Black Dog Summer (28 page)

“There was a piece of Johan's scalp, with the hair still on it, stuck to the kitchen wall.” Gigi squeezes her eyes shut, almost as if to lock the image more securely in place inside her head. She leans her hot forehead against the glass.

On the other side of the room, Bryony finally manages to untie the dressing gown cord and pull it down beneath her chin. She wrenches the soggy T-shirt out of her mouth, gagging as the fabric scrapes over her palate and finally flops free. She rubs her aching jaw muscles, eyes riveted on Gigi's motionless, spine-knobbled back, and takes huge gulps of air. Her heart is thundering. Despite the fact that her head feels light and swimmy when she tries to lift it, she forces herself into a slumped sitting position. She waits. Gigi does not move. Bryony fights to free herself from the tangle of what feels like endless reams of stifling dressing-gown fabric, but every move she makes is slow and clumsy. Fresh tears of frustration spurt from her raw eyes.

“I'd never seen the inside of a scalp before. It was sort of orange and wet-looking. I thought I was going to vomit but I didn't,” Gigi whispers.

The dressing gown finally slips from Bryony's shoulders. Suddenly her arms are free. She glances at Gigi. Her cousin is still off in her own world, head turned towards the window.

Bryony suddenly launches herself in the direction of the doorway,
feet and fingers scrabbling for purchase on fabric and floorboards. Beyond the doorframe, she sees the upstairs landing and the staircase banister going down and freezes. The familiarity of the view throws her.
I am in my own room! What's happened to the furniture and the carpets? Where's the picture of Granny on the landing wall? Where is everyone?

“Mom! Dad!” she screams as she stumbles towards the staircase. “Tyler!” It feels as if she is dragging her body through syrup. She is dreaming. It must be a nightmare. “Wake up wake up wake up!” she howls, lurching for the banister.

But something grips her ankle, pulls her back, and throws her to the floor once more. The sudden weight on her back knocks the wind out of her. Bony knees in her ribs. Stale breath hissing into her face: “Are you insane?”

“Wake up!” Bryony screams, struggling against the sweaty hand that tries to clamp down over her lips. “Wa—” But the crumpled-up T-shirt is jammed deep inside her mouth once more.

“You're going to get us both killed, don't you understand that?” Gigi grabs her arms to hold them still. Her strength is impossible. It feels as if Bryony's wrists are being gripped by something mechanical, all metal gears and ratchets. “This is not a nightmare, Bryony,” Gigi whispers. “The men are coming for us, so you'd better wake up and get real.”

“They must've left the complex.” Adele crosses her arms over her chest. Her fingers feel rubbery and strange when she clenches them. “I just don't understand where they would have gone.”

“No girls came past the entrance gate,” the security guard repeats for the third time. He has been pulled off entrance duty and now stands against one wall of the poky Cortona Villas security office with Adele, Liam, a policewoman, and the manager of Cortona Villas Security clustered around him. “I would've definitely noticed.” His hat is on slightly askew. His eyes dart from one worried face to the next. “I was watching all the time.”

“But we've looked everywhere.” Adele's voice rises, and Liam places a hand on her shoulder. She frowns and hugs herself tighter.
“You don't understand. Bryony was really sick. She wouldn't have been able to walk very far.”

“I am sure they're all right,” the manager of Cortona Villas Security mutters, but Adele shoots him a furious scowl.

“Based on what, exactly?”

“Could they have left in a car, perhaps?” Liam says, and everyone turns to look at him.

“Don't be daft. Where would they get a car?” Adele snaps.

“I don't mean they were driving it, Addy.”

“I didn't see any car leave here with those two girls in it. The car would have to have stopped at the gate, and I always look inside.” The security guard now removes his skewed cap and rubs his hand over the fuzz of his hair.

“Unless they were in the boot?” the manager of Cortona Villas Security suggests.

For a moment there is silence as everyone contemplates the implications of this possibility. Finally, Adele lets out a loud, broken wail.

“Jesus,” says Liam. His face has gone a pale green color.

“Look, I've called in the K9 search-and-rescue unit. They will be here soon,” the policewoman says in a calm, measured voice.

“When the hell is soon?” Liam asks over his wife's sobbing head.

“There's a big situation out at Rivonia and all the dogs are there right now. I've requested that one unit be called off the search and brought here as soon as possible.”

“A big situation? How many people go missing on any given day, for heaven's sake?” Liam asks.

The policewoman's large dark eyes are steady, but something inside them flickers. She glances out of the small security office window at the gray sky.

“It's going to rain any minute,” she says.

Bryony tries kicking her feet, but they connect with only the dusty floor.

“Stop it. You're making too much noise,” Gigi says, and Bryony gives a muffled yelp as her arms are tugged up higher behind her back.
“Please. Please, Bryony. Be quiet.” Gigi's voice is tinged with tears of her own. “Please. You don't know how horrible they are, the black men. If they find us we'll be sliced up like Seb and Johan were . . . like tinned tomatoes spewing red pulp and juice.”

Bryony goes still. Her whole body is vibrating and her breath snorts in and out of her nostrils.

“It's true. I saw them, Bryony. I watched through the window as they killed Johan. Seb was dead already, I think. At least, he wasn't moving.”

The weight of Gigi's knees pushes Bryony's ribs hard into the floor.

“I didn't want to watch, but after a while I couldn't stop. I was too scared to move in case they spotted me and grabbed me and cut me up too.” Gigi's voice has gone very high and soft. Bryony has to quieten her frantic breathing in order to hear it. “One of the men had yellow in his eyes where the whites should be. He was the one with the machete. The other man just used a piece of wood to hit and lots of kicking instead of a knife or anything. He kept kicking Johan long after he stopped moving. I remember thinking that it must've hurt, to keep on kicking like that.”

Bryony feels Gigi's grip on her arms loosen, and she winces as blood flows back into her joints.

“There was another man, of course. But I couldn't see him most of the time because he was leaning against the sink to hold Mom up. I think she fainted because I could just see a piece of her hair hanging down as if her head was flopping forward.” Gigi remembers how impossibly fair that lock of hair had looked, like the dove feathers she'd once found and strung up from the curtain valance in her bedroom on a length of fishing twine to catch the light. She'd used a big blue glass bead to weigh down the end of the twine, and the feathers strung along it would turn and turn one way, and then stop for a moment and turn and turn the other, over and over again.

And then suddenly the hair flicked backwards out of sight and she could hear her mother trying to scream and the yellow-eyed man spun around to look at her, saying in English,
And now it's time for you, lady. Save the best for last.
The machete hung from his hand. There was no metal color left on the blade. Just red.

“The man who was holding my mom pushed her forward towards the blade man, and then I could see how little she looked crushed up against his chest. His arms were thicker than her neck. Dark and oily-looking, like river mud.”

Gigi releases her hold on Bryony's wrists and slides down off her back. Bryony's breath makes a whistling sound as she tries to suck as much air into her lungs as possible. She rests her forehead against the floor. She is shivering.

As soon as the man took his hand from my mouth, I retched. Nothing came out.

“Hush hush hush,” he whispered in my ear, just as one would soothe an ailing child.

“Why are you doing this? Why?” I begged.

The yellow-eyed man came towards me. He took my chin in his hand and squeezed. His fingers were slick with blood. I wrenched my head away. The men all laughed.

With my head turned towards the window, I suddenly saw that Gigi had returned.
No. She's meant to be hiding somewhere they'll never find her.
Her face was a pale half-circle sticking up over the bottom of the windowsill. Her eyes were enormous.
My baby girl, I told you to run.
I looked away. I couldn't bear to have the men follow my gaze and spot that fragile little half-woman face.

The man holding me suddenly released his grip on my shoulders, and I stumbled forwards, off-balance. Just a little kick from the yellow-eyed one sent me to the floor. I could see an ancient, curled-up piece of old toast wedged down the side of the oven. I stared hard at it as I felt the man using the wet machete blade to lift my skirt, and I remember thinking:
If I don't fight, if I can give them no reason to kill me I can survive this and see my daughter again.

But I was wrong.

“I saw everything they did to her,” Gigi tells Bryony. She is lying beside her on the floor, face-to-face with her cousin. But for the
bunched-up T-shirt in Bryony's mouth, they look like two girls sharing secrets at a slumber party.

“I could see she was trying not to scream, but she couldn't help it. They hurt her.” From somewhere outside number 22 Cortona Villas comes the distant sound of a barking dog.

“I don't remember seeing it happen, but suddenly there was this huge red slash across Mom's face and blood was pouring out of it. Into her eyes and everything. Just pouring. And then the man with the machete nodded to the river-mud man and he leant over my mom and put his huge, oily hands around her neck. I could see the muscles move beneath his black skin as he squeezed.”

The room is very quiet. The girls stare into each other's eyes. Outside, in what seems like a separate world, a dog barks again. Closer this time. Bryony flinches at the sound.

“It was my fault, Bryony,” Gigi suddenly whispers. “The men were there because of me.” She had been so angry with Johan, and had just hated and hated her mother for being the one he wanted. Gigi takes a big breath. “I left the padlock open on purpose.”

Gigi remembers the way the solid lump of morning-cold metal had felt in her hand. Inside she'd been burning, furious. She kept remembering her mother going into Johan's cabin in the dead of night, his arm around her back.
How could he love my stupid mother and not me?
All she had needed to do was click the lock closed. Simple. But she hadn't. She had left it hanging on the end of its thick chain like a useless ornament.

Bryony raises a shaking hand and brushes the tears from Gigi's cheek.

When I could no longer draw breath, I remember seeing shifting colors. Orange and pink and sunset yellow seemed to billow up out of nowhere and cover the face of the man who was strangling me. The colors brightened and swam together.

And then I was looking down on the kitchen from somewhere by the ceiling. I saw the men leave, carrying whatever useless things they'd decided it was worth it to steal from our little home. I watched
Gigi run into the room after they'd gone. She slipped on my blood and fell to the floor, only to scramble and slither up again and crawl to my side.

She shook me and held me and shook me and then, finally, stopped moving altogether.

And then I was a thorn tree with long white points and almost no leaves. And then a rock on the beach being sucked on by mussels and pounded by salty Atlantic water. And then I was an eggshell-blue sky tickled by wisps of icy cloud. And then I was a vast plain of long, waving, brown-tipped grass with scurrying beetles going between.

And then I began to hear the stories.

The bark is throaty and deep. The dog must be a big one. Bryony, overwhelmed by Gigi's tale, and freshly feverish from the tonsillitis, decides that the black, darkness-vomiting shadow dog that has been following her for days has finally come for her. She can sense it out there, prowling, sniffing her out as it circles closer.

Gigi reads the panic on her cousin's face, and seems to wake from her reverie.

“The black men are coming, aren't they, Bry?”

Bryony's eyes widen. She nods. Black men with black dogs and blades. She is struggling for breath again, snorting and sucking against the T-shirt in her mouth. She tries to pull it free, but Gigi stops her with a touch.

“You'll make a noise; you'll give us away.”

Frantic, Bryony shakes her head. I won't I won't. But Gigi is already holding the dressing gown cord. Her hands tremble as she ties it around the back of Bryony's sweat-damp head and over the bulging gag. “It's for the best. You really have to keep quiet, Bry.”

Bryony tries to pull the gag out at once, clawing at her face with desperate fingers. Her muffled voice seeps through the soggy fabric, and she can feel bile rising up the back of her throat.

“No. Hush. Stop it,” Gigi sobs. “Please.” She grabs Bryony's hands and pulls them behind her back once more. “I thought we'd finished with all this. It's for your own good, Bryony. I have to save you.” She
takes the two ends of the dressing gown cord that hang from Bryony's gag and uses them to bind her cousin's small hands together behind her back. She ties the knot double, to be sure.

The dog barks once again. Closer.

“Come, quickly.” She wrenches Bryony to her feet and drags her towards the built-in cupboards that line one wall. They are exactly the same as the ones in Bryony's own bedroom back home, and she half expects to see all her clothes and junk when Gigi flings one of the cupboard doors open, but there is nothing but a crooked, abandoned wire hanger on an empty rail.