Chapter 41 #3
Down there in the hallway, Andrew has Cathy pinned facedown to the floor.
She is twisting her body in an effort to roll away, but his hand has snagged and twisted the collar of her T-shirt.
His strong, limber arm snakes tightly around Cathy’s neck, pulling her head off the floor and cutting off her windpipe.
She makes a sharp, guttural hnng! sound and I am filled with despair.
I stumble down the stairs at the same time as Suzie is running toward them, teeth bared, leaping onto Andrew’s back with clawed hands.
There is blood on Cathy’s hands as she tries to beat them against him.
Blood in her beautiful blond hair. One of her earrings is lying on the ground, catching the light.
I’m not going to make it. I feel so heavy, like I’m walking underwater, and the sound she is making is now a thin whistle, like a punctured tire.
The front door swings wide open, hard enough to knock a dent in the plaster of the wall.
Squalling wind carries snow inside, the scent of pine so strong I feel it hit my chest like a bullet.
That pattering, getting louder. All that blood, running right out of me, only it’s not blood, I realize, it’s the sound of feet, moving fast across the floor.
It’s Maria, sprinting through the front door toward her brother like a creature possessed.
Her face is twisted into something I don’t recognize; a feral creature, snarling.
I have enough time to yell before Maria’s scream of triumph and rage blocks out all other sound.
Andrew rears up like a cobra, flinging Suzie off his back.
She lands awkwardly with a sharp crack of bone.
Maria is holding something in both hands, swinging it through the air.
I see the white flailing shape sketching a long arc downward just before the stryker hits Andrew high on his temple.
The impact is a sound like a foot through a frozen puddle, wet and brittle, the crack of slushy ice.
Andrew makes a low gurgling noise as he leans sideways, the drill bit falling softly from his limp fingers.
Maria sucks in a long breath, her skin red and chapped with the cold.
She is trembling all over, and even at this distance, I can see the thin crust of ice on her eyelashes and brows.
Wet clothes hang from her skeletal frame. She looks up at me and grins, feverish.
“Did you see, Hazel? It worked. The stryker worked!”
I nod. I feel like laughing, but I don’t have the strength, so I simply let my legs give way and sit abruptly on the step, hugging my knees against me.
Cathy looks up. She sees me and doesn’t see me.
There is no immediate recognition on her face.
I don’t blame her. I’ve lost a lot of weight, I’ve had my head shaved, and although I haven’t checked in any mirrors lately, I think there is a lot of blood drying to thin scales all over my face right now. I must look nightmarish.
“Hazel? Is that you? Oh man, what has he done to you?”
Cathy struggles out from beneath Andrew’s slumped weight, her eyes round and wide as saucers. Her cheek oozes a thin stream of blood.
“I’m okay,” I tell her, but my voice is a rusty saw. She rushes toward me, her hands outstretched, and then I have nothing to say at all, leaning into her and feeling her gently press my scalp, my jaw, checking me for injury.
She studies the hole in my head with her brow furrowed, muttering, “You poor thing, you poor little thing,” over and over again.
I examine the slit in her cheek. He caught her on a downward stroke, but it looks as though she pulled away in time to stop it going too deep. It’s a laceration. Nasty, but it’ll heal. I can tell by the look on her face that I haven’t got quite so lucky.
“He’s put a hole in you,” she tells me slowly and with uncharacteristic patience. “Oh! I think I can see the bone. It’s making me feel funny.”
“Don’t look, then.” I smile, and the tears spill out of her eyes and I’m helpless to stop them. “I’ll tie something round it, like Rocky.”
“Rambo,” she corrects me, laughing. It feels so good to hear her laugh that I almost forget where we are, the brisk, chattering wind that gusts fitfully through the open door.
“He’s still alive.”
We both look up at Suzie. She has her fingers pressed to Andrew’s neck. When she stands, I’m amazed to notice that despite everything, she still looks immaculate, like she has just walked into a studio set.
She brushes her hair back from her face and turns to Maria. “That’s quite a swing you’ve got there.”
“It’s the pivot that makes it effective.” Maria beams, looking at me, and I realize she is repeating the same words I’d used. It makes me feel a little sick, thinking of the wet crunch as she’d hit him.
“Suzie, your arm—”
“It’s my wrist. I think I’ve cracked something, but I’ll live. All the same, we should get to high ground and call him an ambulance. They might be able to get the helicopter out for Andrew if—”
“Fuck him,” Cathy interrupts bluntly. “He imprisoned my sister and tried to kill her. Let him rot.”
Suzie looks like she might argue that, but already Cathy is turning away, putting her hands on mine. Her eyes are filled with tears.
“We’re going to get you home, okay? We’re going to make sure you get through this.”
“And Maria,” I tell her. She looks at me doubtfully, then to Maria, thin and pale, a wraith in a flannel shirt and saggy leggings, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Her eyes are bright and hectic in her gaunt face.
“We can have the police come back for her.”
“No. She leaves with us.”
“Hazel.” Cathy lowers her voice, holding my gaze. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
I look over to where Maria is standing, still clutching that pillowcase in one hand. As she sees me looking, she reaches inside it, producing a large rock. I know it right away. A chunk of granite as big as a fist, studded with quartz. My mother gave it to me. Said it had magical powers.
Slumped against the wall, Andrew stirs. His eyes flicker.
There is a dent in his temple where that magic rock had struck him, deep enough to hold a glass of water.
That funny feeling my sister described to me when she saw the white of bone?
I get it now. Like everything has gone fuzzy on the edges.
Thick, heavy-tongued. I watch with abject horror as his eyes open.
His left iris starts to drift away, as if trying to look at that awful crater in his head perhaps, while the right remains fixed on me, the pupil fat and bloated.
“We need to go.”
“Can you walk? It’s a long way to the car, and it’s started snowing again.”
“I just need to get on my feet.” I have to tear my eyes away from Andrew and that dent in his skull, his hair matted with gore. Suzie helps me up and I test my weight carefully. I think the adrenaline is keeping me going, and that is good. I have to work with it.
“Maria, is it?” Cathy turns to the girl, speaking loudly and slowly, enunciating every word as if Maria is hard of hearing. “Have you got something warm you can wear, sweetie?”
I take another look at Maria. She is still standing with that rock in her hands, a big smile fixed to her face. There’s a prickly sensation in my lower back where my scar is, a deep, uncomfortable itch. I try to ignore it, but it burrows deeper.
“Upstairs,” I tell Suzie. “There’s a whole wardrobe of stuff in her room. Last door on the right. Grab something, anything. None of it fits.”
Suzie brushes past us, heading up the stairs in her neat little white trainers. Now I’m on my feet I feel better, able to think more clearly. I glance at Andrew. That slippery, off-kilter eye, the depression in his temple—it makes me feel like fainting.
He sees me looking. Gives me a dark, ugly smile. Blood seeps between his teeth.
“I thought you’d stood me up,” Cathy says quietly, wiping her nose with her hand. She has a pack of cigarettes in her hand, turning them over and over. “When you didn’t show, I figured you’d changed your mind. I was so mad at you.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell her, but she raises her hand. Let me finish.
“I know we haven’t spoken in a long time. I know I’ve missed big parts of your life—important parts—and I’m sorry I didn’t come and visit you at Belle Vue. I tried, but maybe I should have tried harder. If I had—”
“Stop it. Please, Cathy.”
“It can be all right again, though, can’t it? From now, I mean. A reset.”
“Yes,” I tell her, but my eyes are back on Maria. She hasn’t moved. Still smiling, still holding that rock. My scar burns with heat. I hear Suzie moving around upstairs.
“Do me a favor, would you?” I turn to my sister. “Go and see what’s taking Suzie so long?”
“Oh.” She looks suspiciously at Andrew and seems to be satisfied that he isn’t likely to be going anywhere before saying, “Okay, sure.”
I wait for her to reach the top of the stairs before slowly approaching Maria.
After his horrific crimes, Joseph Bray had been hanged from a gibbet before he was buried at the crossroads where the road to the Spit now diverges.
In announcing his punishment, the judge declared him “a monster in the skin of a man.” I think about that phrasing sometimes. How apt it can be.
“Tell me how you got away from her.”
I keep my voice level. Try to hold Maria’s gaze. It’s tricky. Her pupils are fat black inkblots floating on her irises. She keeps smiling, but it looks like it is starting to hurt.
“I made a deal,” she whispers. Laughs. I wish she’d drop that rock.
“What kind of deal?”
“It was like you told me, Hazel. Quid pro quo. I do something for you—”
“You do something for me. Yeah. I get it. So, what did she do for you?”
I keep saying that word. She. Maria shouldn’t know who I’m talking about, but she does.
That worries me.
“She let me go, silly!”
“And you? What do you have to do for her?”
I keep my eye on that rock. It glitters under the light, a thousand twinkling stars.