Chapter 1 Riley #2
Riley brushes Oliver’s teeth gently, trying not to move his canine and incisor, both of which are loose.
There’s a little blood on the toothbrush when she’s finished so she washes it quickly under the tap before he can see.
She doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to be losing so many teeth so fast. Maybe it’s normal at this age, Riley can’t really remember.
Everything that happened before their mother died is hazy.
Oliver’s eyes close intermittently and he sways.
With so little food and doing the boxes each day, he sometimes falls asleep on his feet.
Riley tucks Oliver in and then goes to her own bed under the window.
She lies down but doesn’t sleep. Instead she stares into the dark and tries, just like she does each night, to fix her mind on how they will get out.
Riley is allowed to go to school, which means she’ll get her GED.
Oliver is home-schooled. Mostly this seems to mean boxes and the Bible, along with that old phonics book Cousin found at the goodwill.
Riley thinks the only reason Cousin lets her go to school is he wants her to help at the funeral home.
Bookkeeping. Riley acts like she will stay and do this.
Otherwise he would pull her out of school too.
Riley listens as Oliver’s breath grows slow and regular. At least he can rest now.
The scent comes sudden and strong, hits her as if someone has just opened an oven door.
Meat, burning, roasting. It’s fainter than it was this afternoon but that’s not even good because it’s coming through the window, creeping through the cracks.
Riley sits up. Her heart hammers. The sound when it comes shocks her, quiet though it is.
Tap, tap, tap. Riley clutches her blanket.
Tap, tap, tap. A fingernail on the glass, a summoning.
Calm, she tells herself. Stay calm. If it wanted to kill her it wouldn’t tap at the window first, would it?
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound is growing sharper, more insistent. It sounds impatient. Riley thinks anxiously of Cousin sleeping across the hall. She wonders if you can shatter a windowpane with a fingertip.
She leans forward and looks.
Behind the glass is the boy in a green t-shirt, grinning like a mask.
His bright straw hair is cropped short all over, and he’s thin.
Perhaps he is fifteen or sixteen. His brown eyes are wide; they should look innocent but all Riley can see in them is pleasure.
The boy covers his mouth with one hand and laughs at the horror on her face.
He must be clinging to the window frame with only one hand now, but he’s steady, easy as if he were floating mid-air.
He motions with a finger for her to raise the sash.
Riley gently slides the window up an inch or so and bends to look through the crack. She understands that events are now out of her control. There’s a momentum to what’s happening that can’t be stopped. The scent is very strong now; the reek comes in through the window – char and flesh and smoke.
‘You followed me from the store,’ Riley says. ‘What do you want?’ She wonders exactly how the boy is going to hurt her. She accepts hurt now, as a part of things. Demons might not be real but people are.
‘I just wanted to talk to you,’ the boy says, startled, and hearing the voice, Riley realises her mistake. ‘You looked sad. And I saw you steal the milk.’
‘You’re a girl,’ Riley says.
‘Sure,’ says the girl. She touches her shorn head. ‘I had to cut it off, it was knotted like a rat king.’
The smell that surrounds the girl is mostly dirt, woodsmoke and unwashed clothes, Riley realises – not meat and sulphur.
‘My name’s Noon,’ the girl puts a hand through the open window for Riley to shake, and the gesture is so homely and regular in spite of the strangeness of it all that Riley can’t help but smile.
The girl’s hand is warm and dirty, with the calluses and scratches that come from work.
It’s a normal hand. She gives Riley’s hand a quick squeeze and holds on.
‘How did you get up here?’ Riley asks. ‘What are you standing on?’ She hates heights and even thinking about the girl clinging on to her windowsill two storeys up is terrible.
‘I’m a good climber. So why were you sad?
’ Noon says. She turns Riley’s hand over, palm up and looks at it, the bones protruding sharp from the wrist. She reaches for Riley’s upper arm and holds it for a moment, assessing.
She’s gentle, Riley doesn’t feel the revulsion she usually gets at the touch of others.
It’s like Noon is a doctor or something.
‘He doesn’t feed you,’ Noon says. ‘But he’s big enough.
’ The house still holds the scent of the fried bacon and eggs Riley made Cousin for his dinner.
In the beginning, when they first moved in with Cousin, Riley was very hungry.
Now the scent of food, like fat and eggs bubbling in the pan tonight, just makes her feel sick. It’s Oliver she worries about.
‘Where I live,’ Noon says, ‘we catch fish from the streams and roast them on open fires. We grow our own vegetables. If we need something we can’t grow or catch,’ she leans in and whispers in Riley’s ear, ‘we come to town and we steal it.’ Her warm breath fills the spaces in Riley’s head.
The scent is all around her but now it seems like sun-warm earth and something spicy.
Riley draws a deep breath, head swimming a little. ‘You can’t steal me.’
Noon grins her mask-like grin. ‘I don’t want to steal you.’
‘No?’ Riley feels a flutter of something, fear or something else, hard to tell.
‘No. Come because you choose to. Don’t you want to be free? Live in the mountains, under the sun and the stars, where everyone gets love and respect? We’re all kids, we all escaped something bad. And we decided to make a better place.’
Riley’s hand tightens on Noon’s. ‘It’s a good story,’ she says sadly.
‘Come and see for yourself. Climb out the window right now and come.’
‘I’d fall …’
‘I’d catch you.’
‘I can’t leave Oliver,’ Riley says.
‘Bring him too.’
‘We can’t walk through the mountains now, it’s night.’
‘Maybe we’ll fly.’
Riley laughs. But as she looks at Noon, hanging there in the dark, she thinks she sees again that slight rise and fall to her as if she were hovering in the air.
Riley starts at a faint sound from the hallway. Cousin is going to the bathroom.
‘I have to go,’ she whispers.
‘Here.’ Noon pulls a scrap of paper from her pocket. It’s smudged, laboriously written in block capitals. ‘I wrote it all down. Directions.’
‘Directions to what?’
‘Nowhere,’ Noon says. ‘Come and find us.’
‘That place,’ Riley whispers. Her fear returns with a cold blow, it races up and down her spine with small feet.
‘My mother told me about Nowhere.’ She whips her hand out of Noon’s grasp.
‘Leaf Winham’s place, where he killed those people.
’ She looks at Noon with dawning horror.
‘How are you really staying up here at my window?’
The toilet flushes. Cousin is coming out.
‘Go away,’ Riley says. ‘Don’t follow me again.
You’re a dream. If you’re real, I’ll call the police.
’ She draws the window closed as quickly and quietly as she can.
Riley crumples the directions in her fist and looks frantically for a place to put them.
Cousin does not allow a trash can in their room.
He inspects each morning, and sometimes wakes them in the night for extra checks.
He looks through their drawers and smells their sheets for evidence of the demon.
He checks under the mattress, the insoles of sneakers and in every pocket.
If he finds food or candy or any writing or drawings that are not schoolwork, it means the quiet room in the basement.
Riley doesn’t want to go there. She wonders if the paper with the directions on is too big to eat and decides that it is.
She tucks it quickly into her underwear.
As she hurries into bed she glances out of the window. No one is there, just the yellow circles of streetlights and behind that the dark, and the cloud-haloed moon over distant mountains.
By the time the bedroom door squeaks open and Cousin’s shape fills the doorway, Riley is lying quiet, her breathing even, her body still as death. Even after the door closes behind Cousin, Riley stays still. Sometimes he listens, ear to the wood.
Under the blankets Riley raises her middle finger, as she does each night, at the old man in the sky.
Eff you, she mouths at him. Until I finish school I’ll keep going.
Only four more years. Then I take Oliver and we go.
The words beat a pulse in her brain, pounding black and white until the black takes over and they follow her into sleep.
In the morning she wakes with an unusual glow in her, a feeling she vaguely recalls from some time past. It’s happiness, she realises, though that doesn’t make any sense at all.
She knows that the boy/ girl at the window was a dream.
The memory has that feel – of otherness, of being neatly lifted out of reality.
But when Riley told the girl to go away she felt the flare of anger and for just a moment she was herself again.
Something feels scratchy. Riley puts her hand gently into her underwear, to find the folded paper resting against her skin.
Riley got caught, the first time she stole the milk from Mountain Foods and Goods.
Mr Assadaya’s son was on the register. He was a quiet man, maybe in his early twenties.
Riley had never thought about him much. But she slunk past him now, trying to be unremarkable.
She had to give Oliver something that wouldn’t make Cousin realise they were cheating.
He palpated their stomachs sometimes. Sometimes he checked the toilet after they went.
Riley had thought about it a lot. Milk was the answer.