For Rye

by Gavin Gardiner

  She replaced the Flaubert and crept towards the empty alcove, keeping an eye on the shop window for any sign of Mr Harper. The shelves were indeed bare, but the alcove was not completely empty.

  The whistling that suddenly approached the shop was, to the girl, an air raid siren. Without a moment to even look at the cover of the battered paperback she’d spotted hiding on the floor under a shelf in the alcove, she’d rammed it into her coat pocket and rushed to a neighbouring shelving unit, pretending to be engrossed in a Madeleine L’Engle fantasy. Mr Harper stepped through the front door carrying cups of soup and hot rolls, none the wiser.

  And now, back in the safety of her clock tower, there’s an intruder. She knows it’s there, waiting patiently in her coat. Already she’s been here for hours; the night has drawn in and a biting wind is piercing through the little stone room like a spear. She should be in bed. They all think she’s in bed, but she’s here, finally ready to confront the demon that’s been awaiting her all evening. Heart racing, she reaches into her coat.

  Under the lantern’s light the book is unassuming. Tame, even. The classics she’d worked through were bibles, thick as logs with pages thinner than air. This thing is slender, its cover illustration laughably cheap. She whispers its title:

  Horror Highway

  Quentin C. Rye

  She giggles at the cover and its name. It’s like throwing a white sheet over a kitten and hoping people will run screaming from the ghost. Just a cheap paperback, she thinks. Can’t fool me. She giggles again.

  For the final time, she giggles.

  She believes, after the tomes she’s conquered, she can digest the book by quickly skimming through its pages. She begins to flick.

  A little boy is told to slip the tip of a sharpened blade into his baby sister’s soft skull in order to save the lives of his parents. He complies.

  A man chokes through shattered teeth, their jagged tips sticking from his raw gums like tiny fangs. He is fed his own genitals.

  Through blood and tears a woman screams as she is raped in a shadowy alley to an audience of cheering hobos.

  The girl’s tears dot the pages. She can’t stop flicking. Why can’t she stop flicking?

  Eyelids removed, tiny games of noughts and crosses carved into corneas with a drawing pin; holes drilled under fingernails and down the length of each digit, bleach funnelled into the fleshy shafts; broken glass sandpapered into skin, broken glass, all over, sandpapered, skin, over and over and over and—

  Pages roll by. Death, torture, and pain wash over her.

  Then she finds it.

  A flaming pickup truck tears through a lone woman standing in the middle of the road, her emerald green dress flapping madly in the wind as metal rips her from the asphalt. She’s tossed, her contorted body flying up and over the vehicle through billowing flames. The fire catches upon her dress. The flaming truck speeds into the distance while the woman lands on the road and lies crumpled, paralysed as the burning green fabric melts into her flesh.

  Eyes stung by tears, the girl throws the book across the stone-walled room and backs away. It lands amongst a pile of dirt and rubble. The demon rests. It has done its work.

  There it shall lie for thirty years.

  There it shall await Renata Wakefield.

  12

  Renata picked up the ringing telephone and carried it into the hall on its long cable. She closed the living room door, sat on a step at the bottom of the staircase, and answered.

  ‘Hey, Renata? It’s Sandie!’

  ‘Sandie…uh, hello,’ she said nervously, searching for the words. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Nothing, just calling for a chat.’

  ‘From…America?’ Renata paused. ‘I’ve not thought any more about the Adelaide Addington movie, you know.’

  ‘Oh, no sweat. I really just wanted to apologise profusely for how Daddy carried on at the film set, shouting at me like that. He doesn’t usually do that. That happening in front of you was so embarrassing. Guess he’s under a lot of pressure at the moment with this new film.’ The sound of a knife on a chopping board came through the line. ‘I’m on the hands-free. You hear me satisfactorily?’

  ‘Fine, yes.’

  ‘I really enjoyed talking to you when we met. Won’t be, like, a regular thing or anything, I promise. I won’t start stalking you – I’ve had my fair share of that.’

  ‘I don’t mind, Sandie,’ said Renata, ‘but I’m a little concerned your father doesn’t want us speaking. I wouldn’t want to cause an upset.’

  The girl giggled. ‘There’s a lot Daddy doesn’t know about me, Renata. One more thing won’t hurt.’

  ‘Sandie, have you any idea why your father wouldn’t want us talking? He seems rather adamant about it.’

  ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, he’s always been real protective over me, but this is just dumb. Sometimes I think he loves me too much for his own good, the goofball that he is.’ The chopping stopped. ‘He does seem pissed at me, though. I dunno if I’ve done something wrong, besides talking to you, of course. But why he wouldn’t want us chatting, I got no idea. Guess I need to think of a way to make it up to him. Maybe I could get rid of some of the…miscellany he wants to sell to raise money for his charities.’

  The flicking television channels of Sandie’s mind cycled through various other disparate topics, wedging in those oh-so-impressive words wherever she could. Finally, the conversation drew to a close amongst further promises of Sandie being first in line for the Adelaide Addington part, should it ever materialise. Renata hung up the receiver even more perplexed about Quentin’s behaviour. So Sandie also found his keeping them apart strange. What kind of harming influence could Renata possibly have on the young girl?

  She carried the telephone back into the living room, replaced it on the sideboard, and stepped to the bookcase. She had work to do.

  ‘He’s a rat,’ spat Thomas. ‘His type are vermin, ungodly. Keep working for him and pray the Lord’s forgiveness finds you.’

  Her advance from Quentin was extravagant, too extravagant, but he’d had it no other way. She pulled a folder from the dusty shelf and reached to the back to run a finger over the envelope of cash stashed behind the books. Yes, it was still real. A few more of these and she could secure her father’s care, maybe even clear her debts. She moved a few thick religious texts in front of the envelope, along with Thomas’s mammoth bible, and returned to the couch.

  The fire lit up the peeling wallpaper and patches of mould around the room. Furniture draped in musty sheets, framed pictures of loved ones now gone, ornaments of which only the ghosts in the pictures knew the significance: these were the kinds of artefacts dotting the mausoleum.

  Above the raging fire loomed the flood. She’d considered taking the painting down but it held a weight carried over from her childhood. It was a living thing, an organism, and never had she so much as dared to touch it. Best leave it where it was.

  The folder held the remaining script to be reworked. Renata had saved the hardest part for last; this bundle, they’d agreed, needed to be completely rewritten. Since her night with Quentin, from which her skin still rose at the thought, there seemed to be a hint of inspiration returning. She had to put down a lot of ink before tiny globules of true creative juice found their way through the nib of her pen to the paper, but they were there. She just had to persist. For Quentin, she had to persist.

  Thomas swiped a moth from his face. ‘A rat and a Jew,’ he snarled, interrupting her train of thought. ‘All those Hollywood types are Jews. They’ve wrecked their country with their death movies.’ His blank eyes rolled in their sockets. The dishevelled mongrel by his side let out a gargled moan. ‘Death movies, that’s what they are. That’s where your blood money’s coming from, girl.’

  Her pen remained poised as he raved on. Lately, her father’s hateful spiels were provoking in her something more akin to anger than fear. Anger at his ignorance, or at the terror under which she’d live
d as a little girl? Could it be anger at his treatment of her mother? Rage can become to a writer the catalyst of their craft, but not this writer.

  Not yet.

  The anger paralysed her, as if her very thoughts had been injected with the blind old man’s medication. Tonight his rambling was infuriating her. There was a cork jammed in the bottle of her abilities. Nothing came.

  ‘And now they come to this town with their cheap thrills and actress whores and…’

  Still nothing.

  ‘…they soil this once great country with their filth. Blasphemy, it’s nothing short of…’

  A moth landed on the blank page.

  ‘…a slap in the face of God. Let the will of their Creator strike them down. Let me tell you, girl…’

  The insect stood frozen.

  ‘…for these heathens, for all of us…’

  It would be so easy.

  ‘…in the name of the Father…’

  She reached for it.

  ‘…the flood is coming.’

  Its brown abdomen crushed between her fingers.

  As if his visionless eyes had seen, Thomas fell silent. Samson twitched. The question of what made her do it didn’t present itself as she wiped the pulp on her skirt. She was too taken by the bubbling over of her mind, too taken by the pen that suddenly and furiously began filling the page. Aside from the crackling fire, the only sound in the room was the scratching of pen on paper.

  She wrote.

  Thomas’s spiels resumed in fits and bursts. And yet, as this sudden and almighty inspiration flooded from the pen, his words passed around her like water bypassing a rock.

  She reached the end of the final page of script after three hours of the pen’s pouring, then sat back to look at her jagged scrawls. It wasn’t until she turned back to the first page that she was reminded of what had sparked this torrent of activity. At the top of the page, above the first words of her maniacally scratched work, lay soaked into the paper a tiny wet spot: the dying juices of a moth. She looked at her fingers in horror – more dying juice – and raced to the sink in the kitchen.

  Her father, having succumbed to a quivering half-sleep, choked back to life. ‘Girl,’ he shouted through to her, his words a froth of confusion, ‘what…where’s the…get the…’

  She shut off the tap and returned to Thomas, slowly drying her hands. She fixed her gaze on the man’s eyes. They were as misty as the fields.

  ‘He’s not coming back, is he?’ she said. His unseeing stare clamped around her as that ragged fingernail began its incessant tapping and scratching on the arm of his chair. ‘I need to know, Father. If Noah isn’t around then I have to deal with your care myself.’

  ‘A pig.’

  She looked blankly. ‘Father?’

  ‘She never stopped believing you’d come back,’ he croaked.

  Renata felt a mass in her chest, an empty solidity rising to her throat as the face of Sylvia Wakefield materialised in her mind.

  Midnight, midnight; it’s your turn…

  Suddenly the water battered the rock. She felt the familiar stab of nervous fingernails in her scabby palms. Tears begged to be born in her eyes.

  ‘I knew you were gone,’ he trembled, ‘just like your brother. And when I made efforts – oh, such efforts – to…convince her, she squealed—’

  He smiled.

  ‘—like a pig.’

  So out the front door and through fog-drenched fields she ran. She wasn’t meant to be here. The beam would have held, it would have taken her weight. By now, her neck should have been snapped. It would have held. There was nothing keeping her here, only some ancient promise made to a dead woman. There was nothing keeping her anywhere.

  Except Quentin.

  Tears fell to the fields speeding under her trailing skirt. For a time, the thickening mist rendered both the Wakefield house and the town ahead invisible. Like a sailor lost at sea, she registered a momentary loss of orientation, during which all sense of direction seemed to dissolve. She ran through space, a white, smoky space. The misty vacuum was a microcosm, her life miniaturised. The walls of fog became the cottage on Neo-Thorrach where she’d hidden herself, the passing grass the stream of dim-witted words she’d churned out endlessly for a dim-witted readership. She clenched her eyes shut as she ran; maybe the fog and the grass could be something else? Maybe they could be white, endless corridors? Pure, simple, everything in its place. No disorder, no disaster.

  She opened her eyes and saw the town materialising from the abyss ahead. Millbury Peak still had her.

  Quentin’s rented manor finally came into view. She made a beeline for the Georgian building, scrambling down its driveway and thumping on the front door. She suddenly wondered where she’d go if there was no answer. The clock tower, no doubt. It would be freezing tonight, but she couldn’t go back to Father. He wasn’t a moth she could extinguish with two fingers. He was a thread of fear running from her childhood to this very moment, except the fear was changing. She was still a cowering child waiting for the shouting to stop, but the child was angry. She wondered if this rage had replaced the fear, but no, she was still afraid of Thomas Wakefield, of Millbury Peak, of everyone she met.

  But there was hope. Somewhere alongside the fear and the anger and whatever else boiled inside of her there was another man, the thought of whom convinced her she could be alright – maybe even normal. This man made her feel like a human being, as opposed to an imposter in a world belonging to everyone but her.

  Quentin opened the door.

  Part of her felt ridiculous collapsing into his arms, like a hopeless, romance-saves-all cliché from one of her budget potboilers. Another part felt as she had when their lips had met, when his forehead had pressed into hers in that expression of unadulterated relief; as she had when his hand slid under the fabric of her skirt, his warmth meeting hers; as when she’d lay beneath him, her mind swimming in a blend of anxious terror (there must be some mistake) and complete trust. She felt as she had when watching herself give to him her very being, just as she’d watched her countless literary creations do over the years. She felt as she had that night when her body ceased its subliminal resistance and, for the first time, received a man.

  His tightening arms said everything his lips didn’t. She burrowed into the thick fabric of his turtleneck. She felt the voiceless whispering of his embrace assure her it was okay, that she was safe. She looked into those horn-rimmed frames, the evening chill tickling her tear-stained cheeks.

  ‘Quentin, I don’t want to be alone anymore.’

  13

  The girl is now sixteen years old, the boy six.

  Her birthday is today, as is his.

  She sits on her bed. The room is bare, save for a small dresser and wardrobe. Her identity lies not in this room, but another across the fields, high above a cemetery. A secret room. She will go there now.

  Moments ago, she realised the papers, her seven chapters, were not where she thought she’d left them the previous night. Her eyes widen in panic. She must have set them down in that damned larder when returning the soup flask.

  Downstairs: a cheer for every gift her brother tears open. No cheers from the kitchen, meaning the coast is clear to the larder. She checks her room one last time for the papers. All she finds is that old diary. Its opening pages are sparse, dotted with the occasional account of daily life. Reliving each day became painful, so the entries grew fewer. Many pages are left blank until suddenly, halfway through, the pages fill. She discovers storytelling.

  Whooping from downstairs. A woman shrieks. Screams of laughter from another.

  The girl is finished with the diary. She now writes on the crisp, yellow writing paper Mr Harper gives her. Scrawled upon a pile of these sheets, the missing sheets, are the first seven chapters to her best story yet. Adelaide Addington is finally speaking off the page. Those pages. For weeks she’s toiled over her creation, the pages a mess of corrections and amendments, but within this code only she could d
ecipher lies the first thing of which the girl has ever felt proud. If the papers have been found, and she’s wrong in her belief that no one could decipher them, then things will get bad. Father will get bad.

  The diary’s served its purpose – for now. She stuffs it into the back of the dresser drawer. It will lie here for decades, until it is reclaimed to serve an unthinkable purpose.

  She grabs her rucksack and slips out of the bedroom door, then slinks downstairs. The whooping in the dining room – the ‘special occasion room’ – has been replaced by chattering. The front door is open, but she won’t use it. Mother and Mr O’Connell are locked in deep conversation on the porch, a glass of scotch swirling in his hand. She’d never make it past them. She’ll use the back door.

  The girl sneaks through the impeccably clean living room as the grandfather clock continues its unrelenting ticking. The latest of Father’s precious hounds, the latest Samson, glares at her as if she’s committing some terrible sin, the knowledge of which it cannot share. She glances nervously at the flood painting.

  ‘Whale is it?’ Noah says, red curls hanging over blank eyes. He stands in the doorway, expressionless. ‘Whale’s my plesent, Lenata?’

  She backs through the kitchen door, fists clenched. Get the papers and get out, she tells herself.

  The larder door towers over her. She tugs on its cast iron pull handle, the cold from inside rushing over her as the heavy door swings opens. She finds herself unable to enter. It’s the same every time, her legs refusing to carry her into her former prison cell. She thinks of those two days six years ago in the pitch-black without food or water, soiling herself, no concept of time. But that was then, this is now.