by R. H. Dixon
‘But you kept the chocolate, right?’ Suddenly Smiler looked worried. He began picking at the scab at the side of his mouth.
She laughed, her eyes teasing. ‘Yes, I kept your stupid chocolate. Though I nearly never. It’s not good for you, too much.’
Thunder complained. Louder this time. It had rolled a tiny bit closer.
‘Smiler, you know how you said you’ve been here a long time?’ Callie said.
‘Yeah.’
‘And that there’s nothing in the nearby village. Like no other people or shops or anything.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then where the fuck do you get potatoes, tuna and chocolate from?’ She put her hands on her hips, feeling massively duped.
Smiler continued to pick at his mouth. She wished he wouldn’t.
‘That’s the thing, you see,’ he said. ‘This is gonna sound crazy.’
Callie bent over, resting her elbows on the kitchen table. She cradled her head in her hands and closed her eyes. ‘Even crazier than the rest of it?’
‘Maybe. I dunno. Probably. Yeah.’
‘Go on, hit me with it.’
‘Well, every day the cupboards get restocked with the same stuff.’
‘By who?’
‘I dunno, that’s the thing. The food’s just…there.’ He looked to Pollyanna for support but she said nothing, so he turned back to Callie. ‘It’s true, stop looking at me like that.’
‘Seriously, how can you not notice someone filling the bloody cupboards?’ Callie opened the nearest one and peered inside. It was empty.
‘I dunno. It just appears. Every morning there’s, like, a new stash of potatoes, tuna, chocolate, coffee and cigarettes.’ Nervous energy made his fingers busy. He fiddled with his bottom lip.
‘Isn’t that a bit random?’
‘Well yes, very,’ he agreed. ‘And pretty damn tedious. But that’s the way it is.’ As if to further validate what he’d said, he then thought to add, ‘I mean, I never used to smoke before I came here.’
Callie shook her head. Unreal. ‘Haven’t you tried to catch out whoever it is who leaves the stuff?’
‘Of course. Me and Poll stay up loads, waiting in the kitchen and guarding the cupboards all night. But even when we sit awake for a full twelve hours, sometimes longer, we always find the same things in the cupboards. It’s always baffled us.’
Callie covered her face with her hands. ‘Right now I actually don’t know whether I want to laugh or cry.’
‘If you have the luxury of choice,’ Smiler said, shrugging, ‘definitely laugh.’
9
Throughout dinner Pollyanna remained quiet, inwardly thoughtful, while Callie and Smiler made small talk (mainly about the weather and when it might be safe to venture out). Her lack of conversational input bothered Callie. She wanted the girl to open up and say something, to give further insight as to who she was and what link she had with the cabin, if any. But she just sat there, fiddling with her fork, mashing crumbly white potato around her plate. After a while, unable to bear the girl’s silence or her fork’s tick-tick-tick any longer, Callie laid her own knife and fork down on the worn table top and fixed her with a firm stare. ‘When did you first come here, Pollyanna?’
Smiler stopped chewing and froze, as though she’d asked something particularly daring and outrageous. Lightning flashed through the kitchen window at the same time. It was nothing more than a pink subtlety in the artificial brightness, but the fluorescent strip lighting hummed and flickered above, making all three of them look up. The sound of thunder charged closer.
‘Feels like years,’ Pollyanna said, returning her attention to her plate. Pressing her fork down onto the leftovers again, she made lined patterns. ‘But it can’t be.’ She arranged the flattened potato so it looked like a flower head on the glazed blue ceramic. Or the sun shooting rays. ‘Unless I’m dead.’ She met Callie’s gaze then and held it. ‘I do consider that a lot.’
Callie’s thoughts floundered for a moment. It wasn’t the answer she’d expected. She cupped her hand and forced a small cough into it. She wanted to make some kind of remark but couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound patronising. So she didn’t say anything. None of them did.
The weather was then overly loud above their shared silence, the wooden husk of the cabin amplifying each sound of the wind and rain, which by now was driving down an eerie fury. Callie didn’t think she’d seen so much rain in a single downpour. It was relentless. She could no longer see Whispering Woods from the window; it was nothing but a dark smear on the glass. The clouds were overripe and they raged with thunder, which was never directly overhead but always within the periphery of the lakeside shelter. Each sky-explosion had enough bass to rattle drinking glasses in the cupboard above the sink. They vibrated like a charm of hummingbirds singing of the dangers of nature. Callie wondered whether if the thunder got any closer, the glasses would smash into pieces. Subsequently she found herself hoping so, because they belonged to the cabin and she hated everything associated with it. Its damp smell had already become less noticeable, she realised. Subconsciously accepted, perhaps. This disturbed her, immensely. She promised herself she would get out, shoes or no shoes. If not today then definitely tomorrow. Before it was too late. Before the cabin captured her and made her another of its permanent residents. Another trophy. She couldn’t bear the thought. Hated the idea of some unseen sadist restocking the kitchen cupboards with the same lousy food, day in, day out, while scrutinising her from some secret place. Watching her fall to pieces; physically as well as emotionally. Playing this game. Whatever game it was.
One I refuse to play!
And all the while the red and white room above them weighed down heavily, bleeding into Callie’s thoughts. A festering malignancy that gnawed at her subconscious like the itch of a lump that shouldn’t be there.
They cleared the table and nobody spoke. Callie washed the plates and cutlery, Pollyanna dried them with a damp tea towel and Smiler put them away into cupboards and drawers. By the time they were done the sun had given up the ghost and the rain was still coming. Callie accepted, regretfully, that she would have to stay overnight. Her subsequent announcement came as no surprise to Smiler or Pollyanna. Smiler suggested he air the red and white room, but she declined the offer and said the couch would do fine. To which he nodded his understanding and accepted her decision without further comment.
Pollyanna, who radiated a substantial anaemic glow, went to bed just after eight. Smiler said she often did. She slept along the corridor, next door to the bathroom, in a room Callie hadn’t yet seen. Which, if she was honest, she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
When there was just herself and Smiler, Callie felt less uptight. By no means relaxed, but not as on edge. She took a knife from the kitchen, unsure if she felt safer or not because of it, checked the security bolts on the front door in the hallway, then went through to the lounge to settle down for the rest of the evening. Smiler followed and set to work lighting the log burner.
For the next two hours they occupied either end of the couch in front of the fire, their legs glowing and itchy with orange heat, and held stilted conversations about television and fame, which seemed trivial and ridiculous given all that was happening. It was an undiscussed mutual decision to avoid talking about their captivity and the general awfulness of their plight, however, because until the storm cleared there was nothing they could do. They both recognised and respected this fact.
Callie held onto the knife and Smiler sat with the poker in his hand and a family-sized bar of Dairy Milk in his lap. Every so often he would offer her a square, but she never accepted. Their light-hearted banter was intermixed with regular bouts of awkward silence, and during these silences they listened to the thunder and the rain and waited for something to happen. Something unpleasant. Because it was a day for unpleasant things to happen.
When nothing unpleasant or otherwise had happened by
ten-forty and the fire had almost burned out, Smiler declared it his bedtime. He stood up and stretched, his t-shirt lifting to reveal his soft stomach. ‘Are you sure you’ll be okay down here?’ He looked anxious. Perhaps worried in case Callie disappeared, deliberately or not, while he slept.
‘I’m sure I will be,’ she said, managing a smile; a weary effort that in some way showed she shared part of his anxiety.
‘Well, shout if you need me.’
‘Thanks.’ I think. She was unable to imagine a scenario that would prompt her to call his name.
At the foot of the stairs he stopped and fingered the light switch. ‘Want me to turn the light off or are you staying up a while longer?’
Callie’s heart quickened and she resented him for asking. For highlighting a new problem. The idea of being doused in darkness wasn’t at all a happy one, but she knew if Smiler didn’t turn the light off now she’d only have to do it herself later. Then she’d have to find her way back to the couch in the dark. With bare feet. And that thought made her feel entirely too uncomfortable. She gripped the knife’s handle tighter and pulled a scratchy wool throw from the back of the couch over herself, especially her feet, and nodded.
‘Night then.’
Once alone in the moonless black, Callie stretched out on her side and used a saggy cushion as a pillow. She wished she had a bottle of wine. Or vodka. Or anything over twelve percent proof that might help her through the night. Because she had a feeling it would be long and arduous, sleepless and terrible. Shadows leapt up the walls with every irregular flash of lightning, for which thunder didn’t always follow, and rain laced the windows. She closed her eyes but couldn’t slow her thoughts, so she looked to the lake which she knew was out there somewhere.
Elsewhere in the house she could hear water dripping; a sound that might have been there all along but was detected only now that the darkness had augmented her other senses in the wake of partial blindness. She imagined a bathroom tap not tightened properly, letting water loose to drum against white enamel. Or the toilet cistern dripping. Or a weak joint in a kitchen pipe. Or rain water seeping between wooden joints in the saturated cabin and drip-dripping into the hallway. It could be any or all of those things, but it was also highly likely, she thought, that the lake was swallowing them.
Soon the dripping ran red. In Callie’s mind, blood trickled down the walls of the red and white room. Oozing. Seeping. Bleeding. She managed to fall asleep to its rhythmic, unhurried endlessness and immediately her dreams were dark and uncertain, transporting her outside into the woods, where she was surrounded by trees that spat leaves and harried her with balding limbs. There was no rain in this place, but the wind ripped through the latticed branches of a million trees till it howled loud enough to rouse the dead. Its wolf breath bit her skin and thrashed her hair. She was standing still, but panted as though she’d been running. With each chest heave, her breath came out like ghostly entrails; white vapour that was whipped upwards and dispersed to the wind. Two large black birds watched her from above. Perched on a bare branch, their backs hunched against the wind, they babbled in bird-speak, repeating a sequence of caws that sounded something like Hookin’ and Moonin’. Over and over.
When Callie tried to move she couldn’t. She looked down and saw that her feet were ankle deep in mud and dead leaves. Struggling to free herself, becoming hysterical with panic, she found that the ground, the very foundation of the woods, wouldn’t ease its grip. Wouldn’t let her go. She pivoted her body and saw the cabin some way off, obscured by a dark jumble of branches and trunks. But closer, much, much closer, was an emaciated figure lying face down on the ground, swathed in a long, old fashioned white nightgown. Callie groaned and tried kicking her feet free, but the earth held firm and made her watch as the figure sat up with movements that were unnatural and jerky. Like a parody of death reanimated.
‘Pollyanna!’
The girl was covered in soil, and earwigs nested in her dulled red hair. Her black eyes were vacant but she grinned some awful vindictive grin. ‘Listen to the trees, Callie Crossley,’ she said. ‘Hear them in your head and you’ll have the answers. You’ll know why you’re here. You’ll know why I’m here.’
The trees bore down on Callie as though they’d been prompted, their angry faces defined by black whorls in bark. But their mouths were quiet. None of them spoke. Callie cowered on her knees and whimpered. She clawed at the earth around her ankles and felt it collect beneath her nails. The trees poked her with spiky branches, breaking her skin till she bled, and the ground became tighter, threatening to break delicate foot bones.
‘But I can’t hear them,’ Callie said, wiping tears from her cheeks with dirty fingers. Her whimpering voice was drowned out by the surrounding noises of branches and leaves rustling. ‘The trees, they aren’t saying anything, Pollyanna!’ she screamed. ‘How will I know if I can’t hear them?’
Pollyanna laughed at this and crumpled to the floor, as though her bones had turned to mush. She lay in the same face-down position in which Callie had first seen her, like a waif sacrificed to the woods by some immoral someone or something.
Callie let out a long frustrated cry. When she was done her throat hurt and her ears rang. She felt the earth loosen and crumble around her ankles. Pressure eased from her feet and there were crawling sensations across her skin where roots slackened and unanchored her. ‘You will,’ she heard Pollyanna say.
She looked to the girl who was clearly dead and realised she couldn’t have spoken. Maybe it was the trees all along, Callie supposed. Maybe they had spoken to her.
Then there was another voice, hushed and urgent. A woman. ‘Can you see her? Is she there? Are you sure?’
Callie awoke with a start, certain this voice had been real; right here with her now, beyond the safety net of dreams. The words continued to resonate in her head. She sat up, heart crashing, and asked, ‘Who’s there?’
The question was met by silence.
Lightning flashed and there came a giant clash of thunder. Callie jumped. The storm was directly overhead. Scary, loud. There was a new coldness to the air which permeated the thick, stiff blanket around her, making it even more unpleasant against her skin. She shivered and pulled it tighter about her shoulders.
‘Is someone there?’ she asked the room.
Again no answer.
She felt for the knife, needing it close, and found it by nicking her fingertips on its blade; it had slipped down the crevice between the couch’s arm and cushion while she’d slept. Cautiously, steadily, she rose to her feet, wincing at every creak her bones and the couch made. Some ten feet away the stair spindles rose up to the ceiling like an empty ribcage. Callie scrabbled over to its base and smacked the light switch on the wall with her hand.
Nothing happened.
Shit!
The storm must have knocked the power out, hardly an omen of menace. She stood unmoving, trying to decide if she believed that. Yes. She did. But this logic made her no less scared because what about the voice she’d heard?
A bolt of pink lightning split the sky and zipped down over the lake, illuminating for the briefest of moments not only the landscape outside but the lounge as well. Callie saw no one else in the room with her. Thunder shook the cabin and it sounded like all of the trees in Whispering Woods were sparring.
Creeping to the window, gripping the knife close to her chest, she saw that rain was still lashing the outside world. It was heavier than any rain had a right to be. And the engineless Bentley was, of course, still on the lawn. A black mechanical carcass that served no purpose other than to mock her. L0S 3R!
She touched the glass and somewhere behind her a floorboard creaked.
Someone was there in the lounge.
She spun round and saw nothing but darkness and shadows interspersed.
‘Smiler?’ she whispered, hating that her voice made her sound so weak and afraid. ‘Pollyanna?’
There was no reply.
But in the shadows something breathed. There was someone there. She could sense it.
Can you see her?
She could still hear that voice in her head.
Is she there?
The hairs rose on all the exposed parts of her skin and she found she could no longer move.
Are you sure?
So she stood listening. And waiting. Knowing that each torturous second was aeons away from dawn. Then something brushed against her arm. Warm. Human. Skin. She fell backwards, her lungs gasping for air. Her elbow smacked against the huge window. Ow! She pressed her back against its cold pane and held the knife out in front, ready to strike. But there was no one there. She’d felt someone touch her, yet no one was there.
She sobbed soundlessly and leaned heavily against the window, her legs threatening to give way. Another rupture of lightning lit up the sky and garden. She whipped her head round with a groan; her brain had registered something out on the lawn that hadn’t been there before. As blackness reclaimed the garden she screamed.
Instantly there was movement upstairs, then the door to Smiler’s bedroom was flung open. Emerging onto the landing, his silhouette was even blacker than the night. ‘What is it?’
‘Quick!’ Callie told him, her back still pinned against the window.
‘Why? What’s going on?’ Smiler was already rushing down the stairs. Once he reached the bottom he ran, surefooted, and leapt over the couch to reach her.
‘Look!’ She was pointing to the garden, her hands shaking.
‘What? What is it?’ he said, standing next to her now. ‘It’s too dark, I can’t see.’
‘There’s a body. Out there. On the lawn.’
10
Wind screamed in Callie’s face as she pushed outside. It snatched the door from her hands, slamming the brass handle against the cabin’s outer wall and creating a gunshot crack above the noise of the storm. The door then ricocheted back. Callie dodged out of its way but it caught Smiler on the shoulder and knocked him backwards into the hallway. He dropped the iron poker, which at some point had found its way back into his possession, on the parquet floor. It hardly made a sound above the wind that wailed past him to sift and search through the cabin’s empty spaces. Quick to retrieve his make-do weapon, Smiler hurried back outside and grappled the door shut behind him. He stood for a moment, his back against the door, and clutched his shoulder. Callie lifted the woollen throw from around her shoulders and held it above her head to shield herself from the weather. She squinted her eyes against the insistent shards of rain that found their way beneath the throw and mouthed to Smiler Are you okay? In reply to which he sucked rain from his bottom lip and nodded.