The sudden zip of light made him let go and leap backwards. The lighter fell into the base of the pile of bones. He reached and tried to wrap his fingers around it but it slipped. He went down onto his knees and scurried to the pyre, to where the sun trail of spark in his vision still pointed. He searched for it, prayed for it, pushing his hands through the bottom layer of twisted body parts that felt frozen, clammy somehow, coated with a layer of dust that stuck to his skin like green off of trees, only much darker, until he suddenly lost his balance and grabbed onto one of the limbs to keep himself from falling in.
He stood up if a voice had called to him.
Something was wrong. He stepped away from the heap of bodies and bone. All around were faint red eyes, watching him through the trees, like some flock of owls made of hot metal perched in the branches. He froze in place. The sky over him was black-red now, not like dawn. A mist seemed to creep out of the surroundings, covering the eyes for a moment, making them blink.
He turned and began to stumble away from the pyre, back the way he came, running where he could, struggling through one clutch of branches and another, all turning into black hands, wrapping in flame, soon to the dips and rises he had ran hand-in-hand with the girl, no time to remember the soft velvet of her flesh, no air. Nothing to do but flee, lungs plugging with smoke, with the taste of charcoal, with the black spit sticking on his clothes.
Behind him, ahead of him, the forest seemed to crackle with laughter, cheering for the blaze as it followed, wrapping around him, cutting him off, closing in, until there was only one path he could go. The world around either black or ochre. Sun blotted out. Night or flame. The void or the lava. No in-between. A dying sun, a giant sun, swelling, burning crimson, and expanding through space like a frog's throat when it searches for a mate, pulsating, scorching the world.
The boy found his way to the camp in the clearing. He pounded the side of his father's tent, though there was nothing solid enough to give noise, and then scrabbled around to the zip, trying to push his fingers underneath the metal tongue to lift it,
"Wake up! Wake up!"
He stopped and looked around. The line of trees around the campsite suddenly resembling a circle of gasoline poured around innocent men, branches burning like sacrifices, standing tall, taking it, approaching martyrdom, turning into ghoulish candles, stretching, not swaying, narrowing, shredding their foliage into sparks with a great rush of air, of heat that plunged into the sky, like a hot poker going into a quencher, hissing, screaming, so that all of the smoke was a mask, a shield, as if there was nothing there but clouds, no hint of the hotness within, as deep down the roots probably did run to gold, sucking out all the nutrients to burn like chemicals.
"Dad!?"
"What?"
"We have to go! Hurry!"
The zip started to open, caught halfway for a moment before it rumbled all the way up to the top, nearly knocking the boy down.
"We have to get out of here!
The eyes in the gap grew large, reflecting the line of fire ahead, behind.
"It wasn't me," the boy said.
His father looked confused, but calm. He reached back behind him to pick up part of his gear.
"We have to get to the car."
He came out of the tent and began to edge towards the circle of fire wrapping around the plateau, gesturing that the boy should stay back, using his hand to hold back the heat. He licked a finger and held it out to find the breeze. It seemed to do no good. He put an arm over his mouth and began to choke and spit up before going down on his knees. He shook his head but did not turn back, just stayed where he was, shaking.
The boy crawled across the clearing to him and knelt by his side. The heat was penetrating even low down. It began to burn. It hurt. But after a few moments it passed from pain to something else, as if he was being slowly choked in warm water. He closed his eyes, lips covered by flecks of spit that dried fast into hard white lumps like curds of milk. He moved closer to his father, as close as he could, in his shadow. So close that only pain would come if he moved away. His body had adjusted to the heat now. It had embraced it, as if the heat was all he had left. All anyone had left, in any of the universes swimming around his head, clustered like the tears around his eyes, fast drying and fastened up, all of those things that would fade to black and miss the pain of burning to death, one day, when it had passed.
It had to be that way. Space was not cold like the books said. He had felt it now, he was sure. He had basked in it. The stars were just the ends of glowing sticks, held up in the sky by a giant, by The Giant, creating a mesh through which to slip and slide, all the way to the tip of the galaxy, which swung around to the top and then back again. Some children's game like they had found in another house, with marbles in a tube ever poised to drop as one by one, the sticks were withdrawn and piled, perhaps until one world, one glass bead, one long-dead eye, remained on which to gaze, a globe with a flame at the centre, a crack running along the fault, just a tiny spec and then a gaping gulf.
He had already fallen, into the fire, through the fire, through the world, through the sky, and still was, repeating. Holding her hand. In her heart. In her fingers. And he lost sight of the camp. He lost sight of the trees. He lost all of the soft grass. All he had was a colour, not quite black, not down here, through the ground and the sky become the earth, become the air, all of the elements combining on a huge canvas in front of him. Used up, burnt up, flamed up, and ever speeding by him as he fell.
He looked to his wrist, to the bright white rope that had tied him to the girl, once, always, willing for the invisible thread to reveal itself, the thin silk that had joined them. He prayed for it to shine out against the blank charcoal black. It would only take one glimmer of light, the smile from one remaining star in the sky, just one tiny beam to fall on the thread and glisten, and then he would know she was with him. He would know there was hope, even if the cord between them was spooling and unfurling. He pictured a spider spinning the thread for him, for them, those little hands that worked at its web, sending it out without a trace of the globs of glue it contained. He tried to pull her to him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The rain woke the boy. It was hitting the roof of the house and then sliding down the windows, again and again, as if a million archers were stationed across on the hills, bombarding them. Archers that shot shafts of blue, sharpened by the tiny light from all the clouded daylight that sang as they fell, that whistled through the air, impacted with the thud of a bullet on a sheet hung over a fence to dry. The noise made it hard to think, like fingers drumming at the side of his head. It had woken him up, this song, this siren, and it would not let him go back. Somewhere in the distance was a crack of thunder, as if an asteroid just came through a layer of glass surrounding the world.
He was lying alongside his father, who was unconscious, on top of the sheets pulled across a double bed. The morning air was warm despite the damp. His clothes smelled of smoke, his body too, as if the fumes were coming up from him and hanging over in a haze. He turned to shield his face from the dim light from a large window to his right, and then rolled over again, unable to get rest. His arms were covered in cuts. It hurt to press on them. It hurt not to. He choked and sat forward in a sudden gasp, as if the flames coming through the trees had returned. He remembered running, but then what. Some vague memory of a car bursting into the camp, the Land Cruiser, the men.
He cleared his eyes to remove the blur, rubbing the grit from the sides with the back of his hand, wiping it on the bed. Across from the window, there was a white door with a brass handle, slightly weathered to green, a few dents painted over, tracks of velour running parallel to the frame of the door on the walls, a light switch flicked off.
Something didn't feel right. Some thought, not yet clear, started to jab uneasily at him from the opposite corner of the room, as if some small imp-like creature was sat on the dresser chair, preening itself in the oval mirror, dabbing its face with powder f
rom a pot and then applying blush, watching him through the glass.
He thought of the pyre he had seen come to life. He thought of the rain. He wondered how all the drops it had taken had affected it. He could see them if he closed his eyes, these long drips all pulled out with a stream of moisture behind like comet tails, all falling into the heart of flame.
The rain outside was fading now. It was soon quiet after the rain, save for the gentle scrape of the wooden beams across the roof over his head. There was something strange by the wardrobe, a pile of boots. He got off the bed, still wearing his shoes, dropping his feet onto the wooden floor. His father did not wake. He did not wake him yet, although he wanted him to, so that he could share this. So that he could wonder too?
He walked over to a pile of leather all huddled on the floor as if trying to stay warm. He froze two paces away, inspecting the pile as if some animal was hiding inside ready to pounce.
Further along, on the corner of the dressing table was an apple. The green it once held now only threatened the surface in places, while the rest had withered into brown patches with long lines in the skin that spread like the thick lines that very occasionally still hung from the communication poles they had passed on the road that sunk down in the middle.
He considered if there really was a tree inside such a small space, just waiting to come out. He flexed his fingers around the side of it, not daring to push too hard in case it split into black. Didn't the tree only grow from the apple because the fruit took other things from the soil, and pushed it into a trunk to grow up to the sk?. Without soil this apple would just stay pretty much like it was now, like a planet floating in the void to be swallowed by the sun, a planet floating until it rot. Until they all did.
He put the fruit down. Had this trip been meant to grant him a certain responsibility? Had his father tried to plant an idea in him, to set him out on a search for truth, a search for belonging, in a place that despite his years, despite his reach, he didn't really know? For what was the world but a personal experience, lives, thoughts, faces, rolling up together, into red clay, turning into rock, into trees, into rivers, into sprites.
"Do you like to believe in monsters?" his father said, making the boy jump.
He turned to see him sat forward in the bed.
"I guess."
"Well, you're right to."
His expression did not change. He stared ahead as if resigned, as if given up. That didn't make any sense. They may have lost their things, their camp, their car. But they were alive.
"Why?"
"Because."
"Are you ok?"
"For now..."
"Well, do you believe in them?"
"I do. In a sense... I said I'd be honest with you didn't I? See, I used to think monsters were invented as a way to see ourselves as good. I mean, if we believe in monsters it's like creating something that's evil. It makes us seem somehow better, because we're not them. But, I mean... there is no evil. Not really. We invented evil. And we can, we can."
"What?"
"... Try to forget?"
"I don't understand what you are talking about... You remember the fire?"
He walked over to the bed and pushed his hands onto the frame to support his weight, leaning in. It was one of those older style beds made out of dark wood and ends that curved up and around like a large sledge.
"You kept asking about hunters, didn't you?"
He nodded.
"You think that's evil?"
"I don't know..."
What had the girl said? That we don't have a choice? That we can't talk to animals. We can't communicate with them. So we end up having to run things our way. As there is no other way. Maybe that's why we call some of them monsters. Because it makes it seem better, to hunt to catch, because people can't trust nature if it can make a monster? They build the big walls and keep all of that outside.
His father smiled at him.
"So monsters are or aren't real?" the boy asked.
"Monsters are just words to describe things we don't understand. So anything we don't like can be a monster. Other people can be monsters. That's what I'm trying to say. Because then they are not us, they are not within us, they are different from us, and we can neglect them, we can dominate them, we can do what we please to them, because they aren't us."
"So?"
"What I'm saying is that to someone else, we could be monsters too." He had tears in his eyes now. "Have you thought about that?"
"What is it?" the boy said.
"You have to know..."
"Do you remember last night? The car?"
"We may not have much time."
"What is it?" the boy said, turning away, to where he saw once again the flames that had flown for him from those trees where they had sat with red eyes, and the smoke, and the run, and waking up, choking, sleeping again. The chrome edges of the car, the tally marks, the dirty red paint.
"We're in trouble," his father said.
"What? What's happening?"
"We shouldn't be here."
"It's ok. You don't remember the fire?"
"I remember."
"I told you it wasn't me. I told you... And you struggled through the smoke. And..."
"I must have passed out," he said.
"They came to get us."
"The men with the Land Cruiser?"
"Yeah."
"And the girl?"
"Yes."
"Hunters."
"I don't think it's like that."
"It is," he said, turning away.
The boy moved to look him in the face. He lacked colour, his eyes flitted around the corners of the room, to the window, to the door, spinning, trucking, glistening with sweat like the rest of him.
He stood suddenly and moved away from the bed, walked towards the wall as if he was about to step into it, to have it knock him out. He stopped and put his palms on it, leaned into it hard, until the veins in his hands stood prominently. He composed himself and then began to walk around the room like a rodent in a cage, pressing his hands against the walls and rubbing at the satin stained wallpaper as if to find the latch to a hidden door, following the beige lines that might have once been covered with gilt, with guilt, like the gold in the limbs of the trees, in her hand, in her eyes when the boy had looked into it.
"What's going on?" he said.
His father turned and shushed him, putting a finger over his lips, long and covered in charcoal powder like the end of a gun. Then he went back to apparently searching for some hidden door, or a secret compartment that perhaps he knew about, as if he had been in this space before, putting his ear to the wall as if to hear the click. Then he crouched down on his knees and began to crawl, rubbing his hands on the large rug in circles, over rough edges and clumps where the fibres had matted together, same thing, same search, perhaps there was a trap door beneath that he could lift up and see them free.
The boy pulled the pillow so that he could lean against it and cushion his back. The feathers inside had all sunk to one end of it as if trapped by gravity. He turned it but the feathers didn't feel that pull the way other things did, or at least resisted the fall, as they might, as all of these actions suggested. Were they falling? Was it possible to know. He remembered the sensation in dreams sometimes, the memory of.
It had happened for real when he had explored a dark house up the road from one of the places in which they had stayed, without his parents knowing, whilst they had searched the house next door and he had snuck away, up the wooden stairs into the loft full of boxes of photographs that made no sense, paintings turned to face the walls with limp string at the back, and a gaping hole into the night at one end of the loft with a plank angled down to the roof of the next house that he had crawled across and entered, another loft, another collection of boxes, but sealed so much darker than the one before.
It was here he had stepped forward in the gloom and found the gap, the place where the floor was missing, where he had falle
n in the dark, turned side on, and it had felt like forever until he had crashed into the room below, onto the side of a bed that had collapsed under the weight of the ceiling. A bed that did not bounce like the ones he had jumped on as he grew older, until it didn't seem to work the same, like this bed, with its wooden frame, with its wooden flame, the sticky sense of the fire on the sheets, the smell of smoke, and hope, and all of the flecks of gold burned through to coal, where he now fell back, shaking his head.
"But they saved us?"
"No," his father said.
"No?"
"No -- You were right all along."
"How?"
"They are bad men."
"How do you know?"
He had made his way back to the bed, crawling on the floor. He pressed his head down to the planks when he got to the frame and looked underneath in the direction of the window, where a glowing slice of light from the sun made a sharp contrast from the shadow. The boy moved to the side of the bed and leaned out and over, holding onto the bottom sheet to stop himself from sliding around and hitting the floor. There were two boxes under there and his father wriggled towards them, putting his arm out as far as he could and trying to grab hold and turn them around, settling for pushing them towards the light at the other side, by the window and going around to get them.
"Well?" the boy said.
"Because they've locked us in here."
"What?"
He did no reply as he inspected the outsides of the boxes, turning them around. They weren't sealed, but the flaps at the top had caught hold of one another and he had to work a finger inside them to spring them free. He put his nose into the top of the first one, pushed it aside and tried the second.
"Why'd they lock us in here?" the boy said.
"Because..."
The Lanyard Page 11
