The Killing Lessons (35 page)

Nell hadn’t gone far – maybe only thirty steps, though each one seemed to take minutes – when she began to get a little confused. The pauses to rest between each step had been getting longer. She felt sleepy. Her legs were far away things. Not just her teeth, but her whole head felt numb. When she blinked, it was like a heavy velvet curtain very slowly descending. The snow was driving hard around her. She couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. If it weren’t for the ascending slope of evergreens on her right and her own footprints behind her she wouldn’t have been sure which way
was
ahead.

She took another step, but found herself easing herself down to sit in the snow. Just for a moment, she told herself. Just rest for a moment. She was thinking about the tree. Josh and Mike Wainwright had sat there that afternoon and Nell had been terrified that if Josh tried it and fell she would have to go and tell her mother what had happened. Her mother knew about the tree, and had strictly forbidden either of them to
ever
try to cross it. Twenty feet, Mike Wainwright had said.
Can’t
be more than twenty feet. It had looked a long,
long
way across to Nell. You’d have to pick your way between the branches. You’d have to crawl. Mike Wainwright claimed he’d seen another, older boy, Francis Coolidge, do the whole thing, there and back, on foot, wearing special soft rubber shoes with what Mike called ‘nodular grip’, but neither Josh nor Nell had believed him.

She couldn’t understand why she felt so tired. She’d slept last night for what had seemed a very long time.

At which thought the dream came back to her, and she remembered the hare.

Safe travel
.
You’re old enough, now.

She put her hand into her pocket.

It wasn’t there.

Angelo woke from a dream of him and Sylvia on a boat in glittering blue water to find Nell, and the remaining Advil, gone. He knew at once what had happened, what she’d done. What
he
’d done.

And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?

How long had he slept? How long had she been gone? The thought of going after her took stock of his energy. Pitiful, despite the sleep, which felt as though it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours. And she had taken his walking stick.

He would have to go and look for her. Dear God, if she’d tried to cross the tree… And in this fucking blizzard…

He was searching the cabin for anything that might serve as a prop when the door opened.

‘My bracelet,’ Nell said. ‘I can’t do it without my bracelet. Where is it?’

‘Thank God,’ Angelo said. ‘I thought you’d… Jesus, come in, come in. Shut the door.’

But Nell didn’t shut the door. She just sank to her knees. Angelo’s walking stick clattered to the floor next to her. ‘It was in my pocket,’ she said. ‘My mom gave it to me. It’s for safe travel. I can go across the tree with it.’

Angelo crawled to the door and closed it. The kid was different. She wasn’t right. The pills? She’d taken three times the recommended dose. He would have to be careful. Right or wrong in her mind, she was more mobile than him now. Speak calmly.

‘You’ve lost your bracelet,’ he said. ‘OK. We’ll look for it. What’s it look like?’

‘It’s a silver chain with a gold hare.’

She was wrestling her jacket off. ‘It was in my pocket,’ she said, going through them for what was obviously the umpteenth time. ‘It has to be here.’

‘Check in the lining,’ Angelo said. ‘That’s where I found the Advil in mine. Come over by the stove in the meantime.’

Nell crawled towards the warmth, dragging her jacket. ‘I have to have it,’ she said. ‘It’s got to be here somewhere.’

‘How are you feeling?’ Angelo said. ‘Any stomach ache? You might have taken too many of those pills. So if you’re feeling—’

‘It’s here!’ Nell said. ‘I found it!’

Her speech sounded a little slurred.

The bracelet was in the first place she’d looked: under the couch. Kicked there by him, presumably, during one of his many spectacular journeys around the floor.

‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘Can I see it?’

‘The chain’s broken,’ she said. ‘It broke when I fell. But it stopped me going over the edge into the river.’

OK, she was definitely not herself. He’d learned enough of her over the last three days to know she was too old and too smart for something like that. (
Says
the man who talks to the dead
.) How long ago had she taken them? He had no idea how long she’d been gone.

‘That’s really very pretty,’ he said, examining the bracelet she held in her palm. ‘And it’s a good luck charm for travellers?’

‘My mom gave it to me,’ she repeated. ‘It’s been in her family for ages.’

‘That’s a genuine heirloom,’ he said. ‘And these days, not many—’

He stopped. They’d both heard it. The sound they’d all but given up believing they’d ever hear again.

A car. It was a way off down the hill, but it could only be coming in one direction. There was nothing the other way except the end of the road and the wrecked bridge.

For a stretched second they looked at each other. There were too many feelings. Nell’s face had lost all its knowledge, everything. She was suspended, out of time.

‘Thank God,’ Angelo said. He grabbed his stick, got it under himself, braced, shoved himself (one scream as S1 bellowed in protest) to his feet.

‘Wait!’ Nell said.

Angelo, bent double, turned. She just looked at him, trembling, willing him to understand.

He paused. He was an idiot. Had he forgotten everything already?
Who the hell was she running from
?

Still, it was very remote, he knew. The chances of the men who had attacked her mother…

Reason and paranoia.

Very remote. But not impossible.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I know. Christ. Let’s get you… Quick. In there.’

Not to the bathroom, but to the room next door, empty but for some old wooden crates, half of which had been broken up and used for kindling. A window looked out alongside the porch. A rickety wooden door opened into the cabin’s small fenced backyard. An exit, he told himself – what for he didn’t know, since even hopped-up on the Advil she’d hardly be able to
run
.

‘Don’t worry,’ Angelo said. ‘It’s going to be fine. It’s someone from Spring maybe gone the wrong way, lucky for us.’

Nell didn’t answer. Neither of them had realised how much the stillness and confines of the cabin had become their world. Now that they were disturbed it brought all the horror of her flight back to her. And the insurmountable fact of his virtual helplessness back to him.

‘Anything happens,’ Angelo said, ‘you hide. Understand? You
hide
.’

Outside, drenched in sweat from the effort of getting there, the cold shocked him. No coat. The wind nearly took him off his feet. Flakes rushed to his eyelashes. His jaws were tight. The pain was burning through the adrenalin, a furious inflagration. But he stayed on his feet, bent under his invisible load, shivering. The wind had blown the cabin’s front door open, though he’d pulled it closed behind him.

Headlights through the snow’s wild cross-hatching. The vehicle was moving slowly, a creature nosing its way. The engine sounded big and healthy. It brought all of civilisation with it. Angelo’s hands and face were wet.
Think. Don’t assume. Think.

Thirty feet. Twenty. Ten.

It stopped.

The driver’s door opened and a man in a windbreaker got out, one arm up over his eyes to shield them from the snow’s blur.

‘Jesus,’ Angelo gasped, staggering forwards. ‘Thank Christ you’re here. I need help. I’ve got a back injury and I’ve been stuck here for days. I really need to get down to Spring. Do you have a cell phone?’ He’d been shouting over the noise of the wind – but it dropped, and made his last utterance sound like he was patronising a deaf person. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said,
not
shouting, ‘but I’ve been completely stranded up here.’

The two men looked at each other.

‘Where does this road go?’ the guy asked.

‘This way’s no good,’ Angelo said. ‘The road only goes as far as the bridge, and the bridge is out. Please, I really need to make a call if you have a phone. Do you have a cell phone?’

‘Where does the bridge go?’

Angelo hesitated. The guy wasn’t right. The guy wasn’t seeing him.

‘Ellinson,’ he said, just as the wind hurled itself again, so that he had to shout the rest: ‘But the bridge is out. This is a
dead end
.’

Bizarrely, the guy took a few paces away, put his hands on his hips, as if that was the
last
thing he needed to hear. The depth of the snow made it look ridiculous, like an angry toddler stomping around his room.

A gust knocked Angelo to his knees. The nerves in his leg roared. He cried out. He couldn’t, for the moment, get up.

The man in the windbreaker stomped back and stood over him. He wasn’t looking at Angelo. He was watching the cabin door bang open and closed, open and closed.

‘This is a dead end,’ the man said. He still had his hands on his hips. One of them was bandaged.

Angelo didn’t speak. The ground was uncertain under him. The guy standing over him looked exhausted.

‘Hold on,’ the man said, reaching for his back pocket. ‘Let me see if I’ve got reception on my phone.’

But it wasn’t a phone.

It was a gun.

Which he smashed into the side of Angelo’s head.

Nell, peeping through the junk room window, saw the man hit Angelo. Not the man from the house. A different man. How was that… They’re still here, her mother had said. They. More than one. Where was the guy with the coppery hair and the thin beard? She saw Angelo fall.

Anything happens, you hide. Understand?

There was nowhere to hide. He would find her in seconds.

The door. The back porch. Under it.

There was nothing. There was nothing but the occasional blasts of pain and the certainty that this was it. It was over. It was going to happen.

She grabbed the window sill and pushed herself up onto her good foot. No stick, now. Angelo had taken it. Without it her ribs on the left side took her breath away with the first step. She went down.

Hurry.
Hurry, Nellie
.

It was her mother’s voice. Her mother’s face with the blood on her lips.
I’m going to be all right but you have to run. Now!

But she couldn’t run.

Your mother is dead.

She crawled. The smell of the floor was intimate, old wood and the freezing soil beneath it. She wondered how long the cabin had stood here. She wondered too (vaguely, as if she had all the time in the world) why Angelo had come here. She had never asked him. Now she would never know. It came to her in spite of everything that he had been kind to her. She wished she’d thanked him. The image of the other man hitting him with the gun replayed in her head. It snapped a small stem in her heart. The water he’d warmed for her, and the clean smell of the soap and the towel. She’d felt better afterwards. He had done so many small things for her.

Hurry!

At the back door she had to push herself up again to reach the latch. She had no thought. She was just moving. She would move as long as she could, and when she couldn’t move any more whatever was going to happen would happen. It was a blankness ahead of her. Except the feeling that she would see her mother on the other side of it. It comforted her. It would happen, then it would be over and she would be through.

As soon as she got the door open the blizzard rushed her face. The snow was a soft, urgent suffocation. The pain in her ankle felt like it had layers upon layers of warmth wrapped around it. It would make her sick if she thought about it. On her knees, she pulled the door closed behind her. The porch had a dusting of snow but the area beyond it was deep. Deeper than her, if she crawled. If she tried to crawl under the porch. If there was even a space under the porch. It was impossible. He would open the door and see her immediately, half buried in the snow, going nowhere, a helpless animal still moving, long past the point at which it should have given up.

The porch roof was low, a handrail, uprights supporting the pitch at either side.

I’m not worried you’ll fall. I’m worried you’ve got monkey genes.

She looked at it. There was a rusted hanging basket bracket halfway up the upright. Good leg first. Knee on the handrail. Hands on the upright, then she could reach the edge of the roof. Pull herself up. Left foot on the bracket.

And then what? It was impossible. She couldn’t put that kind of weight on her right leg. The thought of it made her dizzy. She hadn’t realised she was crying.

But there was nothing else to do. The alternative was to go back inside, in which case he’d find her. Or wait here on the porch, in which case he’d find her. Since all she wanted now was to go through and see her mother again, shouldn’t she just
let
him find her? What difference did it make where?

The prospect of this tempted her, sweetly, with a quiet voice in the midst of her dinning blood.

The girl’s red jacket was on the floor next to a sleeping bag. Xander had seen it when the door blew open. The door had kept opening and closing, showing it to him every time. The door was determined he should see what he needed to see. The door was on his side.

He stood over the old man in the snow. The old man’s head was bleeding, but he wasn’t unconscious. His eyes and his mouth were open. Xander kicked him in the stomach, once, twice, three times. He felt relief flooding him, warming him from the inside despite the icy air on his face and hands. The cold even numbed his hand a little. He stood in the deafening wind, enjoying the sensation. All the hours and days, all the gathered weather and miles were leaving him, a swarm that had covered him and made every movement slow was tearing quickly from his body to be carried away on the racing snow. He could feel the weight lifting. Mama Jean laughed, quietly, right next to him. It was going to be all right. He was going to fix it. He was going to fix everything.