The Last House on Needless Street

by Catriona Ward

  Ted groans and turns, slow as a world revolving. Dirt and leaf mould cover his flesh like a dark tattoo. The knife is still stuck in his abdomen. Blood bubbles up around it, pulses out in a glossy stream. He sees her, and his expression of surprise is almost comical. He has no idea how well she knows him, how closely she has watched, how intertwined are their fates. ‘Help me,’ he says. ‘You’re hurt too.’ He is looking at her arm.

  ‘Rattler,’ Dee says, absently. She stares at him in fascination. She knows how the snake feels, now, approaching the mouse.

  ‘My bag, by the stream, surgical glue. There’s a snakebite kit too. Don’t know if it works.’ She finds it wonderful that at this moment he’s concerned for her well-being. Of course, he thinks she’s going to help – he needs her.

  ‘I’m going to watch you die,’ she says. She watches as disbelief spreads over his face.

  ‘Why?’ he whispers. Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘It’s what you deserve,’ Dee says. ‘No, it’s just a little of what you deserve, after what you’ve done.’ She looks around in the dim air. Nothing else stirs between the trees. ‘Where is she?’ Dee asks. ‘Tell me where she is and I will make it quick. Help you end it.’ She thinks of Lulu, alone and frightened, under the big uncaring sky. She wags a finger back and forth in front of his face. His eyes follow it. ‘Time is running out for you,’ she says. ‘Tick-tock.’

  Ted gasps and red bubbles form at his lips. He makes a sound. It is a sob.

  ‘So sorry for yourself,’ Dee says furiously. ‘You didn’t have any pity to spare for her.’ She stands. The world sways and greys at the edges, but she steadies herself. ‘I’m going to find her.’ Lulu will come home to live with her. Dee will have the patience for the years of healing she will need. They will heal one another. ‘Die, monster,’ she says and turns away, towards the sound of the waterfall, towards the day, where the sun is breaking gold through the cloud.

  Behind her, a little girl’s voice whispers, ‘Don’t call him that.’

  Dee turns, thrilling. There is no one there but her and the dying man.

  ‘He’s not a monster,’ the girl’s voice says, coming reedy and weak through Ted’s blue lips. It is the same voice that was recorded on the cassette tape. ‘I had to kill him – but that is between Daddy and me. You keep out of it.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Dee asks. The rushing of red wings fills her ears.

  ‘Lauren,’ the little girl says through the big man’s mouth.

  ‘Don’t try to trick me,’ Dee says firmly. It must be a hallucination, some side effect of the poison. ‘He took Lulu. He takes little girls.’ This must be true, or everything collapses.

  ‘He never did that,’ the girl says. ‘We’re part of one another, he and I.’

  The world tips as Dee limps towards Ted’s body. ‘Shhhh,’ she says. ‘Be quiet. You’re not real.’ She presses her palm over his nose and mouth. He squirms and struggles, kicking up leaves and dirt with his heels. She holds her hand fast until he goes still. It’s hard to tell through the mess but she thinks he has stopped breathing. She stands, wearier than death. The world goes grey at the edges. Her arm is shiny, blackened and swollen.

  She stumbles to Ted’s backpack, through wisps of white cloud. She finds a yellow pouch. The snake on the label rears out at her and she flinches, gasping. The instructions swim before her eyes. She puts the tourniquet on and places the suction cup on the mouth of the wound. The flesh there is pudgy and dark. It hurts. She pumps and blood fills the chamber. Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but she feels better already, steadier, more alert. She pumps a couple more times, then gets up. That will have to do.

  She sees the surgical glue tucked into a pocket of the backpack. She throws it into the fast-running stream. ‘Just in case,’ she whispers. After all, dead rattlesnakes still bite.

  She thinks of her hand over Ted’s nose and mouth as he fought for breath. It’s fine, because he deserved it. Everything will work out. As for the moment when the man spoke with a little girl’s voice, that was just confusion caused by the poison. Her vision blurs, but she quests patiently, until she sees her yellow blaze on a distant tree trunk, marking the path out of the valley. She stumbles towards it. Dee will find Lulu and give her a place to live, and they will be so happy, and hunt for pebbles together. But not at a lake. Never there.

  ‘Lulu,’ Dee whispers. ‘I’m coming.’ She staggers through the forest, through pillars of dark and light. Behind her she hears a dog baying. She hurries on.

  Olivia

  It’s not your body, Lauren. I am crying now. It’s his. We live in Ted.

  ‘Yes,’ she says with a sigh. ‘But not for much longer. Thank God.’

  Why, why? I am rowing like a kit. You made me kill us. All of us.

  ‘I needed your help to end it. I couldn’t do it on my own.’

  I thought I was so smart – but Lauren led me so easily down this path, to this moment, to our death.

  You lied, I say. All that stuff you said, about the vinegar and the freezer …

  ‘That was all true,’ she says. ‘Though it happened to him and me both. You don’t know what we have been through. Life is a long tunnel, Olivia. The light only comes at the end.’

  I can see her in my mind, now. Lauren is slight with big brown eyes. Everything she said about her body is true. Murderer, I say to her.

  Somewhere, Ted is panting. There is a really bad sound in it, a wet red whistle. He raises our hand, where it has been clutched against the wound in his abdomen. We all watch as our blood runs down our palm, hot and stinking slick. It drips to the ground and the earth drinks it. Ted’s body, our body, is failing.

  Oh, Ted, I say, trying to reach him. I am sorry, so sorry. Please forgive me, I didn’t mean to hurt you …

  ‘You can’t hurt him,’ Lauren says, voice both a whisper and a scream. ‘We take his pain. You take it from his heart, I take it from the body.’

  Be quiet, I say. You’ve done enough talking. Ted, I call. Ted? How do I fix it?

  He is bleeding from the mouth, a thin line of red. The words are slurred but I know him well so I understand. ‘Listen to them,’ he says. All around, in the dawn, the birds are singing in the trees.

  The cord is white and soft, glowing. It connects the three of us, heart to heart. Then the white light grows, spreads over the earth, and I see at last that actually the cord runs not only through us, but also through the trees, the birds, the grass and everything, out across the world. Somewhere, a big dog bays.

  The sun has risen. The air turns warm and golden. The lord is here, before me, a burning flame. He has four delicate paws. His voice is soft. Cat, He says. You were supposed to protect. I cannot bring myself to look up into the lord’s face. I know that, today, it will be my own.

  Ted

  Dimly, above, someone is pressing their hands to the hole in my stomach. Someone’s breath is warm by my ear. He presses down harder and harder but the blood comes out all slippery anyway. He curses to himself. He is trying to draw me back up from the black, into the sunny morning.

  We could have told him it was no good. We are dying, our flesh is cooling to clay. We feel it as it happens, each one of us. Our blood comes in slow pumps, spilling out all our colours and thoughts onto the forest floor; each breath is harder, slower, leaving us colder. The safe tattoo of our heartbeat is broken; now it beats like a kitten playing or a bad drum: growing fainter, more irregular.

  There is no time for goodbye, there is only the cold stillness that creeps over our fingers and hands, our feet and ankles. Crawling up our legs, inch by inch. The little ones are crying, deep down in the pit. They never did anything to anyone, the little ones. They never had a chance. The bright burning world falls into darkness.

  Sun lies in long stripes across the bloodied forest floor. Nearby, far away, a dog whines.

  Now nothing.

  Olivia

  I’m back in the house, I don’t know how and it doesn’t ma
tter. There is no time to feel relief at having my lovely ears and tail again. It’s anything but safe here.

  The walls are giving in like lungs collapsing. Plaster falls in chunks from the ceiling. Windows explode inwards in a hail of icy splinters. I run to hide under the couch, but the couch is gone, instead there is a great wet mouth with broken teeth. Through the portholes there falls thunderlight. Black hands reach up from the floor. The cord is tight around my neck. It is transparent, now, the colour of death. There is no scent at all, and perhaps it is that which makes me understand that I am going to die.

  I think about fish, and how I will never know its taste, and I think about my beautiful tabby, and how I will never see her again. Then I think about Ted and what I did to him and I am really crying, now. I know, in the way I know my own tail, that the others are already gone. For the first time I am all alone. And soon I will be gone too.

  I can feel it all, now, the body. The heart, the bones, the delicate clouds of nerve endings, the fingernails. What a moving thing a fingernail is. I see that it doesn’t matter what shape the body is, that it doesn’t have fur or a tail. It still belongs to us.

  Time to stop being a kitten, I say to myself. Come on, cat. Maybe if I help the body, the others can come back.

  But when I look there is a seething mass of shining blades where the front door should be. They whir and snick through the air. There is no way out there.

  I’ll try up, then. At the top of the stairs, the landing and the bedroom and roof are gone. The house is open to a raging sky, the storm which beats and whirls overhead. It is made of tar and lightning. There are brouhahas with great saggy jaws, baying. They tumble and race through the clouds, eyes like points of fire.

  My fur is on end, my heart pounds. Every fibre of me wants to turn, to run and hide somewhere quiet, and wait to die. But if I do that it’s over.

  Be brave, cat. I put my paws on the first step, and then the second. Maybe this will be OK!

  The staircase caves in with a great sound. Rubble lands all around me, and there is choking dust and ropes of the sticky black tar that burn and blind me. When the dust clears, I can only see rubble, brick. The walls are caved in, closing off the stairs. Everything is quiet. I am sealed in.

  No, I whisper, tail lashing. No, no, no! But I am trapped, the crumbling house my tomb. I am finished, we are all finished.

  I call on the lord. He does not answer.

  There is a deep stirring somewhere and I start, tail bristling. In the darkest corner of the living room Night-time groans. He raises his head. His ears are ragged and there are deep slashes along his flanks, as if made by a knife. Dying, yes. But not dead. Not yet.

  I think furiously. I can’t go up or out, but perhaps there is somewhere left to go, after all.

  Hurt, he says, in a deep growl.

  I know, I say. I am sorry. But I need your help. We all do. Can you take me down, to your place?

  He hisses, a sound as deep as a geyser. I can’t blame him. He tried to warn me about Lauren.

  Please, I say. Now, more than ever – now it is your time.

  Night-time comes forward, no longer graceful, but limping and painfully slow. He stands over me and I hear his breath sawing in and out. He opens his jaws wide and I think, This is it, he will finish me. Part of me is glad. But instead he closes his mouth about my scruff and picks me up, gentle as a mamacat.

  My time, he says, and the house is gone. We hurtle down, down through the dark. Something hits me with a terrible blow and now we are somewhere else entirely.

  Night-time’s place is worse than I could have imagined. There is nothing but old, old dark. Great plains and expanses and canyons of black nothing. I understand that there is no such thing as distance here – it all goes on for ever. This world is not round and you never come back to yourself.

  Here, he says, putting me down.

  I gasp, my lungs almost crushed by loneliness. Or maybe it is the last life draining from us.

  No, I say. We have to go further down.

  He says nothing, but I feel his fear. There are deep places even Night-time cannot go.

  Do it, I say.

  He snarls and bites me, deep in the throat. Blood gushes forth, freezes in a stony spray in the cold dead air. Bodies don’t work the same way down here.

  I snarl and bite him back, my small teeth puncturing him in the cheek. He starts in surprise. We die if we go down, he says.

  We have to go down, I say. Or we will certainly die.

  He shakes his head and grabs me by the scruff and we sink into the black earth.

  It is like sinking to the very depths of a dark ocean. The pressure becomes unbearable. Night-time forces us deeper into the dark ground, rasping in distress at my side. We are pressed together so tightly that our bodies and our bones begin to break and our eyes explode. Our blood is frozen to sludge and bursts out of our veins. We are crushed, bodies mangled to jagged ends of bone. The weight of everything obliterates us. We are crushed until we are no more than particles, dust. There is no more Olivia, and no more Night-time. Please, I think, it must be over now. The agony cannot go on. We must be dead. I can’t feel him any more. But somehow I am still here.

  A gleam of light ahead, like the first evening star. We struggle towards it, weeping and gasping. Somewhere, Night-time raises his head and roars. To my amazement, I feel it rumbling in my chest.

  I am powerful and sleek, my great flanks heave. Where are you? I say. Where am I?

  Nowhere, he says, and here.

  Are you still Night-time?

  No.

  I’m not Olivia any more, I say, certain.

  I roar and run towards the light. I tear at the dark with my great paws, clawing at the point of light until it rips and grows. I fight with all my strength until I burst out of the black, into the barred sunlight. I cannot move, I lie trapped in the cold and bloodied corpse on the forest floor, with the red-haired man’s hand pressed down hard on the wound. The blood has slowed almost to a stop.

  I take a deep breath and spread myself throughout the body, running through all its cold bone and veins and flesh. Come back. Wake up.

  Our heart twitches faintly.

  The first beat is like thunder, echoing through the silent body. Another, then another, and the roaring begins, blood hurtling through the arteries. We gasp, we take his breath in a great heaving sigh. The body lights up cell by cell, reawakening. It begins to sing with life.

  Dee

  Dee runs into the dawn. The bite on her arm is a ragged hole, edges brown with dirt. She knows she needs a hospital. The pump seems to have got the venom out, but the bite might be infected. She tries not to think about that. All that matters is finding Lulu.

  She stumbles on through the forest, seeing faces in the patterns of light and shade. She shouts her sister’s name. Sometimes her voice is loud, sometimes it is a dry whisper. Ahead, she catches a little sound. It could be a blackbird, or a child’s whimper. Dee hurries on, faster. Lulu must be scared.

  Murderer. The word is like a bell, ringing through her head. Is that what she is? Dee knows she can never go back to Needless Street. She left bloody traces of herself all through the forest, all over his body. If one thing comes to light, others follow. They are like that, secrets, they move in flocks like birds.

  She runs on through the forest. It becomes difficult to see the path ahead; the past is everywhere, overlaying the dawnlit world. Images come, and voices. She sees a ponytail flying between two tree trunks, hears her name whispered in a frightened voice. The tired detective’s face swims before her, the last time they spoke face to face.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve told me everything about that day, Delilah? You were just a kid, you know. People would understand.’ Karen’s eyes were kind. Dee nearly told her right then and there, she really did. She has never been closer to telling.

  It was Lulu’s white flip-flop that made Karen suspect, of course. The woman from the bathroom was certain she hadn’t picked it
up by mistake and put it in her own bag. She was sure it must have been put there by someone else. Dee was furious with herself for that. Who knew the woman would be so sharp?

  ‘You can’t prove anything,’ Dee hissed. Karen’s careworn eyes moved over her, the creases deepened at the edges, like volcanic land.

  ‘It will eat at you until there’s nothing left,’ she said finally. ‘Believe me, it would be better to let it out.’ That was when it went sour, of course.

  Dee stops, retching. She crouches, her mind yawns up colours and memory. Her breath is coming too fast. She tries to summon the white static, make it cover the thoughts that teem in. But it’s no good. The air smells like cold water, sunscreen on warm skin.

  Dee walks across the lake-shore, away from her family, navigating the chequerboard maze of blankets.

  The yellow-headed boy says, ‘Hi.’ She sees the swirls of white lotion on his pale skin. When he smiles his front two teeth overlap slightly. It gives him a feral, intriguing air.

  ‘Hi,’ says Dee. He has to be at least eighteen, probably in college. She watches him watching her and understands, for the first time, that he sees both predator and prey. It is complicated and exciting. So when Trevor offers a hand to shake she smirks. She sees the flash of anger, of hurt. His pale skin flushes.

  ‘Are you here with your folks?’ This is retaliation. What he means is, You are a baby who comes to the lake with her family.

  Dee shrugs. ‘I managed to lose them,’ she says. ‘Except for this one.’

  He smiles, like he appreciates the joke. ‘Where are your parents?’

  ‘All the way over by the lifeguard stand,’ she says, pointing. ‘They were all sleeping and I was bored.’