Psychos

by Neil Gaiman

  He went down.

  Everybody’s fallen down. But few people appreciate just how much we rely on our arms to protect our heads from damage during a fall. Falling forward, we throw out our hands and take the damage there, turning a potential cracked skull into a mere pair of sprained wrists. Neither one of us had the option now. Ethan managed to compensate enough to take the bulk of the impact on his knees, but even that did not stop his fall, and when he landed flat on his chest, his head whipped forward, smashing nose and forehead against the hard concrete ground.

  Without the knees, that fall might have been enough to finish him all by itself. Daddy cried, “Good one, Jen!”

  I managed a weak kick to Ethan’s calf as he rolled away, but didn’t waste time waiting to see where he went after that, not with life or death riding on who rose first. It was early, still. I got my feet under me and backed off, giving Ethan the space he needed to back against the wall and take stock of himself. His nose was broken and bubbling blood from both nostrils: good news, as that would obstruct breathing. There was more blood in the seams between the teeth clamped against his bit-gag. He couldn’t have bitten his tongue or cheeks, but maybe I’d loosened an incisor or two. Another advantage, in that he’d have that sickening taste to deal with.

  But his eyes were still smiling.

  Daddy yelled, “Don’t overestimate him, baby!”

  Ethan came for me again.

  I faked another dodge to the right, but he changed course without even trying hard, and I tried to duck and roll, but that was going for the same trick twice in a row, and he was ready for that, lowering his head and reaching me before I could move away.

  He drove his head into the softer flesh below my ribs and drove me off my feet, the force of his charge carrying me all the way to the concrete wall of the pool. The impact drove the air from my lungs. I gasped as my head whipped back against the wall with a force that I experienced as a burst of blinding white light. Before I could recover he smashed the top of his head against my jaw, driving my skull against the concrete a second time. And then a third.

  “Finish her!” yelled the Bitch.

  He might have.

  I only stayed up because Ethan’s body kept me from falling.

  He rammed me again. My legs thrashed and my feet left the floor. He was bearing all my weight now, driving me into the concrete so hard that I didn’t have time to fall.

  “Put him down, honey!” yelled Daddy.

  If I’d had the use of my hands I could have taken out Ethan’s eyes. If I’d had the use of my teeth I could have ripped out his throat. I only had my legs, which didn’t have the proper angle for a worthwhile kick.

  But I didn’t need to kick him to put him down, not when the wall was right behind me.

  Not when he was keeping me from falling.

  I braced the bare soles of my feet against the concrete, took another skull-rattling impact with the wall just to gather my fading strength, and at the moment when he pulled back for another power-driving charge pushed off with everything I had.

  It wasn’t enough to send him flying backward, as I’d hoped. But it did throw him off balance. His greased skin lost traction against mine. He tried to shift, but then he fell left and I fell right and we both hit the bottom of the pool in a tangle.

  I landed on top, driving my knee into his shriveled balls with a force that made him double in two.

  “That’s a girl!” Daddy yelled. “Now finish him!”

  But I was in no shape to risk more close contact, not with my vision going gray from the beating I’d taken. I rolled away, got my feet under me again, and managed to get to the opposite wall just as Ethan was also getting back to his feet.

  He looked like hell, sweaty, out of breath and the entire lower half of his face gleaming with blood. I don’t know what I looked like, but as he went in and out of focus I knew that I had to look worse.

  He shouted something through his gag, something that emerged as a series of bubbly roars. He could have been telling me to fuck myself. Or he could have been saying that I was his sister and he was sorry he couldn’t love me. Or he could have been describing all the ways he wanted to make me suffer before I died.

  It didn’t matter what he wanted to say. Or what I wanted to say. Our vocabulary was limited. This fight was the only conversation we had left.

  Fortunately, he’d had enough for now.

  He looked away and staggered toward the Deep End.

  I went for the Shallow.

  Dad shouted encouragement from above. “That’s good, honey! Pick your opportunities! Don’t waste yourself going after him until you’re ready!”

  The Bitch cried, “I love you, honey!” And so came the night.

  The stars surprised me.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d spent the night outdoors. I’d had that summer in the Sierra Nevadas, and the endurance treks in the Mojave, and long nights shivering in tents on Alaskan glaciers. I’d been so far from cities that if anything had happened to me it would have taken days or weeks to make my way to the first emergency room capable of giving me so much as a single stitch. I’d learned just what the sky could look like in the rarefied places untouched by smog or the glare of neon lights. I’d seen those distant suns glowing by the thousands, each so bright that they might have been tiny campfires just beyond my reach. I had grown bored by them.

  I had never seen stars as bright as the stars looked tonight. They were so brilliant that the sharpest stung my eyes and made my vision blur. Whenever I moved, some twinkled out of sight, eclipsed by chain-link. I had never seen them so close, so mysterious. I had never seen other eyes looking down, from those distant places, wondering about us the way I wondered about them. I had never known that some of them had to be fighting for their lives, to settle conflicts begun long before they were even born.

  There was no moon. Daddy and the Bitch had decided that we shouldn’t schedule this for a night with a moon. But the stars still provided enough glow to reveal the shape of the cracked white concrete walls. I could see the way the concave side curved off into the distance. The shadows were deep enough and large enough to provide any number of possible hiding places for my brother, but I could hear his bubbling snorks—representing a constant effort to keep his nostrils clear—and as far as I could tell it came from all the way around the bend. We were still at opposite corners.

  I was thirsty. When I leaned the back of my head against the wall, my skin stuck, revealing a dried clotted mass back there. My teeth ached from biting into rubber for so long. My arms were in agony. I was nauseated, but didn’t dare throw up, not when the gag would have forced me to swallow it or choke. I hadn’t heard Daddy or the Bitch shout their little encouragements for quite a while, and couldn’t tell from the shapes of lifeguard chairs silhouetted against the night sky if they were still up there watching.

  It must have been about midnight that I squirmed away from the steps, which had been the closest thing I had to a refuge, got my feet underneath me, and padded over to the gentle curve to my immediate right. I crouched there, hesitated to make sure I was alone, and peed. Drizzle ricocheting off the puddle peppered my right ankle. A rivulet flowing downstream puddled against my heel. I wondered not for the first time how female dogs managed to keep their paws dry. After a few seconds, feeling better, I straightened out and put some distance between myself and the only toilet I’d have for as long as this battle lasted.

  A million miles away, Ethan snorked again.

  With his nose obstructed by the break, just breathing had to be exhausting him. It would deny him sleep, deny him rest, deny him even enough air to stay strong. He could get some around the gag, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep him going forever. Even if I did nothing at all, and stayed out of his way, his probable life expectancy in the pool must have already been cut in half. I only wished I could be sure that what was left was still shorter than mine. After all, I’d suffered a head injury. The nausea and dizziness was a sure symp
tom of a concussion capable of deepening into coma as soon as I drifted off.

  I had to make another go for him.

  Padding along the warm concrete floor of the pool, which had not yet given up all the heat of the day, I made my way toward him, stopping every step or so to keep him from triangulating my position from the sound of my breath. Not that stealth mattered all that much. The thin layer of grit at the bottom of pool made every step crunch like an old-fashioned soft-shoe.

  I tried not to think about how big he was and how badly he’d hurt me the last time we’d faced each other.

  In my head, he’d grown to twice his actual size.

  In my head, he was an ogre, towering over me like any other creature of old fantasies, with arms the size of tree trunks and a head that blotted out the sky. In my head, I only came up to his waist.

  An image from an old stop-motion movie intruded, painting Ethan as a roaring Cyclops, scooping up badly-imposed sailors to bite in half with one chomp of his oversized jaws.

  I cursed my imagination. This was stupid. He was nothing but a big, stupid, overdeveloped boy too clumsy for his own good.

  He was just my brother.

  Daddy had said, “You’re better than him, honey.”

  He had said, “You’ll win as long as you have heart.”

  He had said, “I have faith in you, Jen.”

  The Bitch might have said any number of things like that to Ethan, but then, she was the Bitch, and she was used to lies and deceit. Just look at all the things she had done to Daddy.

  When Daddy said things like that, he told the truth.

  I made it to the line that separated the Deep and Shallow ends. The bowl ahead of me was inkier and, it seemed, deeper than it had any right to be. I couldn’t see the far wall. There was too much shadow there even to admit the distant light of the stars. It was too black to see Ethan, but I could still hear his breathing, somewhere ahead of me. It was ragged, wet, and labored. It didn’t sound like he was lying down. I got the clear impression that he was standing against the far wall, beneath what would have been the diving board, confident in his own ability to meet my advance with a strength that trumped my own.

  He was accurate enough there. If he was waiting for me, I should turn back. I took another step to be sure.

  Something nearby smelled like a sewer.

  I still couldn’t see him. I listened for him and all of a sudden couldn’t hear him either.

  I couldn’t bring myself to hope that he’d died in the last few seconds. More likely, he’d realized I was close and was holding his breath as long as he was able, to keep me from being able to track him.

  That trick worked for two as well as one. I couldn’t close my mouth or pinch my nostrils shut, but I held my diaphragm tight and held my next breath as long as I could, counting off the seconds.

  Ten. Thirty.

  One minute.

  I could hold my breath for two.

  More, since my life depended on it.

  Ninety Seconds. Still no sound from him.

  He couldn’t be dead. I could feel him.

  Was he moving toward me?

  Coming up on two minutes. My heart was pounding.

  Two minutes. Still silence.

  Would I even be able to hear him over the roar of the blood in my ears?

  Two minutes ten.

  It was not breath that alerted me. It may have been a soft, padding thump or a rush of air or the instinctive connection between siblings, but I knew I was being charged.

  I spun, not knowing which way to dodge. Something massive struck a glancing blow against my right side, and kept going, the impact enough to make me lurch to the left in a clumsy dance that barely kept me on my feet.

  I heard a metallic clang.

  Rushing past me, he’d scraped the top of his head against chain link.

  That had to hurt.

  It didn’t knock him down, but it did make him grunt.

  I gasped as best I could, and whirled to face him in case he made another charge. I saw a gleaming wetness at just about eye-level and identified it as his gag, slick from hours of blood and drool. I had just enough time to register him racing toward me at terminal velocity. I went to my knees, looked up, caught another glimpse of an Ethan-shape occluding the sectioned starscape, and for just a heartbeat knew what it must have been like, in Jurassic times, to be a tiny animal cowering at the tyrannosaur shadow standing between me and the primordial sky.

  He went over me hard.

  I heard a thud, a crack, and a subsequent moan.

  That had to have killed him. He had rushed me too hard and gone over me in what felt like a somersault. He would have had to smash his head again, maybe broken his neck, at the very least dislocated his shoulders or fractured a leg. He must have sustained some kind of injury, maybe even something internal that would seep his life away.

  I peered into the shadows and saw a huge form, glistening from wounds and other liquids, dragging itself toward the farthest wall. The snorking breath started again. He wasn’t dead, then, only hurt. And there was no way of telling how hurt. It would be just like him to fake something worse if that meant drawing me close.

  I thought of how large he’d been in the darkness, and more than just gathering thirst filled my throat with sand.

  I’d peed all I had just a few minutes ago, but I lost another couple of drops now. I couldn’t go after him again. Not while it was still dark. There’d be more light in the morning.

  I retreated, refusing to turn my back on the giant in the darkness, not feeling safe again until I was on my knees again, curling up beside the steps that represented my only refuge. The stars above still twinkled in and out of existence when eclipsed by the overhead wire.

  All at once, they blurred.

  I didn’t want to kill him anymore.

  I wanted to kill the Bitch. I wanted to grab her by her stupid witchy hair and smash her face into the concrete again and again until her head staved in and the pavement turned red from blood and brains. I wanted to scream at her, call her names worse than the obvious cunt and whore and demand to know where the fuck she got off doing this to her son and her daughter when we’d both be so much better off if she’d just close her withered lips around a double-gauge.

  I wanted Daddy. He had done the same thing. But he was Daddy. “You can’t cry,” he’d told me. I’d been flat on my back pressing weights and he’d been spotting me. “You’re strong and you’re brave and you have more heart than anybody I’ve ever known, but if you don’t get him right away and it goes into hours or days, then at some point it’ll all be too much for you and you’re going to want to cry. You’ll know what it means because it’ll be the first sign that you’re losing heart. You can’t let it happen. You’ll have to shut it down, wall it off, put it away before it takes over and it’s all you have left. You have to make yourself too hard to break.” I’d told him I would and he’d said, “That’s a good girl.”

  When he called me a good girl, I felt capable of anything.

  But I hadn’t heard his voice in hours.

  Had the Bitch done something to him?

  Or were things even worse than that?

  Was all this just a joke to them? Or, worse, foreplay? Were they together in that shithole of a mobile home sharing six-packs and nuzzling each other’s necks while they laughed over the big hilarious joke they’d played on the kids?

  Were they in the car together, lighting out for parts unknown while wondering which of their two science experiments fell first?

  “You’ll even lose faith in me,” he’d said. “But you’ll know I love you, honey.” Unless that was just another part of the trick.

  I couldn’t cry. But there were too many hours between now and morning, and my eyes were burning.

  I don’t think I fell asleep. I think I passed out.

  I saw myself running, the summer Daddy and I spent in the Cascades. I rose before dawn, performed three hundred pushups, then donned my wris
t and ankle weights and hit the woods for a twenty mile run. It was the time of day when the chill left over from the night before turned the dew into frost, and the grass into stiff needles. The air ripped at my lungs like fire and my breath trailed behind me in a necklace of little clouds. Daddy had pointed out one ravine that could be leaped as long as I used a fallen tree propped up against a living one as an acceleration ramp. It was a tricky stunt even in perfect light and an almost suicidal one in woods still marked by the failing shadows of the previous night, but I’d mastered it, always landing in a duck-and-roll that plastered dirt and leaves to my back in a mortar of warm sweat. Even a perfect landing was hard enough to knock the breath out of me, but I always got up and kept going, As a younger girl, running other courses in other environments, I’d cracked ribs and once or twice broken fingers, once even run headlong into a low-hanging branch that ripped a gash in my forehead and freed hot burning blood to seep down into my eyes. It hadn’t slowed me down. I’d been blinded but I’d returned home without slowing down. I couldn’t depend on vision when so many possible attacks depended on targeting the eyes.

  When I woke the sun had arrived, illuminating a sky that the wire above us sectioned into little diamonds. I was curled by the concrete steps, my skull pounding, my throat burning, my arms numb from lack of circulation and my jaw aching like a dead thing attached to my skull with six-inch nails. I would have expected Ethan and I to collapse in opposite corners, but instead we’d fallen only a few feet apart, in a togetherness unexpected for two people who wanted each other dead. His eyes were already open, and though it was hard to tell through all the gear on his face, he seemed to be smiling.

  His nostrils weren’t bubbling. I wondered if he was dead.

  I shifted position and prodded him with a toe.

  He blinked. The gagged smile broadened. He murmured a series of vowels that should have been indistinguishable as words, but which his sunny tone communicated perfectly.

  “Unnnh Aww Innh.”

  And good morning to you, too.

  I couldn’t make myself believe that he’d been too injured to chance attacking me as I slept. Or that he’d been too afraid. More likely he’d experienced a spell as lost and as despairing as mine, and had wanted nothing more than to spend the remaining hours of darkness close to another living being. Even if that person happened to be me. Maybe especially if that person happened to be me.