The Lanyard (14 page)

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

"What should we do?" she whispered.

The sky felt like a grid of wire being pulled over their heads, tight, heavy and sharp with incongruent touches of damp distress. The sound of the car got pulled to the horizon, stretched into saw spikes that sank and rose like the beating of a heart, a purr. That sense brought on by the cold, by the snatch of sweat at their neck. He looked back. Nothing but rock. His jaw opened but he didn't speak. What could he say to the terror in her eyes that he glimpsed.

He reached in his mind for the smoke further down the hill and tried to gather it up, willing it all to combine somehow, to wrap around, to twist together into black thread and crawl over him like a snake, and enter him, to stitch him through with leadership, the ability to take charge, not to sit back. Avoidance of doubt, of her heart of his. He wanted it now. He sucked at the smoke to gather it up, imagined it filling his eyes until they were all black like the middle, and he learned from it, and he grew strong from it, his heart turning into jet, but not brittle, strong. Solid with solutions, with an elution, of what they had, what they were, just droplets of mist, fled from a fire,  come together for whatever time they had before they split like birds scattering into wind.

"Stay down, alright," he said.

He heard the sound of the car come out of the silence behind them over the top of the ridge through which they had crawled once more. It was the sound of an engine coming to rest, a car sliding to a halt. He knew because sometimes he dreamed of cars, of lines of traffic. The engine stopped then clicked as the heat circled around the fan under the bonnet. And he knew that if he could hear that, if they could, then the car had to be close. He froze like time paused, overwhelmed, as if all of those days and hours long passed crashed through his brain. 

He remembered how similar thing had happened elsewhere. One time after he had walked in on his father fiddling with a large projector screen with blue paint and a chrome finish, a thin bar across the back that latched into a hook on the pole he extended, pulling hard until he managed to snap this latch over the top and stood back, taking a few more paces as if to see the whole thing at once, looking it up and down, checking over his shoulder so as not to get too close to the small stool that he has sat a few feet away from the screen with a false wood finish on top and black spindle legs.

"What's that?" the boy had asked.

"It's for showing photographs. I found it along with some old slides in the loft down the road and I wanted to set it up. Might just be a load of family holiday stuff but it might be interesting."

The boy walked up to the screen with his hand outstretched, almost scared to touch the surface as if there was nothing there, as if he might fall through it like out of a top floor window and end up smashed down below. He'd have thought the white surface would look like a picture this close, like a
sewing
box worth of thread sliced down the centre of each spool and twisted, turned end on, a million tiny fingers all wriggling in shades of red and yellow and blue, a tangle of plants in a stream that seem to blow? As he touched it the whole screen turned slightly, it rotated on the shaft running up the middle like a sail tracking the wind.

"What's it for?" the boy said.

"If you give me a hand here you'll see."

He picked up a large cardboard box so covered in dust that the dust didn't leave the surface when he moved it. He put the box on the table in the middle of the room and fumbled with the top to pull up the flaps and fold them down to the sides.

"Remember how I told you about cinemas? Well, this will be like a small version of that. For stills."

Inside the box was a black square with a large glass eye on the front. He took it out and set it down. He connected the power to an extension lead that must have connected to the generator in the workshop and turned it on. The projector whirred into life and clicked and blew, the sound of a car engine idling down. The fan increased in pitch. The projector screen lit up bright white. The boy put his hand on the screen again and sees his skin turned the colour of ivory.

"Hey, you want to watch?" he called to the boy's mother who must have been somewhere on the ground floor. "The slideshow?"

There was a delay as if his words had to snake slowly along the corridor to wherever she was.

Suddenly she opened the door to the room without entering, taking in the screen and the projector.

"You didn't check what it was?"

"Looks kind of vanilla as far as I can tell."

"Not more sport, though?"

"No idea."

"Do we have to?"

While they spoke, the boy tried to catch the spots of dust that were floating across the beam of light. Not just dust, but hair that had turned into a number of spirals. He put his hand into the beam, watching his shadow go across the bottom half of the screen. He shifted position so just a finger stuck, reaching half way up. He wiggled it and the shape moved in time. Suddenly a black set of jaws came in from the top, like the mouth of a long dead dinosaur. It snapped down onto his finger. The boy jumped. His father laughed.

"Got you!"

"That scared me."

"Sorry. Hey, here, take a look at this while we wait."

He held out a framed picture with some people on it.

"What's that?"

"I found it in the box. I guess this is the family..."

"Oh."

"Nice clothes huh?"

There were five people in the picture. An older man with a beard and a woman old enough to be his wife. Then three children, all staring right out of the frame. The boys seemed to be of widely different ages, though the youngest two were closer than the older one in years. It was faded and hard to make out. Perhaps it wasn't helped by the dirt set down on it, inside the glass almost, a dirt that made everything seem to be distant, moving away, as if it was in the back of a truck speeding off with the lights on, making onlookers squint with the dirt blowing into their face, a whirl of smoke from the road.

He wiped his arm across the glass to try and clean it. He turned the frame over and inspected the back. There was an indent panel that was about as big as the photograph, with four small metal flaps to lock the back cover shaped like seeds. For no reason he twisted one, which was hard to do because they were small. Then he did another and another so that the back part was completely loose. He removed the back and turned the picture over, expecting it to fall into his hands. Instead it turned into shreds and fluttered to the floor.

He leapt back out of the way so as not to have any of the coloured pieces touch him as they turned end over end as they fell to the floor, moving like the blade on a grass guzzler, or a corn clipper, spinning around and around. Some of the pieces landed face down, the backs as white as the projector screen, while the others were picture side up. The contents were no longer clear, the pieces too many different sizes and shapes, some the colour of skin, the colour of shirts, the colour of clothes, and the light blue background upon which they were sat all blue and milky as if some dots of ink had fallen onto a projector screen and begun to swirl around.

"What happened?" the boy said. "It's not my fault is  it?"

"Guess it was a picture that got torn up or something? Then they changed their mind and tried to put it back together behind the glass?"

"But you couldn't even tell it was that way, by looking."

"Yeah. That's weird isn't it?"

"I guess."

He kicked at some of the pieces with his toe. One or two of them seem to lift up off the ground out of the way and then settle, flipping from plain white to the colour of clothes, clothes to ice field.

"It's not like they were going to need to see them again."

"I guess," the boy said.

His mother suddenly came into the room.

"Turn that thing off," she said.

"Huh?"

"Quickly. And the light. Kill the light."

"Why?"

"Just do it."

His father flipped a switch on the side of the projector and the room fell near dark. The fan slowed to a stop.

"Listen," she said. "Outside."

"What is it?" he spoke in a whisper.

The boy did not make a sound.

As the projector made a last click before it fell silent, the sound of a patrolling engine began to soak through the walls into the room. It seemed near, as if the sides of the house were softly shaking in time to the sound. The boy looked at the projector screen to be sure it wasn't vibrating. It was hard to tell because it was so big and blank. He focussed on the very edges, trying to see any shift against the rest of the room, against the lines of hardback leather books in three shelves that went across, all greens and red with gilt lettering.

The engine outside suddenly gave a growl and then faded, as if the car had suddenly accelerated and turned down a street that took it in the opposite direction. It snorted and then dropped in pitch, far away, and then continued to hum, like the sound of a chainsaw resting on the stump of the last tree it brought down, recovering strength, idling, taking short but deep breaths.

This wasn't the first time they had heard such a noise. The engine seemed to be louder than a regular car, more like some sort of pick-up. It had a deep growl to it, as if the exhaust had been damaged and it spat its smoke in fits and bursts.

Secretly, the boy wondered if maybe it wasn't a car at all but some kind of light airplane. He would soon take to watching the evening sky because of this, though would never see any evidence, just the scattered dust grains of stars and the warming glow of the horizon where the last of the sunlight from the previous day cooled off and lost its brilliance in a methane lick. Sometimes he'd see the moon and wonder how it was creating light without any sound to match. No one ever talked about not hearing the sun or the moon. They were used to it, he guessed, that was just the way it was. Not all bright objects have to emit sound. Not all bright objects need fans to cool them or engines to run them. Yet some did, like the clicker-clack of the projector
reel
spinning, the fan stopping the whole thing from bursting into flame, and stopping them from hearing the car, or whatever it was, and the beam of light coming out of the front of it and hitting the screen with a near audible slap, making the table under it creak as it heated up.

And now he had heard it again, the sound of a car engine, somewhere up above them, like the suggestion of distant children at the edges of his vision, watching him, watching them. And he wondered if darkness could emit noise too.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

They had to move. He knew that.

He took her hand and led her down the side of the hill, beneath where the car was. They scurried down several short drops to an area where trees seemed to have been cut in half and left like stumps, perhaps by fire, like the fire that had brought smoke and left it around like loose marbles in another room in another house, too quick to bag, as if those orange whipping tongues were really made of steel that sawed and sliced through the wood, through the forest, so all of the branches were gone, all of the were leaves gone, all of the hints of height torn by the heat, by the rage, and scattered. And yet in other places the burn had not been so sharp; the limbs had been ruined in a different way, that was to say demolished, turned to half-hearted sticks gone black.

He could not help but feel to be rolling back to youth as they ran, afraid to face what was truly up at the top, only to find the once green land he had thought
of
fondly as he grew had changed. These mountains were not clothed in trees any more, nor grass: they had become a pure black, a charred remain, impossible to walk without sinking into pages and page of ash, of pulp, of deep compartments in the sand where even rocks had been swallowed and left behind like bad beef-teeth that never came, that couldn't come, because they lacked strength to push past the sugar smile of youth and at best couple only could come up like corpses in a river after a storm, like the landslip around a house built on mud, like water after a surge, filling the heart with silt, stopping the pump, plugging it.

He stopped.

"What is it?" she said.

He pretended to listen, to look past her. He stared at her mouth without caring what she thought, trying to see her teeth, but she kept it closed for once, not like she had back in the forest before the fire came, that slight overhang, a challenge to climb, to scurry up to reach her eyes to fall inside them, down the hole down to the centre of her head, to her soul.

"I think it's this way," he said, having no read on which way it was at all.

She followed him in that direction, over to where the sun was cloaked in clouds that seemed to swell up from the ground and fall, moving around in cycles that made it hard to see anything of the mountains beyond. The whole place stunk of fire, of the black swatches that crumbled under their feet, like burnt paper balled up into powder and flung back and forth across the night, some sort of dead snow.

He had once seen lines in the frozen dirt of fields, when he was young, and his father had told him that they had been caused by ploughs. But that was then. Now the dirt had no such patterns, not anywhere he had seen, and he wondered how many rains and thaws it had been for the lines to go away. He wondered where they had gone. Had they sunk down and been buried or had they somehow lifted free, been pulled into the air, or filled in by the stones dropped by birds. How long would he have to wait for nature to create such a thing. Could it ever. Did it ever. It didn't need these lines of progress, these lines of traffic that too were no longer seen from above, or far off.

The girl coughed and put the back of her hand over her mouth. She cleared her throat and then spat.

"There's something in the air."

"It's dust," he said, putting a hand through it as if he was combing with his fingers. The breeze was careless here, thick with whatever it was. He licked his lips and felt it on his skin. He put his tongue back in his mouth.

Their feet sank into the silt. It was hard to make much progress. He reached out and pulled her clear of the last step up onto a small ridge that ran across the ground like a river turned inside out, as if it was the corpse of some devilish reptile that had come here only to die. They walked this spine as far as they could before it fell away and they were back on the black powder, no longer so deep.

Now and again, the engine became audible. They increased their pace as best they could, running the way he had with his father, after he had found the knife in the pit at the foot of the yard back behind another house, in another place, running from the sound of a car. The last of the blood from his hand had turned to flakes of rust that came free of his skin as they fled, dropping a trail of red breadcrumbs behind them from the house into the woods.

And he had taken his father's hand back then as the girl had taken his, and they too had been tied by loops around their fingers, running up and down the bumpy dirt that tended to slip free behind them as they went, looking over their shoulders for the shadows of an approaching.... What? Truth was, they hadn't waited long enough to see. They never did. This was the way it was.

And he realised now, casting his eyes back to that time, to all of the other times when he had come inside scared of invisible eyes that would push him back inside the house, that he had never seen anyone.

Back then, they had run to the crest of the next hill and then slowed, but not stopped, carrying on a few paces to lay down on the descending slope to try and look over the top out of view. And they had waited while the sun drifted over the top of them like a giant sail in the sky, become bilious from an imaginary wind that seemed to twist it into two halves and then release. And the grass had tickled at his skin, but he had not flinched, too scared, as ever, to stand up without a word, without a lead.

He decided they would loop back and around again through the trees to shake them off this time, walking after themselves, walking away from themselves. Running. Was that what it was. Growing up? Becoming a man. Climbing that mountain ahead, once more, cloaked in clouds, and then coming down. Cackling. Crackling like fire.

He stopped and looked over at the girl. She was staring at him too, in a way he didn't know. Part fear. Part something else. Her eyes had slits in them like broken emeralds. The dark seemed to suck at her cheeks, inflating them, her brow was free of lines and generous. Her eyes. He had seen them. He had seen into them. He wanted to reach out to her but could not without moving so stayed where he was. How had they separated from holding hands, like the poles of magnets, pushing rather than pulling together?

"I think I recognise this place," he said.

"What is it?"

"Look."

He lifted a finger and pointed towards the centre of a flat area in the midst of all of the broken trees and thin spirs that remained like broken telegraph poles with no wires, with no wives, all clustered close as if someone had planned an improved seance by pressing so much communication through one place, so many voices rushing past, going in, heading out. This place was where the pile of bodies had been. Where the pyre once sat. This was where he had put his hand in to touch it, to touch her, and the world had burst into flame.

Only, here now there was something else. Something new. He walked to see it, to understand.

In place of the pyre was a large round shaft lined with metal going into the ground, which grew in size as he approached, far too deep to see the bottom.

"Is that?"

"I think it is."

"So the bodies went..."

"All the way down."

The boy walked up to the edge.

"What are you doing?" she said.

The words ran across him like water across a rock on the bed of a river. He stared down into the hole where the bodies had been, desperate to see the bottom.

"Must have been filled all the way to the top," he said.

She pulled at his arm, but he shook her off. "We have to keep going. Listen."

"".

"Please."

"I can't."

"But they're coming."