by G X Todd
‘I think you killed him,’ Lacey said. She spat blood on to the floor.
Pilgrim nodded, inclined to agree with her, watching the man’s chest stutter erratically. He lowered the gun. His left hand was trembling badly now.
‘You’re wearing my scarf.’
He lifted his shaking fingers, brushing them over his brow, having forgotten all about the scarf he’d tied around his head. He tried for a shrug and felt his right shoulder hop up and down. ‘It’s a good colour. Suits my complexion.’
‘Hm, yeah. I hate to tell you this, but your complexion is looking pretty crappy.’
For the first time, he looked at her – properly looked at her – and there were colours shooting off her like little sparking embers. They crackled around her head and shoulders and arms, much like the tree down in the children’s library had crackled with energy, except this was a fiery red. It worried him, those sparks – they seemed angry, as if they were trying to convey something and he was being too dense to understand.
He forced a smile. ‘Probably because I got shot in the head.’
She got to her feet, swatting dust off her clothes as she did, and came right up to him, tipping her head back so she could meet his eyes. Holding on to the shotgun, she reached up with her free hand and rested her palm along his cheek. It was warm and dry and softer than he’d expected. His left hand twitched, an involuntary spasm, as if it wanted to lift and hold her palm to his face. He clenched it into a fist until the impulse passed.
‘The white of your eye is all bloody.’
Dizziness swept over him, and he closed his eyes. The world spun around him, and he stood at its dark epicentre, imagining invisible roots sprouting up around his boots and winding around his calves, tethering him fast to the rotating Earth. He waited for the spinning to stop.
Lacey’s hand disappeared from his cheek, and he opened his eyes to find her staring strangely at him, her head shaking slowly. The red sparks had stopped jumping off her body. He was glad.
You’re dehydrated.
Was that his own thought? It had sounded like his own. Even though it had come out of nowhere. Maybe he was dehydrated.
‘How are you even here?’ she said, so quietly he had to strain to hear her.
‘Magic,’ he said, and saw surprise flash across her face. He licked at his dry, cracked lips. ‘Do you have any water?’
Her expression opened up again. ‘God, sorry. Yes. In the truck. Wait here, I’ll go get it.’ She hurried away from him.
Pilgrim glanced back down at the dying man at his feet, but dying had turned into dead. The man’s face was slack, his mouth agape, the soft muscle of his tongue a pale slug lying within. The blood was already drying in the sun to a hard carapace, moulding to his unmoving chest.
Pilgrim felt nothing. The man had undoubtedly been the protagonist of his own story, the centre of his small universe, and everyone around him bit players, but now his life story had reached its violent denouement. Pilgrim wondered if the guy had ever seen it playing it out this way. Probably not. Men like him always thought they would live for ever, preying on those weaker than them, taking everything they wanted and giving nothing back. Maybe he had been the main guy in his story, the one man who ruled his world, but to Pilgrim he was just another dead man in a long line of dead men. Still he felt nothing.
Pilgrim traipsed over to the barn, wanting to be back in the shade, the sinking sun burning into the nape of his neck.
‘There’s a little food, too!’ Lacey called from inside the truck.
Pilgrim rested his back against the warm wood and slid down into a seated position, resting the rifle crossways over his lap.
The girl jumped down from the cab and came to him, holding a large bottle of water and what looked like two soup cans.
‘Peaches,’ she said, smiling.
He must have looked blank, because she shook the can at him, its contents sloshing. ‘Canned peaches. It’s like nectar, I swear.’
His stomach clutched painfully, its emptiness almost caving in on itself. She passed him the water first and sat down cross-legged, angled at ninety degrees to him.
He sipped the water, not wanting to overfill his belly, and passed it back to her, exchanging it for the peaches. He felt her watching him as he struggled to hold the can in his left hand and open it with his right.
‘Want me to do it?’
He passed it wordlessly back and stared at the track, looked up and down the road, too, but they were all alone, could be the only two people left alive in the world right then, for all he knew. It was a pleasant feeling, just to sit and let his weary bones rest, to think he had reached an ending – just him and the girl and the empty world. The sky was turning crimson in the west, a hidden cauldron sending streaks up into the sky, a great big furnace pumping out heat beyond the horizon.
‘It’s nice here,’ he said.
‘Huh?’ Lacey glanced up, almost finished levering the lid off. She looked around, not appearing to see any of the beauty he did. ‘I guess so. Where did you put the girl?’
It took him a moment to grasp who she was talking about. ‘She’s in the—’ Again the word escaped him, so he said: ‘In the space at back of the car.’
He accepted the can from her, careful not to spill any of the juice. The sweet scent of the peaches reached his nose and saliva flooded his mouth, quickly followed by a wave of nausea.
Lacey was staring at him again.
‘You put her in the trunk?’
Pilgrim took a sip of the juice. It was very sweet, and very good. After the first rebellious spasm of his stomach it settled down, and he drank half the can.
‘What about Rink? Where’s he?’
He had a segment of soft, tender fruit in his mouth and couldn’t answer.
‘The stooped, gimpy guy,’ she said. ‘The one who went in there looking for her.’ Lacey nodded at the barn.
‘He’s sleeping.’ Pilgrim popped two segments of peach into his mouth and chewed slowly, rapturously, savouring the delicate, slippery texture on his tongue, the burst of flavour.
‘We need to talk to him. He needs to tell us where Alex is.’
Pilgrim stopped chewing and swallowed. Watching her from the corner of his good eye, he licked each of his fingers and tilted the can up to his mouth, drinking down the last two fingers of juice.
Lacey carried on talking. ‘They were packing up to leave when I left. Planning on heading somewhere new. Lou and Rink wouldn’t tell me where. We can’t leave her.’
Pilgrim said nothing.
There’s that sneaky ‘we’, his own voice whispered, wanting to add its thoughts to the conversation. If it’s not ‘we’, it’s ‘us’. We’re being set up as a family unit.
‘How many were there?’ he asked, trying to appear non-committal while his aching brain turned over, the broken cogs squealing as they click-clacked into rickety motion.
‘Many what?’
‘People.’
‘Oh. Not so many. Like, maybe thirty or so.’
‘Did any of them—’ He struggled to think of the word. ‘Did any seem to be there . . . against their will?’
She looked at him closely for a moment. ‘You don’t just mean me and Alex.’
‘No. Was there anyone else?’ The gimpy-footed man had said the Boss would welcome Pilgrim, no questions asked. And Hari had told him about the man who came at night to steal people. People who ‘hear beyond what you or I can’. Bedtime ghost stories didn’t scare Pilgrim, but all of this was starting to make a disturbing amount of sense.
Lacey chewed on the inside of her cheek, her gaze drifting away from him and along the dirt track. ‘I saw four others tied up,’ she said, returning her gaze to him. ‘Just as I was about to leave. And there were others who called out to me while I was locked in the freezer. They might’ve been the same people, though.’
‘But that was all you saw? Just four?’
‘There was a handful of people who were kind of out
of it. Like, muttering to themselves, staring.’ The girl shrugged. ‘Out of it. They weren’t tied up or anything, though.’
‘Women? Men?’
‘Both.’
He was quiet a moment as he rubbed the length of his finger around the inside circumference of the can, sucking the last bit of juice from it. ‘Interesting,’ he said quietly.
‘What’s interesting?’
‘That they’re keeping people prisoner.’
‘I guess so.’
‘And Alex is normal.’
She squinted at him. ‘Normal?’
Did she realise she was repeating everything he said? ‘Right. She doesn’t hear a voice.’
The girl blanched and blinked. ‘Oh. Right.’
‘I heard a story about a man taking people. People who hear voices.’
‘Like the story Alex told us?’
Pilgrim must have looked baffled, because she took pity on him and explained. ‘She said she’d heard about this Pied Piper guy. He’d sneak into places when everyone was asleep and whisper in folks’ ears – ones who heard stuff, anyway – and then take them away. He’d burn up everyone else. You don’t remember?’
Was that why Hari’s story had seemed so familiar? Alex had already told it to him? ‘People with voices, that’s what she said?’
The girl nodded and fell silent, looking down at the bottle of water in her lap. She unscrewed the cap, lifted it with both hands and took a few of sips. The bottle shook in her hands.
‘“Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table.”’
Her eyes swivelled back to him. She lowered the bottle.
‘It’s a poem,’ he told her. ‘From a book. You remember those things I showed you? Books?’
Her lip curled in a half-hearted smirk. ‘I remember. Is there more of it?’
He nodded.
‘Will you tell me?’
He stared out at the road, considering, not answering straight away. He cleared his throat. ‘“Do I dare to eat a peach?”’ He tipped up the can and gazed into its empty bottom. ‘“I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach./ I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./ I do not think that they will sing to me.”’
She seemed to wait for him to carry on. When he didn’t, she said, ‘Is that how it ends? It’s sad.’
‘No. There’s a little more.’ He glanced at her, resting the can on his thigh, and when she met his eyes, her own wide and expectant, he finished the poem for her. ‘“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/ Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”’
She was looking at him as though she had never seen him before, as if he had unexpectedly sprung his own magical merman tail, its scales all shiny and blue. It seemed he could surprise her, too, on occasion.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.
‘Bleak but beautiful,’ he agreed.
‘What’s it called?’
‘You know, I don’t remember.’
A smile spread across her face. It was lovely. And, this time, Voice wasn’t around to warn him against its pull.
‘You remember a whole chunk but you can’t remember the title. That’s funny.’ She reached around her back and brought out something flat and rectangular. She held it out to him.
Surprised, he took the book from her and rubbed his thumb over the title, the white letters jumbled and wriggling around, no matter how many times he smoothed them over. He felt an almost-unbearable sense of loss.
‘You’ve been reading it?’ he asked.
‘A little.’
He passed it back to her, and she accepted it slowly. ‘You keep it,’ he told her. ‘It needs newer eyes than mine.’
Shifting the empty peach can from his leg, he placed it upside down against the barn wall and started to get up. It was a long and painful process. Lacey jumped to her feet and hovered near to him, as if to catch him in case he toppled over.
Once up, he took a moment to catch his breath. He knew the girl was worried – it was in every line of her face, in the darkened cast of her watchful eyes – but she didn’t ask if he needed help, for which he was grateful.
‘Come on. Let’s go see if Goldilocks is awake.’
He wasn’t. He was still out cold.
Pilgrim tied Rink’s hands and ankles and then forced himself to go back outside. It wouldn’t be wise to keep a fresh corpse so close to their camp. The smell of blood would draw animals.
They hadn’t come for the dead girl.
He couldn’t explain that. It was an anomaly. But he didn’t think it would happen twice. So he dragged the body to the truck, and Lacey helped him lift it into the back. He drove to the road and went a half-mile up the highway before dumping the body in the brush. When he came back he parked the truck inside the barn, out of sight.
Exhausted, Pilgrim sat while the girl collected wood for the fire. Desert nights became cold very quickly once the sun had set. She chattered away as she worked, telling him everything that had happened since he had been left for dead. They used the makings of the old campfire, setting up in the same place they had before, but Pilgrim felt the wrongness of the scene, and Lacey quietened in her chattering once the fire was lit. There were three people here once again, but they weren’t the right three. Alex was missing.
Pilgrim attempted to wake the man a few times, but there was no response.
I hit him too hard, he thought to himself.
He’d been unsure of the strength in his left hand so had struck the man with extra force to make sure it was an incapacitating blow. Now he was concerned he had hit hard enough to crack his skull.
Head injuries can be troublesome, said that new little voice.
Pilgrim breathed a laugh. ‘They sure can.’
As he came back to sit by the fire, he saw that Lacey had the book open and was reading. He sat down quietly, not wanting to disturb her, but she looked up at him anyway and closed the paperback.
‘Words are important, aren’t they?’ she said.
He tried to settle himself comfortably, but he quickly came to realise it was a futile task, so he became still and looked over at her. She was waiting for his answer, such a look of earnestness on her face that he was momentarily discomfited by it. The firelight flicked over her skin, shadows coming and going on the contours of her face, but her eyes remained bright.
Because she had asked with such seriousness, he considered his answer carefully before giving it. ‘Words should be important. They’re all we have now. They’re who we are.’
She nodded and seemed satisfied with his answer. She stared into the fire for a while, thinking, and eventually looked back up. There was a timidity in the way she regarded him that he hadn’t seen from her before.
‘Your family,’ she said. ‘What happened to them?’
He returned her stare. He could tell his gaze made her uncomfortable. It wasn’t his intention to make her fidget, but her question had thrown him.
‘There are things I don’t like to remember,’ he said. This wasn’t the whole truth; there were many things he couldn’t remember. Not fully. He was well practised in casting them over that white cliff and down into the deep, dark fathoms of the ocean. What remained of his memories was patchy, or lost completely. More still had vanished with the shot he’d taken to his head. There were parts to him he could no longer even remember forgetting.
Lacey said, ‘I get that. But you don’t forget your family.’
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘you don’t completely forget them. But you bury them. In more ways than one.’
She frowned, unhappy with this answer.
He gave her what he could. ‘I had a sister. She was younger than me.’ And he made the effort to picture her, sitting next to him on the floor, both of them so close to the TV set their heads were tilted back at the exact same angle. Her hair fell in ringlets, soft curls that bounced when she g
iggled; her giggle was like feathers on his soul, tickling out a smile even when he was in the foulest of moods. The colourful cartoon played out in front of their eyes – the shocking racing-car reds, the vivid ocean blues, the fuzzy tactile brown of the teddy bear the little cartoon girl reached for and hugged tight to her chest – while the washing machine rumbled quietly in the background, their mother busy doing the laundry.
‘What happened to her?’
For once, he disregarded the warning bells set off by his instinct for self-preservation and consciously cast his memory back, reaching down into that inky pit at the rear of his mind, but not far (it hurt his head to delve too far). He came up blank. It should have concerned him, his lack of recall, but instead he was relieved. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘How can you not remember your sister?’
‘Practice.’
‘That’s sad. Does that mean you’ll forget me, too, some day?’
‘Memories last for as long as they need to. Then they pass on, like everything does. That’s the way it should be.’
Her frown became exasperated. ‘That’s not a proper answer.’
He half smiled, and even that small movement hurt. ‘Yes it is.’
‘I won’t ever forget my sister.’
‘Because you feel you still need her,’ he said quietly.
‘I’ll always need my family.’ The girl seemed angry with the direction the conversation had taken, and she went back to fire-gazing, her expression stony.
Pilgrim closed his eyes, the canvas of his eyelids painted red with the backdrop of flames. He didn’t know how long he sat like that before the girl’s voice came again.
‘What do we do if we can’t wake him?’
It was a struggle to open his eyes. ‘If he’s not awake by morning—’ He left the rest unsaid.
‘We can’t leave her,’ she told him. ‘Alex, I mean. You didn’t see what Dumont did to her. He was—’ Pilgrim watched the shadows on her throat move as she swallowed. ‘He likes hurting people.’
There was a tight band around his head, and it pulsed in tandem with his heart. His head hurt, but it was a dull ache, a constant pressure on the backs of his eyes and in his temples, a swollen throbbing behind his ear.