CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Wren
They come at nine minutes past sunset, which tells you everything about how long they've been sitting in the trees.
I'm in the kitchen packing the green book into a bin bag inside a rucksack, because it's raining and the book is two hundred years old and I am, at heart, a professional. Cassius has been up from the cold room for eleven minutes. The kettle's on.
Then the string goes hard and cold, all at once, like a tap turning, and I am already moving before he says a word.
"How many?"
"Four."
"Four?"
"Three at the treeline and one on the lake road who's been there since six." He's between me and the window without having crossed the floor. "Where are the wards?"
"Kitchen frame, both windows, porch inside, cold room, and I did the front door twice."
"The back?"
The back.
There's a back door off the scullery that I didn't do, because it's boarded over on the outside and has a chest freezer against it, and because I was on my eleventh cut with a shaking hand and I looked at it and thought nobody's getting through that.
"Cassius, the back door's—"
"Get in the cold room."
"No—"
"Wren."
"The book's here and the knife's here and I am not getting in a box under the floor while you die on the porch," and I hear my own voice go up and crack and I don't care. "Tell me what to do."
There's a second where I genuinely don't know which way it's going to go. I can feel him wanting to pick me up and put me under the floor. I can feel him deciding not to.
"Scullery," he says. "Now. Cut the frame while I hold the kitchen."
I run.
◆ ◆ ◆
The scullery's four foot by eight and smells of damp stone and old Persil.
The back door's warped in its frame and there's a chest freezer against it that hasn't been moved since the last time anyone in my family was alive, and I get my shoulder to it and get about nine inches, and that's when something hits the outside of the door and the whole thing jumps in the frame.
I get the knife into my thumb.
Cut it — properly, deep, no messing — and get the blade up to the frame and start.
Two curves. One line through. The four words.
The thing outside hits the door again and a board splits.
Second one, cut it deep and cut it twice.
Two curves, one line through, four words, and my hand is slick and the knife slips and opens the side of my finger and I keep going.
There's a noise in the kitchen behind me like furniture being destroyed by weather.
Third mark. Fourth. The door's coming apart at the bottom panel and there's a hand through it — a hand, in the gap, white, with something wrong about the knuckles — and it's reaching, and I put the fifth mark in the frame six inches from it and say the words and the hand goes back like it's been dropped on a griddle.
Somebody outside starts screaming.
I do four more anyway, because my grandmother wrote cut it deep and cut it twice, and because my hands have stopped being mine.
Then I go back into the kitchen.
Cassius has one of them on the floor and one of them is coming through the window frame — through, not in, the window's gone entirely — and I am standing in my grandmother's kitchen with a penknife and no plan when I see the rack of jars.
Eleven years of preserves gone black.
And, on the shelf under them, in a line, the way every rural house in this country has had them since 1950: bleach. Ammonia. A gallon of white vinegar. A tin of caustic soda for the drains.
"Cassius, get down!"
I have been a professional cleaner for four years. There is exactly one thing my entire industry is terrified of, and it is the thing an idiot does with bleach and ammonia in a room with no ventilation.
I do it on purpose.
I do it in a Pyrex jug on the kitchen table and I throw the jug at the window and the gas goes up green-yellow and thick, and the thing in the window frame breathes it, because they do breathe, they breathe when they're hunting because that's how they smell you.
The screaming this time is different.
"Out," Cassius says, and he's got me under the arms, and we go through the front door and off the porch into the wet grass, and behind us my grandmother's kitchen fills up with chlorine gas and something in it is coming apart against the walls.
◆ ◆ ◆
The two in the treeline come at us across the grass while I'm still coughing on all fours in the wet.
And I watch him do it.
All of it, this time. In the open, in the rain, with a torch on the ground throwing everything twenty feet up the side of the house — and worse than watching it, I feel it, because there is a piece of string between me and the thing that is happening in that garden and it does not have an off switch.
He takes the first one's arm off at the shoulder and uses it.
That's the sentence. That's the thing I watch him do. There's no technique in it and no dignity; it's four hundred years of a body that was built for exactly this and nothing else.
And down the string, where a man ought to be, there is nothing.
Not rage. Not hunger. Nothing — the same clean grey nothing you get from a room with the power off, and I am standing eight feet away screaming his name into the rain and there is no one on the other end of it.
"Cassius. Cassius. CASSIUS—"
Eleven seconds.
I know it's eleven because I counted, because counting is what I do in a bad room, and because somewhere around six I understood that I was going to have to know the number afterwards.
Then he comes back.
I feel that too — the whole man arriving in his own body like a light coming on — and Cassius Rook is on his knees in the grass with his hands wrong and his mouth full and there is very little left in front of him.
Rain.
"Wren."
I don't move.
"Wren, the one in the kitchen has about four minutes—"
"I know."
"We have to go."
"I know," I say, and my voice is completely level and completely wrong, and that's how he understands exactly how badly this has gone, because he can feel it, because it goes both ways.
◆ ◆ ◆
We're eleven miles down the Halloran road before either of us says anything.
"On Cadger Row," I say, "I thought it was mercy."
"What?"
"When you did it to the boy. It was so fast. I actually thought, at the time, that was almost kind." I'm looking out of the window at nothing. "It wasn't fast because you were being kind. It was fast because you weren't trying."
He doesn't say anything, because there isn't anything.
"How long did you hear me?" I say.
"Wren."
"How long, Cassius."
The wipers go.
"I didn't," he says.
And that's the thing. That's the actual thing, and he says it out loud instead of letting me find it, which I suppose is the last honest act available to him in that car.
"You said my name," he says. "I know you did, because I have it now — I've had it since about four seconds after, and I will have it for the rest of my existence.
But there was no one in me to hear it. That's not an excuse and I'm not offering it as one.
I'm telling you the mechanism because I promised you the disgusting version and this is the most disgusting thing I have. "
I put my hand over my mouth.
"You told me it was a muscle," I say.
"Yes."
"You knelt in front of a chair in your own living room and you made me say it back to you—"
"Yes."
"You said it was a mechanism."
"It is," Cassius says. "For feeding. Feeding is a thing I do with the front of my mind and I have four hundred years of practice at stopping.
That —" his hands go on the wheel — "was not feeding.
And I have never had a reason to find out what happens to the mechanism when it isn't, because in four hundred years there has never once been a woman in the grass behind me. "
I sit with the green book in a bin bag on my knees for about nine miles.
"Here's what I need you to understand," I say eventually, "and I need you to not fix it, because you can't."
"All right."
"It's not that you're a killer. I knew that on day one.
You told me before you told me anything else.
" My hands are shaking. "It's that I have spent my entire adult life being the only person in the room who's still functioning.
My mother, the business, every job we take, every family on every pavement — I'm the one who stays level.
That's the whole of me. That's all I've got. "
"Wren—"
"And I finally found a person who's louder than the room," I say, "and last night I got eight minutes of a sunrise and it was the best thing that's ever happened to me, and tonight I stood in the grass and shouted your name into a hole."
He doesn't answer.
He doesn't have to, because I can feel exactly what's happening to him, and it is the single worst thing I have ever been made to sit next to, and there is nowhere in that car to go.