Kit's Law (20 page)

I staggered to my feet, partly stunned, and yelled as she grabbed my box of glass and shucked it out the window, scattering the pieces of glass and the little robin’s feathers all over the freshly covered puke beneath her window.

“What’d you do that for?” I half cried, clamouring to my feet and glaring down at her. Without waiting for an answer, I slammed out of her room and down the hall, tears of pain and spite flooding both eyes.

“What’s the matter, Kit?” asked Aunt Drucie, sputtering awake as I stomped across the kitchen.

“Go back to sleep,” I said, wrenching open the door and shoving out through. Marching around the house to where Josie’s room window was, I grabbed hold of the shovel and plunged it deep into the thick, dark soil and started pitching it over the glass and feathers, cursing like the sailor as I went. Dig, pitch; dig, pitch; dig, pitch. When the last piece of glass was covered, I marched back to my room, dirtied, hot and sweaty. Flinging myself across the bed, I gritted my teeth and willed back the smothering hot tears that were threatening to pour down my face.

That evening after Aunt Drucie left, I slouched down on the daybed, glaring at Josie as she crept around the kitchen making a cup of tea, her face pale, and her hand shaking a little as she spooned sugar into her cup.

“That’s enough sugar,” I snapped, thinking of walking into Haire’s Hollow to find Sid.

“Not enough sugar,” she argued, her voice too weak to sound up a bark.

Footsteps sounded on the stoop. Sid? I bolted upright as the door swung open, my stomach taking flight, then whipped my hand to my mouth in shock. It was Shine, his heavy frame blocking out the evening light and flooding the room with the stench of stilled liquor. The crackie dog scrambled in through the door around his feet and ran sniffing around the kitchen as Shine took a step towards Josie, a bottle of liquor in one hand and a gunny sack in the other.

“You go,” said Josie to Shine, shaking her head and taking her cup of tea to the table.

“That your girl?” Shine snarked, looking my way with a rotted-toothed grin.

“That’s Kit. That’s not your girl,” Josie said, sounding a little louder. “You go. Go.”

“You like dogs?” Shine asked me as the crackie sniffed at the floor around my feet. Sinking heavily into Nan’s rocking chair, he patted his knee and beckoned me over. “Come here, you girl. Come here.”

Josie, busy sipping her tea, never looked up.

At that second Pirate sprang out hissing from beneath the daybed, his claws splayed as they swiped at the crackie’s nose. Howling in fright, the crackie scampered across the room. Taking advantage of the commotion, I was off the daybed and down the hallway in a second’s flash. Something stopped me as I was about to go into my room, and instead I ducked into Nan’s closet. I picked the highest shelf up and crawled beneath the blankets. My heart pounded and I shivered to think that the sound of its beating could be heard throughout the house and traced back to where I was hiding.

I strained to listen. Josie was barking at him, like he was bothering her. But it must’ve been like swatting at flies, because every time I heard her bark, I heard him bark back like a dog, and then laugh—a gargling, stomach-turning laugh that sounded more like snarling than laughing.

Closing my eyes, I turned to the wall and concentrated on breathing and trying to shut out her barks as she fought with him, and his snarls as he fought her back. Then she laughed. Then yelled again. After a while I got tired of trying to figure out whether she was laughing or yelling, and whether or not I should try to sneak into my room and jump out the window and run into Haire’s Hollow for Doctor Hodgins. I concentrated instead on the smell of Nan’s mothballs still clinging to the blankets and I thought how nice it was to smell the mothballs after all this time, almost like smelling Nan herself, as if she were hiding beneath the blankets with me. And when I finally went to sleep, there was the sound of two hearts beating in the closet that night.

The next morning I woke to the sound of Shine’s footstep creaking down the hall, pausing by each room and inching open the doors as he come. I drew a long, deep breath and held it. It was sweltering up near the ceiling, and bundled beneath the blankets and sheets. And the mothballs that had smelled so sweetly of Nan the night before were sharp and sickly by now. The floor creaked near the closet door and I held my breath and prayed to Nan for the strength to be still.

He creaked away. I listened harder as he crept and groaned, figuring that with all the grunting he was doing, he must’ve been bending over to check for me under the beds. Not finding what he was looking for, he walked heavily back into the kitchen. He rustled around some, then opened the door. The crackie’s feet scampered across the floor, then the door shut and there was silence. I strained to listen harder. The springs on the daybed squeaked. Then the sound of Josie’s footsteps as she trudged to the bin and dipped a glass into the water bucket. I listened as she came down the hall to her room, shut her door, and then her bedsprings squeaking as she fell across it. Then all was quiet. A bit longer and the blankets began to feel like a weight pressing in on me. Quietly, I climbed down from the shelf and sneaked through the house, looking out the windows. I couldn’t see Shine. Satisfied that he was gone, I tore down the hall to Josie’s room and barged in through her door.

“You see why you ain’t never allowed to go near Shine again?” I yelled. “He’s bad. And he makes you bad.”

She whipped her head up off her pillow and blinked at me in startled surprise. Then springing to her feet, she lunged at me like a surly cat, scratching at my face and bawling out.

“Get out! You get out! Farmed! Farmed.”

I stumbled backwards beneath her weight and fell on my behind. Kicking me savagely in the leg, she slammed her room door and fell heavily across her bed. I scrabbled back onto my feet and whammed my fist repeatedly against her door.

“You don’t ever go near him again. You hear me? He’s bad! Bad!”

“You’s bad! Get away! Get away!” she muffled through her pillow.

“Are you listenin’ to me?” I yelled.

Silence. Giving her door one last thump, I went back to the kitchen and, jamming a chair beneath the doorknob, started cleaning Shine’s cigarette ashes and spit off the floor, taking time to check out the window every two minutes in case Shine come back. The cleaning done, I unjammed the door and went outside and sat on the grassy spot to keep watch. It was still early, yet a blue haze covered the far-side hills, making for another hot, sultry day. At least she never got drunk last night, I thought, leaning back against the side of the house, using my sweater for a pillow. I closed my eyes tiredly, having hardly slept a wink the night before, and in what felt like minutes, sat up with a start, rubbing at my face. Sid was squat besides me, tickling my nose with a blade of grass.

“I’m giving you another chance, sleepyhead,” he said mockingly.

I hung my head sheepishly, then started speaking in a flurry of blurts.

“Shine was here. Last night, with his dog. I hid in the closet and this mornin’ he come lookin’ for me.”

“Jesus … ”

“He didn’t find me.”

“Christ!” He slumped besides me with relief, then was on his knees, his hands on mine. “You’re not safe here, Kit. We have to get you out of here.”

I shook my head, covering my face with my hands.

“God, I’m sorry, Kit.” He wrapped his arms around me, cradling me, his face against mine. “I should never have left you the way I did. I was such an ass.”

“No, I shouldn’t have said what I said,” I whimpered.

He pulled my hands away from my face and whispered softly, his nose a hair’s width from mine.

“Next time I’ll just trounce you good, instead of running off,” he murmured.

I tried to smile, but there was such a feverish look in his eyes that I could only close mine. His hand crept up the back of my neck and he pressed his forehead against mine. As soft as a moth’s wings, his lips slowly grazed my brow, my nose, the corners of my mouth. I breathed deeply as his breath fanned out over my face, warm and caramel sweet, and then his lips were pressing against mine, gently at first, then more and more sure. When finally I was bursting my lungs for wanting of air, he pulled back and rested his chin on my forehead.

“It’s because I was afraid of kissin’ you, that I said what I did,” I whispered.

Lifting a finger to my chin, he tilted my face to his.

“Are you still afraid?”

“No.”

I closed my eyes as he lowered his mouth and kissed me again. Then he was on his feet, pounding his fist in his hand.

“We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to protect you against Shine.”

“I’m scared, Sid.”

“Of course you’re scared. Jesus Christ, half of Haire’s Hollow’d be scared if they had Shine coming after them. God, Kit.” He dropped down besides me. “What about Doctor Hodgins? We have to tell him. He can help.”

“No, he’s already worryin’ about me.”

“He could give you a place to stay till … ”

“No! Once I leave here, he’ll never let me come back. I know it.”

“Kit, you’re not safe here.”

“There’s nothin’ we can do,” I said with despair.

“There’s always something. We just have to think. I’ve already let the news out that Shine’s back. It won’t be long before the Mounties are after him.”

I shook my head despondently.

“It’ll take forever.”

Sid grasped my shoulders with a little shake.

“Now you listen to me, Kit, no one has ever been able to get you out of here, not even the reverend, and he could turf Satan out of hell if he tried. We’ll find a way to get around this one.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” He slumped down besides me, his head in his hands, and we sat in silence for some time. Then suddenly he was on his feet, pulling me to mine and striding back around the house. Ripping up the rest of the pickets of the old rotten fence, he tossed them in a pile, then started lugging them across the meadow, up to the woods.

“We’re going to build you a camp,” he said, as I stumbled along behind him, dragging a load of pickets. “Just a makeshift thing that’ll do you to sleep on during the nights. Until they catches Shine, which won’t be long now, I know it. Everyone’s too fed up with Shine to tolerate his bullshit much more, and what with the peace they’ve been having since he last ran off, they’ll be only too eager to go running to the Mounties with whatever information they have about him chewing up and killing people. I’ll talk to Mum and get her going after the reverend to encourage the people to come forward. It’ll happen, you’ll see. The people have to come together, and with the reverend’s help they will. Meanwhile, we have to keep you safe, and sleeping out of the house at night is one way of doing that. No one will know. During the days, we can keep watch. I don’t expect he’ll be doing much visiting during daylight hours. It’s evenings that vampires suckle, and that’s a good thing, because by then, you’ll be safer than any of us in your new bed that I’m going to make for you.”

Coming to a large black spruce, its wide, flat branches swooping down like a ready-made tent, Sid dropped the pickets and commenced building a platform off from the base of the tree. Back at the house, he stripped the plastic from inside of the lean-to that he had built for storing the wood, and draped it around the underside of the tree branches to circle around the platform, weatherproofing it. After he was finished building, we went inside the house and brought back an armful of blankets and pillows. Then we carried up some biscuits, water, and even matches and a stub of a candle I found in Nan’s room.

“Make sure the front door is always barred and your window is always open,” Sid cautioned, back at the house again, standing outside my room window. “The second you hears a sound—run! Take no chances. If it happens to be Pirate, then you can always climb back in. And if it’s Shine, make for the woods and stay there until I comes, or until Shine leaves. Here,” he passed me a picket with a couple of rusty nails sticking out of one end, “keep this by your bed and if he pokes his head in through the window, whump him in the face. And make sure it’s the end with the nails that you slam him with.”

I shuddered.

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Decide that when you sees his face coming through your window.”

I tried to smile so’s Sid wouldn’t look so worried, then widened my eyes at the sight of Aunt Drucie dodging down over the bank.

“What about her?”

At that second Josie poked her tangled red head sleepily out the window. Seeing Sid, she broke into a loud grin and hoisted her leg out through.

“You go find some excuse to keep Drucie at home during the next few days, and I’ll deal with this one,” Sid said, holding out his hand to help Josie as she prepared to jump off the window ledge.

“Do you think it might scare Shine off if Aunt Drucie was around?” I asked.

“Uumph, forget it,” Sid snorted as Josie landed on the ground at his feet. “Nothing scares Shine. Then all you’d have is Drucie running around scared to death and sounding the bells about Shine’s coming to chew the face off the lot of you. Now there’s reason for the Noble ones to haul you out of here.”

“You’s farmed! Farmed!” Josie barked, landing on both feet and scowling at me.

“Farmed?” Sid gave me a blank look.

“Later,” I sighed, scowling back at Josie and going off to greet Aunt Drucie.

T
HE
K
ILLING

S
AFETY WASN’T JUST MY CONCERN.
When word got out that Shine was back, a shiver went through Haire’s Hollow like that of a near miss. Shine was back. And with him the haunting image of Rube Gale’s bloodied corpse, the open-faced grave and the unnamed headstone. Margaret Eveleigh and her best friends started walking in groups, each keeping their eyes open for the other and walking short distances from the outport, until one of them would start squealing, thinking she had seen Shine’s evil eye peering through some bushes, and sending the works of them racing back to the outport as if there was a hoard of devils chasing after them. Their parents chided them for their foolishness, yet the women ceased their dallying in May Eveleigh’s store, and the men made fast work of mending their nets and getting off the wharf before evening fell. Even the reverend softened his sermons to say we should all be more accepting and loving of each other, a startling change from the hell-burning damnations he had preached when Shine had first disappeared, leading Old Joe to say that even a man of the cloth couldn’t feel safe preaching the word of God with Shine on the loose.