Chapter 12 Riley
It’s Riley’s turn to bleed the woman. She flicks on her lighter and passes the flame along the blade. The woman jumps when she hears it and starts to cry.
‘Stop it.’ Riley speaks in a whisper, like Noon told her, because voices are less identifiable that way. They don’t want the woman to recognise who’s speaking or know how many of them there are.
There’s not much room left on the woman’s arm, which is covered in band aids. Riley finds a patch of bare skin, making sure it’s far away from the blood-rich blue veined places on her wrist. She tries to think of it like the cut she makes in rabbit hide to skin it.
Riley cuts neatly into the woman’s forearm. The woman cries out. She shakes with sobs. The blood runs down her white flesh and drops into the sunken garden. Riley doesn’t look down. She doesn’t want to see it again, the ground breathing in and out.
‘Are you all going to kill me?’
‘I don’t know,’ Riley replies honestly. ‘But I saw what you did to your kids and I wouldn’t care if you died.
’ Riley shakes the bottle of baby formula and puts the nipple to the woman’s mouth.
The woman sucks hard, she’s hungry, takes too much and chokes.
Riley removes the bottle and waits for it to pass.
‘My name’s Alison,’ the woman says through tears.
‘I don’t care about that either.’ Riley pushes the rubber nipple back into the woman’s mouth. ‘Drink.’
Dawn is shaking Riley’s shoulder, gently, speaking to her.
She holds a piece of summer carrot in her other hand.
Riley startles up. How long has she been sitting here?
She’s by Home Barn, the afternoon is low and golden, and the air is warm.
Dandelion clocks blow over the meadow in the long light.
Riley looks down at the rabbit trap in her hands.
Right, she’s supposed to be mending it. But the wire has got loose somehow, the end has cut Riley’s hand. Blood trickles down her finger.
She stares as the drops fall, coating the sleek blades of grass at her feet. Does the earth tremble a little with pleasure?
Riley, Midnight and the little ones are by the lake when the men come to the gate. The summer sun beats from the blue sky, the meadow is tall and bleached gold, alive with grasshopper song. Riley smells the warm earth on the wind.
Midnight, Oliver and Riley are in the sandy shade of the rocks. Oliver sits playing with the sand and Midnight lies back with her baby on her chest. Una stares at Riley with her round dark eyes.
Riley can’t sit. She paces, watching the water as it gleams under the sun. The kids crouch in the shallows, building pebble castles and digging holes.
Oliver fidgets, restless. ‘Can’t I go in the water, Riley?’
‘No. You stay here.’ Riley says to Midnight, ‘I don’t understand, how can you let them swim in the lake? The crocodile …’
‘The crocodile won’t hurt them.’ Midnight yawns and turns over. ‘You always hear it coming. It makes a squeaky noise.’
The little red-haired boy, Rufus, drops his electric blanket on the sand and wanders towards them. He smiles a shy smile. ‘Mommy,’ he calls. That’s all Rufus ever says. Mommy.
‘No,’ Riley says as kindly as she can. ‘We’ve talked about this.’
Rufus smiles and turns away back to the gleaming waterline. He always seems so happy. He and Hallie scream and run along the shallows, water scattering in diamonds.
Everyone seems to take care of the kids together.
Apart from Midnight and Una, who’s always wrapped tight to her chest, there’s no indication of parents.
There’s the very blonde-headed one, Whitey.
She’s a little older than Rufus, six maybe, and one of her eyes has been injured in the past. The eyelid has healed wrongly, the skin too tight, so that her eye never opens fully.
A thoughtful, serious child. She doesn’t talk much. Whitey wades out into the lake.
Riley can’t take it anymore. ‘Come back,’ she calls. ‘Come back in right now, Whitey!’
Whitey turns and looks at Riley, then drops and swims out into the water.
‘I’m going after her,’ Riley says. ‘I’ll bring her back.’
Midnight clamps an iron hand around Riley’s wrist. ‘You don’t touch her. I’ve told you again and again, you outsiders don’t touch the children until it’s time, you might contaminate them.’
‘So I’m more dangerous than that thing?’ Riley’s breath comes fast. ‘We won’t hear it coming – who can hear a squeaky toy underwater? You’re insane.’
‘You have to calm down,’ Midnight says. ‘I’ll get her out of the water, if it means that much to you.’ Midnight stands and yells. Whitey turns around and swims back towards the shore.
‘Listen,’ Midnight says to Riley. ‘At a watering hole at dusk in Africa, all the animals gather to drink. All of them together. Antelopes and lions and hippopotamuses. Not everything is hunting each other all the time. There’s a balance.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense.’ Riley tries not to yell.
‘Why would you take the risk? Are you – are you trying to give one of them to the crocodile – to Nowhere? Like,’ she lowers her voice to a whisper, ‘like that woman in the house? Is it another kind of sacrifice? Are you raising them for the blood?’
Midnight slaps Riley so fast that her hand is a blur.
‘Don’t you ever say that.’ Her voice trembles.
‘Everything that every single one of us does here is for them. Every single thing.’ Midnight stops, and Riley sees that Hallie is standing a few feet away.
Hallie is thin and dark – nine or so. She seems lonely.
The younger kids are too young to be her friends, and the rest of them here are too old.
She’s only three years younger than Dawn but it’s a world away.
‘It’s ok, honey,’ Midnight says. ‘Riley and I were just talking.’
Hallie holds out her hand, looking at Riley. There is a cricket in her palm. Hallie never says anything at all. She smiles though, a lot. She’s smiling now.
‘Thank you,’ Riley says, not moving. She’s not allowed to touch. Riley sees that Hallie has torn the legs off the cricket.
‘Hallie!’ Midnight says. ‘That’s not nice. We don’t hurt things unless we need to eat them.’
Hallie nods, serious like she’s just learned something. She puts the cricket in her mouth. Then she spits it onto the ground, still wriggling, and wanders away.
Noon feeds the kids separately, at odd times of day.
Riley understands it. She must have been giving them extra food during the bad time; they didn’t lose weight.
Oliver eats with Riley and the others but Noon always tries to give him something extra, even if it’s only a little something – a boiled pigeon egg, a rabbit heart.
Something flashes, blinding bright in the distance.
Midnight tenses. ‘We have to go. Come on, kids,’ she calls. Over the meadow, the point of light flashes again.
Riley takes Oliver’s hand, holds it tight. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s Noon,’ Midnight says. ‘She signals with a mirror when people come to the gate.’
Noon, Everett and Cal are in Home Barn. ‘How long have they been there?’ asks Midnight.
‘Cal saw them about an hour ago,’ Noon says. ‘They came up the road then went into the tree cover. I think they’re trying to decide what to do.’ She shoulders a ragged canvas backpack. ‘Let’s go.’
The road to the gate is overgrown, not travelled much. Brambles and creepers spill all over the ground. Riley feels asphalt under her trainers, ridged and bulging like a frozen sea, full of holes and craters.
The road passes into a narrow defile between the high red rock on either side.
It feels like being inside something breathing.
Riley can’t help the feeling that the cliff walls on either side are moving gently in and out like flanks, or like a birth canal.
Nowhere seems to breathe, everywhere. At the end, there is the gate.
It’s solid steel, rearing up fifteen feet high.
Rusted, greenish lettering stands above it, flaked gold spelling out the name of the house.
It’s backwards, of course, from Riley’s point of view.
There’s curlicue on the ‘W’ which sets it apart from the H, makes it look like there’s a weird gap in the middle of the word.
Now here.
It’s like a word game or a joke. Now here, the opposite of nowhere.
The base of the gate is shored up with rocks and boulders so it can’t open inwards.
It wears a winding crown of coils of rusting razor wire.
Wicked shards of green glass gleam in spikes along the top, glued there somehow.
On top there are the remains of animals.
A gleaming green spike pierces the body of some bird, a blackbird perhaps.
It has been impaled. There are others. A rat, a possum, a rabbit, a blue jay – dried-out old remains.
It’s a warning. This is what happens if you try to cross.
Riley can’t look at the gate without feeling it in her flesh, how it could hurt her.
Noon holds up a hand to signal silence. They creep closer to the metal, the carrion.
Wind whistles through the struts and wire, singing on the steel.
The gate is welded shut. There must have been electricity here when it was done, or at least acetylene gas or something.
Noon motions them forward and they climb the slope of boulders.
There are small gaps in the structure of steel. Riley looks through.
Beyond the gate the sun-warm road runs on down the mountain, a sheer drop to one side, scattered pine forest lining the gentle upward slopes on the other.
It ripples in the breeze. At first she thinks, but there’s no one there, and then she sees it, a gleam in the green shade.
Metal or maybe a camera, winking in the sun.
Something stirs. A dark head, an arm. Their face is in shadow.
Noon hands Riley a claw hammer. Very quietly, she takes other metal tools out of her backpack and gives them to the others.
A crowbar, a wrench, a rusting cast iron bell.
‘Hello?’ a voice calls. ‘Hello?’ The man hesitates. ‘Is there anyone there?’ He seems to feel their presence, silent behind the metal. ‘Uh, is this Nowhere – the place Leaf Winham used to live?’
‘Fans,’ Midnight breathes. She smiles like she’s about to have a good time.
Noon holds something above her head. It’s an old .22. Riley breathes inwards. She hadn’t known there was a gun at Nowhere. She longs for her own gun, tossed down the hill after – well, never mind that.
‘Cover your ears,’ Noon breathes. She squeezes her eyes closed, points it skywards and fires.
The sound is deafening in the narrow rocky cleft.
It shatters her eardrums even though her palms are clamped over them.
Everything seems to be shaking – Riley’s heart, her bones, the gate.
Her head is full of ringing song. Everett, Cal, Noon and Midnight start beating on the gate with their tools.
Riley is still partly deaf from the shot, but she does it too, screaming and pounding the reinforced steel with the hammer.
She glimpses, through a gap in the steel, two figures, both men she thinks, with backpacks and some kind of equipment.
Hot joy and anger course through her. Seeing them run makes her feel so good.
They beat on the metal until they’re sure the men are gone. They lean against the warm rocks and pant. Riley sees her grin mirrored on the others’ faces. They won. They’re a castle with the drawbridge up. Now here forever.
‘Sometimes they come back,’ Noon says. ‘Someone should keep watch today.’
‘I will,’ Riley says. She kind of wants them to come back, to pound the metal gate and scream at them like a ghost, to see the fear in their faces.
‘Can you use this?’ Noon asks. Riley nods and takes the gun.
She leans against the warm rock in the sunshine. Home, she thinks, yes. She has found it at last. She can’t suppress the thought – will a day come when the men at the gate are not fans – when they are looking for Riley? No one knows she’s here. Why would they look for her at Nowhere?
The high voices fade into the distance. Everyone’s a little delirious as they head back to Home Barn.
Riley sits, but her senses are alert. Beyond the gate, the wind rustles in the leaves.
The air is still as a pond, there’s no breeze.
She bends silently and looks through the gate.
There is movement in the undergrowth opposite.
Something is coming. Riley reaches for the pistol.
A deer moves out of the shadow of the forest and stands in the ruins of the road.
It must be a buck, its antlers are graceful and pointed – on one side, anyway.
When the buck turns its head, Riley sees that that on the right side, the top half of its antlers have been snapped off.
It’s horrible, somehow, this maiming, the disfigurement.
Riley’s breath catches in her throat. The deer raises its head and bounds away back into the dim forest.