Secret Story (36 page)

The lump faced him without much of a face. Soon it would look like that even with no wrappings—a brownish object divested of its features. He must remember to put that in a story. “All right, you can,” he said. “Just let me finish my dinner.”

By the time he had, the lump was resting against the tiled wall. He was going to liven it up. He dumped his knife and plate and the carton of butter on the landing as he hurried to print out his latest tales. The paper smelled as if the heat of the day was concentrated in them. “You ought to be proud,” he said as he returned to his audience. “These are about you.”

It didn’t seem especially proud, even though the name in all the stories was Patricia. Perhaps it was forgetting the name it used to have. At first it held its head up as though eager for its story, but before he’d finished reading about Patricia in the bath the lump sank back. He found its attitude insulting: it had had more chance to rest today than he had. Admittedly it had heard part of the story earlier, when it had failed to put on much of a show in its role, but he didn’t see why he should accept that as an excuse. Besides, it was quite as unresponsive to the fates of the limbless girl and the blind one and the deaf. He tried shouting at random and lurching close to an embryonic ear. Even these methods didn’t always earn a response, and in any case the effects weren’t being achieved by the stories themselves, which he thought unfair to him and to his work. He managed to contain his anger by remembering that he was using the stories to while away the hours. Soon it was sufficiently dark for him to need the bathroom light, but not nearly black enough outside that he could risk taking the package out of the house. He was about to start rereading all the stories when he saw the alternative. “You can have the rest as well,” he said and fetched them from his room.

He read the story of Greta at Moorfields first, though it reminded him of one more hindrance to his career. He changed the girl’s name to Patricia, except when surges of rage at his audience and at being robbed of publication goaded him to call the character Package. He used that name more in the other tales as the window blackened above the sink. Long before he’d used up the
stories the insides of his eyes felt as if they were growing black as well, but he didn’t yield to the temptation to be hasty, despite resenting his audience’s indolence while he did all the work. He slowed his voice down until it reminded him of a failing audiocassette, and shouted or ducked close to the package or eventually both whenever he wanted to be certain it wasn’t asleep. Finally the last Patricia was done away with, and he gathered the pages from the floor around the toilet. He piled them on his bed on the way to craning out of the window.

A few lamps illuminated the deserted street. Above the glowing green sample of hillside, the sky was as solid as coal except for the stars. The Staples’ house and all the others he could see were unlit. It was almost two in the morning, and he grinned at the thought of the mass of his neighbours slumbering like animals in pens, dreaming dull dreams if they had any whatsoever, utterly unaware of him and his adventures. He eased the window shut and made for the bathroom. “All right, we’ve finished waiting,” he said.

He thought the lump of a head was unsure whether to rise or to cower. Of course it didn’t know what he was proposing. “It’s time to let you out,” he said. “You need your shoes on.”

The package crouched and swung its wrists towards him. As its hands wriggled eagerly he saw what it imagined or hoped. “You won’t be doing it,” he said with a grin at the attempt to trick him. “We’ll leave them.”

The package didn’t sit up at once. He was about to use one of its shoes to prod a breast when, reluctantly or burdened with exhaustion, it fell back. He worked the trainers over the hot unappealing feet and tied the laces in bows as tight as Kathy used to make for him until he’d gone to secondary school. “Lift up your legs,” he said. “Let’s get them apart. I expect you’ve forgotten how that feels.”

For no reason that he could comprehend, the package was
unwilling. “Don’t you want to walk out of here?” he had to shout, and even then it only lifted its legs an inch. He grabbed a heel and jerked them high while he found the end of the tape. He dug a fingernail under the sticky edge and peeled it away, all six turns of it. There were as many around the wrists and the head. He managed to unstick the tangled length from his fingers without losing too much of his temper and dropped it in the bin under the sink, and then he thrust his face close to the wrapped one. “You can stand up now,” he said.

Perhaps the package couldn’t without help. It didn’t take long to infuriate him with its attempts, however entertaining they might have been if it hadn’t lost him so much sleep. He gripped one shoulder by the bone and hauled the package to its feet. “Step out,” he urged impatiently. “Step out of the bath.”

It appeared to need to recall the use of its legs, unless it was deliberately trying to frustrate him. Eventually its left foot groped up the side of the bath and wavered over. He held onto the shoulder while the other foot followed. As soon as both feet were planted on the mattress he let go. “You aren’t going to fall, are you?” he said. “Not yet,” he only mouthed.

He poised a hand above the shoulder, which was working as if it ached, in case the package overbalanced when it stepped off the mattress. Though it wobbled as its foot touched the floor, it didn’t topple over. He pulled the door wide and steered the package by its other shoulder out of the room. It accepted his guidance as far as the stairs, but when its foot stepped on air it recoiled so violently that he had to flinch back to prevent its body from touching his. “Don’t worry, I won’t let you fall downstairs,” he said. “We don’t want you cluttering the place up.”

The package took its time and far more importantly his over descending the stairs. More than once he was tempted to give it a shove instead of simply gripping its shoulder, but he mustn’t risk injuring it yet. Once it was safely in the hall he inched the front
door open and peered both ways along the street. A treacly breeze came to find him, having lent the trees on the hillside such a sluggish movement that he could have imagined the sky was black water, but otherwise there was no sign of life outside the house. He propelled his burden onto the path and closed the door, then hustled the package across the road and up the grassy track. He didn’t slow down until they were screened from the houses by the trees, although he had to encourage the package by speaking with his lips almost touching an ear. “I’ll be letting you go,” he said, which was true enough—from the unfenced edge above the road that cut through the highest section of the ridge. “You won’t be seeing me again,” he said.

When Patricia felt the breeze she knew she was outside the house. That was the only way she could tell. Her legs seemed hardly to belong to her, and her feet were unable to identify where they were standing. It had to be the Smiths’ front path, but the effort of walking gave her legs no chance to experience anything more specific, and the thick soles of her trainers didn’t help. It must surely be late at night for Dudley to risk taking her outside. In that case the street would be as quiet as it sounded to her, and any noise she made would wake the neighbours. She could only stamp, and how long would he let her keep that up? She would never know unless she tried—but she’d barely started flexing the muscles of her legs when Dudley gripped her less bruised shoulder between a finger and thumb as if holding some unpleasant item and shoved her forward into the dark.

She did her best to tramp, but he was urging her so fast that the little strength the act of walking left her was used up by keeping her balance. By the time she found the energy to resist she was being pushed uphill. When something clawed at her jeans and tore free, she deduced that she was climbing the path to the top of the ridge. She felt as if most of her vitality had been crushed out of her along with her sight and hearing. Nevertheless her debilitated efforts to be cumbersome brought Dudley’s voice against her ear. “I’ll be letting you go. You won’t be seeing me again.”

Did he mean to release her and go into hiding? However much she yearned to be free, she couldn’t let him escape too, not when he might find other victims and treat them worse than her. She had to assume that she was going to survive because she’d formed some kind of relationship with him, however much his mind had warped it. Perhaps he still thought of her as his publicist or some even more unlikely appendage of his writing. The possibility made her want to wrench herself out of his hateful grasp. The path underfoot grew less uneven, or her legs regained some of their steadiness, and she sensed that she’d emerged into the open; there was space for a breeze. It tousled the little of her hair that wasn’t bound under the tape, and fondled the stretch of her throat below the sticky wrapping. She shrugged out of Dudley’s grip and jerked the fingers of one hand, gesturing him to unbind her wrists. “Not yet,” he said. “We can’t have anyone hearing or seeing.”

She would have assured him that she wouldn’t make a sound if she’d had any way to communicate this. It might even have been true for a while. She stayed as she was in case that could change his mind, but when he pinched her shoulder she pulled free. “Don’t you want me touching you?” his muffled voice said. “You don’t think I like it, do you? Do as you’re told and I won’t. Walk straight ahead. There’s a path.”

Either the ground underfoot turned soft or that was her perception of her tread. She’d taken several increasingly less tentative paces and was becoming confident of her ability to remain upright when Dudley uttered a version of a laugh. “Not that straight. Go right or you’ll be in a bush.”

Did the spectacle of her playing his puppet amuse him? She could bear it if it saved her from worse. She veered in the direction he’d given, only to be told with rather less mirth “Not that right either. Bit left or I’ll get hold of you again. Bit more. Are you trying to be funny? That’s it, as if you didn’t know. Go on.”

Apparently her performance satisfied him at last. He was silent for a while as far as she could judge. While she plodded warily forward she strained to gather some impression of her surroundings, but all she was able to sense outside her enclosed darkness was a smell of charred wood and the scent of a night bloom she couldn’t identify. “Not so fast,” Dudley said.

Was he missing his control of her? All at once it and her bonds and the confinement of her perceptions were almost if not wholly unbearable, and she could only march forward as though she might outdistance them. “Go on then, fall,” Dudley said.

She didn’t know if he meant to warn her or express a wish. She took a hesitant pace that yearned to be defiant, and her foot collided with an obstruction. “Just in time,” he said. “Step up. Big step.”

Patricia scraped the toe of her shoe over the hindrance, and her foot wavered into space. As it hovered in nothingness she felt as if she was about to lose more than her balance. She threw her weight forward, and her foot struck a flat surface. The impact jarred her leg and sent pain deep into her knee. She thought the joint was going to give way until her other foot supported her on the rock. “Go left now,” Dudley said. “You’re on the top.”

The rock was more uneven than the path had been. Perhaps the depressions were shallow, but they were deep enough to rob
her of any sense whether her paces would take her up or down. The steps she had to execute from one eroded slab to the next were at least as disconcerting, especially since she was being directed by her increasingly impatient captor. She thought he’d lost all patience when he said barely audibly “Stop.”

Her left foot came down and found just enough rock for its heel to stand on. She snatched it back and almost toppled into the dark. As she struggled to restore her balance while her bound hands clutched at the air behind her she heard Dudley say “Who’s that in the observatory? Is he watching us?”

Patricia twisted around, only to realise that she had no idea which way to face in order to display her plight. She was tilting her head back and forth in the hope of making its state more apparent when Dudley said “It’s all right. It’s the moon.”

Could he actually believe that he was reassuring her as well as himself? Perhaps the interlude had been a joke at the expense of her hopes. It made her yet more conscious of her blindness—of the moon that she was unable to see, and the sky, and everything below it. She felt as if the blindness had gained weight, holding her where she was until Dudley shouted “I said it’s all right. Go ahead. Big step down.”

The step wasn’t as deep as she feared, which undermined her confidence. Before she was sure of her footing again she had to step up, and then down, and then up. As she wondered if Dudley was guiding her along the most difficult route for his amusement he said “What’s that, a dog?”

It could be with its owner. Patricia had no idea how distant they might be, but she halted on the skewed rock and turned her head from side to side. Even if she couldn’t see, perhaps she could be seen. She held her breath until she heard a laugh. “Don’t know how, but you’re right. It wasn’t a dog,” Dudley said as if she should be pleased. “Just a fox.”

Had it been either? Had it ever been there at all? She thought he might be growing bored with her progress and so taunting her with jokes. He’d directed her transit over two more slabs of rock when he said “There’s a helicopter.”

She was unable to hear it if it existed. She considered jumping up and down to attract the attention of the police, if it was theirs. He hadn’t told her to stand still; he didn’t as she tried to locate a foothold sufficiently level for her to risk prancing blindly about. Wouldn’t she look like a reveller? Surely she ought to take the chance, except that Dudley said “There it goes, over the sea.”

That was miles distant. She would be no more detailed than a matchstick figure, if she was visible at all, if there was anyone to see her. She thought he would have been more concerned for himself if there had been, unless he’d decided that nobody would hinder his plan. That was how he sounded as he reverted to telling where and how to move. She was almost growing used to his curt phrases—at least they implied that he’d abandoned playing jokes—when he said “It’s all black and white. It’s like being in a film.”