by R. H. Dixon
‘She didn’t. She’s just pessimistic about everything.’ Smiler had become flighty. Unpredictable. His nerves like stacked matchsticks that might tumble and fall or ignite and go up in flames.
Pity and mistrust warred within Callie, neither instinct dominating the other. She wasn’t sure how to read him, he was so convincing. She looked up to where the sun was hiding beneath an old, bobbly blanket of grey cloud in an attempt to cleanse her eyes of his face, otherwise she thought she might punch it. But looking up made her feel trapped. Beneath this particular stretch of sky, for all she knew, she could be anywhere in the country. Anywhere in the world. Her head spun like she might have drunk ten bottles of champagne at Antonio Drake’s party. The sky throbbed, or maybe it was her eyes, and she was aware of the lake’s blackness even though she wasn’t looking at it. It was silent, but horribly there. And the cabin, she could feel it glaring at her, victorious. She reached out to touch the Bentley’s raised bonnet, to steady herself, then looked at Smiler’s face again. Everything slowed down. Too abruptly. She felt sick. She filled her lungs with clean air. ‘If you’re lying,’ she said with strong conviction, ‘I swear to God I’ll kill you.’
Smiler held his hands up in full acceptance and together they went back to the cabin.
Pollyanna was waiting in the hallway for them, like an old doll that had been left too long at the back of a dark, mildewed cupboard, unfed with love. One that talked when you really didn’t want it to. When it wasn’t supposed to. One that moved when your back was turned. When the lights went out. Always creeping. ‘Told you it wouldn’t work.’
‘Don’t fucking start,’ Callie said, aware at once of the cabin’s damp smell; the insidious, festering stink that would make her lungs rattle and throat itch if she stayed for much longer. She could feel an unhappy kitten unfurling in her chest already.
‘You swear too much,’ Pollyanna told her. Her black eyes glistened like roaches’ backs in the shadows of the boxy passageway and her stick-thin arms stuck out at right angles from the wheels of her chair.
‘And you’re a little shit, what of it?’
Pollyanna sneered, her tiny teeth like popcorn kernels.
‘Will you two stop bickering?’ Smiler said, the plea mostly directed at Callie. ‘It’s just, like, can’t you both try to get on?’
‘We could, but what’d be the point?’ Callie squeezed past Pollyanna and made her way to the lounge. ‘It’s not like I’m staying in this shit tip.’
‘Oh? Where are you off to?’
‘There’s got to be somewhere else I can get to by foot.’
Pollyanna did a three point turn and wheeled after her. ‘With no shoes?’ She was enjoying this way too much.
She also had a point. Beyond driving off in the Bentley, Callie hadn’t considered how else she might escape. She scrunched her recently pedicured toes into the horrible carpet and cursed the fact she had no sensible shoes. ‘If that’s the way it has to be,’ she said, ‘yes.’
‘Look, I’ve had plenty of time to find somewhere else,’ Smiler said, fiddling with the scab on his mouth again and making it bleed. ‘And there isn’t anywhere. Certainly not that you can reach by foot.’
‘There’s got to be,’ Callie insisted, crossing her fleshy arms over her chest and making the crease of her cleavage stretch right up to the base of her throat.
‘But there isn’t. There’s no escape.’ His expression conveyed scared desperation, which made Callie think he was telling the truth. At least, what he believed to be the truth.
She sighed. Counted to three. Felt like weeping. ‘Please tell me this is a joke,’ she said. Her demeanour was suddenly weary, her limbs felt weak. All of the rage in her had depleted and she surrendered to the despair that was pressing down on her, trying to grind her spirits into the terrible depths of the carpet beneath her feet, alongside goodness knew how many years’ worth of cigarette ash and dead skin. ‘Candid Camera, maybe? Or some brand new show I’ve not heard of? Did someone set me up? Did they? Tell me. Was it my agent, Sam? Or Franky? Bizzle? Freya? Emma? Or…Landon? Was it him?’
‘Hey, I wish it was a joke,’ Smiler said, wiping blood from the weeping sore on his mouth with his thumb. ‘At least then there’d be a way out for all of us.’
A loud thudding noise from somewhere above in the uppermost realms of the cabin reverberated through wooden panels and floorboards, making all three of them look up to the ceiling and freeze. Callie could almost feel the weight of the building bearing down on her. She felt breathless and woozy and insurmountably scared.
‘See,’ Pollyanna said, with not even the tiniest amount of smugness. ‘I told you this place wouldn’t let you go.’
8
‘You can’t just go nosing about!’ Pollyanna moved with great finesse. She skirted round the couch at surprising speed and stopped at the foot of the stairs, glaring up. Her eyes were like cold pieces of basalt.
Smiler was already trailing after Callie. He turned and frowned at Pollyanna. ‘Let her look, Poll. Let her see what she wants to see. Let her see there’s no one else here.’
‘But she has no business…’
‘Just leave it, Poll. What does it matter?’ He lifted his arms then let them fall to his sides. ‘We have nothing to hide.’
Pollyanna didn’t argue, but she stewed at the bottom of the stairs; her arms folded and her entire countenance in a funk.
Callie glanced down. She thought about saying something, but decided against it. Antagonising the girl wasn’t in the least bit constructive. Her primary goal was to validate Smiler’s claim that only he and Pollyanna resided in the cabin, beyond that she wasn’t yet sure. Bickering with a teenager didn’t score highly on her list of priorities though, so she pushed open a door on the landing and stepped into one of two first floor rooms.
A warm staleness of too much Smiler and not enough ventilation greeted her, as well as the sight of a large unmade bed. The bed had a grubby velvet throw crumpled around its base and an example of taxidermy-grotesque mounted onto the wall above it. Callie supposed the stag’s head had been an intentional display of stagnant death by whoever had put it there originally, but now, however many years later, it had degraded from freshly-killed grandeur to decrepit monstrosity. Its fur was thick with dust and age, its eyes comatose-black. She hated it immediately.
Smiler touched her elbow, making her start. ‘This one’s mine,’ he said, indicating the room with a tip of his head. ‘Yours will be the next one along. If you decide to stay, that is. But, to be honest, I don’t see any other option. Sorry.’
Callie made a belligerent face. She had no desire to claim a room in the cabin as her own. She’d sleep outside in the tree with the ravens before it came to that. ‘What’s in there?’ she asked, pointing to a closed door next to the unmade bed.
Smiler frowned. Again. ‘I dunno. I’ve never been able to get inside to see. It won’t open.’
Looking upwards, Callie attempted to work out the layout of the cabin from where they were standing, trying to remember its shape and how it had looked from outside. ‘The tower’s right above this room, isn’t it?’ she said at last, shivering as she recalled how its windows had watched her with private black humour as she’d stood with the words DEAD TO ME in her hands, pulled fresh from her mouth, while nothing in the world made sense anymore.
‘Er, yeah.’
‘In that case, I’m guessing that’s not just a storage cupboard,’ she said, pointing to the locked door.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
She gave him a curious look. ‘Is there another way to get up there?’
Smiler shook his head.
‘So, wait.’ She paused, needing to clarify the situation in her head. ‘You’re telling me there’s only one door to the tower and you can’t open it?’
Lowering his gaze to the floor, he shrugged. ‘Er, yeah.’
Incredulous at the thought of having unexplored space above the
m, Callie laughed. It should have been a nervous sound, if anything, but came out forced and perverse; wholly inappropriate given the situation, yet uncomfortably comfortable in its surroundings. The out-of-control shrillness and suddenness of her own maniacal outburst terrified Callie. Almost as much as the dark possibilities that lurked overhead. Smiler regarded her warily. She covered her mouth with her hand and stopped laughing, feeling awkward and horrified and altogether too edgy. ‘Shit, there could be anything up there!’ she said, wide-eyed. ‘Why the fuck haven’t you tried forcing it open?’
‘Don’t think I haven’t.’
‘Not hard enough, obviously.’
‘Obviously.’
‘Maybe I’ll try.’
Smiler’s lifeless eyes became sardonic for the briefest of moments. His old self shining through? He stood back and gestured to the door with an open hand. ‘Be my guest. Let’s see you in action.’
Callie’s mouth tightened at the challenge. She hadn’t meant right this minute. Still, she tried barging the door with her shoulder a few times and rattled its handle up and down. The handle’s mechanism was stiff, but she felt metal grinding against metal, and the wooden door trembled against its wooden jambs. Like Smiler had said though, it was locked. No amount of pulling and shoving would open it. She’d need tools for the job. A hairpin. A chisel. A sledgehammer.
Smiler’s eyebrows were raised when she looked at him, like he expected her to do something else. So she bent and looked through the long keyless keyhole, even though she expected there would be nothing to see. There was only blackness. But it was a blackness that seemed to have enough substance to poke her in the eye if it wanted to. A blackness, she thought, that might seep out and touch her. Her scalp tightened and she shivered when some dreadful intuition told her that by looking into this blackness she had alerted something unseen of her presence.
She straightened up and backed away. ‘Okay, let’s see this other room you were talking about, Golden.’
Inside the next room she hoped to find a film crew camped out. A whole group of faces that would look up from amidst cameras and monitors and other electrical equipment and shout, ‘Surprise!’ At which point Miles Golden would reveal he’d been wearing theatrical makeup all along and that Pollyanna was his kid sister or something. Instead, when she opened the door, she found an empty room that was filled with too much red and white. Satin bedsheets were a large haemorrhage against stark white walls, and a canvas above the bed, the only decoration in the room, was an abstract splatter of red. An arguable piece of art that looked to have been created with all the speed and frenzy of a severed jugular. Three piles of folded clothes, menswear by the looks of it, were stacked on the floor along the window wall. ‘Whose are those?’ was the first thing Callie thought to ask.
‘I’m not sure.’ Smiler stayed on the landing, poking his head inside the room without stepping over its threshold. ‘I always presumed they must belong to whoever owns this place.’
That idea chilled Callie. Because if that was the case, then where was he? Might he be behind the door to the tower? A dark entity existing in blackness, in whatever state of life or death? Maybe he was the mastermind behind this situation, spying on them and plotting his next move. Or a third-party removed from the equation, murdered, his body hidden by someone else so that his property could be used for ill intent. Or maybe, ignorantly or not, he was someone who simply let the place out to kidnappers and sociopaths who bore no clearly defined grudges against the people they took. Whatever his circumstances, the absence of the owner of the abandoned clothes bothered Callie. A lot.
She stepped over to the window and looked out. Trees crowded the rear of the cabin, forming a blockade, and went on as far as she could see in a tangle of dark green, orange and brown post-summer foliage. She was trapped; hemmed in by woods on one side and water on the other. The wind threw a handful of dead leaves at her face, but the window caught them. Still, she jumped. She thought she saw movement in the darkness between two thick trunks below, but on closer inspection saw nothing unusual. Just branches waving.
‘Whispering Woods,’ Smiler said.
‘Lovely, I’m sure.’ Already Callie wasn’t interested. She hated woods. Hated outdoorsy stuff. Hated walking. Hated this place. She turned from the window and picked up a pair of jeans from the nearest pile of clothes and held them up. Levis. Thirty-four inch waist. Probably about right for Smiler these days, but the leg length was too long. Next she picked up a checked shirt. Barbour. Large. Didn’t mean anything.
‘They were in my room originally,’ Smiler explained. ‘I put them in here because it felt sort of weird having someone else’s stuff around me. Took a while to get to that stage though. At first I slept on the couch, you know, till I knew for certain there was just me and Poll. I mean, Poll always said that was the case, but, like you, I doubted it. I didn’t believe her. I mean, there was no reason for me to be here. I’d never been here in my life and I didn’t know Pollyanna from Adam. After a week or two went by and there was nobody else, that’s when I decided I had to get used to living here as comfortably as I could. What else could I do? So I cleared the other room out and tried to make it my own.’
‘Why didn’t you just use this room?’
‘I dunno.’ He picked at his chin, making the skin between sparse whisker growth turn red. ‘It just never felt right.’
Strangely, Callie could understand. Something about the room didn’t feel right and given the choice she reckoned she’d have taken the one with the stag’s head too. Even if it meant being closer to the oppressive, breathing blackness that was behind the tower door. She’d have wedged something up against the door’s handle and plugged its empty keyhole with damp tissue paper. But whatever dwelled in that blackness no longer seemed as threatening as the red and white room she was standing in now. Something bad had happened in here. Something terrible. She could sense it like sometimes she could sense oncoming rain. Ghost-white walls reflected a malevolent unrest, preventing it from soaking into the cabin so it might settle and lay still. Instead, this bad energy from distant or recent past kept a frenzied momentum between walls and ceiling, all the while being sucked in and blown out by sleazy bedsheets.
‘Looks like rain’s on the way,’ Callie said, wondering whether if she touched the bed the satin would absorb her fingers and pull the rest of her in.
‘Yeah,’ Smiler said. He was biting the inside of his mouth, his attention outside again. ‘I’d hold off exploring Whispering Woods if I was you.’
Callie went back to the window and considered the intent of the clouds. ‘I think I’d rather get wet than stay here any longer than I need to.’
‘But when it rains it really rains. I’m not even kidding. You’ll end up in trouble if you go out there.’
‘Compared to the trouble I’m caught up in here? I think I’d rather risk the rain.’ The whole sky was moving fast; a turbulent inflow of storm-grey. Callie turned round and cast the Barbour shirt onto the bed.
‘You aren’t in danger here,’ Smiler said. ‘But you will be if you go out there.’
‘Not in danger? Are you kidding me?’
Wind showered grit against the window and the first spots of rain began to fall.
‘Look, whoever the Bentley-driving note-scribbling head case is, he’s not in the cabin, is he?’ Smiler said with a certain amount of hand-talk going on. ‘You’re safe here with me and Poll.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Callie said.
‘I wish you would.’
‘Well I don’t.’ Callie looked down at her feet. ‘Are there any spare shoes in here?’
Smiler groaned. ‘You aren’t really thinking about going out there are you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What if he’s out there though? And besides, it’ll be dark before you know it. You can’t be out there in the dark.’
Callie got down on her knees and looked beneath the bed. He was right, of course. How
far would she get in the woods once night fell?
‘There aren’t any shoes if that’s what you’re looking for,’ Smiler said.
Unable to determine if he was telling the truth or not, Callie supposed it didn’t matter. Not at that moment. The first pangs of thunder grumbled in the distance, marking the incoming storm as a sulk above the mountains beyond the lake. Its arrival could be imminent. She would go nowhere just yet.
Back downstairs they found Pollyanna in the kitchen placing foil parcels onto a baking tray. ‘I hope you like baked potatoes,’ she said, not looking up from the task in hand.
Confused by the display of calm domesticity in the wake of the tantrum Pollyanna had thrown not yet half an hour since, Callie hesitated for a moment before answering, ‘Er, yeah.’
Pollyanna looked up and smiled. Smiled! Beneath the kitchen’s fluorescent strip lighting she appeared to be a different girl. Not entirely approachable, because there was still an underlying wildness about her, but certainly a lot less hostile. The light had removed shadows from her face and given her skin a marginally healthier tone. Her eyes were less black, more darkest brown. More human. And Callie could see now that she might have been pretty before the cabin had taken her for itself.
‘Lucky,’ Pollyanna said, still smiling, ‘because there’s not much else except roasted, boiled, fried or mashed. There’s always raw of course, but no one eats raw potatoes. They’re slimy. And cold. Like tongues. And slugs. Do you like slugs, Callie Crossley?’ An element of trickery crept to her eyes.
Callie’s guard was raised again. ‘Not particularly.’
‘Me neither.’
‘We also have tuna,’ Smiler said, rounding the kitchen table and stooping to pull the oven door open so Pollyanna could slide the baking tray inside.
‘Not today we don’t,’ Pollyanna said. ‘I threw it away.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m sick to death of it. It makes the whole place stink. And it makes my hands stink. It totally stinks. And I hate it.’
