She struggled nevertheless, as living things will. When the shiver subsided she inched herself up toward the undergrowth, looking for some kind of shelter, but the forest was cool and soaked with fresh rain on top of its own permanent damp. Her truant muscles were barely capable of moving her at a crawl. Farther along the sunny slope of rock, a long white log lay beached. She was halfway there when the breeze crawled over her naked flesh again and another spasm of shuddering took hold, curling her up but denying her rest, racking her from top to toe. She tried to tell herself to fight but she had no weapons. The shivers were an enemy within. It was all she could do to keep breathing, long shuddering gasps through rattling teeth.
The sun began to go down.
• • •
Within a few unspeakable hours the entire world had reduced itself to a square meter of rock. Her chin was tucked to her chest, her ankles locked over each other to squeeze in the last fraction of warmth, her arms bent fetal. She breathed in small soft huffs. She waited to fall asleep permanently. From time to time she caught herself sliding to the brink of it, dipping a toe in the dark, but it would only happen when she wasn’t watching. There’d be no one to watch. Her body pushed in on itself, groping for a comfort that wasn’t there.
She was too tired to be frightened now, and too cold. She’d given up. She’d stopped thinking about moving. If she admitted the slightest cranny of air into her cocoon, the feverish shivering would follow it at once and savage her up and down.
Night fell patiently, as always, drawing the blinds gradually. The scoured stone under her eyes turned from yellow-gold to grey.
A few flutters of grief came with the thought: I’ll never see anything else again. Some of the multitude included in that anything swam up before her mind’s eye. There was less pain there than in the compressed misery of her flesh, though. The shivers had squeezed like an old mangle, spread her flat and empty for the coming night to get to work on.
Not too much longer, she hoped.
• • •
Death came when it was fully dark. It arrived with a swish of surprised air, and then scraping footfalls, tchok tchok tchok. She stirred at the sound. Only the smallest tremors quivered through her now. She felt the dullness of relief. She must have dropped over the elusive edge at last, fallen accidentally into a final delirium. If her eyes were open, they were looking through its veil. They saw a delicate glimmer over her tomb of rock, a mild failure of darkness, like the most tentative echo of moonlight.
Death moved to stand right over her. It was shapeless and fully black.
“Someone here,” it said.
Death bent. Its breath was a warm gust.
“Not her,” it said. “Wrong girl.”
The brush of warmth passed. With a feeble ache of disappointment Goose saw Death retreat from her, returning some of the wispy starlight it had blotted out. Its outline wavered, making a stiff rustle.
“Too late,” Death said, in its skeletal voice. “Missed her.” It withdrew farther. The unbearable cold came back and pressed in. She tried to move her lips to plead with Death not to go: impossible. Something else answered instead, another shape forming and approaching, not Death itself but Death’s unknown and unexpected companion. The shape came close and bent over her with no sound at all, since Death’s companion was a barefoot boy.
PART VI
30
Marina had been told to stay right where she was, so that’s what she did. She was careful not even to shuffle her feet. It wasn’t helping. The telephone had been quiet for a long time now.
“Hello?”
Where the peculiar voice had been there was now no sound at all. She must have made a mistake. There’d been a thing she specifically wasn’t supposed to do, something about hanging. Hanging upside down? Could she have done it accidentally? But how, without even moving? She hadn’t even wiggled the telephone in her hand, until her elbow had started aching.
“Gwen? Gwenny?”
Horace had always told her she didn’t know anything, but she didn’t see how this could be her fault. The voice had said it was coming right back. She’d waited, like it said. And waited. And waited. She’d waited so long her feet were hurting from standing still and the wet trickle dribbling from the bandage on her heel had made its own miniature swamp on the floor. Something had gone wrong. There must be something else she was supposed to do. Cautiously at first, then desperately, she shook the thing she was holding, pressed it, squeezed it against her mouth, her ear, her chest. Nothing she did made anything come out of it. It was just a thing among the houseful of weird things, as silent as the fat lucky god.
Where had the voice gone? She furrowed her brow and tried her hardest to remember what it had said (it was so difficult, though, with her painful confusion getting worse the longer the silence went on, and the tormenting feeling that some kind of chance was drifting away, some door closing). Horace was just up the road. Horace was in a hospital, which explained why no one had seen him. Gwen was . . . And the person who was talking about them was . . .
Marina was standing by the window overlooking the street in the upstairs room. The window was still open from when she’d fetched the saucepan of rainwater in from the sill. A rumble gathered outside and a few moments later a big car came up the lane from right to left, all dirty white walls rather than windows. It came slowly, crunching over the sticks and empty bottles and scraps of wet plastic in the road. Instinct made Marina shrink away from the window, though not before she read the word police printed on the car in big black letters.
At once her memory was jogged. The voice had said something about the police. Was that it, then, going up the road, to where Horace was? She leaned out of the window, still holding the phone. The big white car had already passed the house: she couldn’t see anyone inside. She put the telephone carefully down on the dresser and ran lightly downstairs. Iseult was still asleep and snoring on the floor. Marina didn’t want to lose time waking her up; she slipped on her shoes and shift, stained and tattered but dry, and levered herself as swiftly and quietly as she could through the empty pane of the broken window. She could still hear the car grunting away down the road. Otherwise everything was very still. The morning was on the way to being foggy without having quite got there. She skipped around to the front of the house, thinking to wave at the car before it disappeared.
She stopped before reaching the road.
Someone else was there. A man was standing just outside the open door of the house opposite, examining her from among the brown wreck of its front garden. Taken aback, Marina dropped her eyes at once, remembering Iseult’s face at its fiercest, telling her not to talk to anyone.
“Are you lost?”
The car noise was fading into the distance. Marina was about to retreat back out of sight behind the house when she remembered how careful Iseult had been about making sure no one saw them go in. She didn’t know what to do.
“What is it?” another voice called from somewhere behind the first one, inside the house.
“Kid on her own. Looking for someone.”
Several different half-recollected instructions and prohibitions jostled each other. Confused, she stayed rooted to the spot at the edge of the road.
“Is empty house.” The second voice said it like that, missing out some words and pronouncing the remaining ones oddly. “All these houses empty now. Except this one. Are you looking for the professor?”
Marina looked up in surprise. Two men were studying her now. The house across the street on whose threshold they stood was the house she and Iseult had been going to, she remembered, and the woman they’d been going to see was called professor. The man she’d seen first was the nearer of the two. He hid behind round-lensed spectacles like Owen’s and a wildly unpruned beard. The other man stood on the doorstep behind him, leaning out of the house to look. He was shorter and sharper. His face was like a hu
nting bird’s except pale instead of dark. His eyes were icy and he had straight hair that was almost white. They were almost as unlike each other as they were unlike anyone else she knew. Neither voice could possibly have been the one she’d heard on the phone.
“Professor left weeks ago,” the sharp-faced man who left out words said. “Before new year. Others all gone too now. Are you left behind? Who are you looking for?”
Iseult had told her not to say anything to anyone, not to look at anyone, but she hadn’t told her how to do it. Was she supposed to stand with her mouth shut until they went away? She didn’t know. She did know that they’d knocked on the door of the house across the road just yesterday, though, and that the woman called the professor was one of the people they wanted to find.
“Yes,” she said. “Please. We wanted to see the woman who lives there. Do you know where she is? Or Horace, he lives here too, or Gawain, he—” The bearded man turned to his friend so sharply, Marina was sure they’d recognized something she’d said. “He came here. Didn’t he? Do you know? Please. We’ve come such a long way.”
“Did you say—” began the bearded man, the nest-brown tangle around his mouth twitching, but the other man put a hand on his shoulder and stepped in front of him.
“You know Gawain.” His strange voice said it Gah-van, halfway between Gawain and Gavin, as if he wasn’t sure which was right. “Man with mask.”
A spark of hope kindled, lighting a sweet flame. “Yes! Of course!”
The bearded man muttered something to his friend, who nodded. “You should come,” he said.
“Where?”
“Inside.”
“He’s there?”
“There is message from your friend.”
The bearded man beckoned, crouching slightly, the way she would have herself if she’d been trying to get Grey Mouser in through a door. “It’s okay,” he said, unnecessarily: of course it was! A message! They’d come to the right place after all.
“Where?”
“Come,” the blond man said, eyes narrowing keenly. “I show you.” She crossed the road quickly. Up close the men were bigger than they’d seemed. Both smelled of unwashed clothes and coffee. The bearded one’s hands twitched at his sides.
“Hi,” he said. “Yeah.”
Marina stopped a pace or two away. The other man motioned toward the open door behind him with slender and dirty fingers. She looked inside over their shoulders but saw only dimness.
“Or maybe I bring outside?” he said, smiling as oddly as he spoke. “Is better light. You know where he is now, this Gawain?”
She hesitated, momentarily confused again. Wasn’t it the two men who were going to tell her where he was, not the other way around?
A muffled shout came from behind.
“Marina? Marina!”
Iseult must have woken up. “Oh,” she began, half turning, “that’s my—” and got no further. A hand closed over her mouth, another pulled her around the waist, and too quickly for her to register any of what was happening beyond the stink of man-flesh in her nose and the brute force propelling her, she was bundled into the waiting house. The door clicked shut.
• • •
The two simplest freedoms, to move and to speak, and she had lost both.
This had never happened before, in all the life she was willing to remember. It came as an existential shock.
Not that Marina didn’t know about brutality. There was no sweetness about her innocence: on the contrary. She had grown up far more intimate with the raw harshness of things than most children. Until the beginning of that winter, when the world stirred from its centuries-long coma and began to remember that its nature was double like hers, she’d been completely untouched by all those discreet mechanisms that insulate us from the real. No out-of-the-way slaughterhouses and supermarket packaging hid the fact that someone killed the meat she ate. No underground pipes brought warmth generated hundreds of miles away when her house was cold. No phantasmagoria of imaginary lives was pixelated and projected on mesmerizing screens to displace or blot out the slow immediacy of her own. The part of her that belonged to her mother couldn’t tolerate such things. She hadn’t been able to touch plastic or nylon or tarmac. She couldn’t eat refined sugar or hydrogenated vegetable oil or sodium hexametaphosphate. Everything that was needed to keep her alive she saw with her own eyes. She watched it growing and dying. She knew how to twist the necks of birds and gut fish. She watched Gwen’s cat toying with a field mouse and never thought of cruelty, any more than she’d have sentimentalized the aphids that ladybirds gobbled from their garden roses. It wouldn’t have occurred to her that she was entitled to a life where violence only happened somewhere else.
But she’d never felt the fact of it, the actual weight of it on her own body. Neither her father nor Gwen nor Caleb had ever touched her in anger. (It could have been that as well as loving her too much they knew enough to fear her mother, but Marina didn’t know about that, not yet.) She couldn’t comprehend what was happening. She heard Iseult outside in the street, shouting her name louder and louder, a horrible edge of panic in the sound sharpening each time. So all she had to do was jump up and open the door and say It’s all right, here I am, but instead of that a big hand was pushing all over her mouth like the opposite of a kiss, its fingers were clamping her jaw tight shut, and there was a muscling heaviness wrapped all over her back.
Her eyes were wide open.
She was in a gloomy place of hard surfaces and scattered, disordered things to do with eating. She saw plates and forks and bowls and packets illustrated with pictures of food, all of it in chaos. Everything screamed its wrongness but she couldn’t even scream with it.
A hot mouth breathed right by her ear as though trying to worm inside. More than anything she wanted to twist away from it, but the hand stopped her even turning her neck. The meaning of being weak and small became starkly clear, a totally new kind of knowledge, worse than the worst surprise. She couldn’t do anything. She might as well not exist at all.
The bearded man crept in and out of the room. He and the one who was holding her kept whispering things to each other, as if she wasn’t there, as if they hadn’t noticed that she was trapped and half suffocated.
“Okay, she’s gone. Out the village. South.”
“What about the police?”
“No sign.”
“Is woman coming back?”
“I’ll look outside.”
“No! Not yet.”
“I reckon she’s gone.”
“Wait longer.”
“Can she breathe like that?”
“You think I kill her? Go watch next door.”
“Can’t hear anything anymore.”
“One minute. Then open door.”
Things like that. The heat of the body behind her was making her hot too. She couldn’t help breathing in the stench of the hand. She gagged and tried to cough but the hand shoved the cough back inside her.
“Shit, Pav, careful. That’s her neck.”
“You want she scream? You want police come?”
“They’re long gone. No one’s about.”
“How do you know? Who’s watching?”
“Can’t we just tie something round her mouth? Shit. Hey. You won’t scream, will you? Understand?”
“What are you, moron?”
“I’ll check the street now, okay? It’s totally quiet.”
“Window first.”
Things like that.
It wouldn’t have occurred to her to scream. In her world there had never been any strangers to come when they were called. When the hand finally freed her mouth and the contagious weight behind her loosened, she just stood, gasping.
“Good, good! Sensible girl. Nice and quiet.”
The room had a stale metallic reek. Though the brutali
ty had withdrawn, she could feel it thick in the air, waiting. She held very still, as if any movement might bring it toppling on her.
“How about sitting down?” The bearded man stood in the doorway to the other room, the one they’d pushed her in through. He gestured nervously toward a stool.
“Okay,” the other man said. “We go outside very soon. We go find mummy. Yes? My friend went to tell her you come soon.”
“Yeah. That’s right.” When the bearded man pushed his lips closed, his mouth vanished altogether. His eyes had already gone. The window was shaded by a roller blind and his spectacles reflected its rectangle of grubby light back at her.
“I like kids like this. Not noisy all the time.” The blond man patted her on the shoulder. She flinched. “Hey. It’s okay. Nothing to worry about. Good girl.” His hand tried to rest on her arm. She whimpered as she twisted away and screwed her eyes shut.
“Shit. You freaked her out.”
“What?” The blond man started talking far too loudly for a small room. “No, no. Girl knows we don’t hurt her. Yes? Maybe frightened a little bit, okay. Sorry. I worry mummy doesn’t let us talk to her even though we have message from her friend. Hmm? But is okay now.”
“Yeah. Just want to talk, that’s it. Hey, what’s your name?”
As well as the men’s there were three other faces in the room, Marina saw, when her eyes opened again. The two gentle ones were in a picture on the wall, one caught in the act of whispering to the other. The third was flat, almost featureless, and looked like it was made out of black stone. It lay on a table and stared vacantly at the ceiling.
“Go on. You can tell me. I’m Jon. What are you called?”
She realized she was free to move now, but when she glanced around she could see nowhere to go. The man called Jon blocked the whole of the doorway where he stood. There was another exit on the far side of the table, leading to a narrow curving staircase, but the smaller man was between her and it.
“Look what you’ve done. You scared the shit out of her.”
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