Hugo & Rose
Page 26
But it was something.
Rose glanced down, through the small window of space between her shoulder and the cliff wall.
The canyon floor was distant. Miles away, it seemed.
A small sound of despair bubbled its way out of her lips.
A smatter of pebbles bounced down the wall in front of her face. She looked up.
She had not fallen far. Maybe twenty feet from the cliff top. Her eyes strained against their sockets for a view; she didn’t dare shift her weight to angle her neck for a better look. But even so, she knew.
The thing was there.
The outer prongs of its horns whipped over the edge of the Chasm for a moment. Rose could hear its sniffing. Smelling out her location.
She suppressed a whimper.
Above, the sniffing stopped.
Rose held her breath.
Then she felt it … the enclosure around her hand, the one that had stopped her from falling …
It was closing.
The rock was sealing itself, growing over Rose’s hand and wrist.
Rose cried out and pulled her hand free, the sides of her fingers scraping against the narrowing gash of stone. Her body swung down, held only by the little outcropping. Her fingers were cramping, protesting against the weight of her.
She sensed movement above. A small face peering over the edge of the cliff.
“Hugo?”
Beneath her hand, the outcropping began to shrink back into the rock wall.
“Hugo, please!” she cried.
Her nails broke against the rock, losing their purchase.
And then she was tumbling backward toward the floor of the ravine, the air screaming in her ears, hair blowing a soft cradle around her face. In the growing distance she could see little Hugo’s face watching her placidly from the cliff’s edge, a ready witness to her destruction.
Rose braced herself for the pain that would come with the ground.
Maybe I’ll wake up. Isn’t that what they say? If you fall in a dream that you wake up before you hit the ground?
Her body slapped a surface …
And kept going.
Rose was enveloped in a cool green world.
Water.
Bubbles flew upward, ascribing a trail to her plummeting body. Rose took in her surroundings, confused.
Somehow she had fallen into water, instead of hitting the rock floor of the Chasm.
Rose’s descent stopped and she righted herself. A white shape danced in the gloom. She swam toward it.
It was a woman’s body, her eyes closed and peaceful. She looked young, maybe thirty, and pregnant. Over her belly was an apron decorated with a familiar brown and yellow marigold print.
Rose recoiled, turning away from the corpse—
Right into another body floating in the dim. This one male. Rose could just make out the mustache on his still and silent face.
A scream of bubbles escaped her lips. Rose pushed away from them. This dead couple. Ghosts in the water. Sediment swirled up from the lake floor, and they disappeared into the cloudy murk.
Rose couldn’t see anything. Her lungs were burning. She needed air.
Something cold and hard brushed against the back of her hand.
A chain.
Rose clasped it and pulled. Hand over hand. Above her she could make out that the gloom was getting lighter … she was nearing the surface.
She broke it with a gasp.
The Green Lagoon.
Rose beached herself onto one of the enormous roots that bordered the edge of the pool. Her body spasmed, coughing up the insurgent water that had invaded her lungs.
“See! I could have let you hit the bottom of the ravine—but I didn’t, Rose. I could have hurt you, but I didn’t.”
Little Hugo was standing on the other side of the pool. He looked proud of himself.
Just in front of him floated the Plank Orb.…
Or rather, the remains of the Plank Orb. An ax rested in the small part of the vessel that remained seaworthy. It had clearly been used to create an enormous gash in its upper hemisphere.
Orphaned bits of wood bobbled on the surface of the Lagoon.
Rose coughed again, her cheek pressing against the rough bark of the root. “Who are the people in the water, Hugo?” Her voice was strained, torn. She barely sounded like herself.
“Nobody. Come on, Rose. I want to go back to the beach. I think the sun is going to come out. We can jump on the rainbow trail. You always like that.”
“I want to wake up, Hugo.”
“We’re never going to wake up, Rosie. You’re going to stay with me here forever.”
twenty-four
“What did you do to us, Hugo?”
Little Hugo was making his way toward her. Hopping from tree root to tree root. He looked pleased with himself. Like Isaac when he came home with a good score on a math test. Look, Mom!
“Let’s go back to the beach.”
“What did you do to us?”
“God, Rosie. Nothing bad.”
“Why aren’t we going to wake up?”
“Because I don’t want us to.”
His face was infuriating. Smiling Eddie Haskell shit-sated grin. Rose felt the desire to slap him grow in her palms. An itchy want.
“But what did you do?”
He rolled his eyes.
God, I hate it when they do that.
“He did it. But it was my idea. To take them. To give them to you.”
Rose suddenly became aware of a faint, familiar bitterness spread across the width of her tongue. The pills.
Grown Hugo turned to sand, crumbling away into nothing.
“How many?” she asked, but she knew.
“All of them.”
All of them. All of the pills. Divided in half. Swallowed whole by Hugo. Crushed and poured down Rosie’s unconscious gullet.
To sleep, perchance to dream.
Suddenly she was running toward him. Driven forward by fury, propelled by hatred of this selfish child who had taken her from everything she loved. Her arms raised. She did not care anymore that he looked like a little boy. She did not care that he looked so much like Hugo … whatever part of Hugo she had once loved was crumbling into sand.… And this thing wearing his skin needed to be destroyed. Ripped apart.
Her hands reached his shoulders, palms poised to curl around flesh—
And then she was stumbling onto the dry earth of the meadow. She tumbled to her knees, bent grasses caught in her fists instead of the insipid little boy she had been looking to throttle.
“Goddamn it!” she screamed. Why was she being tossed from place to place like this? Battered and buffeted around the island like some grocery sack in the wind?
Because Hugo is dying.
Rose felt the rightness of the thought. Maybe he had just tried to put them to sleep. To knock them into comas like the one she had been in when they met. A permanent dreamworld.
But he had overshot.
“Oh God.”
He had trapped her here. Trapped her here in his dying, collapsing mind. Lured her away and poisoned her so that she couldn’t escape his nightmares, the nightmare of himself.
Rose looked up. Castle City loomed a short walk away, its green walls crumbling a hundred yards distant. Rose could see that portico that had thrilled her weeks ago, the gate to the city, the long-sought-for way in.
Through it, she could see the streets of the metropolis.
A dead place.
She stood. All around her the meadow was littered with discarded dusty furniture and storage boxes. The contents of a thousand emptied basements and attics, church rummages and garage sales.
She took a step.
“Rose, I told you. I went to the city. You don’t belong there.”
He was behind her. The darkest part of Hugo. The part he’d left her with.
Rose didn’t turn to look at him. “What’s in there?”
“Things you shouldn’t see.”
“What shouldn’t I see, Hugo?”
Small showers of earth burst up from the ground all around her. Spiders making their way to the surface from below. In the distance she could hear Blindhead’s distinctive slither.
She heard him right behind her. Was he still wearing the little Hugo skin, or had he made himself look like something else?
“Bad things. Dark things. Nightmares.”
All around her the piles of furniture were waking up. Shaking life into their wood-and-fabric muscles. The hard-packed earth was giving beneath the giant carapaces of the island’s Spiders, bits of clay tumbling from their bodies as they pulled themselves out of the ground.
“Hugo, everything is a nightmare now.”
If he didn’t want her in the city, that was where she needed to go.
Rose ran.
And the beasts came after her.
Came after her on their stilted improvised legs, limping, hulking beasts. Half-things. Rose’s toes bit into the dry earth, pushing her toward the dying city. She felt the wind press drily against her eyes. The creatures were sluggish, partly formed. The Spiders not yet free of the ground.
The portico grew closer.
She could make it.
Rose gasped, one huge long pull of air into her dormant lungs. Had she been breathing before that? She thought of her body—not the one here running from these makeshift monsters, but her real body, her sad overweight poisoned body on the floor of Hugo’s house.
Rose regretted every ugly thought she’d ever had about her living breathing working body.
She willed another breath into her lungs.
She could not die on the floor of Hugo’s house.
She could not die.
She would not.
Rose crested the threshold of the city, pushing her way past the portico gate. She turned, ready to fend off the beasts.
The meadow behind her was empty of monsters. Wild poppies and brush grass waved in their stead. Rose bent over, hands on knees, recovering from the exertion. Another breath. Another breath. Another breath.
He’s still there. Even if you can’t see him. Still there.
Something soft and light pressed itself against Rose’s leg. A faint fluttering.
Rose looked down to find a piece of paper, pushed by the breeze against her calf. She peeled it away from her skin.
One of Hugo’s drawings. A self-portrait. The artist as an almost man.
A few more drawings flew by. Tumbleweeding. End over end past the reaches of her toes. There was a pattering. Like a summer rain.
Rose pulled her eyes away from the pencil sketch of Hugo’s dreamy, sad-boy face and toward the source of the sound.
A library’s worth of paper tears cried from the towers of Castle City.
Rose saw snatches of each page’s contents as they weaved and wended their way down. A watercolor foot. A pastel lock of hair. A limb in charcoal.
Hugo’s drawings fluttered down to the pink drift sand floor of Castle City. Pooling at the bases of the towers like windblown trash.
And the towers?
Rose pushed into the streets, reaching out to touch the wall of the nearest building.
It was flat. Painted plywood and two-by-fours. Like a stage flat in a high school play, it wobbled under her touch.
Rose’s heart hurt.
There was never anyone in this city. Never anyone for them to rescue. It was a prop. A painted backdrop, cheaply made. Empty.
Hugo’s drawings made flup-flup sounds as they freed themselves from one pile and flew to the next. Shuffling and unshuffling themselves by some unknown system of categories.
Rose walked through the city’s pretend streets, her feet sifting through that ubiquitous pink sand. It threaded hotly through her toes, breaking small rivers across the tops of her feet. The same sand that could send her bounding into the air. The sand that had spewed in a nightmare from the mouth of her son. The sand that had claimed Hugo … or a part of Hugo.
She stared up at the backs of the towers, making out the joins and the couplings of MDF. The supports and the struts on their unpainted sides, reaching impossibly high.
Hugo’s drawings went flup-flup. Flup-flup.
What the hell had it all been for? All these years. A lifetime of slumber spent trying to get to this ugly, vacant place.
Then she saw it. A brief flash of orange in the shadow of a tower.
The Orange Tastee.
Its fiberglass arms frozen midwave, dumping out into four-fingered white gloves. Jaunty blossom hat. Friendly leering wink. Battered screen in place of its teeth.
The speaker from the drive-through. First contact. The place where Hugo had first spoken to Rose in their waking lives. What had he said?
“Are you okay?”
And she had thought, No. I am not okay. Nothing about me is okay.
Rose felt like crying.
The Orange spoke. Hugo’s voice. It was fuzzy, distorted by the speaker. She couldn’t tell which Hugo was talking to her, young or old. But whoever it was, he was frightened. Pleading.
“Please, Rose. Please come out. I don’t want to go in there.”
“There’s nothing here, Hugo. There’s never been anything here.”
“Please come out.”
“What is it that you don’t want me to see?”
It was then that Rose saw it. The flat towers and sand of Castle City replaced in an instant, like a slide show moving on to the next frame.
Before her stood a little yellow house with gray shutters like eyelashes on its second-story windows. White trim eaves and a round shutter vent like an eye in the temple of its roof.
It sat on the bend of a flat river, brown, fast, and cold. The kind of place her father would call a trout river. A place for throwing rocks and icing beer in the elbow crook of a narrow valley. Gray-and-pink granite crags and pine reaches on either side. Just enough of both to keep the eye from lumping it all in one as “trees” or “rock,” but to keep it jumping, contrasting the softness of one with the hardness of the other. The air was rich with constellations of dandelion fluff. The seeds hovered, dancing above water, tumbling in the air before some unseen current swept them away.
The house was smartly distant from the banks of the river. Separated by an expanse of close-cut wild grass and a quartz rock drive. Everything covered in a dewy gloss of a summer rain, ceased momentarily. Though the sky above was still covered with a layer of tawny clouds, the sun was kneading its way through in spots … setting the white quartz pebbles and the scrub grass to sparkle for an instant whenever an insurgent beam touched the ground.
A pretty house. A pretty place. A pretty day.
This is what he didn’t want me to see? Rose took a step closer.
A small boat sat by the side of the house. A sportsman’s boat. Modest battered aluminum, small outboard on its rear. Too tiny to merit a name. Next to it a faded yellow station wagon. Fake wooden paneling on its sides.
And farther out … closer to the river, on a patch made muddy by the rain, sat a boy.
A circumference of action figures around his hunched form. Some small towers of mud and rocks in a ring in front of him. A playground for his toys. Somewhere not too far off, someone had made a tent of weathered sheets and chairs, pinning the faded hems under the chair legs so that they would not blow away.
Rose recognized the place, though her view now was different.
She had seen this river and this driveway from one of those second-story windows. Seen Hugo’s wife spin her tires, grinding away from him on this flat of land.
But now she was standing on the grass below. Standing above a child folded into a position she knew well … the pose of deep, concentrated play.
In the
boy’s hand was a Han Solo action figure. Loose white shirt, black vest. The toy was clearly well loved. Battle-scarred and bitten. Han Solo, the rogue hero. Rose smiled and took a step closer.
The boy looked up at her through a pair of Coke-bottle glasses, widening his eyes, the color of chocolate. And her heart stopped.
A screen door slammed and the boy looked away from Rose to the house. A man and a woman stood on the poured-concrete steps, relaxed smiles in the direction of the boy.
Ghosts from the water.
She in her marigold apron, stretched and tied above a high, pregnant belly. Brown hair swept into a shiny ponytail. Pretty and young.
And he with a mustache and easy smile. Sideburns and short shorts.
Hugo’s parents.
And the boy … Hugo as a boy … as he really was. Not the version of him she knew in the dream. Not the one who had been chasing her across the landscape of the island, sending her nightmares. The real Hugo. As she had never seen him.
“Rose. Please. We need to leave.”
Rose pulled her eyes from the family toward the sound of his voice, and there he was … the other real Hugo. Waking Hugo. “David” Hugo. Overweight, wrinkled, graying Hugo. He of the face that had stopped her heart in the drive-through.
“What happened here?” Rose’s voice was small.
He didn’t answer her. He seemed lost in watching his father lift the lid of the charcoal grill, checking the heat. Rose could see the resemblance. Father and son … though Hugo was older by a decade than the man blowing air onto the coals.
His eyes tripped to his mother as she brought a thick slice of watermelon to the boy on the ground. “Only one piece now, to hold you until the burgers are ready. Okay, sweetie?” The boy nodded. He held out his action figure in exchange for the treat. An everyday exchange. The woman slipped the toy into the pocket of her apron and gave him the fruit. Kissed him on the forehead.
“Hugo, tell me.”
Hugo’s eyes were fixed on the boy on the ground.
“It had been raining. For more than a week. It was summer. It finally stopped. I remember I was so happy. I was so tired of being stuck inside.”
Hugo’s mother, headed back toward the house, slowed suddenly in her motion. She stopped, turning toward the river. There was an alertness about her, a slight shift in her demeanor. Lips pursed. Eyes searching.