Arcadia (7 page)

A huge ghost-pale shape appears with no warning at all at the edge of the light and springs in front of him. Rory gasps. He grips the brakes. Everything goes completely dark. The same instant he's knocked off the bike. He hears it clatter on the road but he doesn't fall on top of it because something's got hold of him. Something's breathing harder than he is. His flailing arms thud against it, right in front of his chest. He goes rigid and cold with shock. There's a little moment of stillness, enough for him to register his pounding terror. Then he's pulled up and he can feel that something's right on top of him, in his face.

“Where do I go?” snaps a voice. It's strange in a hundred different horrifying ways. Almost the strangest of all is that it's the voice of a man. “Where is quiet? Nobody sees?” The grip is hands on his sweater. It shakes him urgently. “Hmm? Where? Tell me this!”

At last Rory grasps that he's being attacked. He lifts his hands to try and pries the grip away. “Get—!”

No sooner has he opened his mouth than it's covered, fiercely. “
Sssss
!
” A hand's squeezing his jaw. “
Silenzio!
You shout, I kill you.” The hand pushes his head back painfully. “Kill you! You know?”

Rory's eyes are wide as a cat's, but it's too dark to see what's happening. Someone's got hold of him tightly and his neck's beginning to hurt so he can't breathe, that's all he knows. A man. A stranger. There are no strangers and all the men are dead.

“I need place to go.” Another strange thing is the man's accent. It's foreign. It's from somewhere else, somewhere not in the world. “You show me. Quiet place. Hot. No person. You know this place? You show me quick.”

The hand's very strong and very angry. He's going to choke soon. “I can't breathe!” he tries to say, but it's muffled by the hand. “Get off me!”

The hand relents. He gasps.

“You know,
ragazzo
?” He gets shaken again, not so hard. The looming presence recedes a bit. “House.
Deserta
. I need this place. You show me.”

The voice is speaking very fast and very hungrily. It's the urgency that gets through to him.

A house. The man wants to know where there's an empty house. “There's—” He licks his lips. His mouth's like sawdust. “There's lots of empty houses.”

“
Va bene
.” The man straightens. Rory can sort of see his outline now. He hardly looks tall enough to be a man at all. He can't be one anyway because there aren't any. Fear's making Rory's brain shake as well as his hands and he can't think properly at all. “Now. Show me.”

Where is he? He's lost his bearings. “They're all empty. Everyone stays at the Abbey.”

“No persons?”

“Anywhere. You can go anywhere.” He needs to say what the voice wants him to say or the hands'll hurt him again. It sounds dangerously furious.

“You show me.” The grip relaxes further. It's about to let him go. His legs take some of his weight. They're wobbling like leaves. The shadow leans in and he has the impression of a face. He thinks it's bald. “Listen,
ragazzo
. You shout, you run, I kill you.” Without sound or warning there's a hand at his neck again, throttling. It happens so fast he can't even gasp. “Like so. You know?”

Absolutely terrified, Rory nods.

“
Va bene
. Good.” The hand lets go. He crumples to his knees, gulping. “House here, this ones. No one comes? All
deserti
?”

Something clicks. The man wants a place to hide in. He'd have to if he's a stranger. Rory points ahead, his arm trembling. “That way,” he says. “Down the hill. Past the church. After the church no one ever goes there.”

“
Chiesa, si
. I know this. No one comes? You know this?”

“Me and Mum use the white house at the corner. The others are all ruined.”

“
Ecco
, no one? Is all quiet?”

“Yeah. After the church.”

“You lie, I kill you.” The man seizes his shoulders.

“I'm not—”

“I see you. I see in the night, like this. Where you go, I find you, I kill you.”

Rory's completely certain this is true. “I swear,” he says.

“Now. You listen.
Domani
, you bring clothings, food. Next day,
si
? Yes? You say nothing. To no one.” The man shakes him hard to emphasize each word. “You. Say. Nothing. You say one thing, I kill you. You bring clothings and food, near here, put here. You know?”

His heart's twisting and untwisting itself in his chest. “You want . . .”

“
Vestiti
. Clothings. Food. You bring, alone. Put near here. Say you do this.” An arm curls round his neck and the voice is in his ear. “Say it!”

“'Kay,” he croaks.

“Say it! What you do!”

“I . . . I get you some food and clothes. Bring them here.”

“
Si si si
. Next day. Morning.”

“Tomorrow.”

“
Domani, si
. Listen. Attention. You say nothing. You don't say you see a person. You don't say you bring food. All quiet.”

“I won't.”

“If you lie—”

“I won't! I won't tell anyone!”

There's a pause. The man breathes in his ear, rapidly. He has no smell except an air of violence, the smell of threat. Though everything's dark but the deep indigo sky, Rory has the impression the man's naked like an animal.

“You come with yourself. If I see one other person—”

“I won't.”

“You see bird kill
ratto
? Small animal.”

“Rat,” Rory says.

“Rat. Bird kill a rat. I am like this.” Nails dig into the skin of his neck. He whimpers. “
Subito
, you are dead. So. You don't lie.”

He's so frightened he's tearing up. He can't speak.

“You know?”

Shoulders hunched, he gives a tiny nod.

The man lets him go. “Next day,” he says, withdrawing a little. “Or you are dead.” There's a very soft noise, like a bird in a hedge. The shadow passes him, swift and certain, and disappears ahead. The sea shuffles and grumbles in the distance and his breath scrapes in his painful throat. Otherwise it's quiet. There's no one there. He takes a small step backwards. Nothing happens. He's alone.

He finds the bike in the road. It takes him a while to work up the courage to mount it. He wheels shakily down the hill and follows the telltale yellow gleam back to the Abbey.

T
here he is!”

“I thought you were getting comics!”

“What's wrong?”

He's been trying to think of what to say. All he can come up with is this:

“Nothing.”

“Rory?”

Something soupy and vegetably is cooking. Faint light's trickling into the back hallway from the big room. Laurel, Pink, and Viola are carrying buckets of warmed water up from the kitchen.

“Did you fall off your bike?” Laurel asks, with a kind of disappointed sigh.

Yes, that's what happened. His hands and trousers are badly scuffed. “Yeah.”

“Oh, Rory.” Viola puts her two buckets down and hurries to inspect him. “You twit. Are you all right?”

“Didn't you get comics?” says Pink.

“I'm fine.”

“What happened to your neck?” Viola's hands gently turn him towards the best of the weak light.

“I . . .” He puts his hands up. “I fell on something.”

“You haven't cut yourself, have you? Come in here.” She shepherds him towards the big room.

“Pretty stupid to go riding around in the dark.”

“Laurel, don't.” Laurel's been cross with him all day. Or is it that he's been cross with her? It seems incredibly unimportant all of a sudden. He needs to get away from them all so he can work out what's happening to him.

“I'm fine. Just need to lie down for a bit.”

“Take those to Ali, you two,” Viola says over her shoulder, ignoring Pink's squeal of complaint. “Come on.” She's steering Rory along. “I should never have let you go.”

“Just an accident,” he says.

“You looked shell-shocked. Was it a bad one? Did you hit your head?”

“Is the bike all right?” Laurel says nastily.

The bike's in the shed where they keep the bikes. Why shouldn't it be? His head's whirling stupidly. He doesn't know what he ought to say and what he can't say. There's a man on Home, a stranger. He ought to tell them. He ought to warn everybody. It's the most astonishing thing that's ever happened, so astonishing that he doesn't really believe it himself. But he can't say anything or the man will kill him.

“It's nothing.”

There's a small room farther back in the Abbey with a light that's plugged in, one of those bendy arm ones. Viola frowns everyone else away, takes him in there, and switches it on for a few precious seconds. In the hesitant electric glow he can see how spattered and scratched he is. Viola peers around his collar.

“You've got horrible bruises. What did you do, ride into a branch?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I did. A branch.”

“Looks like no cuts, thank God.” She smiles a little. “Still your mother's going to kill me.”

He winces.

  *  *  *  

Everyone else is asleep. Even the coughing's stopped. The upstairs floors of the Abbey are perfectly dark and full of wheezings and mumblings and snores. Viola's put him in the room with Laurel and Pink, making a bed with cushions from the sofas downstairs. He had to pretend to be asleep when the girls came in so they wouldn't want to chat. Laurel knew he was pretending but he kept his eyes shut anyway and ignored her nasty comments.

That was a long time ago. He's no nearer sleep.

Eventually he slides himself out from under the blankets until he's lying on the carpet, then gets to his hands and knees in the dark. Laurel snuffles and rolls over. It turns out she's inches from his face. He can smell her breath.

He's been thinking about how he can get food and clothes.

Pink sleeps with a hand-wound lantern on her bedside table. It's because she's still afraid of the dark, though no one's allowed to say so. He feels his way to the table and pokes around gently until he's got hold of the lantern.

The handle grinds when you turn it and he can't risk waking anyone up. He'll have to find his way to the door in the dark. He's never slept in this room before (still hasn't, come to think of it). If he bumps into Laurel's bed and she sees what he's doing, what's he going to say?

While he was lying in the dark, waiting as long as he could possibly make himself wait so he could be sure all the women were asleep, he thought a lot about telling Laurel. She wouldn't go telling everyone else and she might know what he's supposed to do.

But he can't. It's not even because he's afraid of the stranger finding out and killing him, though he is. It's more that he can't imagine what he'd say.
There's a stranger on the island. A man.
She'd just laugh at him and say he's been reading too many comics. Perhaps he has been reading too many comics.

He slides his toes across the floor, painfully slowly. He's been planning this while he waited in the dark: sneaking down to the brick-lined larders in the basement, filling a bag with whatever food he can find, hiding it away behind the sacks in the cupboard under the stairs, and then whisking it away in the morning when everyone's busy. It's his only possible chance. It all made sense in his imagination but now that he's actually doing it, it feels like a dream. A bad dream.

He finds the door. The girls' clothes are hanging from the hook. The knob's just below.

The door creaks as soon as he pulls it. Laurel's soft snuffling stops.

He tries not to breathe. He waits as long as he can, then pulls it a bit farther open. It creaks again.

He hears Laurel sit up.

“Pink?”

Out of nowhere he remembers what it was like being made to stand up in class at School.

“Who's that?”

He can't move unless he says something, and he can't just stand there waiting for her to go back to sleep. “It's me,” he whispers.

“What are you doing?”

“I need a pee.”

She snorts crossly and flumps back down onto the mattress. “Could you try not waking everyone up when you come back?”

“Sorry,” he says, and slips out, banging the lantern on the doorframe.

“For God's sake!”

“Sorry!”

He clicks the door shut behind him. He's so full of guilt and terror they're like the gas inside a balloon: he's stretched out, about to pop. He wipes his hands on his pajamas and gives the lantern a few noisy cranks, conjuring a thin and brutally white light. He has to go through with it now. He patters downstairs, feeling invisible eyes following him. The Abbey's twice as big in the dead of night, and older too, and somehow alive. He turns the handle as he goes, dreading the thought of darkness catching up with him. Its noise sounds like a ghost groaning.

The fire's out in the big room. They won't light it again until the next evening, it's not properly cold yet. The cellars are freezing, though, and heavy and shadowy as a tomb. That's why they use them to store food. He hurries to the larders. There's a squashy sack full of plastic bags on the floor. He takes one out and starts filling it, too desperate to get this over with to think about what he's picking up. Apples. Carrots. Beans. Floppy skeins of samphire.

“Rory?”

He drops the bag. The food spills out and rolls around his feet.

Kate's in the doorway, wearing a raggedy dressing gown and fluffy slippers and carrying a tiny night-light in the shape of a cube. Its orangey glow falls mostly on her hands.