by Ely, Jo;
She’s waiting for me to come, Zettie tells herself.
It goes against every instinct in the child’s small body, to head toward the most fearful seeming place in Bavarnica after dark. But Mamma will be there. My mamma will be there. Isn’t that what she said?
The child feels tuned out, strange. She sets off running toward her Mamma. Toward the killing forest, the slowly wavering fence.
Several miles away on the family allotment, Zorry turns, blinks, then goes back to her work. Wind’s getting up, she thinks. She waits a moment for the lights to come back on. Then realising that she’s out after curfew. I’d better head home quietly, she thinks.
And then Zorry hears it. Something that doesn’t sound strictly human. Shrill scream. High pitched but not a woman’s scream.
She shrugs. Something from the killing forest got in to the village maybe. It’s been known.
A Sinta whom Zorry only knows a little straddles the fence to the allotment with some difficulty, “Zorry …” He says. She examines his face and then she sees it. Written across his features.
She drops her spade.
“Zorry.” He says. “Zorry. The Egg Men. This … It’s your house, Zorry.”
ONLY ZETTIE SAW
ZETTIE HEARS DRUMMING IN her ears, her own heartbeat. Inside sounds. The world seems to move slow and strange around her. Sometimes she can’t tell if she’s running or if the cottages are only moving past her. There are Egg Men fanning out into the yards behind the Sinta houses. She looks back briefly. Someone is searching the copse out back of her cottage with a torch. Kicking the leaves and shaking the bushes. Their small search lights zigzag through the branches. Zettie keeps going.
Now she remembers what she’s supposed to do. She remembers it all.
Zettie follows Mamma Ezray’s training. All the way to the edge of the killing forest, then she stops. Panting. Rib cage aches. Feels sweat running down the insides of her arms, pools at her inner elbows. She clenches and unclenches her hands. They’re sticky, cold. The fence sways and the forest looms above Zettie. Swivels around on her right heel to look behind her. Mamma Ezray is not here but she will be soon, Zettie thinks.
Mamma Ezray never lets Zettie down.
Mamma Ezray does not lie to Zettie.
Mamma said that she would be here, by the fence, and she will.
The main problem is they’d never practised this in the dark. When the killing forest comes to silent life, groans and pushes against the fence. Zettie puts her arms over her head and her thumb in her mouth, she folds herself into the smallest ball that she can make.
There is a huge heavy, sliding thing just inside the fence, inches to the child’s right. Small red lights to either side of its long, slanted nostrils. She shifts on her small haunches. Zettie opens her eyes wide in the dark.
At night the white fence to the killing forest becomes transparent. After a few moments, whilst her eyes adjust, it is possible to see things through it. Dark shapes, moving. And a long, low moan that seems human, also not quite human.
Zettie keeps perfectly still.
Now the killing forest trees move apart in front of her eyes, Zettie tells herself that this can’t be happening. But the forest roof creaks open and there are leaves unfurling, it’s like a tunnel appearing in the trees. A long dark, leafy throat widening and then closing, and then ripples open again. And at the end of the tunnel, there’s the small light of the old moon. Wavering from side to side, as the child dips and wobbles, almost like it’s coming closer. Zettie rubs her eyes with her curled fists.
Something plops out of the rain barrel by the fence, flops wetly on to the grass by her left foot. Zettie doesn’t hear it jumping onward. A frog is a bad luck sign, the child thinks.
The forest sounds rise. Clattering and squawking in the branches.
Mamma Ezray always told her that she must be brave for this part.
There’s the sound of sliding again, bird shriek. Something moving sinuously up and along the inside of the fence, the whispering of several voices, just inside the fence. And now Zettie hears the heavy clomp of footsteps coming closer. And a loud hiss, someone saying her name, “Zettie? Zettie?”
Zettie is running once more, looping away from the fence, heading back toward home and the long copse at the back of her yard. The clomping heavy feet behind get faster. When Zettie gets to the copse, the figure leaps and fells her. She’s pinned by an elbow in her small back.
“Quiet child. Be still.” And now Zettie is fighting, biting down hard on the hand over her mouth.
“It’s me, it’s Jengi.” The voice says. “It’s only me!”
Zettie feels the scream rising up in her throat.
Jengi covers her mouth with his hand.
LAST LIGHT
“ANYTHING OUTSIDE?”
“Nothing.” Antek says.
“I thought she had childur?”
“There’s no one else. Leave it.”
“Do not instruct me in my duties, Egg Boy. I know you let the child go.”
The second egg man strikes Antek with the handle of his cow prod. It hits the side of the Egg Boy’s head, a sickening crack, thud. Antek is out cold.
“Get up from that, Boy.”
Black tile, white tile Mamma Ezray thinks. Looking across at the boy. The Egg Man rolls her over with his boot. Cheek against the cold floor. Black tile, white tile. And Blue, she thinks. Red. Blood is seeping onto the painted tile around her head, making a new country out of her father’s last map. It spreads out. There is no fear, she thinks. At the end. Moonlight filters in through the blinds, and then she sees it, whole, in the seam ripped through the patched up fabric. The old moon.
Like a soft gold thumb hole in the sky now.
Wind is rattling the back door.
Ezray rolls her swollen tongue along her jaw, examines the cracks in her teeth. The Egg Man seems to loll in and out of her eyeline. Now her sense of the room around her changes. She is moving in and out of consciousness, drifting. Zettie will need time to get … She thinks. Time to get to the copse and toward the … Toward the fence where no one would, where no one would … Time. The child needs time. And Ezray forces herself up again.
“Witch.” The second Egg Man says, sharply. Kicks her. “Stay down, Witch.”
But there is fear in his voice now.
Mamma Ezray curls her tongue around a front tooth, soft tug tug with her tongue and spits it. Small bloody spray where the tooth lands. Ezray grins with her missing tooth. Eyes him.
But her head’s still bleeding and the sense of things unravels in spools now, since that kick, since the boot, since the black tiles, white tiles, going on and on. And flecks of blue, she thinks. In between. There is a sound outside.
A gun is cocked. The second egg man tilts the blind to look out.
It’s just the wind now. Wind in the trees. Says Antek’s father, coming back in from the kitchen. And then, sternly, “I’ll check it out,” he says. Brief glance down at his boy on the floor. He meets the second Egg Man’s gaze. Squares his jaw.
“I didn’t hurt him, batch-brother. He’ll wake up with a headache is all.”
They are eye to eye. “You stay here and nurse your finger. I’ll be outside.”
“Anything?” The second egg man says to Antek’s father, moments later.
“Nothing. I’ve checked all through the copse, there’s nobody there. Just a gale getting up.” He looks down at Ezray, unreadable expression.
“I thought you said you wanted to finish this quickly?”
“Did I?” The second Egg Man holds up his hand and regards the stump of his index finger.
There’s no blood, but the Egg Man’s pain sensors, looking gnawed at the ends, hiss and fizz.
“Well. Curiously, batch-brother, I appear to have changed my mind.” He squints at Antek’s father, holds his gaze. And then soft, reproachful. “Don’t you want to take her alive batch-brother? Get some names out of her? That’s the protocol here. In a case like t
his one.” He flicks his thumb toward the prostrate woman. “This one has turned out to be pretty hardboiled. Who can say what a woman like that knows?”
Antek’s father seems to be trying to think of a reason to object, something that would lie within the general’s regulations. Finds nothing. Sighs.
“No names,” Ezray says from the floor, she’s semi-conscious and her words wash up like a voice in a dream. Drifting like a sigh, like a song, into the busted-up room. “No names, no names, no names in here,” she lilts. Gentle Sinta music. And then, like a harsh drum roll at the end, “Never,” Ezray takes a deep breath. And now Ezray seems to be listening to another kind of music, on the inside. Something nobody else in the room can hear just now. She tilts her head from side to side in time with the hidden drum curls and the tumbling rhythms. “I’ll go out like a light.” She pronounces.
“Like a light, eh? You don’t know Gaddys very well then. Do you?” The second Egg Man speaks whilst looking at his finger. “She’ll make you hate yourself before she’s done with you.”
“You should know.” Antek’s father is looking down at the second Egg Man. Slow gaze. And now the second Egg Man is looking at his ruined finger again. “I’m going to see that she dies slowly.”
Ezray looks up. It occurs to Ezray now to provoke the younger man into executing rather than arresting her. She doesn’t want to die naming names in Gaddys’ basement. “How’s your finger?” She asks, fully lucid now. Snarls.
“Nice try. But I’m not going to kill you, Sinta. I’m going to take you to visit with Gaddys.”
Ezray turns toward the old language like a blanket. She thinks of her father, teaching her the last words in the firelight after curfew, and only hold on to that thought, she tells herself. And boil that thought until it’s curling back to you like oil through water. Cover me now. The ancient, long-banned Sinta words seem to find her tongue.” Water.” She says. Out loud. And now Ezray’s surface is receding again. She is dying. “Five fathoms five my father lies.” She says. Sinking. Lifting her head up from the cold tiles to say the last thing, and then looking down dreamily at the old mapmaker’s last map.
Antek’s father is looking where she looks.
Now he moves in closer. Examines the tiles. Hand on his holster. Moves until he’s standing behind Ezray. She doesn’t look up, only senses his quiet presence there.
“You do not do, you do not do anymore,” she says. And then, “I can’t think straight just now.”
She looks tenderly over toward the Egg Boy lying on the floor. Soft purple bruise at the side of the boy’s head, blood clotting slowly at his wound. “Blood.” She says. And at first it’s as though Ezray’s speaking to no-one. And then, gazing up at Antek’s father, and once more a look seems to pass between them, “Your Egg Boy is bleeding. Friend.”
“Stop talking, Mother Cupboard.” He says. She looks up.
“Yes.” She says. Closes her eyes. She doesn’t feel the last blow, when it comes.
The Egg Man can’t say what he feels. Maybe he can’t even feel it. Anymore.
It was over quickly, he tells himself.
The second Egg Man is eyeing Antek’s father curiously. “It would have been better to take her to Gaddys alive. Wouldn’t it?”
“This witch knew nothing.”
And then Antek’s father is gazing down at Ezray’s slumped body. Blinks. Turns and strides quickly out into the yard.
The second Egg Man can just see him through the open doorway. Examines the slope of his shoulders, his lowered head. Scowls. He’ll be on a list soon, he thinks. Him and his mismade boy.
And now the second Egg Man is imagining how nice that would be. He’s looking down at the stripes on his shoulder. Another one would be nice, and the food rations to go with the promotion. The second Egg Man smiles slowly. And then looking down at Antek’s prone body, in a heap by the fireplace.
“There was meddling on this night and that’s for sure.” He scratches his nose. And then staring at his ruined hand. “And somebody always pays for the meddling … It’s not going to be me.”
Voices outside the front door distract him briefly. “We’ve got the flowers’ van. We are ready for collection. Have you got them? There oughta be three?” The red haired Egg Boy looks down at his clipboard. And then up at Antek, laying curled on the floor. Blinks.
“There is only one body. Take it outside.” The second Egg Man indicates Mamma Ezray’s corpse. “Take her the long way. Drag her past the copse out back. If there are childur hiding out in the yard, that’ll bring them to their mother in less than a heart beat. We can take the whole family to Gaddys, a job lot.”
They drag the mother cupboard outside, slide her over the cool tiles, past the slumped Egg Boy and the piles of her broken things. A slow trail of blood washes out behind Ezray, making a dark swathe right across the room to the door.
The back of her head bumps twice over the stone kitchen back steps.
There is only dark.
GONE
ZORRY HOPS OVER THE cottage wall, straddling the thing with difficulty. The body of the front door is seeping away from its hinges. Eases herself in through the busted hole in the wood, fingering the splintered edges of the door, as though looking for clues. Zorry passes into the dark room.
It’s empty. Scorch marks on the floor, smoking rags. The lamp is broken, the fire’s out. Zorry steps over a broken egg. Notes the chips in the wall. Other small signs of a struggle.
The dark shapes of furniture are crooked, wrong side up.
The floor appears to her to tilt, she sways and the ground seems to rise up to meet her. Catches hold of the wall and slides down it. Zorry is on her knees now, getting up slowly. When she’s on her feet again, leans her forehead against the cool brick. Not the in-breath, Zorry thinks, but the out-breath. That’s the struggle. She concentrates really hard on breathing now. Holding her gaze to the wall. The small indent from Father’s pot-throwing is still there. She looks at it for a long time. Something comes to her. Now she is moving slowly through the room, looking for clues. For some kind of trail. She is still swaying a little, but she stays on her feet.
Fingernail marks in the kitchen door, running down it. A fine red mist on the wall beside that. Small but adult-sized bloody fingertip-prints in the hinges, and another red print, of a palm, to the left. Zorry knows without looking closer they are from Mamma’s hands, not Zettie’s.
She looks down.
And then black tile, white tile. The curls of turquoise paint, swathes in the blue tiles, the tiny gold inscriptions. Zorry picks up the lamp. She examines the floor more closely. There are muddy footprints, crossing the kitchen in a haphazard pattern, running up to the back door. Blood is embedded in the patterns left by both sets of huge Egg Man boots.
Now she sees it. A large finger on the floor, from the knuckle up. It’s still wriggling obscenely. Curling and trying to point. Zorry forces herself to step closer to the writhing object. Confirming what she already knew. It is not Mamma Ezray’s but the thick boney knuckle, vein-strewn finger and curving yellow fingernail of an Egg Man. Mamma put up a fight.
It’s the first sign of hope.
Whatever it was that happened here, Mamma Ezray did not go quietly. But why not? She must have had a reason for resisting. It occurs to Zorry for the first time that Zettie might be alive.
She looks up, toward the open back door in the room beyond her. Eyes the broken kitchen window.
Zorry dips her head under the low doorway to the kitchen. Smell of tin and something else, she can’t say what it is.
She looks down again.
And now she’s walking beside the dark trail which runs across the kitchen. Blood all the way to the back step. And then, standing over the stone back steps looking out, Zorry finds she can’t move. Can’t take another step forward or back. She’s looking across the yard and beyond it, into the copse.
For one long moment, she has a feeling of rising up softly and away from her body. Where wo
uld Zettie have gone if she ran? Now Zorry’s mind seems to tune out, thoughts rattling, colours in the yard butt against each other, things blur. She holds on to the door frame with both hands. Nausea rising.
And now, from the looted, ruined rooms behind her, something comes. At first she doesn’t know what it is. But she smells Mamma Ezray’s plant smell, mixed with soap, candlewax. It’s like being washed by warm rain. Zorry doesn’t turn. Only letting the soft presence run over the back of her head and neck. Then it’s gone.
Gone as though it never were. Shakes herself.
Now the thought comes to her fully formed. Zettie would have gone to the fence.
And now Zorry knows it, knows it suddenly. With all the clarity of an intuition. Steps into the yard, sniffs the air. She needs to get to the fence. Fast. Something makes her pause, just a little longer. She can’t say what it is. Her left hand is shaking.
She looks back at the broken back door to the cottage. It has strange energy to it, the darkness in the yard and the copse just beyond, the dark open door of the cottage behind her, a quality of horror to the cottage back door, the step. This can never be home again, she thinks. There is no going back. Only on.
The back door is hanging off its hinges. One sharp gust of wind and the door hits the step, tumbles into the dusty yard. No one has put the chickens into the henhouse and they scatter from the falling door, soft clucking. Gentle squawks. The gale is picking up now. The tree out front seems to groan and complain, heaving up its leafy arms and rattling, twisting left and right, like a warning.
Zorry sees the Egg Boy, Antek, standing just beyond the back door, by the shed. It’s a shock and she takes a step backward, wavers. He puts his right hand up to the side of his head. There’s blood in the handkerchief, wadded up in his hand and he’s pale. Paler than she has ever seen him. Blood loss, she thinks. Ripping off the long cuff of her shirt, stepping carefully toward him, as though approaching a deer, or a child.
“You gotta bind it, Egg Boy.” It doesn’t occur to her to be surprised that the Egg Boy is bleeding. She realises only now that she has always understood that he was … human.
