by Ali Shaw
Her head nodded in time with the bounds of her abductor.
She must be dizzy, or drunk. And she could not breathe. She was out of air.
Out of air.
13
Unicorn
Adrien, Hannah and Seb searched for Hiroko until the sun came up, grabbing a torch and following the trail of Leonard’s footprints, which headed uphill through the mud. Among them were scrapes and gouges made by Hiroko’s kicking heels, but halfway up the slope these petered out and there were only the lengthening paces of Leonard’s army boots. As the mud grew thinner, the prints grew faint. Then they reached the forest and there was nothing.
Eventually, and after they had walked in circles for what seemed like hours, Adrien begged them to halt. An unwelcome dawn had arrived, shining its light on their useless search. Birds cawed throughout the forest, and the white tail of a running deer flashed across the middle distance.
Seb would not stop. ‘Hiroko!’ he tried to yell, but his voice was cracked from all the yelling he had done already.
‘Adrien’s right,’ said Hannah, grabbing hold of her son. ‘We’re just burning ourselves out. We need to stop and make a plan.’
Seb screwed his fingers into the fabric of his top. ‘If I’d only been quicker I might have caught him. I can’t believe I wasn’t quicker. This is all my fault.’
‘You were asleep,’ said Adrien, rubbing his eyes, ‘and we’re all exhausted. Let’s not start blaming ourselves. We just have to think of a way to find her.’
That was easier said than done. They had been trying to think of ways to find Hiroko all night now. In the last hour, as tiredness had caught up with him, Adrien had caught himself muttering little prayers under his breath. ‘Help us,’ he’d implored of the forest, of the whisperers, of anything. ‘Please help us to find her.’
A thrush landed on a nearby twig, and sang to him out of its spotted breast. Adrien watched it with worn-out hope, wondering if perhaps it might trigger a revelation such as those that had dogged him since his encounter in the theatre. He wanted a useful vision this time, not one of worm tunnels and the appetites of crows. He wanted to follow the thrush’s flight through the woods, and by doing so find the place where Hiroko was being held.
Nothing happened. The thrush flew away. ‘Please,’ he begged again, under his breath, but there was no response.
‘Alright,’ sighed Hannah, ‘We’ve stopped charging around, so let’s reconsider. Is there anything we could be doing differently?’
‘We could . . . we could look for that chapel again,’ said Adrien, still watching the forest for an answer to his pleas.
They had already searched fruitlessly for the chapel where Hannah had discovered David’s grave. It was possible, she’d suggested, that Leonard had dragged Hiroko there, but try as she might, she could not remember the way. She’d only found it the first time by following the kirin calf.
‘Anything’s better than standing around talking,’ said Seb. ‘Come on.’
They looked for the chapel all over again. Some landmarks Hannah thought she recognised, such as a dead tree spiralled by creepers or a tall trunk covered in domed fungi, each of which hung out of the bark like a miniature parachute. Before long, however, the stops in their search lasted longer than the starts.
‘I can’t bear this,’ said Seb. ‘We’re getting nowhere.’
Adrien looked to the canopy and strained his eyes by trying to picture whisperers up there, or to pick out a huge and spidery silhouette. He could see nothing but sticks and withering leaves. Help us, he thought, but there was no answer.
‘Okay,’ he sighed, ‘maybe it’s time to spread out.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ worried Hannah. ‘If Leonard is nearby, we don’t want to get caught out alone.’
‘We won’t spread out that far. We’ll go in a line, and carry on north-west, since that’s where you reckoned the chapel might be. Keep sight of each other at all times, and . . . and look out for anything. Anything at all.’
That seemed like a safe enough compromise. Adrien walked on the right, with Hannah in the middle and Seb to the left. It was a beautiful autumn day, the kind of crisp, gold-lit morning when even someone like Adrien would enjoy a long afternoon ramble through the countryside. Every shadow, every twig, was distinct, as if the world had been drawn by an architect. Adrien glanced across at Hannah, as she passed in and out of view behind the banded bark of the trees. These were silver birches: he had learned that from her.
They kept going. Even Seb walked heavily now, and each of them tripped often. Adrien did his best to scrutinise every thicket and bush they trudged past, but there were only roots and mushrooms and endless bloody silver birches.
‘You little bastards,’ he muttered to the whisperers, feeling desperate and betrayed. ‘Where the hell do you go when we need you?’
He called out to Hannah, to his left, to ask if she’d seen anything yet. She called back that there’d been nothing, and sounded just as tired as he. Adrien shook his head and kept on plodding, feeling like a fool for believing that, just because the whisperers had taken to haunting him, they might deign to listen to him also.
Then he stopped walking. It’s a test, the man in the pharmacy had said. A question.
‘So show me,’ muttered Adrien, certain that if the whisperers were capable of hearing him, he need not raise his voice for them to do so. ‘Show me what you want or what you’re asking and I’ll do it or answer if I can. I don’t care what it takes. But you . . . you just have to help me help Hiroko.’
Nothing happened. Not so much as a creak or a murmur on the wind. He gave it thirty seconds, then delivered a tirade of every filthy word he knew in the English language, and three in Italian and one in French for good measure. After that, he hurried to catch up with his place in the line.
The sun winked through the treetops, dazzling Adrien’s weary eyes. When he yawned, his head swayed as heavy as a pendulum, and he was just beginning to wonder whether he might, in fact, already be sleepwalking, when he saw something bulky away to his right. ‘Wait!’ he called urgently to the others, then veered towards it. It looked like a wall, but no sooner had he begun to hope it was the chapel’s than it raised its head and snorted at him.
‘Kirin!’ called Adrien, over his shoulder, but the animal shied from his shout and trotted away. It was the calf Hannah had described, with its immature horn and its pelt dark as charcoal. Adrien hurried after it, his arms raised to try to convey peaceful intentions. When the calf slowed to a wary halt, he checked back to ensure that the others were following.
He could not see them. ‘Hannah! Get over here!’
The kirin skittered away, and did not stop running until it had reached the edge of vision.
‘Oh bloody hell,’ snapped Adrien, glaring back between the trees and wondering if Hannah and Seb had simply crashed down asleep in the undergrowth. He was loath to go and fetch them and let the animal out of sight, but when they did not appear, he supposed he had no other option. He headed back towards them.
Something whispered in the undergrowth.
‘Wait . . .’ he said, realising that none of the trees surrounding him were silver birches. These woods had been thick with them not a minute ago, but now he was standing in a grove of squat and twisted vegetation, and he did not know the names for any of it. At once he broke into a jog, but after two or three minutes’ running had seen neither a birch, nor Hannah, nor Seb, nor anything he recognised as having walked past.
A snort of breath sounded behind him. He turned resignedly to face it. The calf kirin had followed him, and was waiting with one hoof raised.
When Adrien took his first step towards it, it brayed and began to lead him on his way.
14
Slingshot
‘Morning has broken,’ said Leonard, when Hiroko roused from unconsciousness.
She turned her neck from side to side, trying to stretch the stiffness out of it. Her breathing was a wheeze and her chee
ks bruised from where his hand had clamped them. She was sitting with her back to a lump of stone, in a roofless building that looked like it had once been some sort of chapel. It was small and built from uneven bricks, but it had clearly been derelict since before the trees came.
‘Morning has broken,’ he said again, indicating with a snapped branch a wooden panel still affixed to one of the chapel walls. The panel had cracked in several places, but it still carried the separate wooden plates of some hymn numbers. They alone in the ruin clean, pristine black and white. ‘Number eight in the song book,’ he said, and tossed the branch onto a fire he’d got burning in the middle of the floor.
Her hands were tied together by wire, just like her ankles, and both sets of bonds were attached to the stone behind her. She didn’t try to struggle, for he had used trapper’s wire and it would only cut her skin.
‘Well then,’ said Leonard, ‘here we are. Bit like a family camping trip.’
At once she thought of her father, in the forests of California, in a time that seemed a thousand years ago. She wondered if she’d ever mentioned that around Leonard, and whether he had said that to goad her. She had no choice but to shove the memory out of her head. Her old self was what she needed right now. The tough Hiroko.
Her larynx was swollen where he’d choked her, so when she spoke it was in a growl. ‘Why are you doing this?’
Leonard opened a rucksack he had placed on a ledge. From it he took a steel camping kettle with a blackened base, then filled it carefully with rainwater from a bucket. He had a trivet over the flames, but he did not place the kettle on it yet. ‘I’ll have a cup of something when your friends arrive,’ he said.
‘I already told you,’ said Hiroko, ‘I didn’t kill your dog.’
‘I know. I believe you.’
‘So why have you brought me here? Why am I the one tied up?’
‘Two reasons. The first is that you were the easiest. Oh come on, don’t look so angry about that. I think you forget that you’re just a girl. The second reason is because it wasn’t you. I’ve thought long and hard about it. They’ll come now, your friends, and whichever one of them killed it will own up, because you don’t deserve the consequences.’
‘That’s ridiculous. None of them killed your dog. None of them have a reason.’
‘Maybe they took revenge on your behalf? We can place bets on who it was, if you want.’
‘They’ll never find us, here. You’ve wasted your time.’
‘They will. They’ll work it out, eventually. Hannah has already been to this place.’
‘And even if they find it, what then? You should have just come and talked to us in the settlement.’
‘Too many other people there. Oh come on, girl, don’t pretend you don’t know where this is leading. You, out of all of them, must understand how this works.’
‘Is that supposed to be a threat?’
He laughed. ‘What kind of position do you think that you’re in? Of course it’s a fucking threat. This entire situation is a threat, by its very nature.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘I doubt it. In fact, everything I’m doing is entirely predictable. If whoever killed my dog had employed just a bit more foresight, you wouldn’t be in this mess.’
‘They’ll outnumber you.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ He held up another length of trapping wire, which he had bound into a simple noose. ‘Have you ever done one of these?’
Hiroko recognised the kind of clip used to make the circle of the noose. It was threaded in such a fashion that the wire could not loosen, only constrict. Poachers sometimes used them in rabbit runs or at the entrances to burrows, where unsuspecting prey might pass their heads through the noose and get caught. Their struggles to escape would tighten the wire until it garrotted them. ‘They’re illegal,’ she said.
He laughed again. ‘Illegal . . . Jesus, I overestimated you . . .’ He disappeared through the door of the chapel, and when he came back he was not holding the snare trap. ‘You’d better dial nine-nine-nine. And while you’re at it, tell them that I’ve laid a dozen more. I’m sure the police will come rushing.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘That’s better. I expected you to be angry.’
Leonard smiled, and picked something up from next to his rucksack. It was her slingshot. He turned it around and around, sucking his lip.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked her.
‘You know that already.’
‘Where precisely in Japan, I mean. I might know it.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘Try me.’
‘It’s in Iwate Prefecture.’
He grinned. ‘I’ve been there!’
‘No you haven’t,’ she said, loathing the idea of his boots trampling her homeland’s soil. ‘You’re just saying that to upset me.’
‘Why would saying that upset you? But I was on a kind of quest to understand the world, and I went to many places. I spent a month on the slopes of Mount Hayachine. Stayed with an old ojiisan there who liked to paint the alpine flowers. Nice place. Are you from near there?’
Hiroko neither said a word, nor moved a muscle.
Leonard nodded. ‘So be it. Can I be honest with you? I’m still surprised it wasn’t you. You were the only one with any reason.’
‘You killed my fox. You and your dog. I’m starting to wish it had been me who did it.’
‘But it wasn’t. I don’t think you even know how to lie. But if I were you, and you killed my dog, I would certainly kill your fox in return.’
‘You did kill my fox.’
‘That was because it killed our chickens.’
‘And now what? Now you think you’re going to get some sort of justice by . . . by hurting whoever did it?’
His lips bunched. He kicked life into the fire. ‘I loved that dog. Do you hear? You should know full well I’m not planning just to hurt whoever took her from me. I loved that dog more than I loved any living human being. There was no one else left, do you understand?’
Hiroko swallowed. ‘If you kill any of them, Leonard, I swear to God I’ll kill you in return.’
Now, when he laughed, he looked genuinely delighted. ‘And do you know what?’ he chuckled, ‘I’d let you, if there were only some way I could see you after. I’d let you, just to see what you’d do with a taste of it. You’re ripe for it. It would fuck you up so thoroughly.’
‘I’ve killed stuff before. Doesn’t bother me.’
He shook his head, still chuckling. ‘You haven’t killed anything.’
When he had finished laughing, Leonard held up her slingshot. ‘Did you make this? It’s good.’
‘It works.’
‘You’re a crack shot with it. I never really learned to use one myself, although I always wanted to try.’ He bent down and selected a pebble from the chapel floor. ‘Is there a knack? There must be techniques.’
For a moment, Hiroko imagined Carter coming out of the woods to save her. Carter could have shown Leonard’s nose a technique or two, shown the gristle all the way back into the skull. But men like Leonard were why Carter had gone to live in the wilderness in the first place.
‘A steady hand,’ Leonard said. ‘I bet that’s more than half of it.’
He fitted the pebble to the rubber and stretched it back to his chin. He was concentrating very hard, and his fist was tight where he gripped the wood. He let go of the rubber and the pebble zinged through the air, then ricocheted off the hymn board. ‘Not good enough,’ he muttered, and reached down for another pebble. ‘But how was my hand? Was it steady enough?’
Hiroko didn’t answer.
The next time he fired, one of the hymn numbers leapt off the shelf and clattered against the wall. Leonard whooped and turned to her with the slingshot raised aloft. ‘Not bad, huh? I knew I’d be good with this thing.’
‘Give it to me,’ she growled, ‘and I’ll teach you how to really shoot it.’
Leonard chuckl
ed and looked in the direction of the sun, which was edging higher into the sky.
‘Okay,’ he said, coming back over and crouching beside her. His eyes looked tired and lined behind the lenses of his glasses. ‘Maybe it’s worth screaming now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I want you to scream for help. So they can find you. Scream their names, if you want.’
Hiroko would have bitten him, had he leaned in a few inches closer. She believed him about the snares, and what he was planning, and she didn’t want the others to walk into his trap, Seb least of all. ‘I’m not going to scream,’ she said. ‘I’m not even going to raise my voice.’
He struck her immediately. His knuckles cracked hard off her jaw and whipped her already sore neck sideways, but she let out nothing but a stifled grunt. She had been expecting him to do something like that.
He stepped back from her with a scowl on his face. ‘You’ve misjudged your position.’
‘No, I haven’t,’ she slurred, nodding slowly with her eyes closed, groggy from the pain in her jaw. ‘You want me to draw them to you. But I won’t. So . . . hit me again. Get on with it.’
Leonard whistled under his breath. She heard him walk away from her. When she dared open her eyes, he was on the other side of the campfire and he had a pebble pulled back in her slingshot’s rubber. He was aiming it squarely at her.
He fired.
15
Unicorn
Adrien followed the calf kirin through the woods.
It trampled along at a pace that seemed infuriatingly slow, when losing his friends made him want to dash. He wanted to run, wanted to climb on its back and gallop. Once or twice he clapped his hands to gee it up, but that only made it stop and flap its ears at him, or raise a forefoot as if about to flee. Then he would be on tenterhooks, for the last thing he wanted was to lose the kirin along with everybody else.