For Rye

by Gavin Gardiner

  The hangar rose through the mist as they approached, Quentin now following her like an excited child. She’d been told the metal building, which had surrendered to several decades of rust, had been housing the centrepiece of the production, a set of such importance that entry was strictly limited. A huge section of the half-cylinder’s front facing was retractable to allow access by aircraft, with NO ENTRY signs covering the colossal door. It was open just enough for them to enter. She stopped at the entrance and looked back at him.

  ‘Please,’ he said, motioning to the gap, ‘it’s time to take our work to the next level.’ Hesitantly, she ducked under the hangar door. ‘I told you, Ren,’ he said, his words infused with anticipation, ‘it’s a big day for you. For us both.’

  The space was so expansive she felt like she’d traded one outside for another. A man-made sky curved over them, the sounds of fluttering birds audible from above. The morning chill had been biting but, somehow, the cold in this metal temple was all-consuming.

  Their walk across the concrete plain felt like an eternity. Finally, they reached the far end of the hangar, where a vast projection screen sprawled across the metal wall like an impromptu cinema. Directly in front of the screen was a raised platform, upon which a large sheet of tarpaulin lay draped over something. Something big.

  ‘Quentin, what is this?’ she asked. ‘What are we doing here?’

  ‘You’ve worked hard on those scripts,’ he announced, a thespian to his audience. The words echoed through the chamber. ‘You really brought those love scenes to life, you know.’ He stopped by the platform and turned to face her, the knives of his eyes finally materialising behind their horn-rimmed frames. He tapped his foot maniacally. ‘But the romance is over, Renata.’

  He held the wrapped up rag in one hand, a corner of the tarp in the other. Keeping his gaze fixed upon her, he yanked the tarp off in one grand sweep. Upon the raised platform, facing the projection screen, was a car – a dark blue Ford Cortina. Quentin pulled from his pocket a small remote control and pointed it behind and above her. She heard mechanical whirring as the screen awoke, streaks of shadow and broken image struggling to life. Then, in a blast of light, the movie started to roll.

  It was a dark country road.

  ‘As you know,’ he declared, ‘in Horror Highway it was a woman in a green dress mowed down.’ He glanced proudly at the projection screen as a yellow shape appeared on the rolling road, then flicked his gaze back to the white-faced Renata. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve used a little poetic licence to make this a touch more…personal.’

  She watched hypnotised from the tail end of the Cortina, which, from her position, gave the rough illusion of its speeding along the projected road. The shape became clearer.

  He unravelled the rag.

  The walls of the hangar melted away. She entered a trance, enslaved by the image before her, until all that remained was the speeding car, the road, and that shape in the distance, the ghost which forever loomed just out of reach. A bead of sweat traced down the length of her back. Her knuckles whitened around an invisible wheel.

  ‘Midnight, midnight…’ he called from the darkness, his words seeped in ecstasy. To Quentin C. Rye, a biblical event was unfolding, a cosmic cycle completing. His universe was this hangar, Renata his Eve. The shape took form on the screen. Sweat stung the scabs in her palms.

  ‘…it’s your turn…’

  It was the shape of a child, yellow raincoat hanging off its puny frame. Quentin dropped the rag and revealed a small red spade. He crouched and smashed it off the ground, those mad eyes drinking in every nuance of her being.

  One

  Pain burst in her brain like never before.

  Two

  He cracked the spade off the concrete.

  Three

  She counted the blows as her brain swelled with a profound agony.

  Four

  ‘Please, stop!’

  Five

  ‘…clock strikes twelve…’

  Six

  His words were infused with orgasmic pleasure.

  Seven

  She lost balance and fell to her knees.

  Eight

  Her bladder let go.

  Nine

  ‘…burn…’

  Ten

  ‘…burn…’

  Eleven

  ‘…burn.’

  Twelve

  The shape, an image of a figure superimposed upon the speeding road, finally took form.

  Noah.

  Thirteen

  Blackness took her.

  15

  ‘Look after your brother, Rennie.’ Her parents huddle around their son, patting down a spring of curls here, smoothing a crease in his jumper there. He is a prize trophy and, tonight, the girl is that trophy’s minder. ‘Get him to bed by eight o’clock and make sure he’s warm,’ her mother continues, smile wooden as ever, hair a sculpture of perfection. ‘You know where the extra blankets are if he needs them. And I want this place as clean and tidy as we left it when we come back.’

  Her father crouches by the boy. His tremors are getting worse. ‘If you need anything, son, you tell her.’

  ‘Me and Lenata have fun!’ squeals the child. The woman’s eyes shine with adoration. The man’s lips curve in a rare smile.

  The cool summer’s night is perfect for a stroll into town with Samson – a stroll which, seven years ago, before the boy’s arrival, the girl couldn’t have imagined occurring any more than her father’s acceptance of the new church. That’s what’s happening tonight, a meeting at the town hall for everyone to vent their rage at the modern facility due to replace the church across the fields. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ Mr Lawson, a physician from Millbury Peak Community Hospital, had declared after service two Sundays prior. To everyone’s amazement, even Mr Crawford’s wife, the mousy librarian (forever ‘Mr Crawford’s wife’, never ‘Mrs Crawford’) had, for the first time in history, spoken up, denouncing the decommissioning of the old church as sacrilege and – yes, indeed – ‘a tragedy’. The school’s head teacher had expressed his disapproval by way of a series of grunts, while Mrs Cunningham wept her agreement that the act could be called nothing less than – you guessed it – ‘a tragedy of the highest order’.

  And so tonight was the night for strategizing the fighting of this gross injustice. Their efforts would fly in the face of a decision already made like a bluebottle in the face of a train. The old church would rot, cursed to serve only two purposes: its clock tower would continue to toll the noon and midnight hours, and its cemetery would continue to swallow the town’s dead. Nevertheless, tonight they would gather while the precious Wakefield boy would be left in the care of the not-so-precious Wakefield girl.

  Tonight, true tragedy will reshape the Wakefield family.

  The girl watches from the living room window as her parents set off, her father stopping to buff the navy paintwork of the Ford Cortina lined up to perfection in the driveway. She feels a gaze from behind like a ghost’s embrace. She turns to Noah.

  He points through the open door of the kitchen to the bucket and spade. ‘Wolms,’ he says.

  ‘No worms,’ the girl replies. ‘No digging tonight. You’re staying in.’

  The boy lowers his hand. To her relief, he shuffles over to an abandoned toy fire engine and begins rolling it back and forth on the carpet by the fireplace.

  An hour passes. The girl sets her pencil down and rises from the chair, walking to her bedroom window. The summer’s evening has turned to night. Her eyes follow the country roads that outline each of the surrounding fields. In the distance, the church. By the church, her clock tower. Everywhere else, an endless patchwork of fields.

  She descends the staircase and looks into the living room.

  The boy is gone.

  ‘Noah?’

  No sound, no sign.

  She returns upstairs and opens his bedroom door, cartoon bears and elephants chuckling in her face.

  The boy is gon
e.

  She runs back downstairs and swings open the dining room door: the boy is gone. Even the closet under the stairs: the boy is gone. Back to the living room: the boy is gone. The kitchen: the bucket and spade are gone.

  Wolms.

  Damn it.

  For a moment, her mind’s eye is filled with the face of her father discovering his daughter’s allowing of Noah to go into the fields to play at night. ‘Lenata let me. Lenata said I could go, Daddy.’ She can hear it now. ‘I was scaled, Daddy. It was so scaly. Lenata said I could go, Daddy.’

  Damn him.

  She opens the back door into the empty garden.

  Gone.

  She steps into the night and looks out over the low-cut hedge across a sea of grass, the narrow country roads intersecting as they trace the perimeter of each field. He could have ended up in any of them in the hour since she last saw him. She would never be able to get round the fields fast enough to find the boy before her parents returned, and he knows it. The boy knows it. He knows she doesn’t have time to find him. He knows their father will hold her responsible. He knows she knows.

  Hatred floods her veins.

  Suddenly her mind’s eye turns from the future to the past, to the driving lessons.

  Unbelieving of what her mind is telling her body to do, she walks across the living room and into the hall. On a hook by the front door are the keys to the Cortina. She takes them.

  It’s dangerous, no question. Aside from wrapping the thing around a tree, as little as a scratch would be enough to push her father into a whole new realm of rage. She steps outside and looks at the car.

  It’s covered in scratches.

  They etch like roadmaps over the doors, the bonnet, the fenders, even the windows. It’s like an autopsy, metal and glass veins exposed to the cool summer air. She can see what happened as if it’s happening right now: the boy running around the car, scraping the spade across its paintwork, giggling that machine gun giggle.

  ‘Ee-ee-eeee!’

  However this plays out, it won’t be in her favour. Could she draw attention to the scrape marks in the spade as proof of the boy’s guilt?

  No, the girl used the spade to set him up.

  Could she hide in her room, feign ignorance, and lay the act of vandalism, as well as his wandering into the night, upon him?

  No, their little cherub would never do that.

  Could she follow through with her original plan, use the car to find the boy, return him, and deal ‘only’ with the repercussions of the scratches? Damage limitation. The roads would be dry. The car wouldn’t get dirtied. There’d be no evidence of its outing into the night, only the scratches. Who knows, maybe they would believe her? She may survive the vandalism enquiry. A missing Noah she would not.

  She clenches her fist around the keys and stares at the gleaming Ford Cortina, her father’s pride and joy.

  Damn it.

  She’s jostled as the car hits a pothole. She yanks the wheel to straighten the vehicle, watching the road for alignment. Keeping a steady speed (‘ABC: accelerator, brake, clutch, Rennie.’) she rolls the Ford along the track (‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre, Rennie.’) while squinting out the side windows for any sign of her brother.

  Moonlight blankets the swaying grass. Trees tremble in the distance. The night is quivering in apprehension. She skids the car to a halt as she spots something in a rippling pasture. Just a scarecrow. She eases the vehicle back into motion.

  She hears rain pattering on the roof; tapping, as if her father’s incessantly tapping finger had been multiplied into an army of drumming digits sent to taunt her. She prays this sudden summer downpour will delay his return, not hasten it. Soon, the rain becomes bullets firing through the headlights. She turns left at an intersection between fields, cringing as a puddle splashes onto the side of the car.

  The Cortina gains speed as she presses the tip of her outstretched foot into the accelerator. The wheel feels as heavy as a manhole cover, the car cumbersome, but the seventeen-year-old maintains control. She has lots of ground to cover. She can handle this thing. She presses harder.

  It occurs to her that, since the brat was wanting to dig for worms with that stupid bucket and spade, he’d probably be hunkered down in the mud out of her line of sight. She should have locked him in the larder like he did to her.

  Her eyes drift from the fields back to the hailstorm of bullets shooting strips through the beams of the headlights. Strips, like cut up paper in a dog bowl.

  Damn him.

  The intersections fly past as she presses harder. Through the rain she imagines her father’s eyes, his feelings towards her spelt out in their glare like chalk on a blackboard. He never wanted a girl. He never wanted her.

  Faster.

  More eyes join her father’s, the eyes of her mother, teachers, family friends, churchgoers. Every pair of eyes in this damned town.

  Eyes like knives.

  She sees the clock tower, her sanctuary. Or is it her prison? Why should she be banished to a cold, stone chamber? She sees the bruises around her mother’s practised smile. She sees her father’s fist. She sees that godforsaken house – the boy’s heaven, the girl’s hell.

  Faster.

  The fields become a speeding haze of grey. The rain’s angle of descent twists until horizontal, as if the car were flying into the sky.

  Then the shape.

  In years to come, her subconscious will embellish the dreams with details inaccurate to the fact; there is no fire, no brimstone, no flames from the sky or the breaking apart of the car, and the red spade does not lie on the passenger seat. The shape in the road, however, will be the same. A part of her psyche will bury the whole episode; another part will exhume it.

  It hovers in the distance, that bright yellow spectre, bullets of rain flying from its outline towards the approaching Cortina. Indeed, for a short time it remains a constant size. There was time, but the opportunity to slam the breaks came and went. The girl’s eyes narrow. Her knuckles whiten around the wheel. A book called Horror Highway leaps into her mind, in which a pickup truck tore through someone standing in the middle of a road.

  Easy. Oh, so easy.

  The headlights grab the yellow shape and stretch it to fill the windscreen. It cracks off the glass and disappears over the roof. The shape is gone.

  The rain twists back to a vertical descent as the girl brings the car to a halt. The sound of the engine’s idling purr is accompanied by the rain’s tapping on the roof. She stares out the windscreen, fists still locked around the wheel. At this point the girl’s thoughts are a jumble, more like that of a baby’s; simple images and concepts are predominant in the mental narrative trying to form.

  She knows she hit something.

  She knows it was wearing a yellow raincoat.

  She knows it was holding a bucket and spade.

  She gazes through the windscreen at the two beams of light shining from the car. Her hands peel from the wheel and push open the door. She steps out. Rain soaks her face and trickles underneath the collar of her jacket. Her eyes follow the headlights until she suddenly becomes aware of something behind her, something in the car’s wake. The girl turns and walks the length of the vehicle, running her fingers dreamily along the scratches in the paintwork. The scene is painted red by the idling car’s tail lights. The shape is still in the middle of the road, except now it’s on the ground in a puddle of rain.

  She goes to it.

  The shape still has a head, two arms, and two legs – that remains unchanged – except one of said legs is now bent at the knee to a perfect right angle…forwards, not back. Something protrudes from the torn skin where the leg bends, something cleaned by the rain to what may usually be, when not lit by these strange red lights, a brilliant white. She’s somewhat intrigued by how little blood the thing seems to have shed. Then she sees the blood.

  Guess that puddle wasn’t rain after all.

  ‘Daddy gonna be mad at Lenata,’ it splutters. ‘Lenata
gonna get it.’

  Funny, it doesn’t even weep.

  The girl picks up the spade by its side. Time to dig for wolms. Lips quivering, the thing looks up at its sister as she holds the spade high into the rain.

  It shakes its head.

  ‘Lenata?’

  She swings.

  One

  It wails.

  Steel tears down upon the shape.

  Two

  Another scream.

  Three

  A crunch as it ploughs into the exposed bone. The resulting pain is too profound to merit a scream, only a choking whimper as it twitches on the ground.

  Four

  Its outstretched hand gets mangled.

  Five

  Details begin to resonate in the girl’s mind: curly hair, gaps in its baby teeth, the raincoat, all cast in that ominous red of the watching tail lights. She knows this shape. She knows this seven-year-old. The spade freezes over her head.

  He opens his mouth to either beg or scream, she’ll never know which. Blood from the back of his throat gurgles then explodes from his lips like a burst water balloon, dripping down his chin and polka-dotting the raincoat. The girl stares at his twitching eyelids, both repulsed and fascinated. The suggestion of vomit pushes up from her stomach, and yet at the same time she is elated, watching from high above in the storm. The adrenaline turns her veins into electricity, the spade her conductor. The suggestion in her stomach recedes. She finds herself once again thinking of that moth in the larder. How easy it would have been to—

  Another burst water balloon from his mouth. The polka dots are running now. Her brother’s bloodshot baby-blues are bulbous, begging, reaching for his sister’s humanity. His quivering, upside-down clown mouth of despair gapes wider, revealing chattering milk teeth, the tiny crevasses in-between threaded with blood. Maybe we all have a little flood in us, Mother had said. Something about strength, about being strong. Was this what she’d meant?