by Kevin Brooks
shake it . . .
like this
and all at once the ground tilts beneath my feet and a blizzard suddenly erupts out of nowhere, a great white whirlwind of giant snowflakes swirling and tumbling all around me . . .
And then I’m back in my room with Ellamay, and I’m staring at the snow globe on my shelf, and she’s saying, What is it, Elliot?
“Nothing,” I tell her, looking away from the snow globe.
What did you see?
“What do you mean?”
You know what I mean. What did you see just now in the snow globe?
“Nothing . . .”
She knows I’m lying. She always knows.
Just tell me, she says quietly. What did you see?
“It was snowing . . . like someone had shaken it up. That’s what made me look at it. And I saw something . . . or I thought I did.”
In the snow?
“In the whole thing.”
What was it, Elliot? What did you see?
“This,” I tell her now. “I saw this.”
The bedraggled figure limping along the pathway, the falling snow, the white-topped branches of great black trees, the endless climb of rough wooden steps leading up to a narrow dirt track at the top of the slope . . .
I saw it all in a timeless moment.
And I’m seeing it all again now. But this time, I’m not seeing it in my snow globe, the one I keep on the shelf in my bedroom, I’m seeing it in Auntie Shirley’s snow globe, the one she keeps on the windowsill in her living room, and at the same time I’m seeing it from both inside the globe and inside my head . . .
I’m there, limping along the path through the falling snow toward the wooden steps . . .
And I’m here.
I don’t seem to know why I’m heading toward the steps, or where they go, or what I have to do when I get to the top . . . but for now that doesn’t seem to matter. All that matters, and all I know for sure, is that I have to climb them.
“What time is it now?”
“Will you stop asking me what time it is, for Christ’s sake? Haven’t you got a watch?”
Dake shook his head. “I use the clock on my cell phone.”
“So use it.”
“I can’t, can I?”
“Why not?”
“The battery’s dead.”
Jenner sighed, giving Dake a withering glare. “You’re unbelievable . . . you really are. I mean, you knew we were doing this today, didn’t you?”
“Yeah . . .” He shrugged. “So what?”
“So why didn’t you make sure your phone was fully charged this morning? That’s what.”
“I did. I plugged in the charger last night.”
“Yeah? So how come it’s dead now?”
“I don’t know . . .” Dake paused, looking a bit sheepish. “I suppose I might have forgotten to connect the cable . . .”
Jenner rolled his eyes in exasperation. “You might have forgotten . . . ?”
“Yeah . . . I mean, I’m not saying I did . . . not for sure . . . but it’s an easy thing to do, isn’t it?”
“For a moron it is, yeah.”
“I’m not a moron.”
“No?” Jenner sneered. “You could have fooled me.”
Across the room, Shirley and Grace were just sitting there, slumped against the radiator. Both of them were staring down at the floor, and both were thinking about their sons. There were tears in their eyes, and they both wished they could stop thinking about their sons, stop imagining the worst, just for a while, but they knew they couldn’t — not now, not ever.
Wishes never come true.
“Yeah, so anyway . . .” Dake said.
“What?”
Dake grinned. “What time is it?”
Gordon hadn’t escaped from the police car yet, and he was beginning to wonder if he ever would. But the funny thing was that although he was still perfectly aware that this was a seriously bad situation, and although the thought of getting caught (and losing everything) still filled him with a sickening dread, he had to admit that part of him — an unfamiliar part — was actually really enjoying all this.
He still wanted to get away from the police car, though.
He thought he’d succeeded five minutes earlier just as he was approaching the moors. A long bend in the road had momentarily put him out of sight of the police car, and when he’d seen the track on his left, he’d immediately hit the brakes and swung the skidding Corsa off the road and onto the track. The snow was thick here, and the ground beneath it was rutted with tank tracks. Gordon just about managed to keep the car going, and as it lumped and bucked across the uneven ground, he leaned forward, moving right up close to the windshield, and squinted out to see where he was going. There was just enough light from the pale scythe of the moon to see a locked gate up ahead, barring his way, and the warning sign fixed to it — TANKS TURNING.
He swung the Corsa to the left, taking it off the track and onto what he hoped was the flatter surface of the moor land next to it, and then — just as the headlights of the police car were appearing around the bend in the road — he quickly turned off the engine.
The police car sped past — lights and siren still blazing — and Gordon watched as the flashing blue light raced away across the moor, leaving an electric-blue trail behind it, until finally he couldn’t see it anymore. He waited another minute or two, just to be on the safe side, then he started the engine, gave it a few revs, and hoped to God that the Corsa wasn’t stuck in the snow.
It wasn’t.
The wheels spun for a few heart-sinking moments, the car sliding uncontrollably to one side, but when Gordon put his foot down, cautiously giving it a bit more power, the wheels suddenly got a grip and the Corsa lunged forward.
Gordon was feeling pretty pleased with himself as he reached the end of the track and rejoined the road — he’d outwitted the cops, he’d saved himself from a very tricky situation, and now, at last, he was on his way home.
You need to think about what you’re going to tell Mother, he told himself as he turned right onto the road. You can’t tell her what really happened, can you? She’d go ballistic. You’ll have to make something up. Tell her that —
“Damn!”
A distant blue light had appeared in the rearview mirror, and when Gordon twisted around and looked out of the rear window, he saw the flashing blue light and the glaring headlights of the police car cresting a rise in the road about a hundred yards back. The siren started whooping, and Gordon could see that the patrol car was really moving, streaking through the snow like a rocket.
He swore again, this time using a word he’d never used before in his whole life.
He was so surprised at himself that for a moment or two he was too stunned to do anything. He just sat there, his mouth half open, unable to believe not only what he’d just said, but the passion with which he’d said it. And then, quite suddenly, he broke into a manic smile and reached down to turn the radio on.
The song booming out of the speakers was Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” and as the Corsa raced away, its wheels spinning and its back end sliding from side to side, Gordon threw his head back and sang along with all his heart.
We had to do it.
“Do what?”
Hit the hillbilly with a rock. We had no choice.
“I know.”
It was him or us.
“I know.”
We don’t have to feel bad about it.
“I don’t.”
Really?
“Yeah.”
We’re on the wooden steps now, and although we’ve only just begun the steep climb up, I’m already so exhausted that I know I’m never going to make it to the top.
“I’m done,” I gasp, stopping to get my breath. “I can’t go any farther.”
Yes, you can.
“I can’t . . .” I gaze upward at the dizzying height of the steps, and from down here, it looks as if they go on
forever — disappearing into the darkness and reaching all the way up to the glass sky and beyond . . .
“The glass sky . . . ?”
What?
“Nothing.” I bend over, hands on knees, and try to get some air into my lungs.
“I can’t do it,” I say. “It’s too far.”
You can take one more step, can’t you? Just one more . . . ?
“What’s the point?”
Just try it, okay? For me.
I sigh heavily, then — using the rifle to hoist myself up — I take another laboriously painful step.
See? That wasn’t so difficult, was it?
“It was just one step.”
They’re all just one step.
I’m too tired to argue. I put my head down and start climbing the never-ending steps again.
You know it wasn’t a gunshot, don’t you? Ella says.
“What?”
The old monkems in the car, you know . . . the old-monkem-lady with the walking stick that wasn’t a rifle? Ella grins. You heard a bang, and you thought it was a gunshot, remember?
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t a gunshot. It was the car backfiring.
“I know.”
Silence.
I keep going.
Keep climbing.
One impossible step at a time.
What does Whitby have to do with Little Red Riding Hood anyway?
“What?”
The snow globe . . .
“What about it?”
It doesn’t make sense.
“Of course it doesn’t. None of this makes sense.”
Well, yeah, but the thing about the snow globe, the thing I’ve never understood, is why it has Little Red Riding Hood in it.
“Why shouldn’t it?”
Because Shirley got it from a souvenir shop in Whitby, and as far as I know, Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t have anything to do with Whitby. I mean, there’s no connection at all, is there?
“How do you know there’s not?”
Whitby’s famous for Dracula, not Little Red Riding Hood.
“Maybe Shirley didn’t get it from Whitby. Maybe she got it from wherever Little Red Riding Hood comes from.”
Little Red Riding Hood’s a character in a fairy tale. She doesn’t come from anywhere.
“Right. And you think Dracula’s real, do you?”
You know what I mean.
We lapse into silence again for a while, and as I carry on heaving myself up the everlasting steps — one by one by one . . . each step getting higher all the time, while my body gets heavier and heavier — I think I’m thinking about the snow globe . . . trying to work out why I keep thinking about it, why it keeps coming back to me — but after a while, I realize that I’m not thinking about it at all . . . I’m not thinking about anything . . . my head’s just an empty skull, a sphere of bone skewered on top of a spine . . .
But then, I ask myself, if it is empty, if there really is nothing inside my head, where are these thoughts coming from?
And now my otherness rises up through my spine and out through my skewered skull into the cold black air above me, and as I look down — for a measureless moment — I see the red-hooded figure of a little girl struggling up the steps, using a rifle as a walking stick . . . and I can see that her right foot’s useless, just a throbbing mess of flesh and bone, and she’s hurting all over, and she’s so tired . . . just so incredibly tired . . . and as I watch her heaving herself up the wooden steps — one by relentless one . . . each step getting higher all the time, her body getting heavier and heavier . . . I hear her voice
Elliot?
and she becomes me again.
Do you want to know something else that doesn’t make sense?
“No.”
It’s got nothing to do with the snow globe.
“I don’t care what it is. I don’t want to hear it.”
It won’t take long.
“I know what you’re doing.”
What do you mean?
“All this talking . . . it’s just a diversion, a distraction. You’re trying to take my mind off everything else.”
What mind?
“Yeah, very funny.”
All right, I admit it. You’re right. I should have known it wouldn’t work. You were always too smart for me.
“Yeah, well, it was pretty obvious.”
There’s no distracting you, is there? You always know exactly what’s going on.
“I wouldn’t say that . . .”
Look around.
“What?”
Open your eyes and look around.
I didn’t even know my eyes were closed, and when I open them and look around, I realize that I’m not climbing the steps anymore. I’ve climbed them. I’m standing at the top of the steps, leaning on my rifle-walking-stick, breathing heavily . . . and as I gaze back down the steps, and I see them disappearing into the bottomless darkness below, I know I can’t have climbed them. It’s impossible. There are too many of them, they’re too steep. I couldn’t have made it all the way up there, not in a million years.
I see the lights then.
Down in the woods, away to my right . . . faint lights, flashing intermittently through the trees.
The four monkems from the field.
“Yeah.”
They’re still quite a long way away.
“Yeah.”
They’ll find the hillbilly.
“If he’s still there.”
I don’t think he’ll have gone anywhere.
“We had to do it.”
I know.
I turn to my left then and look along the snow-covered dirt track stretching out ahead of me. I can just make out a slight graying in the darkness not too far along the path, a patch of blackness that’s not quite as black as everything else.
It’s the field at the back of Shirley’s house. It’s not so dark there. It’s got the lights from the road, the lights from the houses . . . there’s probably a stile into the field at the end of the path. That’s what you can see. The lighter patch is where the stile leads into the field.
It’s hard to tell how far away it is — and I don’t trust my senses anymore anyway — but something in the pit of my belly tells me it’s fairly close.
“Ready?”
Yeah.
“All right, let’s go.”
We set off along the track, and this time, before every step, I prod the ground in front of me with the rifle-walking-stick, making sure it’s safe to walk on. If I fall down into the valley again, I know — without a shadow of doubt — that I’ll never get out.
Do you know what we’re doing now?
“Yeah.”
Tell me.
“We’re going to Shirley’s.”
What for?
“To find Mum.”
Police Officer Annie Hobbes had called in the Corsa’s registration number from the patrol car at the Holly Tree Inn, and by the time her partner, Officer Mark Smith, had realized that the fleeing car was no longer ahead of them on the road across the moors, they already knew who the Corsa was registered to, which meant that as long as it hadn’t been stolen — and there were no reports that it had been — and as long as the driver was the registered owner, then they knew who he was and where he lived.
“Any outstanding warrants on him?” Smith asked Hobbes as he turned the patrol car around and sped off back along the road.
“He’s clean,” Hobbes said. “Not even a parking ticket.” She glanced over her shoulder, looking back through the rear windshield. “Are you sure —?”
“There he is!”
Hobbes quickly turned around again, and as the patrol car lurched over a rise in the road, she saw the Corsa up ahead. It was about a hundred yards away, speeding back along the road, away from them, its wheels spinning and its back end sliding from side to side.
Hobbes reached for the radio clipped to her collar.
“Charlie Three Zero,” she said into
it. “Suspect vehicle now heading east, repeat east, on Grinton Lane. In pursuit.”
A moment later, a voice crackled out from the radio.
“Received. Charlie Three Four is approaching the suspect’s address, requesting advice on how to proceed.”
Hobbes glanced at Smith. “What do you think?”
“Tell them to wait when they get there, lights and sirens off,” he said. “We’ll have a better idea what to do when we find out which way he goes at the junction.”
Hobbes nodded and spoke into her radio. “Charlie Three Four?”
“Go ahead.”
“Where are you, Griff?”
“Just coming into the village.”
“Wait when you get to the house, okay? Lights and sirens off.”
“Received.”
Griff Beattie immediately switched off the siren and the emergency lights, and his partner in the driver’s seat, Rick Tarn, took his foot off the accelerator and slowed the car to a steady thirty miles per hour.
“Which one is it?” he asked Beattie as the houses came into view.
Beattie leaned forward, peering through the windshield. “I think it’s that one,” he said, pointing to a house on the right-hand side of the road. “The first one, the one with the red door.” He looked down at the notebook in his lap, checked the address he’d been given, then looked back at the house. “Yeah, that’s definitely it.”
Tarn glanced over at the house, then began looking around for a parking space. Both sides of the road were lined with parked cars, and the only gap Tarn could see was on the left-hand side between a Skoda Fabia and a Land Rover. The only possible problem was that it was directly opposite the house, and Tarn wasn’t sure if that mattered or not.
“Did Annie say we had to keep out of sight?” he asked Beattie, slowing the car to a crawl.
Beattie shook his head. “Just wait.”
“So do you think we’re all right parking here?”