by G X Todd
He gripped the rock in his stronger right hand as he went from house to house. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it’d do its job if anyone chose to ambush him. Upon entering each house, he spent five minutes on the threshold, listening, not moving until he was satisfied his was the only presence. And even then he felt edgy, watched. He wasn’t sure if this was a normal emotion for him, but either way he didn’t like it.
In the third house he found an almost-empty bottle of bleach in the upstairs closet. In the fifth, he found water in the cistern in the en-suite bathroom. He added a few drops of the bleach to it and drank it all, the taste metallic and harsh. In the eighth house, he found a bottle of aspirin in a first-aid box hidden under a workbench in the garage, and filled an old saucepan with the remainder of the water in the hot-water tank. It almost filled the pan. He drank half in one go and chewed on four of the painkillers. He left the house.
Turning a street corner, he glimpsed a figure dart past on his left. Pilgrim’s head snapped around, his arm coming up, brandishing the baby’s-head-sized rock, ready to slam it down on his attacker. He immediately regretted the movement as pain engulfed his head and neck and shoulder. All that greeted him was a deserted street, some sad, droopy-looking trees and two rows of perfectly matching overgrown front yards. Groaning quietly, he lowered the rock, feeling awkward and foolish. More emotions that didn’t sit well with him.
Weeds and vines spewed out of the sidewalk drains, leading down into the sewers, but, though technically alive, they and nothing else on the street moved. He briefly pressed his palm over his left eye. It felt hot and tender to the touch.
He stood for a while, giving the figure a chance to reappear, and while he did more swirls of dark blood drifted past the damaged vision in his left eye. He sighed. He couldn’t even trust his own eyesight any more.
He went back to his search. In five out of the next eight houses he found bodies. Thankfully, he hadn’t needed to add to them by caving anyone’s skull in. Many were strung up with makeshift nooses, two had self-inflicted gunshot wounds, a family of four was in a garage, slumped in the seats of their Nissan people carrier, a pipe running in from the silent car’s exhaust to the back window. And the last body he found had, quite creatively, taped a plastic bag over its head. The bag had Mickey Mouse on the front, his black, circular ears perfectly covering the corpse’s eyes.
For many people, their deaths had been a private affair, undertaken in the safe confines of their homes or in secluded spots. Those who acted on impulse, or lacked sufficient time to plan, had had no qualms about taking their lives, or anyone else’s, in public.
As Pilgrim wandered from house to house, he didn’t look too closely at the framed photographs of smiling family members on mantelpieces and side tables, didn’t look at the stuffed toys arranged on the window seats in the pink- or yellow- or purple-painted bedrooms, or the empty cots with soft baby blankets lying disturbed and covered in dust. He didn’t want to see the happy faces of the dead people whose homes he was ransacking.
He found himself standing on a front driveway, the half-filled saucepan held in front of him, not knowing how or when he had come outside. He was staring at a crack in the blacktop, a weed poking up like a frilly, green handkerchief. His eyes shifted to the pan he held. He frowned. He was missing something, and it took him a moment to realise he’d lost his rock somewhere. He quickly glanced around, checking for any more darting figures, but he remained alone. His worry abated a little. He tilted his head back to regard the endless blue sky. Everything was so quiet. Unnaturally so. It didn’t feel right.
‘Hello?’ he said.
There was no reply.
His sense of disquietude was broken by a large, ear-popping yawn. Exhausted, he went inside and found his rock on the dining-room table where he now remembered leaving it. He lay down on the first couch he came across, placed the saucepan of water carefully beside him and fell asleep with the rock balanced on his stomach.
When he opened his eyes, it was still light outside and he knew where he had to go. He took three more aspirin, finished the water and was leaving the house when a soft creak came from upstairs, followed by the closing click of a door.
He stood for a moment, one foot in, one foot out of the house, and cocked his head to listen. There were no further sounds, and yet he knew someone was up there. Had been in the house the whole time, creeping around him while he slept. The thought should have troubled him, should have set off alarm bells, but it did neither of those things. Leaving the front door open, he retraced his steps to the foot of the stairs.
There was a strong pull on him to leave, to move, but something held him back. He set the rock on the second step and started climbing.
He didn’t bother with three of the closed doors on the landing but went straight to the fourth. Gripping the handle in his weak left hand, he turned it and pushed.
The first thing he noticed was the body of a child on the bed. The arms and legs were stubby, disproportioned. Its mop of coarse hair spilled across the dusty pillow. No, not a body, but a child’s life-size doll. It lay partially hidden beneath a pink bedspread.
The second thing he noticed was the boy huddled in the corner. The boy was very much alive. He stared at Pilgrim with big dark eyes.
The third and final thing Pilgrim noticed was the knife the boy held. It wasn’t pointed at him threateningly but pressed to the boy’s own wrist; it had cut into the skin. A thin dribble of blood wound its way under his forearm and dripped red dots on to the grey carpeting.
Pilgrim stayed in the doorway. He gazed at that thin line of blood and said, ‘Thanatos.’
The boy frowned, a vulnerable quirk to his brow that spoke more of his uncertainty than of any fear.
Pilgrim frowned, too, not sure where the word had come from. ‘Don’t,’ he told the boy. ‘Don’t do that.’ It took a lot of concentration to get those three words out; it was like trying to speak around a mouthful of stones.
The boy’s wrist was dented inward by how hard he was pressing. The knife trembled in his grip.
Pilgrim had to consciously move his tongue around his mouth to form syllables. ‘What’s your name?’
Slowly, from side to side, the boy’s head shook.
‘No names? OK. You . . . live here?’
Again, a shake of the head.
Pilgrim worked the mechanics of his mouth, forcing his jaw open and closed. ‘Man of few words.’ He nodded in understanding.
The boy’s expressive eyes took on a curious cast. ‘What has happened to you?’ He had a strange, lilting way of speaking, almost musical, not native.
Pilgrim took a couple of careful steps into the room and crouched down, putting himself and the boy on the same level. He stayed near the foot of the bed, leaving a good six feet between them, and used the bedstead to lean against. He was grateful for the support. ‘I lost something . . . important. Now I need to find it again.’ Pilgrim waved a hand next to his head, frustrated at the damned obstructions inside it. ‘I’m having trouble . . . finding my words today.’
‘Where did you last see it?’
Pilgrim flicked a look at the knife. Detected a slight lessening in the pressure of the blade. ‘I think at the—’ He struggled with the word, couldn’t find it, said instead: ‘the building with books’.
‘The library?’
‘Yes. The library.’
‘You should go back. See if it is still there.’
Pilgrim nodded. ‘That was the plan.’
The boy regarded him earnestly. ‘You know the thing you have lost?’
He hadn’t, but as soon as the question was asked the answer was waiting for him. ‘A girl.’
‘She is related to you?’
‘No. Just a girl.’
‘But she needs you?’
‘Yes.’ Pilgrim asked a question of his own. ‘How old are you?’
‘I am thirteen. How old are you?’
Pilgrim cracked a smile. ‘Too old to remembe
r.’
A small smile visited the corners of the boy’s mouth, then solemnness stole over his face again. He lifted the knife’s tip from his wrist. ‘Sometimes . . . sometimes it is good to talk to another person. It can be lonely.’
Pilgrim nodded. ‘It can. But sometimes it can also be peaceful.’
‘Yes. Sometimes.’
Pilgrim glanced down at the knife, which the boy now held loosely in his lap. ‘You have parents?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Family?’
‘Yes. They are dead.’
The way he said it held such finality.
‘You’re here alone, then?’ Pilgrim glanced around the bedroom, although he already knew it was empty except for him, the boy and the limp-limbed doll on the bed.
‘Not fully alone, no,’ the boy replied, and Pilgrim sharply returned his attention to him, but the boy only added: ‘I am here, speaking with you.’
Pilgrim made a soft noise of agreement but remained unsure as to whether the boy had meant something more. A snake of suspicion curled restlessly inside him, and he was at a loss to explain why.
The boy nodded to him, a formal bob of his head. ‘I will be OK. Thank you. See?’ He waggled the knife and placed it beside him on the carpet, that wisp of a smile coming and going again. ‘No more bad thoughts.’
Pilgrim was unconvinced. The boy had appeared to be on the brink of slitting his wrists when he first entered the room. It felt wrong to leave him in this empty house with the bodies of so many old suicides littered around, all reminders that maybe escaping into death was better than the existence in which they currently lived.
Pilgrim felt that tugging sensation again, that urge to move riding his limbs, nudging at him to stand and go back downstairs and out into the daylight. Too much time is passing, that tugging said. More time than you have.
He held out his empty hand to the boy. ‘Would you come with me? At least as far as the’ – he grasped hold of the word before it could slide away from him again – ‘the library.’
The boy’s dark eyes dropped to his open hand, then lifted to his face. There was a trace of something sparkling in their brown depths.
‘Hari,’ the boy said quietly.
Pilgrim frowned. ‘Hari?’
‘Yes. Hari. That is my name.’
CHAPTER 2
Pilgrim drove the juddering car to the library, his teeth gritted against the squeal of the metal rim against asphalt, the sound driving jagged pieces of glass into his head. On each street, he inspected every house – the eyes of their windows, the mouths of their doorways, the fabric of their exteriors – in search of any recent signs of activity. He might as well have been searching for life on Mars. The town appeared completely abandoned except for him and the boy, but there had to be people somewhere. This town was the perfect size: not big enough to warrant undesirables travelling here to scavenge but sizeable enough to offer decent comforts and amenities. Yet, there were no signs of life.
Between Pilgrim’s increasingly perturbed sweeps, his eyes drifted over to his passenger.
Hari sat beside him, his arms wrapped around the hemp satchel in his lap, gazing silently out of the passenger window. Before leaving the bedroom, the knife had disappeared inside the bag and the boy had taken out two rice cakes, giving one to him. Pilgrim had eaten it ravenously while the boy watched wide-eyed. Hari had then offered him the other half of his own rice cake, and Pilgrim had eaten that, too.
‘Were you heading somewhere?’ Pilgrim asked, his question pulling the boy’s attention away from a yard they were passing, a rusted mower sitting in the middle of a tangle of grass.
Hari nodded, a single bob of his head, as if this were his default affirmative setting. ‘There is a place. By the sea.’
Pilgrim remained quiet, waiting the boy out, and after a few more seconds Hari said, ‘It is a secret place. An Inn. Hidden away. ’
‘And you’ve been there before, to this . . . Inn?’ The more Pilgrim talked, the easier the words came, his lips and the muscle of his tongue no longer resisting his every attempt to wrestle them into line.
The boy looked thoughtful. ‘No. But I have read about it.’
Pilgrim took a left turn, using his right hand to do most of the steering. His body automatically guided the car, and Pilgrim let it, trusting his instincts. He made another alert study of the street as they came on to it. The library parking lot was coming up on their right.
‘And you trust whoever wrote about it?’ he asked, glancing over at the boy.
‘Yes.’ The boy rubbed his fingertips over his lips, glancing at Pilgrim from the corner of his eye as if afraid to make direct eye contact. ‘I was also told about the red skies. Do you know of them?’
Pilgrim’s heart flipped in his chest – only a small blip – as if his body knew exactly what the boy spoke of but his brain was unwilling to make the connection. A second contraction lanced through the back of his head as if warning him against asking questions. He winced through the pain. ‘No. I don’t think so. What are they?’
‘It is said that, if you see them, then you will not easily forget.’
Pilgrim had forgotten many things, but who was he to argue? He wanted to tell the boy he was being too cryptic, but his tongue rebelled at the word and outright refused to shape it. Instead, he said, ‘You’re not being very clear, Hari.’ He swung into a parking space in front of the library’s main entrance and stopped. The clunking engine fell silent.
‘Many things are unclear to me also,’ the boy said quietly, his expression serious. ‘But there is no place here for me. So I will go there, and see what I find.’
Pilgrim sat for a long moment, staring out of the windshield at the open entranceway to the library, watching in fascination as a faint, fuzzy ring of blackness pulsed around the doorway. It throbbed in sync with his pains, his left eye narrowing as it intensified in bursts. His wrists rested casually over the steering wheel, though he felt anything but casual. He could feel the boy’s eyes on him. What was he to do with him? He had nothing to offer, no food, no protection; only a ride.
‘Hari, I think it will be dangerous where I’m going. I’ll take you as far as I can, but that’s all I can offer.’
A nod. ‘This girl you are looking for?’
Hari’s expressive eyes were so darkly reflective that Pilgrim could see a shiny version of himself staring back at him, distorted, larger than life. It was disconcerting, having Hari’s eyes swallow him up so completely.
‘This girl is very lucky to have a friend such as you.’
Entering the library, Pilgrim left Hari in the foyer and headed downstairs, flipping his Zippo open on the way and thumbing it alight. With the trembling flame guiding him, he found the dead man.
Everything was floating back up, appearing slowly through the murky waters of his mind. Upon seeing the dead man, Pilgrim remembered the papier-mâché spider and how the man had kicked it into the alcove room. Raising his head and squinting closed his blurred left eye, Pilgrim looked towards the dark opening to the room hiding under the stairs. The room pulled at him like a physical hand tugging on his shirt.
Crossing the threshold, his gaze fell on the beanbag. There was a depression in it and a picture book lay open on the floor. He knelt beside the chair and, spying an accumulation of wax congealed on a shelf just above it, sat his burning Zippo in the spot. He rested his palm on the seat of the beanbag, the material coarse to the touch, the impression of a person still indented into the polystyrene balls. The woman had sat here. He could see her in the wavering light of the flame, her dark blonde hair, her bruised face and her mostly-shadowed eyes; eyes that seemed to watch him, probing at his soul as if trying to pick it apart.
What was her name?
He knew it. He knew he knew it.
But it wouldn’t come.
Frustrated, he held on to his sore ribs with one hand and swivelled around and sat in the chair, the soft rustle of the polystyrene a strangely furtive noise.
That’s w
hen he saw the tree. It grew tall in the corner of the room, cloaked in shadows. The hidden birds in the branches watched him with black eyes. Its colours were concealed by the darkness, and yet he knew the leaves were a diaphanous tissue green and the bark was painted an abrasive brown. He could feel the roughness of it under his palm.
The tip of his tongue touched the edges of his front teeth. Retreated again. Crept back to feel out a shape. An L.
‘Lacey,’ he whispered.
And another name. Almost the same shape on his tongue.
Alex.
‘Yes. Alex.’
He felt a hot splash on his hand but, when he looked down, the only blood there was streaked and dried a crusty brown. He heard the gunshot, felt the percussive gust of hot air in his hair, but the burst of pain never came; his head only throbbed with a liquid thickness, irritating the backs of his eyes. The tree before him seemed to pulse and ripple, a static white light flashing around its edges.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose, waiting for the sensation to pass. When he felt steadier, he climbed out of the beanbag chair and left the room. He went to the dead man and checked his pockets, found a tin of self-rolled cigarettes, a box of matches, a battered wallet that held nothing but two creased photographs (both of a pretty brunette who smiled timidly at the camera) and a handwritten letter, the ink so fuzzy and indistinct that Pilgrim had difficulty reading it. He set the wallet and its contents aside. Under the man’s leg cuff, he found a sheath strapped to his calf with a bowie knife inside. Pilgrim took it and strapped it to his own leg.
With nothing left to pilfer, Pilgrim climbed out of the children’s library.
Hari was gone when he stepped into the bright, open space of the library foyer. Pilgrim unfolded the map from the car and laid it out flat on the floor. He found the road he had been travelling on when he’d met the girl, could easily trace the path they had taken, but he couldn’t read the names of the towns and cities in between – the words wriggled like tiny black maggots and the more he tried to focus on them the more they writhed. He cupped a hand over his left eye and used his good one to read, but it was no use. He folded the map back up and sat for a while in the slanting sun that shone in from the doorless entryway, waiting for Hari to show up. The library doorway framed the car and the parking lot, the cloudless, blue sky above it and his dusty boots in isolation. It would have made a perfect portrait of his life: there wasn’t much to see.
