Mappa Mundi (2 page)

Natalie knew about that place. She could go there when she held her breath and shut her eyes and nobody knew where she was. She knew that was where the old powers went when nobody wanted them. By seeing things and putting your hands on them, by making trees into doors and cupboards, by chopping wood and cutting grass, that was how you kept your power to say what could be done. You banished old bad spirits by tidying them away from your mind with order.

But Natalie was too young to hold on to that notion all the time. She could play and pretend in the wood as long as she believed she could. But her belief was weak when she was alone, even in the daylight. Sometimes she couldn't believe strongly enough that the bushes were only plants with no feelings, or that the trees were recent additions, not an old forest with a mind of its own. Sometimes she felt the belief of the wood pressing in on her and its belief was stronger than hers. It wanted to exist, and she was in its way.

Then she'd have to wait for a sound, a call, her mother's angry voice looking for her to release the spell. And now she'd challenged the wood to save Karen, made up a lie that Karen could use against it, and it didn't even matter that it wasn't true. As soon as she'd said it she'd felt the fabric of reality shift to let it in. Now it was true whether it ought to be or not. She had used magic and the wood spirits would remember her strike against them.

Natalie twisted the net curtain in her hands. She saw the dog come out of its kennel and look up at the wall that protected it from the land beyond, listening, ears cocked. She heard the chink of its chain as it looked, longingly, at the house door, and then slunk back inside the dark hole of the little hut. Inside walls, in a space full of people who did not believe, that was the best protection there was. Even the dog knew it.

She briefly wished her dad were there (he was the ultimate nonbeliever) but he would have had no time for her either, so it was better he was not around. He was the kind of man who could sit by the bedside, reading his paper, while his only daughter was eaten by ghosts he did not believe in.

Natalie moved backwards, into the room, and got into bed without taking her gaze off the window. Curled and chilly in the comforter she stared at the stars and listened hard to the sound of her and Karen's mothers talking in the kitchen below, the chink of ice in a glass, the drone of the television where Karen's dad was watching a police programme. Beyond it all she could hear the wood. A silent vastness, brimming full of ancient secrets and chaos, waiting, eating the lie of the Blue World, looking towards her with clever eyes that had already calculated the total of her crimes against it.

And she wondered, lying there and waiting for the defeat and terror of sleep, whether the wood could be kept at bay entirely by lies. If making up a thing and having it seem true was all there was to making things true. If the world, without a witness, was infinitely malleable.

That was why Karen was so desperate to talk the protection of the blue magic into being. That was why everyone constantly talked and shared and agreed on so many things that she, Natalie, didn't understand. Money, politics, current affairs, gardening, housework, laundry. Did their saying make it so? Had they created everything that way? They spoke with the conviction of knowledge.

But suppose that the fragility of it all was something they had forgotten with age? Then they would be safe, because their certainty in their own stories was absolute, and certainty was protection magic at its height.

Natalie was not certain. She longed to be, but how could she pretend she was when she knew the truth? That the safe world was a web of lies, beneath which the shunned reality waited, a master of infinite patience and terrible revelation.

It was the winter of Jude's senior year. He and George Kilgore and Ru Tanner were in the Maine woods a few miles beyond the boundary of the school grounds, out hunting. It was the first day of the Christmas holiday. They were together because Jude and Ru were friends, and George was loud and aggressive and had delayed departure especially for a chance to roam the forest with his firearms and prove to his father and himself that he wasn't a candy-ass liberal whose eventual Senatorial status would lead him by the snout and pecker into debauchery and casual morals. His was a complex ambition that Jude had no hope would be satisfied by this or many other similar outings. But, he told himself as they'd loaded up, it wasn't as though there was anything else to do but wait for his flight back West.

George had driven them out along the back roads and they had walked a mile or two farther through a new snowfall, as thick and deep as its descent had been soft and silent. Jude sank up to his knees before the powder compressed sufficiently to make a noise, juddering through his feet.

George had been lent three guns from Daddy's collection—a carbine and two rifles. Jude didn't much like George and was only along because he was Ru's friend. Ru was simple, for a straight-A's guy, and he'd never been on a hunt. Both he and George, from white families of
long-line descent, imagined that bringing Jude along would be lucky, although they wouldn't say so in front of him. Nobody in their right mind would really believe that Native American blood would make anyone a better tracker or more attuned to the woods, but Jude was conscious of being watched for any signs of wolflike stealth, sixth sense, and all the rest of that shit. It made him clumsy. He stumbled in the lead, not knowing where he was going, confident of not getting lost only because they were creating such an obvious trail that it would be easy to follow it back to the truck.

Some hours passed and George decided they were nearly in the right spot.

“Okay, Tonto, halt-o,” he said with the deliberate affability of someone delivering a true insult, and got out his binoculars to scan the landscape.

Jude ignored him and walked on, staying in the tree line beside an open meadow. He saw Ru hurry up to his side and glance at him with an apologetic look. Ru sure was in the shit. He wanted George to approve of him and he wanted Jude to stay friends with both of them. Jude nodded in resignation at Ru's stupidity, the rifle he was carrying so cold that it had numbed his hands through his Polartec gloves, its weight leaden and uncomfortable no matter which way he held it. After a moment or two, when George had noticed them carrying on, Jude heard him yomping quickly to catch them up. It was a sound of huffing and rasping, floundering, but with a weighted intent that made the hair on the back of Jude's neck rise.

“Holdja horses!” George grumbled and yanked on the hood of Jude's parka so that he could pass them both and get up front.

Ru said, “Hey, what was that?” and pointed away into the tall, skinny poles that led off to the right where nothing moved except a slither of ice crystals falling from a distant twig.

The wind curled an invisible finger around the lightest top layer of the powdery snow and flicked it into a swirl around their legs.

They slipped and stumbled into hidden potholes under the soft fall. They made enough noise to scare everything from here to next Tuesday, Jude reckoned, and he was glad. He hoped they didn't see a single animal. He would far rather shoot George, who kept talking about how he really wanted to go up into Canada and pot himself a Poley-Bear, a real be-Jeezus berserker.

George was from Boston, but he liked to feign a Kentucky accent for hunting. Jude watched Ru's eager leaping in George's wake with sad jealousy and foreboding as Ru giggled and hooted, finding the idea of George shooting a polar bear very funny. George was dead serious. He glared at Ru, “Get that fucking carbine out of the snow, willya? It's never gonna work if you get it covered in shit.”

“Shh!” Ru said, lifting the gun up to his chest. He was going to study English Literature in Oxford, England, come fall. Jude thought Ru had some kind of fault in his head, maybe Asperger's, anyway, something that made him different and susceptible. He looked at Ru wiping off the short barrel and patting the stock of the gun, and wondered what would happen to him over there.

Around them the woods stretched silent as death. Overhead the sky had a greyish-white pallor that spanned the world, preparing to release another load of snow should the cold let up a little. The air had a frosty nip, and it felt like it cut Jude's cheeks every time he moved too quickly. He blinked, watching his breath plume and vanish, a few crystals dropping out of it towards the deep trough that George and Ru had made, like ploughs, in front of him. Trees stood or leaned in spindly profusion, crowding around them as they circled the meadow. They saw nothing.

The rest of the day blurred in Jude's mind when he recalled it; wading through the powder, sliding into a chest-deep trench and being hauled out by Ru and George; looking through the same trees and flat, empty white ground in all directions, not believing the compass when it told them they'd run in a circle until they found their own
tracks; sitting under a rocky overhang with feet like ice blocks and gritted teeth, George not letting them eat the Hershey bars they'd brought in case a bear smelled the chocolate and woke up from hibernation right underneath them, ready to spring.

“You gotta see a bear to shoot it,” Ru pointed out, handing round the half bottle of bourbon George had opened. Jude didn't drink any, he just pretended to. He was so cold all he could think about was going home.

“We ain't in a market for bears today, Ruby,” George said. “Deer.”

George had a big, foot-long hunting knife he'd spent two weeks sharpening and showing off. He'd talked in the dorm about using it to butcher an animal or finish it off with a big swipe across the jugular. He kept it underneath his mattress, next to a notebook like a girl's with a lock on it, and some survival magazines. Jude didn't doubt that with some more whiskey in him George would be the most dangerous thing in the whole forest. He wished something would happen so it would be done with and they could leave. It didn't occur to him that he didn't have to wait for George, that he could just go.

They saw the deer a moment later, walking cautiously along the edge of a clearing where dense overhead branches had caught some of the snowfall and left weak tufts of bleached grasses to show their heads. It was a doe, a big one, and she was alone. Her ears turned in their direction as she heard the chink of George's bottle when he put it down on the rock.

“Yassuh,” George murmured and began to sight, sinking the gun butt into his shoulder. His grin was fixed. He looked like he was going to bite the wind.

At that moment Jude realized, with a shock of sudden revelation, that there was something deeply wrong with George. He wasn't just a jerk. He was broken, deep down, and even when he tried to, he couldn't work properly. This behaviour of his was a result of the fault in him, and he hadn't always been like that. Someone had done it to
him, a long time ago. Someone had broken George and now George, instead of being poured from a whole jug, just seeped out of the cracks any which way he could. Jude had known him, at a distance, for five years and he'd never seen it until now.

Quickly Jude glanced at Ru, looking for a moment of old familiarity, but Ru was quivering with excitement, fumbling with the carbine, his arms shaking so much he couldn't have hit a barn door from the inside.

“God shit!” George hissed. His brand-new telescopic sight had misted with the warmth from his eye—he'd forgotten he should have kept it in his pocket to stop it getting so cold. He fumbled at it with a cloth as Jude watched him and saw the pouchy middle-aged destiny already beginning to unfurl in George's hopeless face. His rubbery lips were split with cold, but looked like they were deteriorating in a more permanent way; old seed cases whose time had come to open.

The deer stepped carefully to the edge of the grass and pawed away some snow. She put her head down to nibble.

George settled again. Ru squinted along the carbine's length, careless of gluing his skin to the metal with cold.

In a way, the wrong way, Ru and George were right about Jude—he did have more experience with guns than they did, although he'd never have told them that it was his fifteen-year-old sister who had taught him to shoot. Carefully, because he could hardly feel his hands, he slid the rifle bolt into place, listening to George start murmuring love to the deer, “C'mon, baby, turn for Daddy, one more step to the side…that's it.”

Despite the insight and the pity that Jude had felt a moment before, he hated George in that moment for this whole production. Not for the simple fact of hunting, although Jude loathed the idea of killing as sport, but for George's idiotic machismo and his second-hand barroom talk learned from TV shows and T&A magazines.

Jude swung the barrel of his rifle well out to the side and, as the
deer turned and George's finger tightened jerkily on the trigger, squeezed his own hand into a fist.

The deer crouched and leaped. Ru gasped and dropped his gun into the snow, a strip of skin peeling off his cheek with it. George's shot went off in the moment's dead air that followed Jude's.

“You fucking asshole, whaddya do that for?” George flung his rifle down as the deer vanished into the distance, her bounding wallow through the snowdrift silent and slow, like an art film of some moment of salvation.

“I liked it better alive.” Jude met George's stare with a flat gaze that said if he wanted a fight he could have one.

Ru was looking at them both in a puzzled way, not sure what had gone on but using George's moment of distraction to pick up his borrowed gun and dust it off, humming with pain at the raw patch on his face as he did so.

Jude held out the dead weight of the rifle to George, “Here.”

“What?” George batted at it, spitting as he spoke. “You brought it out here, you can take it back.”

Jude dropped the gun in the snow and stood up, legs aching and weak from the long time they'd been crouched under the overhang. He looked at Ru, who was a mass of indecision, then back at George.

“You
take it. It's yours.”

“Jesus! What's the matter with you? Fucking everything up. Pick it up. There's still time to find another one.”

“I changed my mind.” Jude put his hands in the pockets of his coat and started to walk away.

“Jude?” Ru called after him. “Are you going?”

“Nah, he ain't going,” George's voice said from close behind him.

Jude turned round just in time to receive George as he slammed into him in a headlong tackle. They fell down through the soft snow onto a shallow bank and rolled over and over, struggling to hang on and drive each other off at the same time.

Jude wound up on his back, George quickly getting astride his chest and digging his knees in on either side. Jude put his hands up, unable to see because of the white crystals sticking fast to his eyelashes, and got a punch in the mouth, a blow harder than he'd have believed George could deliver. It felt like he'd been struck with a rock. His head slammed against something hard under the snow.

Needles of pain radiated across his face and deep into his skull. He realized he had to do something, but when he opened his eyes he saw black flowers exploding in slo-mo in front of the runny, shaky vision of George reaching back to deal him another blow. This time Jude's lips and the left side of his face exploded in heat, like the sun had come out and was shining just for him.

He dashed a hand across his eyes and looked up into the empty white sky. Through the fierce glare he saw the silhouette of George's hand raised above him. He couldn't believe it was holding the hunting knife, but the fine length of steel blade reflected white snow and the yellow streak of Jude's scarf.

“George?” Ru said from somewhere above them both, hesitant, ready to laugh if it were a joke, hoping it was a joke, not knowing what he would do if it wasn't.

George grabbed Jude's hair and stretched his head back to expose his neck, grinning down at him. “You're gonna pick up that fucking gun and take it back to the truck, and then you're gonna walk back to school on your own.” He was calm now, like he'd had it all planned out for some time. He brought the tip of the knife down to the base of Jude's neck and tapped at his collarbone with it where the anorak was pulled to the side.

Jude's bone told him that, regrettably, the knife was made of harder stuff than it was. At the same moment, in a combination of sensations so peculiar he thought he must be imagining them, because they couldn't be right, he felt George grinding his pelvis in a slow, suggestive way down onto his crotch.

“And I'm gonna tell everyone how you chickened out of shooting a pretty little Bambi in the woods, Mohawk boy.” He balanced the knife on its point against Jude's collarbone.

“George,” Ru said, pleading. “The deer are all getting away.”