by G X Todd
As what he’d said sank in, the skin over Posy’s cheekbones tautened, and fear widened his eyes. He stood up, knocking the stool over with a clatter, and went out of the door to check the corridor both ways. He came back to her, speaking fast. ‘Enough talk. Talked too much. I need to go now.’ He picked up the stool.
Lacey scrambled to her feet. ‘Wait! At least let me help look for your dog.’
‘No. Talkin’s done.’ Posy stepped out of the room, and before she could lift a hand or protest against it he slammed the door closed, shutting her in the dark.
Lacey called after him, but there were no shadowy feet standing outside the door this time. He had gone. In a fit of temper, she threw the book across the room and heard it thump against the wall. A second later it hit the floor with a smack. She immediately went after it, sorry she had thrown something that had belonged to the Boy Scout, and cradled the book in her hands, smoothing out the creases and bends in the cover. Carrying it back over to the door, she lay down on her belly, holding the book in the dim swathe of light creeping in from under it.
She read the back cover, her lips moving, forming the words silently. She imagined the Boy Scout’s eyes running over the same lines, the words entering her brain in the same way they’d entered his, until they had both absorbed the exact same knowledge. She shared that with him now; neither time nor space could take it away. He felt closer to her in that moment while she read then re-read the back cover, lying on the floor, alone in the dark, her eyes growing tired, the words muddling together.
You’re not alone.
‘Suppose not,’ she whispered, laying her head down. She closed her eyes and let her thoughts drift. ‘I’m a crazy girl with my own doohickey in her head for company.’
It’s actually quite pleasant in here. Very clear. Like being surrounded by polished glass. No annoying holes – everything unbroken and smooth and whole.
‘That’s nice.’ Sleep thickened her voice, made her slur. ‘What should I call you, anyway? Doohickey doesn’t sound right. And are you a he? You sound like a he . . .’
You can call me Voice. I don’t mind that so much. Voice suits me just fine.
CHAPTER 6
She didn’t know how long she slept, but when she awoke she was cold and stiff and still lying on the floor, her head near the door and resting on top of the paperback. She levered herself up to a sitting position. Her stomach gurgled so loudly she pressed both palms to it in surprise.
‘Man, I’m so hungry I could eat a girly-named dog.’ She said it to no one but herself but waited for a reply.
None came. Voice remained quiet. Lacey wondered if he slept like she did. Or maybe the crazy in her head had decided to vacate the premises.
‘Maybe,’ she whispered, ‘they already ate the dog . . .’ She refused to continue that line of thought, though, locking it away before her imagination could taunt her further with it.
Pushing at the ground, she rose carefully to her feet and did some half-hearted stretches: fingertips to toes, hands on hips and swivelling her upper body in hip pivots. She even did some jumping jacks at the end, hoping the exercise would warm her up. In fact, she did feel marginally better by the time she went back to the door and pressed her ear to it.
‘Hey! Anybody out there?’
She hammered on the door.
‘Are you planning on starving me to death! Heeey!’
Nothing. She stepped back and kicked, slamming the bottom of her shoe into the freezer door, putting her full weight behind the blow. It didn’t move.
‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. She limped round in a small circle. Her foot hurt from the kick, like when you jump down from a too-high wall and your soles slap the floor in a concrete belly-flop.
Foot-flop, she thought, and laughed.
She wished she hadn’t kicked the door so hard.
When she heard approaching footsteps, Lacey stopped walking. She expected to see Posy when the door opened, but the clean-shaven man, the one with the funny-looking bowler hat, stood there instead. Doc. The smell of menthol came with him, but this time there was something underneath the mintiness that didn’t smell quite so fresh or so nice. His clear green eyes were unreadable as he looked at her.
‘Do you have breakfast?’ Lacey asked him.
He said nothing, only turned away and walked out of sight, leaving the door open. Lacey didn’t immediately follow. What if it was a trap? He could be testing to see if she’d try to make a run for it. She bit at the inside of her cheek and edged forward. She picked up the paperback, which she’d left on the floor, and, holding it to her chest, peered around the door. The man was ten feet away, half turned towards her, waiting. Lacey looked the other way, the long expanse of corridor empty and inviting.
‘I wouldn’t think about running,’ the man called Doc said quietly. ‘There are twenty people in this part of the building. Without me, they’d mistake you for a threat.’ Again, without waiting for her, he turned and continued along the corridor.
After a moment, Lacey tucked the book safely under the waistband of her jeans and followed. ‘Where’s my friend? Is she OK?’
No answer.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked.
‘I want to show you something,’ he said, without looking back.
‘Show me what?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘What is it with people not wanting to straight up tell me stuff? What if I told you I wasn’t moving another step until you told me what it is?’ She halted in the middle of the corridor and folded her arms.
He stopped, too, and half turned to her again. His fine eyebrows were raised slightly, nearly disappearing under the brim of his hat, whether in surprise or puzzlement she wasn’t quite sure.
‘I would say that would be a very foolish thing to do,’ he said evenly.
He met her eyes for a long moment, and Lacey felt a cold, needle-sharp sensation open up in her belly. Fear. She wasn’t sure why – there was no unfriendliness in the man’s stare, no pent-up tension, the kind that often came before violence – but she was convinced that he somehow knew exactly what she was thinking, could read her like a book, and that he found her amusing in the same way a bug expert would find a tiny insect amusing as he poked at it beneath his magnifying glass.
‘You will come?’
He said it in such a way that Lacey wasn’t sure if he meant it as a question or a statement of fact. The sentence was ambiguous in its meaning, much like the man himself.
She nodded mutely.
The briefest lifting of his lips signalled a smile, and then he turned to lead the way once more.
Lacey lost track of the turns and the number of corridors they walked along, but at last the behatted man led her into a room. Before she took one step inside, the smell hit her: old meat, dried blood, hot faeces. A single bed sat in the corner, and on it was Jeb, his head turned away from them.
Doc’s watchful eyes rested on her as he went to a spare chair set up against the back wall and took a seat.
Without conscious thought, Lacey took the final steps needed to bring her to Jeb’s bedside. The closer she approached, the chillier she became. It was as though waves of coldness were radiating from the man, bleeding down from his bed and into the floor at her feet, soaking through her shoes and crawling up her legs, injecting themselves directly into her marrow. Jeb’s pallor was so white she could see the purplish, web-like capillaries beneath his skin. His breathing was laboured and shallow.
‘He’s lost too much blood.’
Lacey looked over when Doc spoke. The man had neatly crossed one leg over his knee and was sitting naturally straight-backed.
‘This is what you wanted to show me?’ she asked.
‘Not quite. Almost.’
When she looked back down at Jeb, the man’s bloodshot eyes were open and staring up at her.
‘You,’ he whispered hoarsely, his white lips dry and cracked. ‘You fucking whore, you killed me.’
Lacey shook her head quickly, guilt slamming into her stomach like a fist. ‘No. No, it was your fault. You should have let us go. Why couldn’t you just leave us alone? We’d done nothing to you.’
‘The talking fucking maggots will eat out your brain. Eat through your dirty-bitch brain, will make you rot for what you done to me. Rot like your fucking friend. I hope the coyotes picked his body clean, dragged his fucking entrails along the road like a skip-rope. Where are all the skip-ropes gone? Been fucking burned or used for nooses. Nooses . . . Jesus Christ, why am I so fucking cold? Doc?’
Doc stood up and entered the dying man’s field of vision.
‘Doc! Help me, Doc, please. God, it hurts.’ Jeb shivered so hard the bed rattled against the wall. He tried to clutch the bedclothes closer about him, but his hands patted over the covers, rubbery fingers unable to grasp anything. He started to cry, broken sobs that left him on heaving shudders, but no tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. His face had collapsed in on itself, all lines and broken, brown teeth and bristling hair.
‘I can’t help you any more, Jebediah,’ Doc said. ‘Only your own God can help you now.’
‘Fuck my God!’ Jeb screamed. ‘And fuck yours, too!’ He glared at Lacey with such seething hatred it knocked her back a step. Spittle flecked his beard. He clawed a hand at her. ‘I’ll fucking kill you! I’ll KILL you, you fucking bitch! Send you to hell with all those fucking maggots in your brain!’ His eyes bulged out of his head and he convulsed. He fell back on the bed, his teeth clacking shut. He made horrible gurgling noises as he shuddered, air ticking dryly in his throat. His arms curled into his chest, waving around like an insect’s mandibles, hands hooked in like claws.
‘What’s happening?’ Tears unwillingly came to Lacey’s eyes. Her heart thudded so hard all she could hear was the drumbeat of it all around her, as if she were trapped inside a womb. She wanted to run away and keep running until all she could hear were her slapping feet and her rushing breath, until the blood rocketed through her veins like machine-gun bullets, but she was unable to move, just as Jeb was unable to stop what was happening to him.
‘His organs are failing,’ Doc said.
Jeb started to babble. ‘Please please please. I’m sorry, Doc, I’m sorry! Please fucking help me, please! IsweartofuckingGodI’msorry!’
‘I’m sorry you got yourself stabbed,’ Doc said, although he didn’t sound very sorry.
Jeb’s eyes rolled in their sockets, rolled around to pin Lacey in place. There was still rage and hatred there, yes, but mostly there was terror. A pitiful terror. His lips had rolled back, his rotting teeth had clenched, and his white lips were bleeding from being bitten.
Lacey stood rooted to the spot until the last of Jeb’s shudders died away and the man expired with a long, rattling breath. His hands remained frozen in claws at his chest. His glassy eyes stayed fixed on her face. He looked shrunken and wretched, as if death had sucked every last ounce of moisture from him. What was left was just an emaciated carcass.
Lacey breathed hard, as if she’d been sprinting.
Death had laid a pall over the room. Lacey could feel it like a cloying presence, stoppering up her ears and mouth and throat until she thought she would choke.
Into the silence, Doc spoke. ‘That is what I wanted to show you.’
Lacey was led back to her prison. She didn’t remember a single step. The door was locked, and she was left alone in the darkness, but she was unaware of either the loneliness or the lack of light. She sat and stared and clutched the paperback in both hands. She was vaguely aware of Voice trying to talk to her, to draw her out of the deep, dark place she’d withdrawn to, but she remained unwilling or unable to engage.
Food was finally brought – some cold porridge-type gruel – and she ate it automatically without tasting it. She drank from the bowl, which had been refilled. Then she curled into a ball, the book at her centre. She slept fitfully, her dreams filled with clawing, insectile hands, and maggots stuffed in her mouth, crawling their way up into her brain, where they wriggled and writhed. Later, she saw her loved ones, all lined up in a row, each one bleeding from gaping wounds in their bellies: her grammy, Alex, Karey, the niece she had never met (who was small and faceless), even the Boy Scout. He looked upon her with pity, his hands cupped under the river of red pouring from his stomach, and asked in sad tones why she wasn’t helping the people she loved.
She woke up crying.
She lay there, and hours passed. Sometimes she listened to Voice, sometimes she didn’t. He asked her questions about her sister, about what she thought her niece would be like. She didn’t answer any of them.
Posy came and tried to get her to read some more, but he left again when she failed to acknowledge his presence.
I thought you wanted Jeb dead.
It was these words that poked a small hole in the numb shield she had built around herself.
‘No,’ she whispered, swallowing past the soreness in her throat. ‘Not like that.’
Dead is dead, no matter how it happens.
‘Shut up,’ she whispered, closing her eyes as if, in the closing of them, she could shut Voice away, too.
He inflicted much worse on the people he came across.
‘I want Alex,’ she said. A hot, scalding tear burned its way down her temple and dripped into the shell of her ear.
Don’t be a baby.
‘I want my grams.’ More tears followed the first.
For the first time, Voice sounded irritable. Don’t go all soft on me now. Where’s your backbone?
‘Don’t have one,’ she muttered.
Well, find it. This isn’t the time to show weakness.
She rolled over on to her other side, putting her back to the door. ‘Just leave me alone.’
It wouldn’t help you if I—
‘Leave me alone!’
Voice hovered for a second longer and then left, the back of Lacey’s head gaping emptily. She immediately missed his presence, but she clamped down on the feeling almost as soon as it came.
What would her grammy think of her, sulking around like this? Lacey caught her breath on a sob because she knew what her grammy would think, and that she wouldn’t have stood for it. She would have dragged her up by the elbow by now, wagging her work-gnarled finger in her face, telling her to buck her ideas up, Missy, ’cause no one likes a cry-baby, that nothing gets done by moping around and feeling sorry for yourself, and there’s always plenty to do and plenty to plan on doing when there was more time to do it.
‘But why would he want to show me that, Grammy?’ she whispered.
She didn’t expect an answer, and she didn’t get one.
‘I don’t understand why he would take me in there just to watch him die.’
Lacey was almost overwhelmed by images again, of how Jeb had convulsed and cried out, of how he’d glared at her right until his last breath rattled out of his dying lungs. Lacey sat up in one quick movement but kept her head down, holding steadfast on to the image of her grammy, of the hand-knitted blanket she would wrap around their shoulders and the wide, scratched wedding band on her ring finger, of her callused hands, strong and capable, but equally good at unknotting tangles in hair or coaxing out splinters. The picture of her grams was far stronger than the picture of the dead man, and Lacey rubbed at her eyes to ingrain that image into her head, rubbed and rubbed until dancing phosphenes floated on the black backdrop of her eyelids. She smiled. ‘Fancies,’ her grandmother had called them. They were there to remind you that, even in the dark, there was always something to be found.
‘I love you, Grams,’ Lacey whispered. ‘I wish you were here with me.’
She slid a hand under her collar and found the St Christopher medallion. It was hot to the touch, and only grew hotter the longer she held it. Out of the darkness, where the fancies floated and the spirit of her grammy still lived, a thought developed in Lacey’s mind, flimsy at first, but quickly growing into something solid and tangible.<
br />
She opened her eyes.
‘Voice? Voice, I need to talk to you.’
Lacey released the St Christopher and touched her hot fingertips to the spot behind her right ear. Voice half appeared, like a striking flint in the dark, not fully there but no longer gone, either. He was a ‘fancy’ of his own kind.
‘Voice, I think I have an idea.’
Reluctantly drawn out, Voice asked, What kind of idea?
CHAPTER 7
Dumont stood on the docking-bay platform, overseeing the loading of the vehicles. There were two pickups, three cars and a Winnebago in the concreted area, people scurrying around them, busy with packing gear into trunks and truck beds. Away from all the activity, two boys, no older than ten, crouched near the back wall, taking turns flipping coins. The next thing Lacey knew, the older boy had shoved the smaller boy over, a mean push that knocked him sprawling, his handful of change scattering in a glittering arc. The little guy popped right back up and jumped on his attacker. He pounded on the bigger boy with fists and elbows until a woman hurried over and dragged him off, giving him a smack around the head for his trouble. The older boy, the one who’d started the fight, remained curled up in a ball. No one went over to check on him.
Lacey returned her attention to the activity by the vehicles and tried to ignore Lou, who was standing close behind her. Too close. She could feel his body heat seeping out of him.