There Will Be Lies (21 page)

This is probably true, I realise, with a shiver. And all the time the Child is crying, filling the air with its unhappiness, wanting me. Needing me.

Despite my terror of the trees, the thorns, it is all I can do not to get up and run into the forest, towards the castle, towards that voice, to find the Child and comfort it …

No.

No, I am here in the clearing, with Mark, and there is the warmth of the fire, its shifting light. Keeping the darkness at bay, the creatures of the Crone at bay. I close my eyes and let the fire wash over me.

Huh.

There is something else too, something that for the first time in maybe an hour distracts me from the constant background of the Child’s crying.

This thing is:

I hear it. I hear the fire.

Mom was right, when she said in the cabin that it was indescribable. There are no words. The fire is like a living thing, and the noise of it is the noise of its living; it crackles, pops, fizzes, crunches, cracks. The sound is constant, comforting.

Mark is gazing into the flames, an unreadable, pensive expression on his face.

The elk that died, he said I shouldn’t trust you, I say.

Mark makes a noise in his throat.

He said you played tricks, I continue.

Do I look like I’m playing tricks? says Mark. He is still looking at the fire and his face stays deadly serious.

No, I say.

Well, he says.

But it wouldn’t be a trick if you seemed untrustworthy, would it? I say.

He laughs. No, I suppose not.

So, I say again, can I trust you?

Mark sighs. Trust is the wrong word, he says.

What does that mean?

I am Coyote, he says. I gave knowledge to people. I stole fire and gave it to them. I made death, so that their lives would matter. Twice I killed the Crone, when she was an owl and when she was a giant. I taught Man and Woman how to write. You can trust me to help you. It’s just … you might not like it.

Oh, I say quietly.

We sit there in silence for a moment – or not silence, I realise. The constant noise of the crackling, spitting, creaking fire. The wind in the trees. The crying of the Child, in the background, pulling at me like an enormous magnet. The fire curls and ripples and rolls, as if its true nature is liquid. Above its flaring heat, the icy stars gleam. There are so many of them, a messy multitude, the constellations subtly different from the ones I’m used to. The light is bright – a bluish glow that illuminates everything.

He shakes his head. The problem, he says, is that in your world the days continue to follow one another. To run out. This is in the Crone’s favour.

Because?

Because if we do not save the Child, and soon, your world will end. I told you this.

So what are we doing sitting here by a fire? I say.

He smiles. Conserving our energy, he says. Preparing.

And when does the sun come up? I say.

It doesn’t, he says. Here there is no time.

What? I say. But we’re moving and talking and –

Yes, he says. Time flows. But there is no sun, no moon. Only stars. So there are no days and everything is forever.

I stare at him. I’m thinking of the elk, closing its eyes. Apart from things that die, I say. Because you are Coyote and you made death.

Yes, he says.

Neither of us speaks for a while.

So when do we go? I ask eventually. I mean, we can’t wait till dawn, if there isn’t going to be a dawn.

Soon, he says, with another smile.

Then I feel something on my arm, something or someone touching me. I look at Mark, but he’s sitting a foot away from me, and there’s no one else there, no one I can see.

I look at the moving forms of the trees, their twisted shadows. Has one of them come forward into the clearing?

Who – I say.

Then the hand around my arm tightens and I open my eyes and –

– I’m in the car, and the Fed has his hand on my arm.

We’re nearly there
, he says.

I look down at his hand and he coughs, then removes it; it snaps back to his side as if on elastic.

We’re in Flagstaff, I think. It’s morning but early. We cruise down still-streetlit avenues, it’s that time between night and day when everything is kind of grey, past anonymous office blocks and warehouses, until finally we reach some kind of public-looking building.

Pinstriped suit gets out of the car and comes around to my side. Then he opens my door and leads me into the building. I don’t get a chance to see it properly – I just get a brief vignette of sidewalk and rotating doors, then I’m in a big air-conditioned atrium, a fish tank on a wall and a tired-looking receptionist sitting at a desk.

We turn right, go down a blank corridor, just flickering fluorescent lights above; a water fountain on the wall. White walls. We pass maybe three doors before suit stops at one of them and opens it. He ushers me inside.

It’s a small, square room with four white walls, a single bed in the corner, a basin in the other corner, a toilet next to it.

It’s basically a cell, I realise. It’s basically a fricking cell.

Your cell
, he says.

I stare at him for a moment, and he blinks.
I mean, your cell phone
, he says.

I shake my head. My cell is plugged into the wall in the judge’s cabin.

You’re refusing to give me your cell?

I give him what I hope is a look that can kill but he doesn’t die so oh well. I turn out my pockets, so he can see the white insides.

Oh
, he says.
OK. No cell. I need your watch though
.

Shaking my head, I take the watch from my wrist and give it to him with exaggerated servility, like I’m really eager to please him, trying to make him conscious of the monstrousness of what he’s doing.

It must work because he stands there with his hand on the door handle for a moment. He’s looking at me with something like … something like embarrassment. Like he’s not quite sure whether he’s doing the right thing, like there are usually protocols to be followed and right now he has no fricking idea what the protocol is.

I may be reading too much into it. But I’m pretty sure that’s what I see.

Someone will come, soon
, he says.
To talk to you
.

I frown at him. What does that mean? Does that mean he’s just going to shut me in h–

Oh.

Yes.

It does.

After he shuts the door, I look around again. There really isn’t anything in the room but the bed, the basin and the toilet. Is this some kind of cop station? I have no idea. But I know that whatever is going down is serious to the power of 100.

When guys in black Cadillacs drive you to some random building and lock you in what amounts to a cell, you know that shit just got real.

Maybe, I think, Mom really is Anya Maxwell. But in that case, what’s the second lie? The Coyote – Mark, I remind myself – Mark said that there would be two lies and then the truth. But then maybe the second lie was something else. Maybe it was –

Oh God, I’m so tired.

I barely slept and some kind of SWAT team just came for Mom and I thought Mark was my friend but then he turned out to be some kind of trickster god that the elks are afraid of.

And what am I doing even THINKING about trickster gods and elks? I mean, what is the relevance? I should be thinking about how my life somehow went from comfortable routine – homeschooling, baseball cages, ice cream – to being locked in a bare room.

I don’t even have the knife any more, so I can’t step over into the Dreaming to escape from here.

I sit down on the bed, and I cry all the tears. All the tears inside me, all the tears in the world.

I keep doing that for two thousand years.

Finally, the tears dry up, my chest is still doing these kind of racking sobs but there’s nothing coming out, and no one has come to see me, like the guy in the suit said they would.

So …

There are thirty-two cracks in the far wall of the room.

There are twelve pubes in the toilet – seriously, I counted them. None of them are mine, I would like to state for the record.

There are –

But then the door opens and someone comes in – a woman this
time, also in a suit, only hers is all dark navy, rather than pinstriped. She is thin and beautiful, with pale eyes. She smiles at me and asks how I am.

I don’t answer.

She asks me lots of other questions. She asks me where my mother is – only, like the other Fed, she never calls her my mother, she always calls her Shaylene Cooper.

Where’s Shaylene Cooper?

Where did Shaylene Cooper go?

Was Shaylene Cooper at the cabin with you?

Nine hundred ninety-nine permutations on the exact same fricking question, and I just sit there and don’t say anything at all in response. As far as I’m concerned, they can tell me what’s going on and maybe I’ll speak to them, but I’m not answering their questions about my mom.

It’s not even like I DO know where she is, and even if I did I wouldn’t tell. I have my issues with her – she has lied to me repeatedly and she made Luke’s hand into a kebab but I don’t want her spending her whole life in prison.

Which, apparently, is what’s happening to me, since when the woman in the dark suit leaves, I’m on my own again for hours and hours.

There are sixty-seven human hairs on the bed!

Seventeen of them are pubes!

Zero of them are mine because I will never lie on this thing, ever!

Hmm.

Of course, like an hour later I’m lying on the bed, having brushed it down as best I can, because, well, lock someone in a room with a
bed for hours and eventually they’re going to lie on it, no matter how gross and pube-y it is.

I watch the ceiling for a while – it’s grey concrete and there is literally nothing, zero, nil, zilch that is interesting about it – and then I must fall asleep for a while because …

Well, you think I’m going to say that I wake up in the Dreaming, but I don’t. I find myself in the hospital again, the one from my dream. I am in the first waiting room already, the Legos are in front of me and the crying of the lost child is in my bones. It’s desperate this time, hurt – it needs so badly for someone to come cradle it and so I run …

I run to the second waiting room, past the rocking horse, and there’s the child sitting in the middle of the floor, face screwed up, wailing, and no one around, no one responding. I rush forward. The child, I think it’s a girl, I don’t know why I suddenly see that but I do, looks up at me and for just a second stops crying.

I reach out my arms to scoop her up, and –

– and I snap back into the room, and look over to see that someone has come in with a tray.

Lunch
, says this person, who is a woman and looks a bit like a nurse. Why would there be nurses here? At an FBI facility? But she’s wearing a green papery dress and I’m pretty sure I’m right.

I ignore her as she sets the tray down, and then leaves. I’m thinking: Lunch? Seriously? That means I’ve been in here, what, only five hours maybe?

I’m also thinking that I’m not eating their food. I refuse. I absolutely refuse.

Yeah, OK, so I eat the food. It’s lasagne.

It’s actually quite good.

I still won’t say anything to them.

They try – they try over and over.

They come into the room where I’m being held – it’s not a prison cell, but it’s not much different – and they talk and talk and talk. They ask me about my life, about where we have been living, about what Mom has said to me, what I know.

They ask and ask but they’re not TELLING me anything, so I don’t answer.

I’m still in the same room – the bed, the toilet, the basin. That’s it. Nothing else. Not even a TV, which might help with the, oh, what is it? oh yeah, that’s it, the COLOSSAL, CRUSHING BOREDOM of sitting in here for hour after hour. It’s homely! If you consider a hospital room to be homely.

You’re thinking – she’s bored? When her mom has just disappeared and is probably going to get the death penalty when she’s caught, for killing her husband? And the answer is: yes. You try it.

Go on – shut yourself in a blank room. Your bathroom maybe. Sit there for ten hours.

Go on. Do it. I mean it. Ten hours. Look at the wall or something.

Bored yet?

So, yes.

It’s like suicide watch, in, like,
Girl, Interrupted
or something.

Have they caught Mom yet? I wonder. I hope not.

This is bad, I think. Really, really bad.

Then I need the toilet, and that’s 7,890 times worse. After, I don’t know, there’s no way to tell the time because of course they took my watch, a nurse comes in. I can tell she’s a nurse because she has a white uniform and one of those things for listening to your chest around her neck, but I think it’s just for show because she doesn’t use it. There’s a guard with her, not a SWAT guy but just a hard-looking man with a gun in a holster.

Do you mind if I take some blood?
asks the nurse.

I don’t answer, but I’m thinking, What, why?

Do you mind if I
–

I just look away, but I don’t, like, resist or anything, so the nurse sticks a needle in me. She’s good – she finds a vein right away. Then she takes some blood.

She says,
I’d like to check your leg too
.

Again, I don’t answer.

She shrugs, then cautiously approaches. I don’t move. She comes close – she has freckles, red hair. Crow’s feet around her eyes, but I put her at maybe thirty. She’s pretty, a diamond on her finger. I wonder if she has kids.

She leans down and opens the slit in my sweatpants. She takes off the CAM Walker and examines my leg. She has a bag with her and she takes some stuff from it and, I guess, changes the dressings or something. Then she nods, satisfied, apparently.

For a moment, I think about sticking my thumbs in her eyes and squeezing.

But I don’t, and they leave, and that’s the only interesting thing that’s happened, and it’s over.