Shantallow

by Cara Martin

  Lightning crashing and the world rocking on its axis, I hold on.

  Something brushes against my cheek, cold but not unkind. Gentle, almost. Flinching, I recoil. Body twisting like live bait on a hook.

  The tension around my right foot eases. I drop roughly to the forest floor, twigs scratching my hands and exposed arms where I land, smooth plastic polymer resting at my fingertips. Slipping my fingers around the gun, I jolt to my feet. A stoop-shouldered woman stands less than six feet away, one of her arms occupying the same space as a tree. She’s middle-aged, maybe. In the dark and deluge it’s difficult to tell, and the last thing I want to do is look at her. But it doesn’t matter what I think I want. Something inside us always wants to look.

  She’s bone dry in a shapeless short-sleeved dress and a hat that almost resembles an old swimming cap, her face tilted away from me. Slowly, she turns to look, relishing the moment. My legs tremor under me. Already I’m turning to bolt, running to escape the sight of her.

  Half of the woman’s face has caved in, the milk-white bone of her cheek partially exposed and her eye bulging from the tragically sunken tissue. The marred side of her face is swollen and misshapen, blood oozing from her ear onto the white neckline of her dress. Damage that a blow to a single side of the head with a brick or shovel might deliver, leaving the other half relatively unscathed.

  Not an accident. A murder.

  Scrambling through the woods without my lantern, my breathing is decibels too loud. Like a beacon calling to bad things.

  If I could find somewhere to hide. Hunker down behind a thick tree, cover myself in leafy, silty camouflage, and hold my breath like a competitive diver. If I could do that for long enough, whatever’s after me might lose interest.

  But Tanvi. Where is she? My gaze scours the woods as I half-trip and half-sprint, mouth opening despite the danger. “Tanvi!” I howl into the pitch black, shocked that my brain let go of her even for a second. “Tanvi!”

  I stumble over something light, accidentally kicking it out ahead of me. Without thinking, I stoop to pick it up. A lone shoe. Child-sized. Lauren’s crochet high-top sneaker.

  “Tanvi! Cal!” I cry, a single high-pitched voice mimicking me from the darkness, mocking my fear. Tanvi. Caaaal.

  Something thumps my back, digs into my skin like it’s trying to reach bone. Pitches me forward. My left hand drops the shoe and touches down, preventing me from falling. Lauren’s disembodied laugh snakes through the trees, gusting cold on the back of my neck. One step behind me.

  I twist and fire, fingers squeezing the trigger like I’ve done it twenty times before. Trying to kill something with no life in it.

  But someone yelps. Falls.

  Someone solid and real, lying among the weeds and leaves a stone’s throw away, shouting desperately up at me. “Don’t shoot. It’s me!”

  Striding forward, my eyes scrunch Luke and Lauren into fuzzy, unlit focus. Him on the ground behind her, one of his feet held apart from the rest of his body, like a size-ten broken wing.

  “You got me,” he says, gravel crunching in his tone. “You got me in the fucking foot, man.”

  I never saw him. Never heard him. Just the damn psychotic laugh of the same young girl lying curled in front of me, fast asleep.

  “She okay?” he asks quickly.

  “Yeah. She’s all right.” I stare past Lauren, at the black running shoe I sank a bullet into. In the dark all I can see is the torn fabric of the hole near the ankle, not the wounded tissue underneath. “I didn’t mean to … something was … right behind me. It …” I can’t string the words together. Can’t hold my thoughts upright in my head.

  The shadow voices are quiet, watching and waiting. My skin prickles with the knowledge of their presence. Any second now, they’ll strike again. We’re not safe here. “It had me,” I rasp. Spinning abruptly, I face a crowd of tall trees, their trunks as straight as soldiers’ spines. Strong, undefeatable. Like this place.

  And in this nightmare place, I might as well be eight years old. Too weak to defend anyone. Rotten with uncontrolled fear of the things that might happen while I’m forced to watch. Eyelids peeled wide like a banana with its skin rolled back.

  “M, listen to me.” The authority vibrating in Luke’s larynx sharpens something inside me that was going slack. “You gotta help me up. We have to keep walking.”

  Tanvi! my mind shrieks. Don’t forget about Tanvi. We can’t go on without her. “Where are the others?” I demand.

  “We’ll find them.” A volley of thunder punctuates Luke’s declaration. Lightning blazes through the trees seconds behind it, my eyes squinting after it, making the most of the light. Searching for Tanvi every place she isn’t.

  Bending, I grab one of Luke’s hands and haul him up next to me. He winces as he leans against the nearest tree. I offer the gun carefully, afraid I’ll accidentally sink another bullet into him. He was right — the gun’s useless. Worse than useless: dangerous only to the people we want to protect.

  Settling Lauren in my arms, both crochet high-top sneakers inexplicably back on her feet, I rise cautiously. The pain’s stickier now. Like molasses made of teeth churning through my rib cage. We won’t reach the side road in a hurry, but if we don’t reach it soon, there might not be anything of us left.

  The rain’s blinding. I can barely see. Hardly walk. Luke limps behind us, leaking pained noises the thunder intermittently overrules.

  I shout Tanvi’s name out ahead of us, step after step, minute after minute. Not smart, probably. The more noise we make, the more easily anything can find us. But the speed of sound is faster than we are, and I have to find Tanvi. The odds that something’s happened to her multiply with every passing moment.

  “Tanvi!” I yell, panic rising in me afresh. “Cal!”

  “Hey,” Luke says.

  Ignoring him, I move faster. Lauren’s weight tears at my abdomen, immediately halving my pace.

  “Hey,” Luke tries again. And the truth is it’s easier talking to him than not, despite what he’s done. His voice reminds me I’m not alone.

  “What?” I snap.

  “You know my real name, right?” When I don’t respond quickly enough he says, “It’s Greg. The nicknames were Joel’s idea. He thought it was funny.”

  Recriminations simmer silently between us in the dark. “How could you do this?” I ask, the blame hot on my tongue. “You know me.”

  “Yeah, so well that you don’t remember my name,” Greg declares. “Look, you weren’t supposed to be at her place tonight. You broke up with her months ago, right?”

  “Is that when you started planning it? The right I was running my mouth off like an asshole? Did you do this because of me?”

  “Not exactly. Joel’s wife works with the little girl — Lauren’s — mom.” Greg’s voice catches, weary with the effort of walking and talking at the same time. “Me and Joel started talking about it one night. Not seriously at first. I remembered what you said about the rich grandparents, too. Joel knew the two girls would be at the Mahajans’ tonight.”

  Guilt burns in my veins. I played a role in this. Planted a shadow of an idea in Greg’s head. Placed Tanvi in unimaginable danger that I haven’t been able to twist her free from.

  “You got some payback already — I’m the one who’s shot.” Greg sounds so matter-of-fact that another layer of unease slips on top of the countless others piled on my shoulders. “If something happens out here, tell my mom it wasn’t her fault, all right?” He pauses, his tone shifting. “It wasn’t that she didn’t raise me right. I know what’s right, and I know it’s not this. But what I did tonight, it’s not on her. She’s a good person.”

  I stop walking and adjust Lauren’s weight in my arms, trying not to think about my own mother and the things she doesn’t know about me. Things that aren’t her fault, either, and that I wouldn’t want her t
o blame herself for. “I’m right in front of you,” I tell him. “Odds are if something happens to you, I’m going down too.”

  Light streaks through the trees, Greg digesting my words. “Maybe, maybe not,” he replies pensively. “The kid will probably survive us all. Once we’re dead her eyes will snap open and she’ll skip straight out of here.”

  I shiver and glance down at Lauren’s sopping blond hair, plastered against her face so that only her nose and a fragment of her mouth are visible. “Wake up, Lauren,” I plead, an equal portion of me hoping that she won’t. If she opens her eyes she’s just as likely to say something sinister I don’t want to hear as she is to be the kid I met last Christmas.

  Pausing again, I lean back against a tree, lecturing myself. Telling the soft, crumbling parts of me that I can walk on like this for as long as it takes, that it doesn’t really hurt much. I’m beyond pain.

  Greg catches up to me, the same tree supporting his frame. It’s an old hemlock, I think. Not poisonous like it sounds. The mighty ones, like this, have big, high root systems that can bring down other trees if they fall.

  Everything is interconnected. Sometimes we just can’t see it.

  Glancing sideways at Greg, I admit, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” If I bend to set Lauren down, picking her up again will be too difficult. I can’t leave her here, but I can’t make it much further with her in my arms.

  Greg’s head dips, rain running clear off his chin and nose like an opened tap. He’s angled his right heel away from the ground, keeping the pressure on his toes instead. “I can’t walk much longer, either. We can stop any time. Wait for whatever’s going to happen next.”

  Not what I want to hear. Frowning, I slam my eyelashes shut. Think of Tanvi sitting cross-legged on my bed, brushing her hair back into place with her fingers. After she’d gone, my room would still smell of her shampoo. Especially my pillow. I’d fall asleep to the scent of grapefruit or sweet grass and shea butter.

  I shout Tanvi’s name into the woods, my fingers numb from Lauren’s weight. If the rest of me were as deadened as my hands, I’d be better off. Lauren’s small-boned, not even as heavy as your average ten-year-old. Any other day, carrying her would be no challenge. But I’ve hit the ceiling. Beyond that, I’ll find only rips and tears. Dissolution into pieces.

  “You gotta do what you gotta do,” Greg tells me. “It’s no good all of us being stranded out here when you might be able to make it to the road by yourself. You can set the girl down. I’ll sit with her. Wait for help.” He raises the gun as if ready to pass it off a second time.

  I shake my head, raindrops leaking between my lips and rushing down my throat. “Hold on to it,” I counter. “You wait here. I’ll send someone back for you.”

  “Right.” Greg laughs in my face, his eyes lit with doubt and irritation. “You’re never going to make it holding on to her, M. But you do what you want. I’m taking a breather.”

  His laugh clings to me as I walk away, my footsteps uncertain and every breath lined with strain and ache. The more distance I put between us, the more tinged with madness Greg’s laughter becomes, until I yearn for two more hands to clap over my ears. Finally, the thunder steals between us, erasing any sign of Greg’s presence.

  When I reach the overgrown driveway minutes later, I could swear I hear it again. His hyena giggle like a manic cackle of frustration from deep behind me in the forest.

  He knows what’s in store. Sees it coming.

  I know it too, yet I keep going. Rounding a bend that will likely return me to Shantallow. Yelling Tanvi’s name into the rain like a little boy lost or the last survivor of a sinking ship, staring up at the sky and counting stars, waiting for the ocean to take him.

  17

  TANVI’S VOICE TRICKLES OUT of the darkness, rainwater curdling in my stomach at the sound of another sick joke. At first the noise is faint, easily ascribed to my imagination. As I continue along the bend in the path, it amplifies into a roar. “Misha!”

  A body comes barreling out of the trees. Every inch soaking wet. Tall for a girl. A torrent of dark hair hanging in her face, rendering her eyes a secret. In the distance, behind her, Cal limps forward, zombie-like, lantern light bobbing beside him.

  “Thank God you still have her,” Tanvi declares, hurtling forward to peer into Lauren’s sleeping face. “I don’t know how we lost you. It was like you just disappeared.”

  “I’ve been looking for you all this time.” My voice splinters as it hits the air. Gratitude for Tanvi’s living presence balances with regret that she didn’t make it out to the side road. No one’s coming for us. We’re all we have.

  “Where’s Luke?” Tanvi gapes behind me as if he might materialize.

  “Out there somewhere, waiting for us to bring help.” I start to explain, Cal joining us and Tanvi cutting me off, extending her arms and silently assuming her cousin’s weight.

  Suddenly Lauren’s voice whispers in my ear, warm and as sickly sweet as treacle, “You must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.”

  Thunder claps over our heads, frenzied shadow voices chanting and shrieking from the woods behind us. “What do they want?” Cal yells, shaking his head and pressing his fingers into his hairline nearly hard enough to draw blood. “Why can’t they just leave us alone?”

  There’s only one way to go — the direction the voices herd us in, bearing down on us from just a few paces behind. Hidden by the trees and the dark, their anger and lunacy runs through me like a live wire as we hobble along the path, surviving by seconds and inches.

  I’ve been winding my way around the same bend for too long already. When there’s only one way left to run, that’s where you scurry, and when we reach the gospel writers’ charred van — the abandoned old house jeering victoriously down at us from behind it — I wait for a shock that doesn’t come. Shantallow’s been lying in wait since the minute we walked away from it earlier, positioned at the end of every dirt path we’d ever find.

  Sagging at the waist, I stifle a chuckle that sticks to the walls of my diaphragm like sand inside a swimsuit. Ha-ha-ha. Sound hiccups out of my body. My lack of control triggers a faulty reflex mechanism, short-circuiting. Laughing breathlessly, my eyes water and my ribs quiver painfully.

  Tanvi and Cal stare at me with sharp, stricken faces. Meanwhile the voices close in, forming an invisible circle around us, a noose tightening. There’s nowhere to go — we’re surrounded. “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,” a mangled male voice growls, its timbre unholy and twisted with hate. “The stars will fall from the sky.”

  “Don’t listen to them!” Tanvi screams. Kneeling to set Lauren down in the wet grass, she arches her body over her cousin’s. With Lauren shielded as best as Tanvi can manage, Tanvi closes her eyes and fastens her hands to her ears, sealing herself off from the outside world.

  Cal turns away from me to lower himself by her side. Planting the lantern in the dirt, his hands encircle his head like a helmet. Before I can move, something tugs at my shirt, flipping it up to expose my lower chest. Hot breath warms my drenched neck. My teeth chatter in my jaw, heart thwacking and accelerating, threatening to explode. Slamming my eyes shut, I plug my ears with my palms.

  Inside my head, the woman from the woods grins brokenly at my fear. The rain pounds on, lightning exploding through the delicate skin of my eyelids. My arms and legs set like granite, unmoving. Pressure cups my head, wanting to crush my skull. Still, my eyes fight temptation. I won’t look at her broken cheek or the eye that no longer fits smoothly within her socket. I won’t listen to their insane ravings and lies. You can’t make me.

  But of course they can. They can do anything they want.

  Scared as I am, anger itches in my bones. The human soul doesn’t want to cower. The injustice burns in my fingertips. Memories sharpen and then lose focus
, ceding to others. My parents slow dancing in a dimly lit kitchen, dishes drying on the countertop rack. Mom covering up a black eye. Balancing on top of my dad’s shoulders at a free summer concert during one of his more sober periods, his hands holding my lower legs in place so I wouldn’t slip. He knew the words to every song. He swayed his hips as he sang along.

  Fingers grip my shoulders from behind. Softly, then firmly. Squeeze into tissue. Something brushes my arm. Takes my hand in its own. Four fingers. One thumb.

  It shouldn’t feel so real, so solid. Another trick. This one pries the fingers of one hand forcefully from my ear. My eyes jerk open and stare into hers.

  Tanvi. Cal at her side, having taken temporary possession of Lauren. The voices have stopped, or maybe been temporarily displaced by the living.

  Tanvi swivels to squint at the house, her face taut with rancor.

  “I can’t make it out like this,” Cal says, looking only at her. “If I can wrap up my foot and get some of those painkillers into my system, rest a little, I’ll have a better chance.”

  “We can’t go back in there.” Tanvi flinches, fresh raindrops skating down her forehead and losing themselves in her hair.

  Shivering in my wet second skin, my eyes fasten on hers. “It had me in the woods. It’s not just the house we need to worry about.” I don’t want to set foot inside any more than she does — malevolence colonizing every corner, infecting our minds with hopelessness. “We’re too tired, and most of us are injured. We can’t keep going. In the morning at least the visibility will be better.”

  “We can stay on the porch,” Cal suggests, his syllables worn down to nubs. “We’ll stay dry, and the second we see the sun come up we’re out of here. We’re all gonna get out. But first I need to go into the house and grab the pills and first aid kit.”

  Tanvi’s fingers skim his arm in silent acceptance. I turn away like I don’t see it, heading for the house and giving the van a wide berth. Cal and Tanvi follow quietly.