaculate except for the slime of mucus around his nostrils, the silvery snail trails of his tears.
I feel the rage rise. He is ruining it all.
What if I suffocated him first? A hand over his mouth and nose, my knees pressed against his chest, holding him down. Two minutes, three perhaps. I recently read a book that detailed the physical changes before death. I had to stop reading frequently to consult a dictionary, but it was enthralling to find out what distress was caused by drowning, hanging by the neck, poison, decapitation, choking. A body that had bled out was almost colorless, just tinged with cyanotic blue around the extremities. How beautiful that sounds: cyanosis! Suffocation or carbon monoxide poisoning were the gentlest. The corpse they left looked as if it were merely resting, cheeks in bloom.
I touch his face. He doesn’t stir. He sleeps heavily as children do, taken by it in an instant, sweat-dampened hair curling on his forehead. I find my scissors and snip a lock from behind his ear, where it is thick and unruly, and slide it into my pocket. I hover my hand over his mouth, feeling the shushing of his breath. Just a little closer, press down, and I could stop it forever.
Maybe. It is not quite what I envisioned but it might serve. In my fantasy he would come willingly to the knife, tilt his head backward so that I had easy access to the column of his throat, lean into it as if the blade were extending a kiss.
But I know from the piglets that once the jugular is slit, struggle is inevitable and it is impossible to control the blood flow.
I get to my feet, careful not to wake him, and move back, looking at him from a distance. Does the scene work? How will it look in a couple of hours? The big tree with its branches outspread above him. His face, bone-white, awash in the moonlight, the shadows wrapped around him like a cluster of crows, his small limbs thrown out in supple unconsciousness. The blood, thick, black and almost invisible until the morning sun catches it on fire and turns the drops to rubies. I can’t wait to draw it. I think of something and hurry forward. The autumn leaves, red, flame-orange, citrine, are a perfect counterpoint, a foreshadowing. I arrange them around his legs and torso like a patchwork quilt.
I decide to suffocate him. I can use my socks.
But then we are found. Pa Cosloy, his mother—her name is Marjorie, I remember. She is concerned, but laughter drowns out the doubt.
“Look how they built a nest,” Marjorie says. “What darlings! What a lovely game!”
Connor is tucked against her shoulder, his chubby legs wrapped around her waist. He hides his face from me. My hand itches for my blade.
Pa gazes at me intently but says nothing, though his fingers are tight around my forearm and afterward there is a band of bruising.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ari hung twelve feet from the ground. She’d already made the mistake of looking down. Somehow it seemed to increase the gravity pulling at her and dragging against her fingertips. She was barely clinging to the wall. And looking up just reinforced how much farther she still had to go. Halfway, she told herself. Almost there. She thought about how much Lynn hated that glass-half-full expression. She always said they should be full-bottle girls, and it always made Ari laugh. Ignoring the increasing rawness of her skin, she dug into the spaces between the bricks with the bone and used her fingers to pull the loose plaster free. She shifted slightly to reach up to the next ledge when a sudden pain knotted her calf muscles. A sharp inhalation of breath made her dizzy, and she lost all sense of up and down.
The ground came up to meet her frighteningly fast and the impact knocked the air from her body.
For a few minutes she just lay on her back staring up at the well cover, too shocked and defeated to even cry. The top seemed as far away as the moon. She’d never make it out. She would die here. And maybe no one would ever find her body. Her parents, Lynn, Coach—they’d never know what had happened to her.
With the first breath that came back into her lungs she sat forward and screamed out her frustration. Fuck! This was as hard as mastering the butterfly stroke. She thought of the days when it had seemed as if her limbs would never obey her br
ain’s instructions. But that was a series of complex motions that had to be fluidly linked—this, this was just climbing.
She struggled onto her knees, patting the ground for her digging tool, and then to her feet, renewed resolve flooding her weary muscles. Up, she told herself. You did it once, now do it again.
Retracing her steps, she clamped her teeth around the bone, trying not to breathe through her nose or reflect on the bacteria scurrying across her tongue. Stowing it in her back pocket and repeatedly reaching around to remove and replace it increased her chances of falling again. And she needed both hands to climb, hanging from one while she used the other to dig out the next brick.
She was past the place where she had fallen the first time. She blinked sweat out of her eyes, transferred the bone to her right hand and scraped out an indentation. Adjusting the fingers of her left hand, she forced them into the shallow crack. A nail snapped and peeled back. She bit off a sob. The smell of blood and the stinging pain robbed her of focus, but she pressed herself like a moth to the wall until the sensation passed.
Coach would tell her to concentrate on her breathing. Inhale. One, two, three…eight seconds. Exhale.
Her world narrowed to one brick. Each one maybe four inches wide—such a small distance to be measuring out in slow breaths. But if she really pushed it, she could move up a couple of feet every time. “Do this precise thing six more times, Ari,” she told herself in a fierce whisper. “Climb, Ari. Brick by brick.”
She was close enough to smell a breath of fresh air. It spurred her on, but she forced herself to continue in her methodical way. The thought of falling again was terrifying. She was much higher now, and she risked breaking a leg, or worse. If that happened it was all over. Slowly she inched forward. The well cover with its seductive gap was two feet away…a foot. And beyond that she saw a dark expanse like a swathe of velvet spangled with diamonds.
The sky. It had never looked so vast to her, so beautiful.
Summoning up the last of her energy, she made for the narrow opening, forcing her ragged fingers to dig and flex and her toes to grip. Another nail split open; she gasped and the bone slipped from her grip. She barely heard the thump it made over the pounding of her heart as she climbed. It was stupid to drop the only weapon she had, but she’d find another.
With the end in sight, she managed to pull herself up and out, squeezing her body through the narrow space, turning onto her back when she could with her fingers flattened against dew-wet grass. She sobbed with relief into the cold air. Her fingertips were chewed up like raw meat by the rough brick, her muscles quivered with exhaustion, and cramps ran up and down her legs, arching her feet and making her want to vomit with the pain. Still, she was on solid ground. Once the dizzying sensation that she might fall off the world and go spinning out into the universe ceased, she sat up.
A full moon hung like a massive silver ball low along the lightening horizon. That must be east, where the sun will rise. She could tell that dawn was still at least an hour or two away. The sky was glittering with a thousand stars, the weight of them an almost unbearable pressure on her shoulders. She glanced down at the white paint caked across her sweat-soaked T-shirt. It would make her visible. Quickly she stripped it off and turned it inside out. She wondered if Sourmash was watching her already.
She was panting like a dog, the push and pull of air ripping across her dry throat. The thirst came raging back. It took effort to control her breathing and slow her heart down before she was finally able to struggle to her feet.
She was in some kind of field surrounded by other fields as far as she could see, spread out like a dark patchwork quilt. Single, silhouetted trees stood in sparse lines like black watchers, and, on a nearby hill, more thickly, a small forest. Crickets thrummed, the only noise other than the heavy silence of the waning night.
No car sounds, she realized. Definitely outside town limits. Not close to any major roads. No wonder no one had heard her screams.
Move forward.
The ground was covered in stubbly razor grass and weeds. It sliced the soles of her feet. She stopped to put her shoes on, looking around nervously, cursing at the knot she’d tied that her ripped, strained fingers couldn’t unpick. Finally she got it loose and shoved her feet into her shoes, wincing as the canvas rubbed over her sore toes. She untied her sweatshirt from her waist, slipped it on and pulled the hood up. The dull color would help her blend in with the shadows. She forced her way through a small gnarled copse of stunted trees and halted.
Just ahead was a square building. Small, hardly more than a cabin. Murky windows; no smoke coming from the steel stovepipe chimney. But she could smell a trace of wood smoke in the air and it made her freeze. Someone has been here. Someone had made a fire, recently enough for her to discern it.
This must be Sourmash’s place. His hunting cabin. He might own all the acreage around here. A perfect spot to make whiskey or meth, live off the grid—bring a victim.
Aware of her visibility, she dropped to the dusty dirt, though there was no cover, trembling like a baby animal caught in the open. Crouched with her face scratched by coarse grass stalks, she strained her ears, listening hard. Was he sitting there in the dark, watching from the shadows? His long-range rifle with hunting sight fixed on her prone body, some kind of night-vision goggles masking his face?
No, he could have shot her any time while she was stuck in the cistern. Like a fish in a barrel.
But he hadn’t. He wanted to keep her alive for some reason.
Or maybe he’d been interrupted. Or maybe he needed to hear her beg for her life.
She had to run. Now.
She bowed her head, half wanting to just stay where she was until day broke, like a kid hiding its face. She thought she would die from the fear, but the idea of him finding her splayed out on the ground after how hard she’d fought to get out of that well forced her to her feet.
Careful, Ari. She’d skirt the building, keeping low. There must be some kind of track, an exit road. Sourmash would hardly hike in; he must have driven. Driven them both. She wished she knew how she had come to be there, but that section of the past was still locked away in her brain. Every sense was hyper alert, her muscle aches and thirst forgotten as she studied the shadows around the dark cabin. Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness. Nothing stirred.
Slowly, she crept closer until she was crouched in the gloom thrown by the pitched roof. Everything in her was screaming, Run away, run away, but her legs didn’t seem to want to cooperate. She peered through the grimy window. A table, a chair, a doorway beyond leading to another room. It looked empty, but he could return at any moment. Her thick tongue clacked in her parched mouth. Maybe there was a sink, water? Her eyes went back to the chair, a red jacket flung over the back. She recognized the brash black-and-white logo for the water polo team, and although folds of material covered most of the chest badge, she spotted the C, and knew what it said.
Captain.
God knows, she’d stared at it often enough—when she wasn’t staring at the enticing muscled skin beneath it.
Stroud. Sourmash must have taken him too. Oh God, this nightmare never ended.
She hesitated. She wanted to help, of course she did, but she didn’t want to risk recapture. She argued with herself. Stroud was big, fit—maybe they had a better chance together? Running blindly into the woods, which were most likely Sourmash’s hunting grounds, was a much stupider idea. But she’d go into the cabin with her eyes open and she’d go armed.
She picked up a stick from the ground and weighed it in her hand. She’d have to get in close to use it, but she thought it would do the trick if she swung it hard enough. She shifted her grip so that she held it in both hands and raised it up, formulating her plan. She’d aim a low blow between his legs and then bash him in the skull.
First though, she made a circuit of the periphery, hugging the walls and listening with all her might. There were only four windows, two in the rear, which looked int
o rooms too dark to distinguish anything beyond shapeless forms, and two in the front on either side of what appeared to be the only entrance. She paused there to gather her courage.
In and out, as fast as possible. She made the list in her mind: Find Stroud. Run. Her blood was buzzing in her ears and she was short of breath, but she forced herself to tiptoe to the door. No lock. She twisted the knob, feeling as if her hand were not attached to the rest of her.
The door creaked alarmingly. It smelled musty inside, but the scent of wood smoke was stronger. She noted the small iron woodstove on the far side of the table, the stack of cut logs, felt the heat that was still coming off it. Dilapidated couch, empty booze bottles, no kitchen area. While she’d been shivering at the bottom of the well, forced to pee in the corner, Sourmash had been up here comfortable and toasty. She looked around the sparse room noting drifts of dead leaves that had blown in, the dust scattered over every surface, splotched with a multitude of fingerprints and smears. The heavy wooden top of the table was scored with deep knife cuts. She imagined him sitting there, butchering someone’s pet. Perhaps he had sat there just a few minutes ago, plotting what to do with her body. Maybe he was out right now, picking up supplies: garbage bags to stuff her body into, a chainsaw to hack her limbs off with, kerosene to burn her corpse.
She hurried over to the jacket and shook it out. It was Stroud’s. She felt something hard in the pocket. His cell phone. She turned it on with clumsy fingers. The battery was almost completely dead and there were no bars. She shuffled to the window; still no bars. She clicked it off and then on again. The screen brightened and died almost immediately. Useless. Still, she slipped it into her jeans’ pocket. His jacket, she stroked and then put down. She needed both her hands free.
She fidgeted on the balls of her feet. There might be a phone, a landline, but where was it?
