For Rye

by Gavin Gardiner

  Noah gazes into the eyes of the flood, into infinity, into Renata Wakefield.

  She swings.

  Six

  Water ricochets off steel.

  Seven

  Blood flows.

  Eight

  Knuckles white around the wheel.

  Nine

  Foot pressed into the pedal.

  Ten

  Splintering bone.

  Eleven

  The spade slices through soft skull.

  Twelve

  She massacres the thing, and with it her father, mother, teachers, church goers, family friends, the house, the creaky staircase, the clock tower, the fields and the night and the town and everything in it. She drives them all into the wet gravel. Weak. Her whole life, weak. Not now. In this moment she is strong.

  She holds the spade in front of her, her own shadow shielding it from the red glow of the still-idling car’s tail lights. The boy’s blood weeps from the steel, blood cast jet-black from the moonlight, sappy oil issuing forth over hands that will remain forever unclean. She raises the spade back into the sky, then delivers it home.

  Thirteen

  Renata awoke.

  16

  Grant unto us, Almighty God, in all time of sore distress, the comfort of the forgiveness of our sins.

  Something was different. She recalled none of the usual pain throughout the dream. It had felt real, like a memory pulling itself together after an eternity. Her parents leaving them in the house alone, Noah running into the fields, driving her father’s car through the night in search of the boy, the yellow raincoat stretching to fill the windscreen…

  In time of darkness give us blessed hope, in time of sickness of body give us quiet courage; and when the—

  No, no more praying.

  Her mind groped for order in the confusion. The last thing she remembered before the black, before the dream swallowed her, had been…Quentin? He was the vortex of a tornado around which the chaos of her memories spiralled. He’d taken her to…the film set. The aircraft hangar. There had been…a car?

  A Ford Cortina.

  The spade. Thirteen times he’d smashed it into the concrete. Thirteen, just like the dreams. And Noah, the boy’s image superimposed over the road projected on the screen.

  Midnight, midnight…

  Towns like Millbury Peak weren’t meant to harbour such insanity, such madness. Why had she come back? Why? Honouring a promise made when she was just a damned girl. What had she been thinking? It had only landed her here, wherever here was, with this pain in the back of her hand… What was that?

  No, she wouldn’t have come back if she’d known what had been in store for her. Why had she come back, and why had she stayed? Those were the questions she kept asking herself, weren’t they? Was it really honouring that promise, or was it something else? Maybe the answer lay in another question: why had Mother stayed?

  Fear.

  Nothing’s more important than family. That was the official line, the words drilled into her during every Sunday school class. But she’d come to see that this grand importance of family was all relative. They’d lived under a reign of terror in that house, every day being presented new levels of tension and dread. Was her mother’s endurance of that hell, in itself, why Renata had stayed with her father this long? Maybe she’d remained because her mother had remained. She could tell herself that she was honouring the promise, or even staying to see Sylvia’s killer brought to justice. But no matter how dark this endless black was, it was still able to light the simple truth that she’d left her island, forced herself to dive back into the world, postponed her plans of suicide, remained through all this madness with the tyrant that was Thomas Wakefield, all for the same reason Sylvia had kept on keeping on through those years: fear.

  On the other hand, meeting a girl like Sandie Rye, you could believe those words from Sunday school. She’d painted a picture of such love, and it was easy to see that family really was the most important thing to Sandie and her parents Quentin what had he done what why who he’d lied about everything what HOW COULD

  But none of that mattered anymore, because Renata was dead.

  Darkness engulfed her. Were her eyes open or closed? She could not tell. The endless black was indifferent to such trivialities. She probably had no eyes, no hands, no body – only a dim awareness of this barren purgatory where she was destined to float for eternity. Except she did have hands, or at least one. She knew this because of that damned ache, not dissimilar to when Father had dragged her into the larder. Her wrist had turned black and blue after that episode, with the bruising creeping gradually down over her hand. It had been weeks before she’d stopped worrying that it was permanently damaged. No, this pain was not dissimilar to that, but more…sharp. Upon straining with every scrap of strength she could muster, she reached her other hand over and ran her fingers down her forearm, over her wrist, and towards where the pain seemed to emanate from. She felt the skin of her hand under her fingertips as the pain drew nearer, until flesh turned to plastic as her touch met with thin tubing. With horror, she followed the tube as it ran under strips of surgical tape and met with rigid, harder plastic. She probed further as it ducked under more tape, before her finger touched lightly upon the intravenous needle lodged in her skin.

  She yanked her probing hand away from the drip as the sound of a striking match leapt from the darkness. She finally managed to peel open her eyes, feeling immediate contentment upon discovering she was in the bed of a hospital room. Had she never left those white corridors, after all? Had these weeks of madness in Millbury Peak been just another nightmare? Relief swept over her, a kind of relief that, if she’d been honest with herself, she would have known was temporary. Reality was waiting; she knew this. But for these few seconds, she could be back in those corridors, those sweet, serene corridors. So white, so—

  ‘Morning, Renata.’ Quentin sat on the other side of the room, legs crossed. A cloud of cigarette smoke mushroomed between them.

  Through half-shut venetian blinds a dampened sun provided the only light. She heard footsteps and chattering outside the door. A clipboard hung over the rail at the foot of her bed, the back of which was headed with the words Millbury Peak Community Hospital. No, not the right hospital. Not her hospital. Back to reality. She looked at the drip in the back of her hand, then at the pale blue hospital gown as it rose and fell, rose and fell over her chest, faster and faster with her quickening breath. More smoke inflated around the figure in the shadows. Her heart raced. Her teeth clenched. She waited for the smoke alarm to go off.

  ‘Two days,’ he said as he recrossed his legs, his corduroys riding up his socks. Mickey was back.

  Renata tried to open her dried out lips but failed.

  ‘You’ve been out two days,’ he continued. ‘I’ve been right here the whole time. How’s that for lover’s dedication?’

  She ran a bone-dry tongue along the inside of her lips, unsealing them. She tried to speak but found the words caught on thorns in her throat. Quentin came closer and held a glass of water to her mouth. She gulped greedily, the thorns melting under the flow of liquid. She bit down on the inside of her cheek. Where was that smoke alarm? Go off, please. Go off.

  ‘How do—’ She choked on the words, then cleared her throat. She stared at the man through tramlines of sunlight in the smoke. ‘How…do you know what I dream?’ She spotted the room’s pristine sink in the corner, a bar of fresh soap sitting ready to go at the base of the gleaming silver tap. She thought again of the smoke alarm.

  Go off, damn you. Go off go off go off go off go—

  ‘Dream? Don’t make me laugh. I told you, dreams are just piss in the wind. I don’t know what you dream.’ Quentin returned to the chair. Strips of light smeared across the lenses of his glasses as he leant through the smoke, smiling. He was spinning a pen between his fingers. ‘I know what you did.’

  There it was, the stabbing pain in her brain, back to make up for lost time. She
ground her teeth against the spasm of agony. ‘I…don’t know…what you’re—’

  ‘Thirteen times?’ Quentin jeered. ‘The autopsy showed thirteen blows to that poor kid. Honestly, I’m not sure even I could have come up with that shit.’ He flicked ash from his cigarette onto the floor. ‘You should write horror.’

  ‘The dreams, I…don’t understand. I don’t—’

  ‘I still remember the day your pop called,’ he interrupted, wiping his glasses on his turtleneck. ‘Imagine: a budding young author being told his debut novel had driven a seventeen-year-old girl to murder. Good old Thomas was pretty pissed off, understandably. My book was, he said, blasphemous, unholy, a work of Satan. Blah, blah, blah. You see, although after your little joyride you were out for the count – “vegetative state of unresponsive wakefulness”, they called it – you were still able to mumble two little words.’ His smile stretched. ‘Horror Highway. I’m told that’s all you said for years of your downtime. Over and over again.’ He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Vegetative state of unresponsive wakefulness – know how I remembered those words, Renata? Because in all those years following that phone call, all those years I disobeyed your dear old daddy and kept churning out my blasphemous, unholy works, I began to see my readership as just that: vegetative.’

  His eyes pierced her own. She spotted that glimmer again, that twinkle of creative energy, except now she saw it for what it really was. He leant forward.

  ‘If they’d been awake, truly awake, they wouldn’t have demanded that same tripe year after year, that same old psycho with a kitchen knife. You get me, I know you do. You see, us writers are all the same. We start out with something new, but it’s only new for a while. Before long we’re jumping through hoops for those…those bastards.’ He rose from the chair and began pacing the room. ‘Tone it down, they say. Then ramp it up. Can’t you make it more like your last one? I told you, Renata, fiction is the vehicle in pursuit of truth. How can you pursue the truth if you never get to say anything new?’

  He rose his hands in apology like a lecturer realising he’d lost his class. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. This must be a lot to take in. I told you it was going to be a big day for you.’ The chair screeched like fingernails on a blackboard as he dragged it to her bedside. ‘Nothing’s changed, my darling. I want you to know that.’ He sat and took her hand, smiling encouragingly. ‘You’re still helping me in my work, in my pursuit of truth. I’m sorry if I had to edit the truth a little to get you to play along.’

  Her muscles felt atrophied. It took all her strength to pull her hand from his. ‘I…don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, Quentin. I don’t know what you’re trying to do. You come into my life playing these games just when my mother’s died and—’

  Her stomach dropped.

  ‘You…didn’t.’

  His hand rustled in his pocket.

  ‘Kola Kube?’

  She stared.

  Quentin turned and walked to the window, flinging a sweet into his mouth. He peered between the slats of the blinds. His tone turned solemn. ‘When your dad called, he told me everything that happened. Every detail, from the colour of the spade to how many blows they found on the boy’s body. Every detail, Renata.’ A hint of joy squeezed through his words. ‘Every beautiful detail.’ He turned back to her, that grin creeping through. Evidently, this was too much fun. ‘Mr Daddy Wakefield had friends in all the right places, not least our dear old buddy Detective O’Connell and his chief inspector. The whole thing was kept as quiet as possible so as to save him and his beloved town’s reputation. The car was scrapped without a trace, Noah was buried in secret under a blank stone – even the autopsy was carried out on the down-low. Grisly motherfucker wanted all the details.’ Quentin spoke with expertise. There was that lecturer again, except without the apologetic tone. He knew his class was captivated. ‘Most importantly, he got rid of you.’

  Her eyes remained fixed on him, jaw limp.

  ‘Yeah, word spread of you and your brother requiring permanent care. “Always such a fragile girl.” In reality, he just wanted to put as many hundreds of miles between him and his beautiful son’s murderer as possible. Of course, you were still in your – come on, you know the words!’ He grinned at the silent Renata. ‘– vegetative state of unresponsive wakefulness, and so were none the wiser. They shipped you off to some nuthouse up north and forgot about you, kiddo. Put it all behind them.’ His lips quivered with excitement. ‘But I didn’t.’

  He stood at the foot of her bed, fragmented sunbeams pointing over his shoulders like accusing fingers through the smoke. ‘I never forgot about you. It took some detective work; Daddy really covered his tracks, but I followed your progress.’ He stroked his chin. ‘Fifteen years in Manse Copse Psychiatric Institution in the north of Scotland: nine in a specialised unit set up just for you, six in the rehabilitation complex to gear you up for release. You were observed every step of the way, for their benefit more than yours. So they could…wait for it…study ya! You were an oddity, baby! A seventeen-year-old country bumpkin driven to random slaughter who sits drooling the same two words year after year? Horror Highway, Horror Highway, Horror Highway… Sure made tracking your progress easier. They kept calling my agent to find out why this nut was babbling the name of my book. Well, I was a good boy, Renata. I only observed from afar. Didn’t interfere in the little Wakefield girl’s recovery. After your first few years in the loony bin, your unresponsive state was replaced by an extreme dissociative psychogenic amnesia…translated: you forgot the whole fucking lot! Mind just blanked it all so you could get up and about again. Fascinated the doctors, from what I hear. Once up and about, you were an antisocial little freak, apparently; just sat scribbling in your room quite the thing, happy as Larry. They decided the only way for you to live a normal life was to feed the amnesia, let you believe some accident had put you in hospital. You ate that shit right up and carried on your scribbling. Then you popped off my radar. Was she dead? Was she back to normal? Was she out there caving in little boys’ skulls again? I eventually learnt they’d figured the only way to keep you believing this shit was to officially release you. After all, your body was fit as a fiddle. So they fling you onto an island in the middle of nowhere where nothing could trigger your memory or tip you off your tightrope of mental blockage – yeah, the rock was their idea, not yours. But how could they afford that? How could she afford that? I found my answer on the cover of a cheap paperback in an airport newsagent…’

  ‘Stop, please stop. I don’t understand, I don’t—’

  ‘THERE SHE IS,’ Quentin yelled. ‘THERE SHE IS, her name on the cover of a goddamn book, no less! Yeah, it looks like shit, but still, she’s writing?’ He slapped his cheeks in mock disbelief. ‘It takes a man to cry, Renata, and let me tell you I wept at that steaming bowl of irony served to me that day. What a wonderful world!’

  His grin wavered. Suddenly he turned his back to her, slicking back his greying hair and straightening his tweed blazer. He cleared his throat and turned to face her again, expression composed. ‘All my life I’ve hunted the truth. Novel after novel I aimed for a note never before struck. My obsession cost me my marriage – basically, she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. Truth this, truth that. Maybe you don’t either, maybe no one can but me. Regardless, I kept searching. I kept dangling that hook but all I could drag up was the same old rotten stories, same old recycled trash. And yet they all kept gobbling it up like the hungry fucks they are. I knew, though. I knew I was getting nowhere.’

  He smiled down at her proudly, a scientist regarding his prize specimen. ‘I told you, Renata. I never forgot you. And one day it became clear, so clear. Matter can never be created nor destroyed, just recycled. Life, death, birth: it’s all just the same shit refashioned. How can you create truth out of nothing? I needed a vehicle for the fiction, just as the fiction was the vehicle of truth. It needed to be forged in reality, in true horror. It came so quick, so clear, as if gifted from above: y
ou were the answer.’

  ‘Did you KILL HER?’ Renata yelled, jolting in the bed. ‘My mother, did you—’

  Quentin’s fists thrust into the pillow on either side of her head as his face flew towards hers. ‘I burnt her, baby!’

  She froze.

  ‘I burnt that bitch like a witch! Your little detective buddy’s been telling you porkies. There was no note left at the crime scene. I carved that Midnight, Midnight rhyme right into her wrinkly old flesh while she lay on that altar. Oh, I promise she was awake for it all. Had to carve it again after the fire, of course. Words were all charred and shit, really quite—’

  Renata went for his throat. The drip yanked from her hand and left a trail of blood down the stiff bed covers. Far off in the distance she heard the stitching of her gown tear. ‘Damn you! You didn’t know her or what she’d been through or—’

  Quentin drove his fist into her stomach. Her body stiffened like a board then went limp, deflated. ‘But how else was I gonna get you home, huh? It got you back to this shithole of a town and started you on the path to flipping out again. Two birds, one stone, babe. Work smarter, not harder.’ He gave her a quick double thumbs up. ‘Barbeque Mamma Wakefield to get you home,’ he said, stroking his chin, ‘carve that rhyme into her to get me involved, then find ways to get you close to me. By the way, you did a fine job at comforting me after that tragic explosion outside your house, and all your hard work on the script really is appreciated, even though I deliberately made it crappy. All ways to get us close.’ He leant down to whisper in her ear. ‘Tell me, Ren. You do still love me, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ll…kill you.’

  Quentin applauded mockingly. ‘Yes! We have a winner!’

  After lighting a fresh cigarette, he reached into his blazer and proudly presented the notepad, the character study on Renata. He licked a finger and began flicking through its pages. ‘I got me the whole shebang right here, all the little details. Your crazy little tics, all those idiosyncrasies that hint at your madness, tell-tale signs you know nothing about. But I do. All the plot points that have led to this moment, every word from your mouth, every twitch and jitter leading inevitably to your unhinging: I have it all. My book won’t be a carbon copy, obviously, but I’ll have enough to create something truly meaningful. It’s just a waiting game now, Renata, darling. A risky waiting game, I’ll admit. After all, you’re a killer. You’ll come after me, and when you do, who knows what shit you’ll try and pull?’ He blew smoke into her face. ‘I can’t wait to find out. I’ll be ready. The risk, the danger: it’s an essential ingredient in this grand search. Or maybe it’ll be dear Daddy Wakefield to get the spade treatment next, huh? No matter, I’ll be sticking around to see where this goes from a safe distance. I’ve been following you for a long time, put a lot of money and effort into you, and it’s time for this little investment to pay off. I can’t wait to see how you flip out. Just make sure it’s good. I want this book to sell.’