by Saul Black
How’re you holding up? His smile when he’d asked that meant nothing you could say would stop him doing what he was doing. It would just make him do it more.
She wanted to go back to her mother. She could stop, turn, say to the man: I don’t care what happens, just let me cover my mom’s legs and put my arms around her. That’s all I want. Then you can kill me. The longing to stop was so powerful. The way her mother’s eyelids had closed and opened, as if it were a difficult thing she had to concentrate on, very carefully. It meant… It meant…
The swish of his arms against the puffa jacket, the thud and squeak of his boots in the snow. He was very close behind her. The twenty yards had been eaten up. How stupid to think she could outrun him. The long legs and grown-up strength. For the first time she thought: You’ll never see your mother again. Or Josh. Her own voice repeated this in her head, you’ll never see your mother again, mixed with the man’s hey, cunt, and her mother saying, Yes but how much do you love me …?
She knew she shouldn’t look back but she couldn’t help it.
He was almost within touching distance, red hands reaching for her. In the glimpse she saw his mouth open in the coppery beard, small teeth tobacco-stained, the pale blue eyes like a goat’s, his sharp nose with long, raw nostrils. He looked as if he were thinking about something else. Not her. He looked worried.
The glance back cost her. She stumbled, felt the ground snag the toe of her left boot, threw her hands out in front of her for the fall.
His fingertips swiped the hood of her jacket.
But he’d overreached.
She stayed – just – on her empty legs, and he went down hard behind her with a grunt and a barked ‘Fuck.’
Her mother’s eyes saying go on, baby, go on.
Never again. The golden hare’s faraway life suddenly close to her own.
Things are just things. They don’t have feelings. They don’t even know you exist.
Nell could hear herself sobbing. There was a bloom of warmth in her pants and she realised she’d wet herself.
But she was at the tree line, and the afternoon light was almost gone.
FOUR
He was still coming. She could hear the pines’ soft crash as he went past them. The forest wasn’t in shock, as the house had been. It had mattered to the house, but in here it barely registered. The smell of old wood and undisturbed snow had always made her think of Narnia, the wardrobe that led to the magical winter kingdom. It made her think of it now, in spite of everything. Her mind was all these useless thoughts, flitting around the image of her mother’s face and the way she’d blinked so slowly and there was a look in her eyes Nell had never seen before, an admission that there was something she couldn’t do, that there was something she couldn’t fix.
Your jacket’s red, fig-brain, she imagined Josh saying. Red. Don’t make it easy for him.
She crouched behind a Douglas fir and took it off. Black woollen sweater underneath. The cold grabbed her with vicious delight. The jacket lining was navy blue. The smart thing – the Josh thing – would be to turn it inside out and wear it that way. She started – but her hands were faint, distant things to which she’d lost her connection. The hare’s heart was hers, now, beating into her pulse.
She heard him say, ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’
Too close. Get further away then put it back on.
She ran again. It had got darker. Somewhere under the snow was the off-road trail, but she had no idea if she was on it. The self-absorbed trees gave no clue. And there were her footprints. No matter where she ran he’d know. At least until the last of the light went. How much longer? Minutes. She told herself she only had to keep going for a few minutes.
‘Come here, you little shit,’ his voice said. She couldn’t tell where he was. The firs and the snow packed all the sounds close, like in Megan’s dad’s recording studio. Should she climb up? (She could climb anything. Nell, honey, I wish you’d stop climbing things, her mother had said. Nell had said: I won’t fall. To which her mother had replied: I’m not worried you’ll fall. I’m worried you’ve got monkey genes.) Should she climb up? No, the footprints would stop and he’d know: Here I am! Up here! She stumbled forward. Found firmer snow. Her legs buckled. Her palms stung when she hit the ground. She got up again. Ran.
The land sloped, suddenly. Here and there black rock broke the snow. She was forced downhill. The drifts went sometimes above her knees. Her muscles burned. It seemed a long time since she’d heard him. She’d lost all sense of direction. Breathing scored her lungs. She struggled back into her jacket. It was dark enough now for the red not to matter.
A branch snapped. She looked up.
It was him.
Thirty feet above her and to her left. He’d seen her.
‘Stay there!’ he spat. ‘Stop fucking running. Jesus, you little—’
Something rolled under his foot and he fell. The slope pitched him towards her. He couldn’t stop himself.
It seemed to Nell that she’d only turned and taken three pointless steps when she heard him cry out. But this time she didn’t look back. All she knew was the tearing of her muscles and the burn of every breath. Stones turned her ankles. Branches stung her exposed hands and face. Something scratched her eye, a mean little detail in the blur. The only certainty was that any second his hands would be on her. Any second. Any second.
FIVE
Upstairs in the house Xander King watched the boy on the bedroom floor die then sat down at the desk’s little swivel chair. The world had come alive, the way it did, but it wasn’t right. This had been a mistake, and it was Paulie’s fault. Paulie was getting on his nerves. Paulie was going to fuck everything up. It was ridiculous, really, that he’d let Paulie stick around so long. Paulie was going to have to go.
It was a relief to Xander to realise this, to know it for certain, despite the inconvenience, the work involved, the distraction. Anything you knew for certain was a relief.
The cool smell of new paint played around him, from the empty room across the hall. (He’d done a dreamy sweep of the upper floor: the woman’s bedroom with its odours of clean linen and cosmetics; another filled with neatly boxed stuff – vinyl records, Manila files, a sewing machine; a bathroom with the fading light on its porcelain and tiles – and the half-painted fifth room, small, with a wardrobe and a chest of drawers draped in painters’ tarps. A roller and tray, brushes in a jar of turpentine, a stepladder. It had reminded him of Mama Jean, up her stepladder in the lounge at the old house, wearing her sour-smelling man’s overalls, her face flecked with white emulsion.)
The boy’s TV was on, with the sound down. The Big Bang Theory. Another show like Friends, with too many bright colours. Xander found the remote on the desk and flicked through the channels, hoping to find Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Or Real Housewives of New York. Or Real Housewives of Orange County. There were a lot of shows he was drawn to. The Millionaire Matchmaker. Keeping Up with the Kardashians. America’s Next Top Model. The Apprentice. But no luck. His body was rich. He teased himself a little, looking at the dead kid’s blown-open guts then looking away, feeling the richness come and go in his limbs, as if it were a dial in himself he could turn up and down at will.
The kid’s guitar had fallen face down on the rug. The rug was Native American style. Which reminded Xander of a fact he knew: white settlers had given the Indians blankets infected with diseases in the hope that they’d all get sick and die. There were certain facts he was familiar with. Certain facts that made sense in the way that so much else didn’t. So much else not only didn’t make sense but exhausted him. He was constantly struggling with exhaustion.
Remembering the disease-blankets made his beard itch. A beard. He hadn’t shaved for four days. His routines had been suffering. The battery shaver was dead. The good thing about the battery shaver was that you could do it without a mirror.
He thought about the woman downstairs. He would go down to her soon, but for now it was very go
od just to sit and enjoy the richness. It was a wonderful thing to know he could go down to her any time he liked. It was a wonderful thing to know she wasn’t going anywhere. He could go anywhere and do anything, but everything and anything she wanted to do depended on him. His face and hands had the plump warmth that was both impatience and all the time in the world.
But still, it wasn’t right. Too many things, recently, hadn’t been right. There was a way of doing what he needed to do, and lately he’d been losing sight of it. The cunt in Reno, for example. That had been Paulie’s fault too. Paulie definitely had to go.
SIX
The world stopped and Nell flew through it. A non-silence like when you put your head underwater in the bath, the loud private quiet of the inside of your own body. She ran through the darkness and with every step knew she couldn’t take another step. It was as if his hands were on her and yet she was still moving. How could she still be moving if he had her? Perhaps he’d lifted her off her feet and she was just pedalling air. Like her mother’s bare legs kicking slowly in the blood. Her mother’s blood. Leaving her. Spreading on the floor. So much blood. When blood came out it didn’t go back in. Never again. You’ll never see…
The trees ended. A deeper cold from the ravine came up, sheer air and the sound of the rushing river far below. The snow was coming down faster now, at a wind-driven angle. The bridge was fifty feet to her left. Which meant she was half a mile from home, going the wrong way. But she couldn’t turn back on herself. When she thought of turning back on herself the only image she got was of him stepping out from behind a tree and the warm thud of her running straight into his body, his arms coming quick around her. Gotcha. She could hear him saying that.
She ran to the bridge. There was, incredibly, a parked car a few feet away from it.
Whose car? Empty?
She stopped. His car? With someone else in it?
She peered through the falling snow.
There was no one in the car. Could she hide under it? No. Stupid. First place he’d look. People nearby?
She scanned the ravine’s edge. No one.
There was no time. Move.
She ran to the bridge head.
A red sign with white lettering: BRIDGE CLOSED DANGER DO NOT CROSS
Rusted metal struts driven into the walls of the ravine. Wooden sleepers she remembered wobbling the few times her mom had driven them across in the Jeep. A mile to the west, she knew, the ravine narrowed to barely twenty feet before flaring out again. Last year an ice storm had brought a Douglas fir down across the gap. Teenagers proved themselves by crawling over to the other side and back. You had to go there and back. That was the thing. Josh and his friend Mike Wainwright had spent a whole morning working up the courage. Daring each other. Double daring. In the end neither of them had done it. Two hundred feet. The ravine’s dark air ready. The river waiting.
She edged around the sign. Her wet jeans were icy between her legs. The creases bit her skin. Her feet felt bruised. The snow here was above her knees. How far to the other side? In the Jeep it took seconds. She seemed to be wading for ever. There were invisible weights on her thighs.
Halfway across she had to stop and rest. She wanted to lie down. She could barely see an arm’s length in the slanting snow. The distance between her and her mother and Josh hurt her insides. She kept imagining it being morning, the grey daylight and the warmth of the kitchen, her mom turning to her as she walked in and saying, Nell, where’ve you been? I’ve been out of my mind…
She forced herself to move. Three steps. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. The end of the bridge. The back of a metal sign, identical, she supposed, to the one at the other end. A broken spool of barbed wire hung between the railings and dangled into the emptiness of the ravine.
‘Goddamn you,’ the man’s voice said. It sounded as if he were inches behind her. She turned. He was at the BRIDGE CLOSED sign, struggling to squeeze past it. It seemed impossible that she’d be able to get her legs to move.
She staggered forward. Two more steps. Three. She was almost there.
Something made her stop.
Apart from the whisper of the racing snow and the intimate din of her own breathing there was nothing to hear. But it was as if she’d heard something.
The actual sound, when it came, wiped everything from her mind.
And when the world fell from under her a small part of herself felt a strange relief.
This part of her – her soul, maybe – flew up out of the fall like a spark with the thought that at least it was over, at least wherever her mom had gone she would go too. She believed in heaven, vaguely. Where good people went when they died. Some place where you could walk on the clouds and there were white stairways and gardens and God – although she always imagined she’d rather just know he was around than actually meet him. She’d sometimes wondered if she was a good person, but now that it came to it, she wasn’t afraid.
Far away was the sound of grinding, metal against rock.
All around her the gloom and the snow somersaulting, slowly.
Then something rushed up at deafening speed to strike her face.
SEVEN
It was still dark when Nell opened her eyes, though she had no idea how long she’d been out. Her first confused thought was that she was in bed, and that the comforter was wet and freezing. Then her vision cleared. Not the comforter. Snow. Three or four inches on her. It was still snowing.
As if it had been waiting for her to realise this, cold rushed her, seized every molecule and said: You are freezing. You are freezing to death.
She pushed herself up onto her elbow. Too fast. The world spun. The sky’s soft chasm and the looming wall of the ravine churned like clothes in a tumble dryer. She rolled onto her side and vomited, and for what felt like a long time afterwards just lay there, though her body not only shivered but occasionally jerked, as if someone were jabbing her with a cattle prod. Through the cold she was aware of two pains: one in her right foot, one in her skull. They throbbed together, in time with her pulse. They were bad, but she knew they weren’t as bad as they soon would be. It was as if they were telling her this, with glee, that they were just getting started.
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. I’ll never see my mother again. It brought back the time she was very small and got separated from her mother in a department store. Suddenly all the unknown adults and intimidating heights, the panic, the full horror of herself in the world alone. The world had been hiding how terrifying it was. It drew back again half a minute later, when Rowena found her, but there was no forgetting it. And now here it was again.
Nell pushed herself back up onto her elbow and looked down. She was lying on a narrow shelf that stuck out from the ravine about fifteen feet from the top. If she’d rolled another eight inches she’d have gone, two hundred feet down to the dark green river and its scattered rocks. On the opposite side, struts mangled, the bridge hung, ridiculously, from one of its huge rivets.
The golden hare bracelet had snapped its chain. It lay in the snow next to her, in flecks of blood. You’re old enough, now. The hare marked the edge of her fall. Another few inches and she’d be dead. She imagined it had a certain number of times it could save you. This was one. She wondered how many. Very carefully, she closed her fingers around it. It seemed to take a long time to work it into her jacket pocket. Safe travel.
She got to her knees. The pain in her foot turned up its volume. She clamped her teeth together. Her head went big and solid and hot, then cold and fragile. Her scalp shrank. She couldn’t stop the shivering. She could feel the sheer drop behind her like a weight pulling at her back.
I wish you’d stop climbing everything. I’m worried you’ve got monkey genes. Nell had thought monkey jeans (chimps in little Levi’s) until Josh, rolling his eyes, had explained. She hadn’t really grasped it even then.
The ravine wall was frozen black rock, veined white where the snow held. Not quite vertical. Not quite vertical, but still.
I’m going to be all right but you have to run.
She reached up for the nearest handhold. Her fingers were numb. Her face flooded with heat. And when she tried to stand the pain in her foot screamed.
EIGHT
Paulie Stokes was in agony. His fall had brought him with the full force of his body’s weight up against what had turned out to be a two-foot tree stump half buried in the snow. His bent left knee had hit it hard, and now, back within sight of the house, the pain was so bad he was beginning to think it must be broken.
He’d thought she was dead.
He’d stood there for maybe fifteen minutes. Until her head had lifted. He’d watched her body get its bearings. He’d watched the little bitch climb. Climb, Jesus.
Xander couldn’t know.
Xander could not and must not know.
Which Paulie knew was an insane decision to have made – but he’d made it. There were a lot of decisions he made this way, with the sense that the thing they were intended to avoid couldn’t be avoided. He did this with a mix of lightness and terror and fascination. He lived a light, terrified, fascinated life slightly to one side of Xander. But the longer he hung around Xander the smaller and less reliable that life became. So now in a kind of looped dream he told himself Xander mustn’t know about the girl and Xander would find out and Xander mustn’t know and it was only a matter of time before Xander found out and he wouldn’t tell him and then the dream-loop dissolved like a skyrocket’s trail in the night sky and he took a few more excruciating steps with no room for anything but the forked lightning of his shattered knee until in spite of that the dream-loop started again and Xander mustn’t know and Xander was guaranteed to find out and he wouldn’t tell him and it would be all right and it wouldn’t.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Xander said to him, as he limped into the living room. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
