Silent Children (37 page)

"I guess," Ian said with all the conviction he could fake.

"I'm asking your playmate."

Ian was having to restrain himself from nudging an answer out of her by the time she whispered "Yes."

"That's the girl. Cheering up already, are you? You start, then. Ladies first as usual."

She was silent even longer, and Ian was beginning to hope she'd fallen asleep so that Woollie might too when she thumped the bed with a fist. He thought she was overcome by frustration, and would have started the game himself if she hadn't muttered "Bed."

"That's a good one," Woollie said as if he were greeting a joke. "Your turn, son. That's the order."

"Bread."

"Careful," Woollie warned, presumably because Ian had referred to food, and gaped with inspiration. "Fed."

"Led," Charlotte made herself say, or a word that sounded like it.

"Zed."

"You'd say zee if you were an American, wouldn't you? Or pretending like some people try. Ned," Woollie offered, and flapped his hands behind his ears. "That's what they call donkeys, did you know? Eeyore. Eeyore," he brayed in a murmur, punctuating the noises with a wide slack grin.

He was expecting a laugh, but Ian could tell that Charlotte managed not to shrink back from the spectacle only by tensing herself. "Fred," he blurted to bring it to an end.

Woollie's mouth drooped as his hands sank, the right one settling on a pink fish that hid the knife. "People used to laugh at that name. Can't think why," he said peevishly. "Go on, love, you have another go."

"I don't know," Charlotte complained until his raw stare told her she better had. "Dead," she gave him with almost no breath.

"Not much fun in that, is there? It's nice and quiet, though. Just like going off to sleep, really. You'd be surprised." Woollie's gaze withdrew into his eyes, taking their expression with it, and Ian willed Charlotte to make herself as unnoticeable as he was trying to be in case the man reminisced himself to sleep. Then the eyes bulged at him as though Woollie had guessed or even overheard his thoughts. "Speak up, son. Just remember you're meant to be trying to make us laugh."

"Ted."

"That's not even as funny as Fred, that. I reckon you're not trying. Head," Woollie muttered, planting the tips of his forefingers on his temples and poking his thumbs under his flabby jaw so as to wag his head back and forth like a wide-mouthed big-eyed mask. "I've seen a few of them gone to sleep," he said, and returned his hand to the knife. "Your go, love."

Charlotte must have been preparing her turn. "Said," she hissed at once.

"That's cute. That's quite witty. Said's what you said, eh? You said said. I'd call that a laugh." Apparently content to say so rather than utter one, he directed an upturned grimace at Ian. "That makes her the winner, don't you reckon, son?"

"Sure."

"He sounds a bit jealous to me, love. It's you to go for winning. See if you can think of one that'll start off a few laughs."

Charlotte lifted a fist as if to punch the bed but clenched it on the quilt. "Don't want to."

"I know what you'd rather do. Think of a name for our game."

"Can't."

"Try or you won't be able to stop trying when you want to sleep. How about Riotous Rhymes? Or Pitiful Poetry, that's not bad, is it? Here's a good one, Wormy Words," Woollie said, his voice growing lower and more intense with each suggestion, and leaned forward in a crouch that might have been about to launch him at the bed. "You say one now as long as mine don't make you laugh."

"Don't know any."

"I didn't either till I thought of them, and I've been up longer than you." They were competing at peevishness again, and Ian was searching under the slab in his brain for a way to intervene when Woollie appeared to recall what he was meant to be doing. "Right enough, you need your beauty sleep at your age. Get your head down and shut those eyes, then, and you'll be gone in no time."

"Can't."

"Of course you can, love. Just shut them. Just let them shut like they want to."

"Can't," Charlotte wailed. "I'm too tired."

"That doesn't make sense, love. Think about it and you'll see it doesn't. When you're tired you sleep, don't you? That's what children do."

"Can't."

"Calm it down. Don't go upsetting yourself or you'll have the rest of us in a state. Your nerves are all itchy because you want to go to sleep, see? Do you want me to sing you to sleep like I nearly did when we were on our own?"

"No."

Woollie's gaze submerged as his mouth tried out a series of increasingly less reassuring grimaces, and Ian saw he had to save the situation while it was only dangerous. He couldn't just ask Woollie to sing—he didn't know how Charlotte might react to his request—but if she looked at him, surely he could make her understand that they had to put up with the ordeal. He reached out to finger her tense back, hoping she wouldn't flinch or cry out, and Woollie said "I know what you can see to help you go off."

Not much expression had resurfaced in his eyes, and it was clear to Ian that Charlotte would have preferred not to respond. Somebody had to. He was parting his dry lips with his dry tongue when a word that sounded as though it had had to struggle for release escaped her. "What?"

"I'll show you someone else asleep."

His gaze remained somewhere behind his eyes as he raised himself an inch from the stool to haul up his pink and yellow dress. He reached in his trousers pocket, and the top of an object like a wallet crept into view. Ian imagined Woollie carrying photographs of his victims in his wallet to display to strangers, the way parents showed pictures of their children. The object—a photograph album the size of Woollie's hand—emerged from the pocket, and Woollie settled himself, tugging his dress down. "Here you are, love," he murmured, and laid the album next to her clenched fist. "Take a glance at these. They're restful, you'll see."

His gaze was ready to come out of hiding if she didn't do as she was told, and Ian was afraid of how it might look. He watched her hand very gradually relinquish its grip on the quilt and stray toward the album. Barely in time to delay her, he touched her shoulder. "Let me look too," he said.

At least that made her turn toward him. She was fighting to keep her eyes and mouth steady, and he focused all his energy in projecting reassurance at her while she groped behind her for the album. He saw Woollie lean over to place the album in her hand, a contact Ian could imagine sending her panic out of control and then Woollie too. But her hand found the album before the man's reached it. She lifted it over herself and dropped it between herself and Ian.

It was fattened with at least a dozen photographs. It smelled of stale leather and, unless Ian was as mistaken as he hoped he was, of earth. He inserted a fingertip under the cover, which felt damp and chill as the earth under a house must feel. He did his best to smile at Charlotte as Woollie crouched closer to watch—close enough to touch her. With a nonchalance that failed even before the gesture was completed, Ian flipped the album open.

His nail caught a plastic sheath, and the album opened at two photographs. He heard Charlotte's teeth click as she trapped a cry, and his own body turned cold as the leather. The children in the photographs—a boy in the left-hand picture, a girl opposite him, both of them about Charlotte's age—might almost have been nothing but asleep. Though each photograph was framed to contain the child's whole body, only the face was visible; the earth in which they lay was drawn up to their chins like sheets. Each face was pale with a flashbulb glare that glistened on the moist black soil. A sprinkling of earth on the boy's eyelids helped them resemble the blank eyes of a stone statue, and there was a trickle of mud at one corner of the girl's slack mouth that suggested to Ian she might be stuffed with earth. He was trying to crush the notion when Woollie whispered eagerly "They're peaceful, aren't they? Don't they make you feel like them?"

In that moment he grasped how much worse the man might be capable of where Charlotte was concerned than Ian had let himself think. Her lips trembled, and he was so afraid of her being unable to restrain a cry that he answered for her. "No," he blurted.

"Studying to be a ventriloquist, are you, son? I was asking your playmate."

"She doesn't either. You're upsetting her and you keep saying not to."

"She wasn't upset till you wandered in." Woollie seemed undecided whether to glare at him or search for something inside himself. "All right, love, if you can't go to sleep just looking at them you can play with them for a bit till you do."

Ian saw Charlotte shrink back from the proposal. "Play what?" he demanded.

"Anything that doesn't spoil them. Use your imaginations for a change. You could cut out some paper clothes to put on them, love. Girls your age like dressing things, don't they? Only we can't have you playing with scissors." His eyes fixed on Ian and grew larger and redder. "Tell you what, son, why don't you make an effort for a change and think of something you can do instead of leaving it all to me."

The slab closed down on Ian's mind so heavily it seemed to darken the room. "Like what?" he could hear himself demanding, except that might push Woollie over whatever edge he was swaying on. He was struggling to think of at least a temporary answer when Woollie said "Here's what you do. You tell us a bedtime story about the girl in the picture."

"She's..." It was like being asked a question in class but far worse, because he couldn't just stay silent or say he didn't know: he had to produce something Woollie wanted to hear that wouldn't distress Charlotte too much. "She looks happy, doesn't she?" he said desperately.

He was afraid that Charlotte would be unable to keep her disagreement to herself, but she only bit her lip. "She is happy," he risked saying. "She's happy because... Because she's where she wants to be."

That was in the earth under a house, he thought, and waiting for more earth to be thrown on her face. Even Woollie looked less than convinced by Ian's assertion. The slab on Ian's mind let another lie crawl out, all he could find to say. "She's with someone she wants to be with," he muttered.

Woollie leaned his shoulders against the door and gave a slow nod that might have been hinged on his unwavering stare. "That's more like it. Carry on."

"Her name, her name's Carla." All at once Ian knew a story, and if he took long enough to tell it, perhaps it could even put Woollie to sleep. "And she had a grandmother who was the person she was fondest of in the world, even fonder of than she was fond of her mother and father. Then one day the grandmother had to go into hospital because she, because she had something wrong with her the doctors had to look at. And Carla went to see her every day and took her flowers and candy, sweets, and read stories to her like her grandmother used to read to her. Only one day she went in and her grandmother wasn't there, and when she asked her mother and father where her grandmother had gone they said she'd see her again after she'd grown up..."

Woollie was nodding; his eyes appeared to have relaxed. Could Ian's tale be soothing him to sleep? "Only Carla knew she wasn't going to be able to wait that long to see her grandmother when she'd been so fond of her," Ian murmured, "they'd been so fond of each other. And just when she thought she was going to start being so sad she'd never stop being it she remembered something her grandmother had told her once when she was sad about something else. Her grandmother used to say if there was a dream you wanted to have you had to think about it as hard as you could while you were going to sleep, only not so hard it woke you up..."

Woollie's eyes were vanishing. The upper lids settled toward the lower and fluttered apart, but nobody was looking out between them. "So when Carla went to bed that night," Ian murmured just loud enough for Woollie to hear, "she thought of the best time she'd ever had with her grandmother, and she kept thinking of it as she went to sleep, the best time she'd ever had in her life..." The lids tried to part again, but gave up, and he was almost certain it wasn't a trick—certain enough to close the album and push it toward the foot of the bed, away from Charlotte. "And the moment she fell asleep she saw her grandmother coming to her with her arms held out, and they just stood and hugged, and Carla never wanted to wake up..."

He paused for a breath, then dared to pause longer, but the lids didn't stir. "Never wanted to wake up," he repeated. If Woollie had been less than thoroughly asleep, surely the repetition would have roused him. In the twilight that was all of the late afternoon light the curtains admitted to the room, the man looked dwindled, fallen inward now that his vigilance and the effort it required had collapsed—he would have looked like an old woman sleeping in a cardboard box except for the beard. "And so she never did," he whispered in case Charlotte wanted to know, and put a finger to his lips. He rolled gradually onto his back and was easing himself toward the far side of the bed, resting his fingertips on the quilt at the edge of the mattress, when she grabbed his free arm, shaking her head so hard the pillow flapped.

He let go of the mattress and placed his hand over hers, which felt smaller and clammier than ever. "Don't wake him," he mouthed. "I'm getting the knife."

Fear glistened in her eyes. Her fingers squirmed under his palm, and he was afraid she might pull away before she realised how much noise that would make. He pressed her hand against his arm and mouthed "I have to. It's our only chance."

He felt as though he were telling her another story, but he was going to have to enact this one. When he risked letting go of her hand it jerked away from him, but only to jam its knuckles into her mouth. She kept it there, and he saw she was using it to cover any sounds of panic. He flashed her a smile that almost made him feel courageous and resumed crawling on his back toward the edge of the bed. His feet reached off it, and too many seconds later his legs up to the knees did. He raised himself onto his elbow to push himself up from the mattress, and the bed gave a loud creak.

He froze in that position, his body aching and shivering with strain. It took him the duration of several short harsh breaths to twist his head round far enough to see Woollie clear. Charlotte had the knuckles of both hands against her mouth, but the man hadn't wakened. His chin was resting on his chest, his back against the door. "All right," Ian mouthed, nodding hard at Woollie until Charlotte ventured to turn her shaky eyes in that direction, and eased himself off the bed.