The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “Except I don’t exactly know where here is.”

  “Oh, Turn,” she said, and she was crying now. He’d never heard her cry.

  “Bee, I’m so sorry. I’ve been trying to phone . . . This is the first time —”

  “Where are you, Turn?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Bee . . .”

  “It’s okay. Calm down.”

  “I’ve sort of been kidnapped. There’s this woman, Jilly, who I almost feel I know. It’s a long story. I . . . I —”

  “Come back,” said Bee. “I need you back, okay?”

  “I’m trying, really hard, I’ve —”

  “It’s all going to be fine.”

  “Something happened,” he said.

  “I’m here,” she said. “I’m listening.”

  Lightning flashed. Thunder cracked loudly, not more than five Mississippis away.

  Donovan struggled to steady his voice. “My father,” he said. “I killed my father. I didn’t mean to. I don’t remember what happened . . . some of it, just not everything.”

  “Shhh,” she said, her voice a soothing whisper.

  “There was something . . . Something I had to tell you.”

  “Okay, go on. What was it?”

  He closed his eyes. “You are,” he said.

  “Yes. What?”

  “I can’t! I don’t know what it was.”

  “It’s okay, Turn. Shhhhh. Stay calm. I’m here. I’ll stay here.”

  Donovan wiped his face with his hands. The sweat was cooling there. The wind was brisk, coming from the east, like Bee’s voice was coming from the east and like the storm. All of it coming at him, exposed on the top of this headland in the sky. He tucked his free hand in his armpit, pressed the phone to his ear. “There was this fight,” he said. “Rolly was there. And Kali showed up, too, which is weird because I thought they’d broken up. But anyway, that was later. She was with this guy. I didn’t know him. There are these conflicting stories in my head. Are you there?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m listening.”

  “I’m scared, Bee.”

  “Shhhhhh,” she kept saying. And her voice was like a quiet lake tide lapping on the shore.

  “Bee? I’m so sorry.”

  “Just come back,” she said.

  “I’m trying. You have no idea.” He laughed — it burst out of him. But he stopped just as quickly, because the sound coming from his mouth sounded insane.

  She didn’t answer, not right away. Then it thundered again, making him leap up from his sandstone throne, the noise so loud, so near.

  “Don’t leave me,” he said.

  “I won’t.”

  “You are . . .”

  “Yes. Right here. You’ll be fine. You are strong, Turn.”

  He summoned up all the strength there was in him. “There’s a storm,” he said.

  “Just come back, Donovan Turner. Do you hear me? Come home.”

  “I need you to do something for me,” he said. He looked at his phone. He didn’t have a lot of battery left. “Get the cops to phone me. If they call, maybe they can GPS my location. I’m on some kind of island, on a hilltop. They could send a helicopter, it’s big enough —”

  “Shhh . . .” she said. “I love you.”

  Then the heavens opened and the connection was lost.

  If it was possible for him to look worse than when she’d left him, he did. He was agitated. As the frigid Nurse Winters had told her, there were ice packs piled around his exposed ankles and draped across his shoulders like football pads. His legs twitched, his free hand twitched, making a feeble fist. She tried to take his hand and he flinched. He tossed his head from side to side, straining against everything that held him down.

  “Donovan, it’s me,” she whispered. “I’m not supposed to be here but I am.” He stopped thrashing. It wasn’t a coincidence! He could hear her; she was sure of it. “You missed me,” she said. “That’s why you were thrashing around, right?”

  He groaned, long and deep. His hand rose and fell, his head shook from side to side against the ice bags. He was talking to her without words, expressing some huge need.

  “You have something to tell me,” she said. And immediately he stopped thrashing. He groaned again. “Something urgent,” she said.

  She turned to the door, heard someone wheel something by, heard the jiggle and tink of glass containers. She turned back to him. “Donovan?”

  He writhed in his bed but stopped again, his broken body railing against the movement.

  “Donovan? Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  “I . . . hee . . . nosh . . . uuu . . . heee . . . is . . .”

  “Oh, Turn,” she said.

  “Bee . . . so . . . sor . . . phooo . . . furti —”

  “Where are you, Turn?”

  “I . . . do . . . no . . . dono . . . Bee . . .”

  “It’s okay. Calm down.”

  “I . . . sor . . . k . . . na . . . thersis . . . wooo . . . Ji . . . Ji-eee . . . I fee . . . no . . . slongsto . . .”

  “Come back,” said Bee. “I need you back, okay?”

  “I . . . tryhar . . . I —”

  “It’s all going to be fine.”

  His hand was twitching worse than ever. “Som . . . ha . . . hap . . . happen . . .”

  “I’m here,” she said. “I’m listening.”

  She watched his throat constrict, the muscles tighten like wires, his face contort. “My fath . . . I . . . k . . . kilt . . . my faaa . . .” He shook his head from side to side. “Di’n mean . . . Don . . . remem . . . som . . . of it . . . not . . . evthin . . .”

  “Shhh,” she said, her voice a soothing whisper.

  “Therwa . . . som . . . te . . . te . . . you . . .”

  “Okay, go on. What is it?”

  His brow furrowed. “You are . . .”

  “Yes. What?”

  “I . . . can . . . cant.” With an almost inhuman effort he managed to change “can” to “can’t.” Then he swallowed. “Don . . . Don’t . . . whas.”

  “It’s okay, Turn. Shhhhh. Stay calm. I’m here. I’ll stay here.”

  She touched his face and, like before, he pressed his cheek into her caress. Then a string of unintelligible sounds poured from his mouth, all vowels without the basket of consonants to hold them together. Then silence. Then “You there?”

  “Yes!” she said. “Yes. I’m listening.”

  “I . . . scare . . . Bee . . .” He began to keen, his voice a vessel of pain.

  “Shhhhhh,” she said.

  “Bee? I . . . so . . . sor . . .”

  “Just come back,” she said.

  “I’m . . . try . . . you ha . . . no . . .” Then his face seemed to erupt with anguish, the cords in his neck tightening. Oh God, thought Bee. What am I doing to him? Then the muscles of his face let go, slackened.

  “Don . . . leeme . . .”

  “I won’t.”

  “You are . . .”

  “Yes. Right here. You’ll be fine. You are strong, Turn.”

  He swallowed, and his eyes, though they were closed, scanned the room blindly. “Therestor . . . stor . . .”

  “Just come back, Donovan Turner. Do you hear me? Come home.”

  “Nee . . . somf . . . me . . .” He stopped. Then a slurry of sound fell from his lips, none of which she could make head nor tail of.

  “Shhh,” she said. “I love you.” She wanted to see a smile break out on his face, his hand reach out for her — any sign at all. But it was too much to ask for. He had done as much as he could.

  “What is it?” she said. “I’m listening.”

  She stroked the back of his hand. This time he didn’t resist.

  They had taken away her chair. It was in the corner, but she didn’t bother going for it. At any moment, Winters would storm in and probably have her arrested. Every moment was precious.

  “I don’t
believe you killed your father,” she whispered.

  Sounds poured out of him then, garbled and jumbled and meaningless, guttural — filled with razors and stone. Bee’s stomach roiled watching him struggle. He withdrew his hand from her touch. That boy, the one lying almost peacefully last night — he was gone. She dared to hope this was a good sign. He is a fighter, she thought. He is recovering.

  “Someone killed your father. That’s what you were trying to tell me, isn’t it?”

  He groaned, whimpered. More sounds clattered from his mouth, but nothing connected to thought.

  Bee leaned closer, wrapped her hand around the guardrail, and whispered into his ear. “You have a story to tell me,” she said. “We have to know your side of the story.”

  “You . . . are,” he said, the word distorted, filled with air, but recognizable all the same.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Go on.”

  “You . . .” He stopped. She waited. But patience was not an option.

  “Who, Donovan?”

  He thrashed his head from side to side as if to say she had asked the wrong question. Was that what he was saying? She waited. His forehead creased. Whatever it was he was trying to say, he was agonizing over it.

  “Ka,” he said. “Ka-ee . . .”

  “Kali?” she asked. He closed his mouth; she watched him swallow. Then he opened his mouth but no sound came out. She reached for the Q-tip and moistened his lips. He sucked on it, and after a moment she recharged it with more moisture and he sucked again, parched.

  “Kaaaa,” he managed again.

  “Kali killed your father?”

  “Nononononononono!”

  She stepped back from his bed, as if blasted back by the force of his denial.

  “Not Kali,” she said. “Got it.”

  “Bo,” he said, interrupting her.

  “Bo?”

  “Bo . . . hu . . . hun.”

  “Bo,” she said again.

  “Bo . . . huh . . . hun . . .”

  His hand flailed in the air and fell to the bed. His face contorted, but she had the feeling it was as much the frustration of trying to speak as the racking pain of his body, one aggravation compounding another. He groaned with a misery that cut her to pieces. She whimpered. She stood back, afraid now that she was actually making things worse. Winters was right; she had no business being here. She took another step away from the bed. She should go, let him rest. Later. She would come back later.

  “Bee,” he said, and she was at his side immediately.

  “I’m still here,” she said. “But you should rest, Turn. You need to rest and knit yourself back together.”

  “Ji,” he said.

  “Jill,” she repeated. “Jilly.”

  “Jilly.”

  “Jilly.”

  She watched his face, wanting desperately to see him nod, but the cords of muscle in his neck were strained as if some huge blackness were passing up through him. His face was frozen in concentration.

  Bee dug in her purse and pulled out the journal, flipped through the pages to where the ribbon was, and wrote down the sounds exactly as he had said them. Kali was connected to this whole thing. And someone named Jilly.

  She heard voices just outside the room, glanced nervously toward the door. She lowered her head to his ear. “I can’t stay, Turn,” she said.

  “Bo . . .” he said. “Bohun . . . bohun . . . er.”

  She wrote it down. Wrote and waited. He opened his mouth wide and what came out was a stifled sob, what might have been a howl had there been enough air in him to make such a sound.

  Then pain seemed to explode on his face, like terrible black waves inside crashing against his skull.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Oh, Donovan.”

  Then the doors behind her flew open and someone was saying her name over and over.

  He stood with the cell phone pressed against his chest, covered with both his hands. But he didn’t stop talking. He had to tell her about Kali and the man who showed up with her at the apartment. Who? The idea came to him out of the night sky as bold and bright as lightning.

  The bowhunter.

  The one who had killed Jilly’s dog. Could there be a connection? He didn’t know or care, he just needed to talk to Bee, tell her all the things going on in his head. There was so much — so much to tell her. He shuddered into the blast of wind and rain in his face, his words shaking and trembling, until he could talk no more for fear of drowning. His mouth was full of the storm. He needed to get in out of the downpour. It buffeted against him, pushed him back away from the ledge. Behind him the trees, batted about by the wind, sounded like an ocean. He looked back toward them. Presumably beyond that wall of trees was the other side of this island. She had said that, hadn’t she? Jilly. She’d called the river a moat, as if the whole place were man-made, imagined into existence. He was drawn to the trees — no, pushed by the huge, flat, slapping hand of the wind. He wanted off this island! But for now, he only wanted shelter. In the trees he’d be out of the rain. Then lightning crackled in the sky, followed instantaneously by thunder, making him duck and reconsider stepping in among the trees. Didn’t every kid get that drummed into his head when he was little: don’t stand under a tree when there’s lightning? But the thing was, standing here so high up he was a lightning rod all by himself. He needed to get down off this rock, but he couldn’t leave, not until the cops called. She had to do that for him. He bowed his head, shivering now in the blasts of freezing rain.

  Phone. Please phone.

  A minute passed. The wind howled, the rain was like sticks beating on him. The phone vibrated in his hand. Then his Death Cab for Cutie ringtone started up, hardly audible with all the elements acting out around him. He pressed the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

  He listened. Nothing. Mumbling chatter. Laughter. Someone calling out a muffled name he didn’t recognize. A rattling sound of glass tinkling against glass. Someone had pocket dialed. He held up the phone beaded with rain to check the number, and suddenly it was yanked from his hand.

  “Wha —”

  His arm was locked behind him in a steely grip.

  He struggled. He was strong, but his assailant was stronger. He must have pocketed the cell phone because the next thing Donovan knew, the man had him in a full nelson and was pressing down on his neck. Donovan slipped, sticking out his foot in front of him just in time to avoid falling on his face. The man was saying something, his mouth up hard against Donovan’s ear — growling something, pressing him harder and harder, doubling him over. He could feel the man’s teeth against his ear.

  “Think we don’t know what you’re doing?” the man said.

  Donovan brought his hands together, cupping his fingers like two C-hooks, and pressed them against his forehead to alleviate the pressure on the back of his neck.

  “Think the bowhunter isn’t onto you?”

  He pressed harder and Donovan groaned with pain. Lightning flashed and he glimpsed the tattoos on the man’s wrists — all that he could see of him: two double bands of thorns.

  It was the leopard. “You’re not going anywhere, kid. You’re staying here, where we can keep an eye on you,” he said. “We need you dead.”

  We need you dead.

  Which meant he wasn’t dead.

  Not yet.

  Hope welled up in Donovan, gave him strength. With a grunt he lifted his right foot and smashed it down hard on Shouldice’s instep. Once, twice. Then he swung his foot back upward between the man’s legs and heel-kicked him in the groin. The leopard howled with pain and his finger slipped — just a bit — enough for Donovan to step beyond the man’s right foot, plant, and then swing his left leg so that his foot was behind the leopard’s right leg. With every ounce of energy he could summon up, he twisted, and Shouldice’s left arm flew free. For just a second, Shouldice, still holding on with one arm, was lying exposed across Donovan’s knee. He punched him three times hard in the groin and took him down. The leopard writhed
on the ground and Donovan backed off. He had to get out of there now, while he had the chance. He started toward the path, slipping on the rock. Got his balance, only to be pulled down. The leopard had grabbed his ankle. Donovan kicked and kicked — kicked himself free. Then slid away, only to be tackled again. They rolled on the rock, Donovan using the other man’s momentum to get on top of him, only to be rolled over again. The man was wiry and filled with the power of crazy. Donovan could feel his strength slipping away.

  The leopard straddled him, his knees painful on Donovan’s upper arms. “You’re going down!” he shouted in Donovan’s face, louder than the rain. “You hear me?” he said, his mouth all teeth. And then, just in case Donovan hadn’t heard him, he punched him hard in the face. Donovan turned his head and took the brunt of it on his left cheek. The right side of his face was pressed hard against the gritty rock. All the fight went out of him. He struggled even to stay conscious. The rain battered his stinging skin. The sky was crashing all around him like crumpling metal. Then the leopard’s hands cupped his chin so he had to look up into the man’s face, dark one moment, then in a flash of lightning all too visible and ugly with rage and punctured flesh and that smile that was not a smile but a memory of a knife fight. It was a face insane with anger, as if his blood were boiling — as if fire were pumping through his veins. His hair had come loose from its ponytail. He was a wild man. He laughed and then took Donovan’s head in both his hands and cracked it back against the stone.

  Donovan went completely limp. It was over. He could feel what was left of his life slipping away from his grasp — his not-yet-much-used life. He could only lie there, sopping wet, bleeding and hurting, and watch his life step up and out of him and walk away.

  The leopard felt it, too, the life seeping out of his victim. He clambered to his feet. Almost lost his balance, regained it, then he stood shakily, straddling the boy, towering above him. Skinny as he was, he looked like a colossus. Donovan had been almost a man up until a few moments ago, but now he was a boy again, defeated and surely dying. The leopard leaned over at the waist, with his fists on his hips so his face was directly above Donovan’s. “You’re gonna love it here. Man, do we have plans for you.” He unbent himself to his full height and flung his head back to laugh up at the stormy sky.