‘Irish,’ he says, catching my eye. ‘They know how to dance.’
How to be an Outside Person – number nineteen: Dance like the Irish.
We lie together, eating up the air until it’s time for him to practise some more slow songs again. I stay lying down, though, watching him.
When Willow leaves, I get myself up and sit by the window, looking out at the night closing in from above, like I’m one of the clouds. The shed is looking mighty small now, like a dent in the floor of the world. And I remember the time when that was the biggest thing I ever did see, so it gets me wondering just how small that Tower really is.
Ain’t nowhere to hide in a small place.
And that’s OK. I’m done with hiding from Willow, anyway. He says he wants to know all this stuff about who I am, like he wants to see me with his eyes closed, too. I don’t reckon it’ll be as beautiful as him playing on that violin, but it’ll be the truth. That’s probably the best thing I got to give him.
And, anyway, I got to do this. I can’t live the truth when I’m still carrying lies. I know that now.
‘I ain’t scared. I ain’t scared. I ain’t.’ I say it into the window until all my breath disappears the view Outside.
‘Ready?’ Willow says from behind me, dressed in black like a shadow.
I wipe the window clear and stand up.
‘Ready.’
Part Three
* * *
INSIDE
Forty-Nine
It seems that stealing a car is the most exciting thing anyone could ever do, by the way Willow is acting.
That’s what they call Dragons: cars.
We’re squatting near the red one outside the house. Willow looks more alive than I ever did see him, bending low and looking over to the front window of the house, which I guess Ezra-Dad is sitting behind. We can’t see in, though – the curtains are closed. The light coming through them makes Willow’s eyes seem like they’re lighting up from the inside.
It’s awful dark out here. The air is as cold as I ever felt, and I have to wrap my arms round myself to stop shaking. I can hear things, too. A distant roar, like when you cup your hands over your ears. And I can see lights up on the mountains far away, all blurred together like lines of fire.
OakWillowBirchSycamore.
Willow turns to smile at me. ‘Let’s go.’
He runs silently round the Dragon-car. I hear a small tap and it flashes its fire again – click, click – all yellow.
How to be an Outside Person – number twenty: Don’t be afraid of Dragon-cars.
I duck down when Willow does, waiting for Ezra-Dad to look out of that window and ask what we’re up to. He don’t.
The floor feels as cold as a fridge under my hands.
There’s another light as Willow opens the scale on the side of the Dragon-car. I can still see him through its big glassy eye as he slides in and moves something. The Dragon-car starts to roll silently. My eyes are wide. They watch Willow walk the Dragon-car like a horse down the hill from the house.
He looks at me, tilting his head to tell me to come over. Some of me wants to stay here in the shadow of the house, where things ain’t so bad. Where I can cook breakfast, and people will eat it who look at me like I belong here. Like I’m a normal Outside Person.
But I go with him.
The Dragon-car looks different all up close. Inside, I can see seats and buttons, and it has windows and doors, too, like the Dragon-car ain’t nothing more than another type of house on wheels.
‘What is this?’ I whisper.
‘A hunk of junk is what it is,’ Willow hisses. ‘Get in.’
Not a Dragon-car at all, then.
There’s a black thing on it that looks kind of like a door handle. I touch it, half-expecting it to be all hot from Dragon fire, but it’s as cold as taps. I pull it up and the door opens.
‘Get in!’ Willow says again.
The hunk of junk is still moving, but I manage to climb in on my knees, kneeling up on the seat. It smells of carpet inside.
The hunk of junk stops rolling and Willow slides in, too, on the other side. His door closes.
‘Close your door,’ he says.
I look at the Outside through the crack in the door. I shake my head.
Willow sighs, leans over me and spins another handle round. The window opens into a hole big enough for a girl to slide on out of if she needed to.
I close the door. The light inside goes off.
He lets out all his breath at once. It clouds inside the hunk of junk like tea steam.
‘Nice,’ he whispers. ‘I don’t think he saw.’
He looks at me, his wide grin showing all his teeth. I hear him fumble around under the wheel, his eyes unfocused. Then the hunk of junk comes to life all at once. The lights inside come flashing on, the insides start shaking and the noise rumbles right through that silence.
I grip the side of the door, throwing a look back to the living-room window, where the curtains are twitching.
‘He’s there!’ I shout, my heart up in my throat.
Willow is all arms. He moves the stick in the middle forward and we’re thrown forward, too – once, twice – hopping like we’re running downstairs.
‘Shit,’ Willow says, but he’s still smiling.
The hunk of junk gets louder and louder, and Willow whoops over its roars. We’re going so fast that I can’t move myself out of the chair. I clutch at the door. Willow laughs, hitting the wheel and rocking backwards and forwards in his seat.
‘Stop!’ I say, looking down at my white fingers.
‘Huh?’
‘STOP!’ I shout louder.
‘Yeah, sure. I guess it makes sense to walk up, anyway. You’re right.’
He lets the hunk of junk roll to the side. We hit a bump and my head slams into the back of the chair. Then we stop.
‘OK?’ Willow says, putting his hand on my shoulder.
I nod, not really seeing him. I’m too busy looking at the black squares up on the hill in front of us.
‘You want to stay here?’ he asks.
I lick my lips. I do. I really do.
‘I ain’t scared,’ I whisper. I open the door, stepping back out into the cold and dark like it ain’t nothing.
Willow gets out and leans over the top of the hunk of junk, still smiling at me. His eyes are all black.
‘We’ll go up slowly, OK? Keep out of sight. You just need to show me where they are, that’s all.’
I nod and clench my fists, all buried up in my sleeves.
That’s all.
Fifty
I already know we’re in the right place before I see the rusted-up sign saying Colt Farm. It’s nailed to a post tangled up with spiky wire and leaning like it’s been kicked in the belly.
Willow flicks it as we walk by, making a short hollow noise. A noise that reminds me of feed hitting the feed bowl.
My legs feel empty, but they’re walking. We follow a grey path, the wire all trodden into the ground and tangled up round other posts like fingers caught in hair. The floor is the same grey as we’ve got at our house – our house – but cracked up, like Giants have been jumping on it. In between the cracks is something softer, drier. Like dirt.
I’m looking for something familiar, but I don’t remember it at all from when I ran away all them days ago. All I got is the feeling of bad weighing in my belly, like I’m carrying a hunk of metal right inside my guts.
As we move, Willow walks closer to me, putting his hand behind my back. I’m wondering if he can feel it, too.
Bad things happen here. It’s in the air, buzzing.
One of the shapes is a hunk of junk. It’s bigger than Ezra-Dad’s one, wheels the size of tables, and it’s got seats upstairs. It has a room in the back with a roof of black.
I know that hunk of junk, but I don’t know how I do. I can feel it moving, though, in the palms of my hands and my knees. I can see yellow light flashing in from the sides. I can h
ear small whimpers from behind me.
And red lips, too. Red lips not smiling.
I walk as far away from it as I can.
There are things all around. Lots of things, all metal. They’re planted like flowers, sticking up as sharp as knives. Some of them have writing on them, like the numbers stuck on the front of the hunk of junk. And there’s big things, too. Big round discs with spikes on them. A cupboard with hundreds of boxes in it. Long, crooked bars.
‘OK?’ Willow asks as we walk past a load of hooks hanging from a metal roof, swaying like someone is pushing them towards us.
I manage to nod.
‘Some farm, eh?’ Willow laughs, but he ain’t really smiling.
I don’t answer. I just walk us up the hill, my legs cussing. Buildings loom into view, one looking like Willow’s house but smaller and darker, windows grubby and locked up. He pulls me away, towards other buildings further on, but I keep looking back. I can’t help it.
There’s a house here. A real house, with windows and doors and a roof. It has windows. Painted-up doors that look like they’d open with a kick. I can see shapes behind the windows. A kettle. Washing-up liquid. Curtains.
I stop. Turn round. And I walk back to that house.
‘Ele? Ele, come on. We can’t stay here. He might see.’
The windows are all dark and dirty – not as bad as the ones on the house Ezra-Dad took me to see, but bad enough to make it difficult to see through. I climb the step under the door on the side of the house, a door that kind of looks like Willow’s back door, but without the wood bit across the middle. This one is full of glass, all swirled up so you can’t see in.
The handle is cold. It squawks when I push it down.
‘Ele! What the hell are you doing?’ Willow calls in a whisper. He ain’t moved to the house with me.
My heart is all up in my throat. I swallow it down when I push the door open and step inside.
‘Holy shit. It’s unlocked,’ Willow says, his footsteps behind me now.
It’s dark inside, only bits of moon lighting up what looks like a kitchen. It ain’t as nice as Willow’s, though. The floor is covered with bits that snap as I tread on them – bits of food or glass or something. It don’t smell like Him, but it don’t smell nice, neither. It smells old. Left. Like bins and old coats.
But there are cupboards. There’s a table with a bottle on it. There’s a load of cups and plates in the sink, all with bits of dinner on them.
His dinners. His.
‘Was this your house?’ Willow says, still behind me.
I shake my head. If I thought really hard, I could imagine it being mine. My table, where I’d eat my porridge. My kettle, where I’d make myself tea. My floor, covered in leaves from the forest. They’re the things crunching up as I walk.
‘We should go,’ Willow says.
I walk through the door to a room with stairs leading upward. I can see another door up ahead – a beat-up wooden one that’s breathing out the cold of the Outside. I walk towards it and catch myself in a mirror hanging on the wall. It’s square and peeling up at one corner. My face and eyes look so white they’re shining.
‘Ele?’ Willow says.
I turn away from the girl in the mirror and start walking upstairs.
‘Ele!’ Willow hisses, and I can hear the panic in his voice now. Hear it shaking, like my insides are starting to do. But not yet. Not yet.
I walk up. The banister ain’t painted white like Willow’s. There ain’t no carpet on the stairs, neither. It’s all wood, and my shoes make hollow noises as they climb.
When I get to the top, I find what I’m looking for.
I grip the banister so tight that the bones in my hand start cussing. But there, ahead of me, are three rooms. I can see a bed poking from behind the door in the room dead ahead. There are clothes all around, and bottles, too. I recognize a lamp. A phone. Trousers on the floor.
I stop looking in that room. One of the other rooms has the door closed. It’s an ugly brown door, with a metal handle like the cold one Outside. The other room has its door swung wide, but I can’t see no bed in it. Just a white cage with a stuffed-up and dead Bear trapped inside it.
‘Is this where they are?’ Willow whispers. ‘The Others?’
I shake my head and, as I do, all the feeling that I been keeping out of me comes rushing in like water from a tap. I squeeze my fists, turn right round, and run down the stairs as fast as my stupid legs will let me, which ain’t fast enough. The wood from the banister bites at the scabs on my hands as I slide them down. I stumble and crash into the wall at the bottom.
The girl in the mirror is screaming out her silence.
Willow runs behind me, out of the kitchen, out of the side door and back out into the night. Out and out and out, until my legs are shaking so much that they ain’t moving forward no more.
Willow pushes me lightly on the back, urging me on. I stumble up, keeping my head down and scrunching my face up.
Goddamn. Goddamn.
My fingernails dig into my palms.
Willow drags me round a small building made of wood, and sits me on an upturned bucket so I’m hidden from the house. I stick my head in between my hands, squeezing my skull between my fists, panting.
And then I scream. Scream and howl and empty all the everything inside of me.
That goddamn man. Fuck Him. Fuck Him.
‘Ele! Are you OK? Ele, speak to me.’
I shake my head. I ain’t got no words. No words.
Three rooms. Three.
I’d thought maybe – maybe – He din have no room for us. Maybe that was why He did it. ’Cause He din have no choice.
‘He had a choice!’ I yell into the night.
I bend over, breathing like there ain’t no air.
‘Had what choice?’ Willow’s hands are on my shoulders. He’s looking around for eyes in the dark. ‘Maybe this was a bad idea …’
I shake my head. Shake it too long, so I know I’m being mighty weird, but it’s the only thing stopping me going back up to that house and smashing every single one of those windows with my own fists.
‘No,’ I gasp out, and I stand shakily. I can’t look him in the eye, but I know how he’s looking at me. Scared. Scared of me.
But he needs to see. Now more than ever. We both do.
I push him ahead of me.
‘You sure?’
Goddamn him for trying to look at my face. I push him forward, away from me, nodding as best I can.
We walk until the ground levels out. The clouds move in the sky and the moon makes everything glow blue.
It sees me, the moon. It sees me for what I am and it don’t blink.
So I look out, too. I look past Willow’s shoulder, past all the broken-down buildings with no walls that hold heaps of more metal junk. Past the wooden sheds, the spiky wire, the cracked-up floor. And I see it: the Tower. My house. And I don’t blink.
Fifty-One
‘We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.’
I don’t want to. But we do.
My breathing has gone mighty strange. It’s all whine, like something is dying right inside me. I want to stop making the noise. I want to, but I can’t.
It’s all I have to keep me moving forward.
Willow walks in front of me, forced on by my own hands. It’s good to have something to hold on to. Something real.
The Tower don’t look like any of the other buildings. It ain’t made of metal, for one. It’s made of wall, just like I remember. And it has doors, made to keep people out as well as in. It’s bigger than the house, but made long and thin, like a hallway.
‘It looks like a stable or something. You sure this is right?’
It’s right.
We keep walking.
There’s two doors – one at each end. I ain’t sure which one I came out of, but I march up to the closest one.
If I don’t think about it, I could be dreaming. The moon is making everyt
hing unreal, anyway. Shadows poke into the nooks and crannies of the walls, and up on the triangle roof. There’s a round box on the side that looks like a massive pill, pipes going off into the walls and disappearing.
Everything is so quiet.
We stop outside the door and I’m suddenly thankful for Willow’s dithering. He turns to me, wrapping an arm over my shoulders and looking at me all concerned. It ain’t how it’s supposed to be. I’m the brave one here. I am.
‘You don’t have to go in, you know.’
I do. I know I do.
How to set things right – number two: Be brave.
I nod. And I guess that’s all the brave I have.
He grabs the handle and opens the door easily, revealing a long room and an almighty bad smell.
‘Och.’ Willow coughs. ‘What is that?’
I push him forward. As he steps inside, lights on the ceiling come on, one at a time, making us both jump. And I think I kind of remember it. Remember the footprint-worn floors. The circle lights on the ceiling. The doors. But maybe I’m remembering something else. A dream. A nightmare.
I don’t remember the flying dots, though. They buzz around, sounding like electricity.
I step in after Willow and he shimmies round me, picking a rock up from the floor and jamming it right into the door, keeping it open.
I look at him. He don’t look excited no more. He looks afraid. But he looks at me like he knows who I am.
He don’t.
I take his hand in mine. His fingers feel cold.
I lead the way. I walk slowly through the clouds of black dots, eyes down, passing clean door after clean door.
‘Aren’t you going to try these?’ he whispers behind me.
No.
I keep walking. Until I get to the one where all the footprints stop. Where the key to the door is just sitting on the floor, waiting for me to come on back.
Where the smell is coming from.
Willow chokes as we stand Outside. ‘What is that?’ he says again.
And my head is all full of noise. My blood is fizzing with a thousand things. My ears are drumming gunshots. And, with every bang, a new picture comes shooting into my head. Of Cow. Of Bee. Of Queenie. Of them all smiling up at me, playing with me and telling me that everything is going to be OK.
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