Wake

by Elizabeth Knox

  The kettle finished boiling and switched itself off. Sam filled the teapot and carried it and two cups back into the living room. ‘Are you sure we can’t have a light?’

  ‘He’s still out there. I only came out myself because I had to feed Lucy.’ Oscar was angry with Sam for looking so unafraid, and graceful, and pretty. And for wearing her bruise without shame or defiance, as if it was just another part of her face. And he was angry with her because she’d found him out, camped here with his cat, a custodian of his old life.

  Sam put the teapot and cups on the coffee table and sat cross-legged on the floor. Oscar went back to the couch and pulled the duvet onto his lap. A moment later Lucy was there too, happily tramping.

  ‘The packet said it should steep for five minutes,’ Sam said.

  ‘It said “steep”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you get “steep”?’

  ‘Yes, Oscar.’

  For a moment Oscar only fumed silently, and then he broke out. ‘You’re horrible! And I’ve been feeling sorry for you! Even if you’re not lying like William thinks, you still have this alternate personality who is like some kind of human shield, and you’re hiding behind her. It’s creepy.’

  Sam watched him rage. She listened with sympathy, and warmth. It made Oscar even more furious. His eyes filled with tears. It was as if someone had topped him up past his high water-level mark. He tried to wipe them surreptitiously, but his nose started to run, and the low light wasn’t going to be any cover.

  Sam gave him a moment. She poured the tea before it was ready and got up to hand him his cup. ‘I need you to talk to me, Oscar,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for being in the dark, but there are things I must know.’

  Oscar dried his eyes on his cuff, then sipped the scalding tea. ‘You followed me to talk to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Despite himself Oscar felt pleased that he’d been chosen—that someone had finally given him something to do—that is, apart from the almost impossible thing he’d been doing so far, which was constantly reassuring everyone that he was all right.

  The tea was grassy water and Oscar couldn’t see why his mother bothered paying for it. ‘Do you actually like this?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. But Sam wouldn’t,’ Sam said. She said it quite matter-of-factly.

  Which provoked Oscar into another outburst. ‘I can see why William’s pissed at you! Maybe you deserved to be thumped!’

  Sam gave a little laugh. ‘William feels cheated because he had supposed he was sleeping with some innocent. He’s the victim of false advertising, the poor man.’ Sam sounded self-possessed. She didn’t seem crazy, but Oscar was suddenly scared of her. He didn’t renew his complaints and, after another minute where the only sound in the room was Lucy’s soft rumbling, Sam said, ‘Why don’t you feed your cat in the daytime?’

  ‘Because of Theresa’s curfew, and the man in black. You know all this.’

  ‘Let’s just suppose I don’t.’

  ‘You want me to play along?’

  ‘Go on, indulge me.’

  ‘Fine. Okay. Theresa and Dan and William and Bub have spent the last week hunting for the man in black. There’s a picture of him up in the reserve, a rock drawing from like four hundred years ago, of him and the No-Go. And it turns out that the people who lived here then had buried a lot of bodies in their storage pits, because they were survivors and there were only a few of them, not enough to dig all the graves. Like us with the swimming pools. And at some point those people tried to tell their story by painting it on the cliffs up in the reserve. They painted themselves testing the No-Go. Apparently rock drawing experts thought the figures had tails, were kind of anthropomorphic. But of course the tails are actually ropes they’ve tied to themselves so they can pull each other out of the No-Go, like we’ve had to. And, in the middle of the drawings, there he is—our black man in black clothes. We all think he’s the same man from four hundred years ago.’

  Sam’s face was glowing with interest. Oscar had never seen anyone look more alive. It made him feel a little less stupid for sitting there telling her things she was pretending not to know. He said, ‘Theresa and that are out every day looking for him—with guns. To ask him questions. Theresa says they don’t want the rest of us wandering around while they’re hunting because they’re keeping an eye out for movement. So I’ve been sneaking out to feed Lucy. No one knows I come here. I’ve been coming every day since the beginning.’

  Now Sam was looking sympathetic. Oscar wanted to thump her, though he hadn’t hit a girl since he was about four, and everyone had made it pretty clear to him that, being the size he was, he shouldn’t ever hit anybody. Oscar kept looking at Sam and seeing someone who wasn’t an adult. ‘You look younger when you’re not pretending to be stupid,’ he said.

  ‘I am. Younger, I mean. Sometime ago I decided to let her go first.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sam. I’m letting her go first. She feels lost on and off anyway, so the discontinuity is worse for her. And besides, maybe I want to see who’s right about global warming.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Oscar.

  ‘If she goes first then I’m around for longer, and can see what happens,’ Sam said, calmly explanatory. ‘But enough about me. So—there’s no sign of him so far?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man in black.’

  ‘He’s gone to ground. First he wouldn’t talk to us—though he helped Bub and William and Jacob bury the kids at the daycare centre. Then Belle took Bub to look at the rock drawings and they put two and two together.’

  ‘Theresa and company are carrying guns to coerce him once they catch him?’

  Oscar nodded. ‘Bub wants to shoot him. But Theresa says there’s no point doing that since he’s probably got some kind of machine generating the No-Go, and he has to tell us where it is so we can turn it off. Dan said that when he saw the man—on the day everyone died—he thought the guy was carrying something small, heavy, and metallic, some kind of device. And Belle says she thinks the man has a personal force field. That when he dived off Bub’s boat he made a hole in the sea.’

  Sam used both hands to push back her heavy hair. She looked galvanised. ‘What about the other thing?’

  ‘What other thing?’

  ‘Oh,’ she breathed. She seemed about to burst into tears of joy. ‘Could you really not feel it?’ she said. And Oscar was shocked to see the sudden bright streak of a tear on one of her cheeks. She said, ‘It’s the first thing in my life that’s made sense in the terms of my life.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The monster,’ she said.

  ‘Huh?’ Oscar didn’t know how to articulate his confusion, but his whole body must be showing it.

  ‘The monster,’ she said again, then frowned in consternation. ‘Could you really not feel it?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Oscar shouted, desperate. ‘And you’re scaring me!’

  All the other adults got a certain look whenever Oscar was scared, a look that told him they were hurrying their own emotions away out of sight. Sam wasn’t wearing that look, and Oscar found himself feeling kind of grateful that she was prepared to scare him—to include him.

  She said, ‘The monster—the thing that came when Jacob was trying to revive Warren.’ She was attempting to be patient, but sounded rushed and mad. ‘It must have woken you.’

  ‘I was awake, but I was in my room. I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘It was bigger than the room, and invisible. But it was there.’

  Oscar thought of the green arrow in Halo. ‘What was there?’

  Sam’s eyes grew wide, she raised her hands and held them up and open, just above her head, like one of those old pictures of a saint in rapture. She grew radiant and still—then seemed to explode. Her words flooded out. �
�It was like a whirlwind,’ she said. ‘Or a biblical column of fire—flaming, noiseless, spectral, sullen, and terrible. But it didn’t have a self. It was just made up of everything it had destroyed—deaths—moments of miserable dying—’ She paused, shivered, and lit up another notch, till it seemed to Oscar that she couldn’t be breathing air, the same air he was, but something that went into her lungs and came alive in her blood. ‘It was like a tower,’ she said. ‘A tower touching heaven, but every one of its building blocks a death. A tower built of deaths—and a whirlwind.’

  Oscar lost his grip on his cup. It tipped and spilled warm tea into his lap, soaking the duvet and splashing Lucy’s head. Lucy launched herself off him again, and this time bolted into the kitchen and out the cat door.

  Oscar surged off the couch and blundered across the room, his feet tangled in the duvet. Then he was fumbling with the chain on the door. Sam was behind him. She grabbed his arms. ‘Don’t run away,’ she said, sounding properly appalled.

  Oscar couldn’t look at her. She sounded normal again. His fear abated some, but he was still determined to get away, before—and then it was too late, he was sobbing hard, really howling, like a frightened little kid. He shook her hands off and yanked the door open. It bashed his toes. He plunged out through the mobile lacework of circling moths in the sheer curtain of light cast by the porch lamp. Sam came after him and, because she was less clumsy than he was, she caught him before he got up to speed. He was only three paces from the porch. But he was too big for someone Sam’s size to easily stop, or hold. He shook her off again, and she was still coming after him, trying to take his arm, when they both collided with another body—the black man in black clothes—who was standing on the path beyond the reach of the light, perhaps attracted by the eruption of voices—Sam’s rapture, Oscar’s sobbing.

  The man in black put his arms out and caught them, and they rotated, as if they were balls simultaneously tossed into a greased catcher’s mitt. Sam slid out of the man’s grip and sprawled at his feet, whereas Oscar, who was too tall to simply slither free, only continued to rotate. He was in the man’s arms, against the man’s chest and neck and face, but touching nothing and sliding around on resistant nothing like the puck on an air hockey table.

  Then the man opened his arms and stepped back. Sam shouted at Oscar to run. ‘Get help!’ she yelled.

  Oscar darted past the man and fled. He looked back once he was at the corner of the road, but the neighbour’s magnolia tree hid his view of the front yard. He ran on, shouting for help.

  Oscar was gone. Sam lunged at the man. She wrapped her hands around his ankle. Her fingers made a loose shackle three centimetres from his skin. Sam stared in wonder and disbelief. She fought her urge to let go and, while he was still within reach, to simply appreciate the slick skin of insistent impenetrable air that surrounded him. She held on—hopelessly—for his foot was slipping free. Though filled with a kind of lust of curiosity, Sam was still thinking, and, because she was clever Sam, she was thinking fast. She thought that if he had to turn his force field on to stop a bullet it would never stop a bullet. And she thought that if, however, it was on all the time, then how would he feed himself? There was only one way in which this could work. She considered all of this, then, while she still had him, her grip around his arch and instep, compressing the slippery nothingness so that he slipped faster, she used this last possible traction to yank his foot so that he toppled. He sprawled onto his cushion of air, and she shifted her grip back to his ankle—or the air around it. Then she hauled on him, and he slid towards her so smoothly it was as if he was moving on a bed of ball bearings. She clambered up over him, straddling him—or his frictionless casing—as best she could. She balanced, and once again made a shackle of her hands, this time around his right wrist. She found the limits of the resistance, rested there a moment, then very gradually and gently closed her grip. It never would have worked had he not been staring at her, through her hair, which had pooled on the air before his face. She saw his white teeth and the white lights in his black eyes. She read his expression—which was puzzled and speculative—and knew he looked like that because he was looking at her, and saw that she was calm, completely calm.

  The circle of Sam’s grip got smaller—slowly. It was like a gesture in Tai Chi. And then the skin of her fingers touched the skin of the man’s wrist, and his eyes went wide with astonishment. He raised his arm and rolled, but she had him, skin to skin, her hands inside his force field.

  He clambered to his feet and began to pull away, dragging her. She tried to get her feet under her, but he was a big strong man and he kept jerking her about so that she was down on one knee, then up on her feet, then hauled against him, and then hurled back so that she crashed into Oscar’s letterbox. And while he shook her, she kept shouting at him, ‘Stop! Stay!’

  She knew that all he had to do to be rid of her was to push her forcibly into something unyielding—like the low wall around Oscar’s neighbour’s yard. Once, he raised his arm so that her feet left the ground and they were face to face, and she could see him considering it—considering hurting her—but he didn’t. He fought hard, but with restraint, as if she were a robust child, and this a play fight.

  Then light began to grow in the street and shadows lunged out at an angle from every bush and fence as they were backlit by the headlights of more than one vehicle, coming in fast.

  Sam shouted, ‘Over here!’

  The man drew her towards him once more, and spun her into his arms. He clamped his free hand across her mouth and nose and crushed her into the invisible resistance that surrounded him. The skin of his palm didn’t connect with the skin of Sam’s face, and she could still breathe—there were still a few centimetres of compressed air between them. Then he closed his hand and that air went as dense as foam rubber. Sam’s lips were pushed against her teeth. The force field slipped into her open mouth and was abruptly as unbreathable as a vacuum. Her nostrils were pinched closed. She struggled. Her heels slid along the grass. The man was hauling her away somewhere. Her field of vision snapped closed, as first the world vanished, then the green bristle of its afterimage. All sounds faded into a ringing silence.

  The room was warm. Its floor was polished wood. The lights were low, the curtains drawn—glistening gold curtains, so long that they pooled on the floor.

  Sam heard the flinty ‘chop-chop’ of a match struck twice before igniting.

  The man in black was crouching by a firebox. There was a neat fire laid in the grate, split kindling heaped over a pile of fire starters. The man held a long match to the white cube of a fire starter until it caught. He watched till the kindling was burning, then he laid two dry manuka rounds on the flames. He closed the woodburner’s door, opened its damper, and turned to Sam.

  She had discovered that her hands were tied before her with what seemed to be a silk curtain cord. While the man’s back was turned she’d been surreptitiously struggling to free herself. She stopped and recoiled as he came over. He scooped her up and put her down in a white leather recliner, then tilted the chair and leaned over her, peering into her eyes. He smelled of wood smoke, a friendly open-air smell. His gaze moved from one eye to the other as if he were trying to judge a difference between each. ‘Which one are you?’ he asked.

  Sam gaped. How could he know that about her?

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sam. ‘Sam.’ The muscles of her arms and shoulders were twitching with tiredness and strain. One of her knees was smarting.

  The man said, ‘You have my attention, Sam.’

  Sam stalled. She asked, ‘Do you have a name?’

  He said something that sounded like the name of the space station.

  ‘M-I-R?’

  ‘I haven’t ever had occasion to write it in your alphabet,’ he said.

  ‘Or is it like the gifts of the Magi—gold, frankincense, myrrh?’

 
‘How can it possibly matter?’

  ‘It doesn’t.’ Sam privately decided that she’d think of him as Myr—the ‘million years’ of cosmologists.

  Myr sat cross-legged on the floor by her chair and pressed its footstool until it tilted upright again. He fixed his eyes on Sam’s face and said, ‘I need to understand how you know that the monster is there. You were telling the boy about the monster.’ He took Sam’s bound hands and held them gently, so gently that his force field didn’t activate. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s your monster, so you tell me.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be able to feel it. Or rather, you shouldn’t feel it as an entity, only as a disturbance—restlessness, misery, suspicion, a dark compulsion, or evil urge. Feelings you would suppose were your own.’

  Sam moved her hands, trying to extract them from his grip, or perhaps trying to draw him closer—she wasn’t sure which she wanted.

  He didn’t let go and he did lean closer.

  Sam bent over their clasped hands, closed her eyes, and settled into her own darkness. She could feel her breath warming the air between her mouth and his knuckles. Myr was real and bodily, and appeared to be human. But he was unlike everyone else in the world—the multitude of mavericks whose lives had been allowed to grow freely, unlike hers, which had been trained into an inscrutable shape. In his unlikeness, Myr was the only one like her. The only one she’d ever met. Her heart went out to him. But Sam hated her own secrets, and she didn’t want to tell them. She said, ‘So I should feel the monster’s influence, but not sense it as a presence?’

  ‘No one knows it’s there until, perhaps, their very last moments, when they sense that something is salting them with other people’s agonies before eating them whole.’

  Sam put that aside for now. ‘Do you feel it?’ she said.

  ‘I only know it’s there because I have it quarantined.’

  ‘Because that’s what you do.’ Sam opened her eyes and stared at him, thinking. Then she asked him to please tell her about the monster.