by Kevin Brooks
Staring, waiting . . .
Hurting.
Another five minutes passed.
I called Mum again and left another shaky-voiced message.
One forty-five came and went, and the sickening terror just grew and grew, until at some point my physical self couldn’t cope with it anymore, and it made the decision to shut me down.
I couldn’t do anything then.
Couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Couldn’t feel. All I could do was sit there in a senseless stupor, my mind in a trance, barely even conscious of reality . . .
Elliot?
Ellamay’s voice was a long way away.
Elliot!
A bit louder, a bit closer.
ELL!! EE!! OTT!!
“You don’t have to shout,” I muttered. “I’m not deaf.”
Never mind deaf, she replied. I thought you were dead.
It took me a while to drag myself out of the stupor, and when I did finally manage it — with a lot of help from Ella — the fear it had been hiding me from came back with a vengeance. It was as if I’d been anesthetized, unable to feel any pain, and now the anesthetic had worn off, and the pain had come back again. The pain was fear, and I could feel it stabbing into every molecule of my body.
But at least I had my self back.
It was agony, but it was me.
We need to get going, Ella said.
“I know.”
I closed my eyes, picturing Shirley’s house in my head, then I zoomed out and pictured the journey between our house and hers.
527 yards.
It’s not far, Ella said encouragingly.
“It is if you’re really small.”
Jenner glanced at his watch again. It was just past one thirty, and Gordon still wasn’t back.
They were in Shirley’s living room. The curtains were closed, and Shirley was sitting on the floor by the radiator, bound and gagged. Her ankles were bound with baling wire, her hands similarly secured behind her back (and additionally tied to the radiator), and her mouth was gagged with a strip of duct tape. Her face was shocked white, her eyes wide with fear. Blood was oozing from a nasty-looking gash on the side of her head, the redness bright against her ashen skin. Jenner had hit her when she’d gone for his face with her fingernails, trying to claw out his eyes. He’d cracked her in the head with the barrel of his pistol — not too hard, but hard enough — and she hadn’t given him any trouble after that.
“You didn’t say anything about a gun,” Dake had said when he’d seen the pistol.
Jenner had stared at him. “You got a problem with it?”
“No . . . it’s just . . . you should have told me.”
“Why?”
“Because . . . I don’t know. You just should have told me, that’s all.”
Now Jenner was looking at his watch again. He knew he’d only just looked at it a minute ago, and he knew he was only checking it again because he was getting really edgy, and he didn’t know what else to do, and he also knew that if Gordon didn’t show up soon . . .
“What was that?” Dake said.
Jenner had heard it too — the sound of the front door being opened. A key turning in the lock, the door creaking faintly on its hinges . . .
“Is that him?” Dake whispered.
Jenner frowned, confused. “I didn’t hear a car. Did you —?”
“Shirley? Hello?”
It was a woman’s voice, calling out from the hallway.
“Shirley? Where are you? Is everything all right?”
Jenner and Dake heard the front door being closed, then footsteps moving along the hallway toward the living room.
“Shirley? Where are you?”
The living room door was open, and the first thing Grace saw when she got to the doorway was a ratty little man in a cheap Santa Claus costume pointing a gun at her head.
I’m back in the hallway now. Coat, hat, boots, gloves . . .
Cold sweat running down my back.
It’s three thirty in the afternoon, Christmas Eve, and I’ve just taken my last remaining pill.
(Bye-bye for now, Mr. Beastie . . .
Bye-bye.)
My heart’s still pounding. I’m still shaking and shivering, I still feel sick, and every cell in my body is still screaming at me to turn around and run, but thanks to the Moloxetine — or at least my psychological reaction to taking it — I don’t feel quite so terrified anymore. I’m still scared to death, but I’m no longer so afraid of being scared to death.
The howling demon has been quieted.
For now.
But it won’t stay silent for long.
I know that. I know there’s no time to waste. I know I just have to do it, right now . . . just step over to the front door . . . one step . . . two steps . . .
That’s it, Elliot, keep going.
. . . three steps . . . four . . .
Now open the door.
. . . the door . . .
Don’t think about it. Just open it.
. . . don’t think about it . . .
Open it!
The sudden sharpness of Ella’s voice cuts through my fear-crazed head and spurs me into action. I reach up and take hold of the doorknob, turn it to the left, and pull, and — BAM!! — the door crashes open in the wind, almost yanking my arm off, and as it slams back against the wall with a juddering smash, I’m suddenly engulfed in a roaring white hell. The fury of the wind is staggering, rocking me back on my heels and almost knocking me off balance, and as the whirlwind of snow explodes all around me — driving ice-cold needles into my face — I instinctively turn away from it, covering my head with my hands and cowering against the wall.
It’s no good . . .
I can’t do it.
It’s impossible.
No, it’s not.
I can’t go out there.
Yes, you can.
“No.”
Glass smashes behind me as a painting is blown off the wall. A door slams somewhere, something else crashes to the floor . . .
I have to close the door.
No, Elliot.
I start backing away from the wall, hunched over against the wind, reaching out blindly for the door . . .
No.
. . . my gloved hand touches the door. I feel for the edge of it, get a good grip, then start pulling it away from the wall . . .
Don’t, Elliot. Please . . .
“I’ll try again in a minute. I just need to shut the door for now —”
If you don’t go now, you never will.
The door won’t move. The wind’s too strong. I shuffle around, get both hands on the door, and pull it as hard as I can. It begins to move, and when it’s far enough away from the wall, I squeeze in behind it so I can use my weight to push it shut.
Never mind, Elliot, Ella says sadly. You did your best.
“I haven’t given up. I just told you that. I’m going to try again in a minute.”
It’s all right. You don’t have to keep pretending for my sake. I understand why you can’t do it. I know you can’t help it.
The door’s at the halfway point now. If I let go of it and step away, the wind’s going to blow it back against the wall, but if I give it another little shove, the wind’s going to get in behind it and slam it shut. And then everything will be calm and quiet again. I’ll be safe from the roaring white wind. And my pounding heart will gradually slow down and stop hammering so hard against my ribs that it physically hurts . . .
And Mum will still be gone.
I lift my head, shield my eyes with my hand, and gaze out into the wildness.
She’s out there somewhere, Ella says quietly.
I look up at the sky and see nothing but white darkness.
She needs you.
“Hold my hand,” I whisper.
We step out through the doorway together, out into the bone-numbing cold, and when the front door slams shut behind us, there’s a finality about the dull wooden thump that mak
es me think the door’s never going to open again.
The snow is thick on the ground, almost up to my knees in some places, and as I head up the path toward the front gate, with the flashlight gripped firmly in my hand, I realize that this is probably only the second or third time I’ve ever been out in the snow. The last time was so long ago that all I can really remember is desperately wanting to go back inside, but not being able to move because I was too scared of slipping in the snow and falling over. I’ve got the same sense of insecurity now — not trusting the ground beneath my feet — and I don’t know how to deal with it.
I simply don’t know how you’re supposed to walk in the snow.
At first, I try taking big, high steps, lifting my knees right up, but that leaves me balancing on one leg for too long, and it doesn’t feel very safe. So then I try walking without lifting my feet at all, shuffling along like a ski-less skier — sliding one foot forward, then the other, and the other — making my way through the snow rather than up and over it. And for a while, it seems to be working. It’s slow going, and it’s not easy — my legs are already starting to ache — but at least I feel relatively safe.
But then, just as I’m beginning to make some progress, a black snake whips up out of the snow and sinks its fangs into my leg.
I leap back in fear, clutching at the pain in my leg, and as I stagger away from the snake, my feet get caught in the snow, and I feel myself toppling over. As I hit the ground — back first and arms outstretched, like a snow angel — the black snake flops down beside me. I instinctively flinch away from it, raising my hand to protect my face, but the snake doesn’t do anything, it just lies there, perfectly still, utterly lifeless . . . and when I finally find the courage to shine my flashlight at it and take a good look, it’s immediately obvious that it’s not a snake. Of course it’s not a snake. Snakes don’t slither around in the snow, do they? It’s a length of black cable, that’s all it is. Just a length of black cable. And when I shine my flashlight up at the house, I can see where it came from. The junction thing (the thing that joins the telephone line to the house) is half hanging off the wall, and the telephone cable itself has been ripped off in the storm. The cable must have been buried in the snow, and when I slid my foot forward, the loose end must have sprung up out of the snow and whipped against my leg.
You’ve been bitten by a cable snake, Ella says, smiling.
If my teeth weren’t chattering so hard, I would have smiled with her.
I’m suddenly incredibly cold, I realize. Deep down inside, I’m freezing.
And I haven’t even reached the front gate yet.
The village road is just about wide enough for two cars, but it’s too narrow to have a sidewalk until it broadens out a bit when it reaches the village. Both sides of the road are lined with either thick hedges (of hawthorn and hazel and holly) or drystone walls — and sometimes both — and there are big old trees growing out of the hedgerows at irregular intervals all the way up to the village. In summer and spring, the hedges and trees form a lush green arch that’s so overgrown in some places that it turns the road into a tunnel, but now — in the depths of winter — the only greenery left is the strangle of ivy wrapped around tree trunks and the dark spikiness of holly. Everything else is barren and bare, like a world of gray-brown skeletons, their lifeless bones frosted with snow.
The fields that lie beyond the hedges on either side of the road are bleak and desolate too. Those on the left stretch out into the distance, eventually merging into the moors, and the fields on the right lead across to the edge of the valley and the woods down below.
The woods . . .
The woods.
They’re almost too terrifying to describe.
Imagine a steep-sided valley, a great trench of densely wooded land that follows the course of a fast-flowing river from the outskirts of town all the way up to the village and beyond, and then try to picture yourself clambering down one of the treacherous trails that wind their way down the precarious slope into the dark heart of the woods. There’s a silence down here, an eerie hush that magnifies the smallest sound, turning every snapped twig and rustle of leaves into something that’s coming to get you. The density of the woods seems to soak up and deaden any external noises too, so although the river’s nearby, the furious rush of the water sounds as if it’s a long way away . . . until, that is, you break out of the woods onto the river bank, and then all of a sudden the crashing roar of the river is so ear-splittingly loud that you can’t hear anything else at all.
Imagine that . . .
Imagine it.
I don’t want to, but I can’t help it.
My imagination of the woods and the river is just about all I’ve got. It’s based on a real experience — a barely remembered walk along the river with Mum and Shirley when I was two or three years old . . . still in a stroller . . . before Mum knew what was wrong with me, before she knew why I cried all the time. She thought it might help to take me for a gentle wander along the river, and if you start the walk from the National Trust pathway in town, which we did, it is just a gentle wander. But all I could see from my stroller, and all I’d come to remember, was the vast towering darkness of the wooded slopes, looming up into the sky like the walls of hell, and a furious roar of crashing water that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.
I cried and howled.
Mum took me home.
And I’ve had nightmares about the woods ever since.
The one good thing about my encounter with the cable snake is that the back of my pants are soaking wet and freezing cold from lying in the snow, which obviously isn’t good in itself, but it means that if I don’t keep moving, the icy dampness seeping through to my skin is just going to get worse and worse. Moving doesn’t make it that much better, but a bit better is a lot better than nothing at all.
So I get to my feet.
Brush myself down.
Take a deep breath . . .
And suck in a lungful of icy-cold air and snow.
And then, when I’ve finally stopped choking and coughing, I put my head down and get going.
The snow isn’t too thick on the main part of road (where I’m guessing it’s been plowed fairly recently), but all along the sides of the road, and up against the hedges, the snow’s piled in mountainous white heaps and windblown drifts, some of which are higher than me. So I don’t have any choice where to walk. I have to keep to the middle part of the road. Which makes me feel incredibly vulnerable, and far too noticeable, and belly-achingly scared.
The middle of the road is for cars.
It’s their territory.
I don’t belong here.
At least the cars will be going quite slowly, Ella says. Even the dimmest monkem isn’t going to drive fast in these conditions.
“Yeah, I guess . . .”
So when you hear one coming, you’ll have plenty of time to get out of the way. Especially since it’s so quiet.
She’s right. It is quiet. The wind seems to have died away now, and there’s an unnatural stillness to the winter darkness, a muffled white silence that feels as if the whole world has been softened and hushed by the snow. The quiet whiteness is relatively comforting (both sound- and color-wise), but I know it’s only a temporary shroud, and that underneath it lie all kinds of horrors.
There’s a streetlight just across from the house. It’s not dazzlingly bright, but with the lightening effect of the snow, it’s enough to let me see where I’m going without the flashlight. I turn it off (to save the batteries), put it in my pocket, then set off up the road.
All I can hear is the crunch of my footsteps, the flutter of my breath, and the beating drum of my heart.
I keep going.
Head down, eyes to the ground.
One step at a time.
My shadow precedes me, a monstrous thing cast by the streetlight behind me, and as I move farther away from the light, the shadow changes shape — distorting, twisting, warping — and I
can’t help feeling that it’s mocking me, taunting me with grotesque visions of what I really am, or could be, or will be . . .
I don’t like it . . .
I don’t like it.
Something takes hold of me then, a sudden strange fury, and I lash out in mindless anger at my shadow — lunging forward and stomping on it, cursing it, kicking it, jumping on it with both feet, desperately trying to obliterate it, destroy it, kill it . . . but it’s a shadow. You can’t kill your own shadow. It’s always going to get away from you no matter how fast you move. All you’re going to end up doing is stomping around in the snow like a lunatic. And if someone happens to see you . . .
“What on earth’s he doing?”
“Looks like he’s stamping on something.”
“Stamping on what?”
Joe and Olive Thwaite, an elderly couple from the village, were on their way to Darlington to pick up their daughter and granddaughter from the train station. It’s normally a half-hour drive at most, but because of the conditions — and Joe’s self-imposed speed limit of twenty miles per hour — they’d allowed themselves an extra hour for the journey.
“It’s what’s-his-name, isn’t it?” Olive said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield. “You know, the boy from the big house . . . the one who never goes out?”
“The crazy boy?”
“Don’t call him that.”
“Why not? I mean, look at him . . .” Joe shook his head. “Whatever he’s doing, it’s not normal, is it?”
Olive couldn’t argue with that.
“Do you think we should stop?” she said.
“What for?”
“To make sure he’s all right.”
“Does he look all right?”
“You know what I mean. We should at least let his mother know he’s out here. We can’t just —”
“He’s seen us.”
I would have seen the car a lot sooner if I hadn’t been so intent on trying to annihilate my shadow. As it is though, because it’s going so slowly that it’s barely making a sound, I don’t realize it’s there until the twin beams of the headlights sweep over me, and my shadow suddenly goes crazy — twisting around, splitting in two, before fading out and reappearing behind me.
