This River Awakens

  Sten stopped suddenly, straightened and stared out of the smeared window, the white light making him squint. Nausea was building inside him – but it wasn’t the smell, he realised – it was the sound of his own voice, and the laughing monsters, and the careening shadows, and the dizzying spaces on all sides. It was the taste of poison in his mouth, dry and bitter, and the hot gusts of his breath. ‘I’ve caught a cold,’ he muttered. ‘That’s what’s happened. I’ve got a fever, too, I can feel it.’ He clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘Hot. I’d better go to bed.’

  Glancing around, he realised that he couldn’t leave things as they were. The jars had to be sealed. He’d leave the rest of the guts for now – the dogs had already been fed some. They’d eaten it like starved wolves. There was enough in the jars to last a month.

  Reeling slightly, Sten began sealing the jars. He could feel the fever coursing through him, and it seemed that his own flesh was becoming too small for him, tightening and tightening until he wanted to scream and strike outward, claw and tear his way out from his own body. ‘It’s the flu,’ he croaked. ‘A white room, no visitors, but send me flowers, okay?’

  After what seemed like hours, he finished with the jars. He staggered out of the shed and hurried across the driveway and entered the back of the house. He half ran down the hallway and then up the stairs. He entered the bathroom and stood in front of the sink, staring at the reflection in the mirror.

  He almost shrieked. Spanning his forehead was a black, flaking imprint of a hand. Runnels of sweat had streaked through it, tracing brownish-red trails into his eyebrows and down on to his cheeks. Inside his head, the monsters roared with laughter.

  In sudden terror, Sten whirled and plunged through the doorway. He ran down the hallway and entered the bedroom. Then he stopped. The bed – he’d been sleeping down on the living-room sofa, even after Elouise had left. He stared at it, dull pain churning through his body. The bed was made, the sheets crisply folded – not a single wrinkle. ‘I hear you,’ he whispered. ‘Under there. Just waiting. You know what you want, you know what I want.’ Sten took a step forward, reached down and pulled back the bed’s cover sheet. He began removing his clothes, not once shifting his eyes from the clean white sheets.

  A minute later, he was naked. The cold air plucked the sweat from his skin, and he shivered. Then he crawled into the bed, pulled the blankets up and rolled on to his back.

  He stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. ‘I’ve got the flu.’ One hand reached down and gripped his penis. ‘Grind the meat, hah.’ Savagely, he pulled down with his hand. ‘But no, never a bra. Never.’

  VII

  Leaning back, I kicked out with my legs, swinging higher and higher. Flight, the only way I could achieve it, and even then the feeling was momentary; an illusion. The chains squeaked and squealed, pinched my palms, pulled me back towards the ground.

  Below, the playground seemed to shrink into nothingness, then explode beneath me – flying, falling, flying, falling; I played games with my shadow, I tossed the horizon up then pushed it away on all sides. I reached higher, only to be once again plucked out of the sky. Blinking, I would see the lines of forest, the red-brown river snaking through the underbrush, overturned black earth, rooftops and ribbon roads. Blinking again, I faced the earth below, flattened and grey, the edge of the playground’s grass field, yellow and lifeless – and there, blackness seeming to pour into an invisible hole: my shadow.

  I swung on, my breath coming in gasps, the world cavorting, pulsing, spinning. I was unstoppable – I would go on for ever.

  ‘Hey!’

  The power coursing through me died suddenly; my legs dangled and I let them drag the earth as I swung backward. I looked around.

  Standing at the foot of the slide was a girl; it took a moment before I recalled meeting her here once before. What’s her name? Jennifer. ‘What?’ I asked, coming to a stop.

  She took a step towards me. ‘We’ve been through this before,’ she said.

  I frowned. ‘Through what?’

  She shrugged, then walked over and sat down in the swing beside me. Warily, I watched her. There was a strange expression on her pale face, and her eyes were red. She sat staring straight ahead.

  I hesitated, then asked, ‘Something wrong?’

  Looking startled, she faced me. ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘Something wrong with you?’

  Yes, I wanted to reply. Instead I just shrugged, looked away. Jesus, she’s worse than Debbie. What does she want? Suddenly angry, I glared at her, found her staring at me quizzically. The anger disappeared, replaced by exasperation. ‘What is it with you?’ I demanded.

  Her face went white, her eyes glassing over. Then she turned away from me.

  ‘You’re crying!’ I exclaimed, pulling myself up from the swing. ‘Let’s see,’ I said, running around to look at her face.

  ‘Fuck off,’ she mumbled, swinging her head around so that her long blonde hair covered her face. She began wiping her eyes with the back of one hand.

  ‘What are you crying for? I didn’t say nothing to make you cry.’ I paused. ‘Did I?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  Staring down at her, my eyes seemed to acquire a will of their own, noting the reddish glint in her hair, the beginning of a tan on her smooth arms, the funny way she made a fist with the one hand gripping the swing’s chain, the crazy red of her skirt, the tiny gold hairs on her thighs. I scowled.

  ‘Then what are you crying for?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She looked up diffidently. ‘It’s over with, now.’

  Our gazes locked for a moment, then I turned away, resumed my seat in the swing. ‘You’ve got weird eyes,’ I said.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ she demanded.

  I shrugged. ‘They’re green.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, that’s weird.’

  ‘No it isn’t. You’re the one with weird eyes.’

  I had no reply to that, since I agreed with her. ‘Well, at least I’m not cross-eyed.’

  ‘I’m not cross-eyed!’

  ‘Never said you were.’

  ‘You did so.’

  Sighing, I pushed back with my legs, began swinging. ‘What’re you wearing that dress for?’ I asked between grunts. Higher and higher.

  ‘It’s not a dress, it’s a skirt. A miniskirt.’ Jennifer had twisted in her seat to face me.

  The wind swept against me as I pumped harder, watching her watching me. ‘So?’ I asked as I swept by. ‘What’re you wearing that for?’

  ‘Because I like it, that’s why.’

  Flying, falling, flying – she was becoming a blur. ‘Were you ever Lynk’s girlfriend?’

  Jennifer stood up. ‘No – look, would you stop doing that!’

  I slowed. ‘Doing what?’

  ‘What are you, a retard? Swinging, that’s what.’

  She had folded her arms beneath her breasts, which was what Debbie always did when she was mad at me. I stopped swinging, began twisting the chains. ‘Lynk said you once let him cop a feel,’ I said.

  Jennifer laughed harshly. ‘With Lynk? No fucking way! He’s a liar.’ She paused, then said, ‘I necked with Roland, once.’

  I stopped twisting the chains, stared at her, dumbfounded. ‘Roland?’

  She shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Sure, about a year ago. Behind the school.’

  I looked away. ‘Roland,’ I muttered.

  ‘He wasn’t bad,’ Jennifer continued, ‘though I think it was his first time.’

  ‘He lied!’

  ‘Who? Lynk?’ She laughed again. ‘He always lies. About everything.’

  I hadn’t meant Lynk. It was Roland who’d lied. But no, I realised suddenly, that wasn’t true. He’d just never said anything about it. He’d held out. ‘Some friend,’ I mumbled.

  ‘What?’

  I glanced at Jennifer. ‘Nothing. Look, how come you were crying before?’

  Her gaze fell to the ground in front of her. ‘My mom’s in
the hospital.’ Then she quickly looked up, her eyes wild.

  I frowned, then realised that she hadn’t planned on saying that – there was panic and fear in her gaze; for some reason I could feel my face blushing. Looking away, I groped for something to say. ‘I was in the hospital once.’

  I heard her let out a long breath. ‘Weren’t we all, once.’

  ‘Huh?’ Glancing at her, I saw that she had recovered, and there was now an odd grin on her lips.

  ‘Well,’ she challenged, ‘you were born in a hospital, weren’t you?’

  I returned the grin. ‘Okay, twice, then.’

  ‘Were you in an accident or something?’

  I fidgeted. ‘Nah. I got bit by a mou … a rat.’

  Jennifer cocked an eyebrow. ‘They put you in the hospital ’cause a rat bit you? What’d it do, bite off your pecker?’

  My face felt on fire, and I scowled at her. ‘No, dummy. It was because of rabies. You get bit by a rat you get rabies. Your mouth froths and you go crazy and attack people and they end up having to shoot you, like Old Yeller.’

  Leaning towards me, Jennifer said, ‘Funny, you don’t look shot.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ I snapped, drawing back from her sudden closeness. ‘The doctors reached me just in the nick of time.’

  ‘Before or after you started frothing?’

  I sighed. ‘Before, of course. Once you start frothing it’s too late.’

  ‘Oh. So how did they cure you, then?’

  ‘Needles.’

  ‘Uck, I hate needles. Was it a big one?’

  The memory of that time had seemed far away up until then; now it rushed close and I felt a moment of queasiness. Taking a deep breath, I replied, ‘Yeah, big ones.’

  ‘They gave you more than one?’

  I nodded.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I answered, shrugging. ‘I sort of, uh, lost count.’ When no more questions seemed forthcoming, I looked up at her. Though I couldn’t read the expression on her face, something about it made my heart jump. Instinctively, my gaze shied from hers. ‘Mostly, it was all just a precaution. That’s what they told me.’

  A door slammed at Jennifer’s house. She seemed to jump. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

  I shrugged, watched as she hurried off. Too bad. I liked talking.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I

  Fisk wondered what was left. He reached up and scratched through the bandage bridging his nose. From his seat on the steps of the porch the maypole rose from the mound of ashes, black against the cool blue sky. It seemed almost insubstantial, like a slit of darkness behind a door left slightly ajar.

  As if the world was opening. Showing me what’s behind this pastoral scene. Nothing. Oblivion. The door’s opening for me. Nothing to do but wait it out.

  Dorry lived only in his mind. Everything else was dust. The pictures of her in the house behind him had cut paper-thin layers from her soul. Almost painless, her smiles in them, frozen for all time, were only faintly pinched. A pinprick of pain, but there every time the camera caught her lively face. As if she’d looked into the camera’s eye and seen only what would be left of her in the years to come.

  His wife had been a simple woman, in some ways too simple. Seamlessly happy, but sidestepping a thousand superstitions in her seasonal dances. Plant around the maypole, such bright flowers, and skip your circle. Straw dolls tacked to the door frames, salt over the shoulder and knock on wood. Did you ever know how much you amused me, my darling? I looked like a farmer back then, didn’t I? But I was just fooling, dear. I lost my soul in the dry white dust of a Mediterranean island, years and years ago. Crawled right out of my mouth, I guess. I didn’t even say goodbye.

  Fisk wiped at the tears on his lined cheeks. Damned nose so busted up I can barely breathe. He wanted to die. At times he imagined Dorry waiting there on the other side. Such images let him look forward to the last beat of his heart. But I know better, really. I’m looking at the crack and at the darkness beyond, and that’s all there is. These days, he had begun to look forward to even that.

  Fisk climbed weakly to his feet. He didn’t feel well. He felt sick. He turned and reached for the handrail, but the sight of his dark, silent house changed his mind, and instead he walked around the house and entered the cage rows.

  Some of the panic from the last order still hung in the air. The piss and shit stank fouler than usual. He strode slowly down the first aisle, feeling their eyes tracking him from each cage. For some reason their attention steadied his stomach. His mink had been fed, and fed well. Hearts and liver and lungs and muscle. A feast of kin.

  I like that. Makes you no different from us, and that’s the way it should be. Us humans rule everything under the moon, everything under the sun. Our will to live just swallows you up, and that’s what it means to rule. Remember that. Don’t ever forget that.

  He stopped and scanned the cages nearest him. Eyes glittered back at him. Nothing but fear. I like that. ‘Almost time,’ he told them softly, ‘to start breeding again. People don’t like you much. They just like your skins. I’ll need more of you. Another generation just like you, not knowing any different. Just my cages.’ He smiled. ‘Nobody says the world’s perfect, eh?’

  What’s left, then, for Old Man Fisk? His smile broadened. ‘Just pain, my friends.’ He continued on his way, up and down the rows, until he came to the house’s back door.

  ‘The little shits,’ he said as he went inside. ‘We made it too easy for them. We said we didn’t want them to have to struggle like we did. Then we told them that you have to work hard to get anywhere.’ He descended the stairs to the cellar. ‘Which is it, eh? If I’d had a boy I wouldn’t’ve made it easier for him. I’d tell him comfort’s overrated, then I’d hand him a shovel and tell him to get to work.’

  The cattle prod was in his hands, charged. He stood in front of Bruise’s cage, eyeing the trembling mink inside. ‘Get to work, you little shit. Stop fucking around on my land like you owned it. We all made it too soft for you, and now you spit on a soldier’s uniform. Then laugh at the camera, there in your beads and long hair. What you were born to, eh? Don’t know any different, eh? Well, I’m here to give you the hard lessons.’

  He pinned Bruise against the back of the cage, watching as the charges jolted the animal’s body, listening to the mink’s snapping pain, its scrabbling claws, smelling the scorched fur and the piss. Bruise had clamped his jaws on the cattle prod’s sheathed shaft, biting uselessly.

  Fisk held it there a moment longer, then he gasped and backed away. He’d come in his pants. ‘Holy shit,’ he hissed, leaning against the workbench behind him, feeling the honey-like trickle down the inside of his leg.

  Breathless and shaking, Fisk headed back upstairs. He entered the living room and fell down prone on the sofa. The air whistled through his broken nose. He licked the salt from his swollen lips. I’m alive again. Christ, I’m alive again, aren’t I? That’s what all this is, isn’t it. The season’s almost done. I’ve survived another, what’s left to do now? Come alive again. Again, and again, and again and again.

  He rolled over, feeling sticky and messy in his crotch, no better than an adolescent, no better than some pimple-faced scrawny kid. Dreaming wet dreams in some classroom, or on a bus. Those agonising embarrassment dreams that go on and on until you just let go and the mess is there and that’s that. God, I’d forgotten those. So long ago, and all the guilt and shame. If Dorry saw me like this, if she walked in right now …

  Fisk groaned and sat up. ‘The lesson was pain, wasn’t it. The rest is just distractions.’ He rose, collecting the cattle prod, and made his way back to the cellar.

  He thought he heard a clatter of claws from the top of the stairs, but as he turned on the light and descended, there was nothing but silence from below. ‘Didn’t expect me so soon again, my friends? Too bad for you.’

  Fisk stopped again in front of Bruise’s cage. He crouched and looked in on the mink.
It wasn’t moving. He inserted the prod and gave the animal a poke. The charge sounded, but that was all. Bruise, he realised, was dead.

  ‘Well,’ he said, straightening. ‘That was too easy. Too easy by far.’

  II

  The dogs had grown quiet. Jennifer lay on her bed, barely able to catch the soft clack of claws on the kennel’s concrete walkway. They paced, bellies round and hanging, eager to run, filled with blood-soaked energy.

  The bastard wouldn’t let them out. Not any more. Not since Max had been killed. The dogs had nowhere to run, and like animals in the zoo, they were going mad.

  She blew smoke rings at the ceiling, unable to keep from straining to hear him downstairs. The zombie, doing his own pacing, from room to room, his boots scraping and clumping, rye in his veins, groping inside his own coffin. He’d kept himself half drunk the past two weeks, while his wife lay in the hospital bed, jaw wired shut, fevered and fighting infection. Half drunk, some kind of purgatory, Jennifer supposed.

  Her mother’s fever had broken two days ago. Jennifer had walked into the room to find a thin, pale old woman. Sipping dinner through a straw, her eyes watery and puffy from the drugs. And the same question in them as she looked at her daughter.

  ‘No,’ Jennifer had said. ‘No different.’

  Are you surprised?

  What had she expected? That he’d collapse under the guilt, that he’d pick himself up and become a man again? That didn’t happen, not here in the real world. He was on the run – he’d always be on the run. All the while going nowhere.

  Fuck that. Not me.

  She lit another cigarette, pulling hard, swelling her chest as she drew the smoke down and held it there. And that fucking doctor. Why doesn’t he mind his own business? Fucking phone calls, the threats of sending a social worker. In my face with so-called offers of help – ‘the school’s been informed of the situation, Jennifer. You’ll still have to repeat sixth grade, of course, because of your marks. But at least Principal Thompson understands the situation now, understands the reasons for your many absences. It’ll be different this time around, Jennifer…’