The air gap between the surface of the pool and the bars had narrowed to about three inches. We’d have to exit soon or drown. I reached down underwater to pull Madeline’s head up so she could grab a lungful of air.
‘It’s not hinged,’ I shouted. ‘As soon as we lift it above the frame push it sideways.’
The hatch matched the gridwork; difficult to differentiate from the rest of the cage roof but fairly light. Working together – no, more than together – this was pure harmony. Whatever force of nature, or super-nature, that transformed Madeline into a female copy of me, nudged us into thinking alike. In ten seconds we’d pushed the hatch aside. Easily, she hauled herself out, that marathon runner’s body of hers making light of the work. Then I pulled myself up on to the roof.
Bang! It hit me what the Echomen had done. In the disused swimming pool of my old school they’d built concrete walls that ran across it width ways. On top of that they’d added what must have been steel sections of fence, only they’d laid these flat across the tops of the walls. Despite botch-quality workmanship this must have taken some forward planning, not to say hard labour. Imagine a swimming pool drained of water; in your mind’s eye add a dozen concrete walls, topped with steel grids to create cells some five feet wide by thirty feet in length; they run from one side of the pool to the other; bizarre corridors to nowhere.
Now that they’d filled the pool with water only the wall tops and grille roof were visible. At the far end of the pool where it was the deepest, some walls had given way under the weight of water. I figured there were other captives here who had escaped as the tumbling walls brought that section of cage down. Now there was nobody on the cage roof but Madeline and myself … oh, the Echoman who had his bones broken as a lesson to us all sat on the grille twenty paces from us. He was of no use to his comrades and no threat to us. He sat hunched, slowly shaking his head, while grunting with pain. All this I absorbed in a snap.
‘Mom? Eve?’ What was important now is that I found them. I ran across the steel grid to peer down into the cell next to mine. A pair of hands gripped the bars, keeping a head above water.
‘Mom?’
There she was. I crouched down to touch her fingers. Her eyes instantly locked on mine.
‘Mason. Thank God.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll get you out.’
‘No!’
I crouched over the hatch. There were six wing nuts holding it down. Two inches beneath the bars swirled the pool surface; my mother’s face could have been a two dimensional mask floating there.
‘Mason! Listen to me,’ she shouted. ‘I’ll be fine. Get Eve out first.’
‘The water’s nearly up to the bars.’ I tried to unscrew the butterfly nuts. They didn’t move. ‘Damn. They’ve used a wrench to tighten them.’
‘Mason … Mason.’ Her voice grew calm as she reached through the bars to hold my hand. ‘Listen to what I’m going to tell you. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Focus on getting Eve out of the cell. She’s very cold. I can hold on. Eve’s losing her grip on the bars. So, you see, Mason, you have to save her first.’ All this she said with such calm and such dignity that it stopped me struggling with the fastenings. ‘Mason, there’ll be ample time for me. Now, go save your sister.’
The wing nuts were screwed as tight on Eve’s cell. What shocked me most, however, only Eve’s forehead and nose appeared above the water. Her fingers had turned bloodless as she gripped the bar to lift herself as high as she could – only it wasn’t high enough, was it? Water ran up into her nostrils. Her face shook as spasms struck her.
‘Damn. That’s why they weren’t worried about us escaping. They used a wrench to make these so tight you can’t loosen them with your fingers!’
Madeline got to her knees so she could reach through the bars to take hold of Eve’s head. Supporting it like that relieved my sister of some of the strain of keeping her face pressed hard against the bars to snatch those last few breaths before the water rose to lethal levels.
‘Blast!’ My sopping fingers slipped off the wing nut. ‘It’s no good. I need a tool to shift them.’
Madeline’s brown eyes met mine. She knew that Eve was dying. ‘Try the hatch cover. Use it as a hammer.’
I raced back to the roof of what had been our cell. By this time my feet splashed as the water rose above the bars toward the lip of the pool itself. The broken man shuffled on his knees toward me. He stared at me with a dogged determination; he knew what I was doing and in his smashed-up kind of way he planned to stop me. Like empty sleeves his shattered arms swung uselessly. It would have been so tempting to punch him in that swollen face of his … I thrust the thought out of my mind. Eve and Mom came first.
As I ran back to Eve’s cell I shot a glance at Mom to reassure me. Her hands still clasped the roof bars. A second later I used the hatch to beat the wing nuts. The hatch was a little larger than the kind of tray you’d eat your supper from. There wasn’t much weight so I had to take a swing at the fastenings. Sometimes I missed and struck the cage bars. At that moment I tried not to notice Eve’s face vanishing beneath the water’s surface. After I’d struck the wing nuts a couple of times Madeline leaned sideways. Still supporting Eve’s head with one hand she began work on the wing nut.
‘It’s moving,’ she shouted. ‘Keep hitting the others.’
This went faster. The blows loosened the wing nuts. By the time I’d done the last one Madeline had unscrewed four of them. Then together we spun off the last two. As I wrenched the hatch off the cage Madeline caught hold of Eve. She drew my sister out on to the cage roof where she lay coughing water; her lips had nearly turned black; her eyes were screwed with pain.
‘I’ll look after her.’ Madeline pointed. ‘Get your mother out.’
Splash, splash, splash. I was running through water.
Running through water?
Beneath the level of my ankles I saw the criss-cross pattern of the grille. Beneath that my mother lay on her back. The water was icily clear. My mother drifted there, her hair fanned out, her eyes open, staring up at me … only they weren’t staring … not really staring. In fact, not seeing anything.
The broken Echoman became the vessel into which I poured a tiny fraction of my rage. Yet at that moment there wasn’t a space big enough in the entire cosmos to accommodate my anger. He reared up on his knees as I approached him. The flip-flop action of his shattered arms had no effect as he tried to punch me. One push put him face down on the cage. I had no shoes of course, kicking him would have only shattered my own bones in my feet. With the blood roaring in my veins I stamped his head down against the bars five or six times until he showed no interest in moving his fucking useless limbs. The water reached above my ankles as I turned him face down then pressed my heel down on the back of his head, grinding his face against the submerged grille. It only took a couple of minutes for the guy’s lungs to fill with water. Nevertheless, I kept holding it there. Just to be sure.
Madeline’s voice sounded in my ear. ‘Mason, leave him. We’ve got to go before they come back.’
chapter 18
So, you’re faced with this problem. You need to move three people a distance of four miles from a derelict school to a suburban house. Add to that one of the three wears nothing but shorts, the second is naked apart from a skimpy T-shirt, the third is clothed in pyjamas, but has narrowly escaped drowning, and is suffering from shock. Add just a little more shit to the mix: all three are exhausted, cold, hungry, still soaking wet. While you’re at it, toss in another pinch of misery (when you’re vulnerable life’s good at piling on woe, isn’t it?): the mother of two of the group died just twenty minutes ago. Oh, and there are individuals somewhere in the former school who are driven by an alien instinct to kill the three at the earliest possible opportunity.
That’s what faced us. It should have made the journey home sheer torture. But that four mile walk home? I don’t remember it. We could have glided there by magic carpet for all the discomfort I
remember. All that comes back to me now is seeing the sunrise as a flattened red ball over Tanshelf. I hadn’t experienced a dawn like it before; the sun resembled a huge bloodshot eye. Were we spotted by members of the public as we trudged along? I can’t say. Did a worker returning home from a night shift, or a youth delivering newspapers, challenge us? If they did I’ve no recollection. We walked but we could have been brain dead. No smells registered. Madeline and I were barefoot; later I realized my feet bled from the four-mile stroll sans footwear. I didn’t notice so much as a prickle at the time.
Looking back, I figure I followed my old route home from school. This was always faster than even catching the school bus that dropped off at every street corner, took detours to Upper Tanshelf before reaching our neighbourhood. So I must have taken Eve and Madeline, dripping like wet bath sponges, along the farm track across the cornfields to where it ran by the end of the road where we lived.
The house hadn’t changed. After what had just happened to us did I honestly expect it to have died of grief or something? I don’t know. It just seemed to me that those redbrick walls should have a different appearance. Instead they were resoundingly indifferent. At times like this logic is a slippery thing … too slippery for a traumatized mind to cling to for long. So, I failed to perceive the illogic of the house suffering in tandem with its residents.
Nobody spoke as we walked down the side of the house. By now it must have been around 6 a.m. Soon clock radio alarms would be alerting neighbours to heave their bones out of bed. Still on autopilot I climbed on to the garage roof, then in through a window with a broken catch; a route I’d followed many times before in childhood. Eve and Madeline shivered by the back door as they waited for me to let them in. On the way I collected dry bath towels. Although we’d been abducted by force from the house the Echomen had left our home remarkably tidy. Even the petrol smell had gone. On reaching the back door I unlocked it, handed out the towels then stood back to allow the pair in.
Eve entered first. Her eyes could have been the windows of an empty house. A staring blankness. She paused.
‘The woman can’t come in,’ Eve intoned. ‘I know what she is. I won’t have her in our house.’
The escape from the flooding prison cell, then labouring to rescue Eve before the exhausting walk home had left Madeline with a beaten look. Matted hair stuck in spikes, a bruise darkened her cheek, no doubt acquired in the struggle to climb through the ceiling bars.
‘You can’t come in,’ I told her.
Her large dark brown eyes held mine as a weary mind calculated her options. ‘I’ve nowhere to go.’ Her voice was hoarse. ‘I don’t even know who I am anymore.’
I turned to Eve. She shook her head. ‘Please, Mason.’
The loss of our mother had broken my sister’s heart. No way would I make her feel more wretched by inviting Madeline into our family home. ‘Don’t worry, Eve. Go change into some dry clothes, I’ll deal with Madeline.’
‘Madeline?’ The way Eve phrased the name had the same resonance of someone saying ‘Edible?’ when served up a rotting pig’s head with an assurance it was lovely grub.
When Eve retreated upstairs I began to close the door in Madeline’s face. She stared with pleading eyes, yet she never actually said anything. With the door just inches from shutting her out I leaned into the gap.
In a whisper I told her, ‘The side door of the garage will be open. You’ll find the car unlocked. Make yourself comfortable in there. I’ll bring you some clothes later. Here.’ She already had one towel but I handed her a second one. ‘Wrap yourself in both; you look cold.’
You can debate the niceties of hospitality any other time but this one. Madeline was a monster – no, worse than a monster: she’s a version of me. I remembered how I’d drowned the Echoman a couple of hours ago. If I was capable of killing in cold blood, what whims and fancies might be lurking inside of her?
chapter 19
A day wrapped in fog. That’s what it seemed like now. We’d been in the Echomen’s jail for nearly forty-eight hours. Eve and I had made it home. Exhaustion smashed our will to keep going. We slept in the bedrooms we’d occupied since children. In the garage Madeline must have slept, too, because the few times I looked out the window there was no sign of movement. At one point in the day I got up to eat something from the refrigerator, I can’t remember what, and I noticed Eve had taken down all the photographs of Mom.
When I returned to bed Eve stood at her bedroom door. Her eyes were hollow things, more like raw wounds than the pretty features that attracted the boys.
In a broken voice she said, ‘Mason, I know I should be asking you what happened to us … my brain feels dead now … I can’t think about anything … nothing that makes sense anyway …’
‘You should try and sleep. You’ll feel better.’
‘Better? I can’t believe I’ll feel better ever again. Mason?’ There was a pause as she held me with a wounded look. ‘We’re not going to the police about this, are we?’
‘Not yet.’
Eve had every right to ask me my reasons, or to simply call the cops. Instead she stepped back into her bedroom. I waited on the landing, just in case she did change her mind and start asking questions. After all, there were plenty. Why were we kidnapped? Who were these Echomen? Why did they do that to us? How come Madeline looks an awful lot like you, Brother dear?
After I heard Eve climbing into bed, then it falling silent in her room, I decided to return to my own. Sleep is supposed to be the great healer of emotional wounds – I don’t know how true that is, but sleep is an ideal escape from reality. You see, this is eating into me, if I’d moved that bit faster I could have saved my mother. All I needed was an extra sixty seconds after releasing Eve. Memory replayed scenes of what could have been: unscrew the winged nuts that hold the hatch on my mother’s cell; she’s pressing her face up to the bars to keep above the water flooding in; then (and I see this more than anything) flip back the hatch with a shout of: ‘That was a close one, Mom! Don’t worry, I’ll help you out.’ And out she comes, dripping wet, panting, but alive as you and I.
I realized I’d sat down on the top step of the stairs. Grief, anger, frustration, remorse – they boiled inside to make me sick to the bone. I gripped my knees so hard my fingernails turned white. In the shadows at the bottom of the staircase a figure sat on the third step. With his back to the wall, his face was tilted up at me. Eyes lightly closed, tip of the tongue protruding through dead lips – just the same as usual, right down to the cracks in his scalp, reddish skin, bandages that were as much dust as cotton threads. Unmoving, unspeaking; the serene god of stillness … Natsaf-Ty, keeper of the sacred crocodiles, he’s looking at me. He knows the secret me. Why, all those years ago, wasn’t he there in the shadows to witness what really happened that evil New Year’s Eve? That I knocked out the drunk to prevent him from stabbing my best friend in the back? Natsaf-Ty sees me replaying that scenario of saving my mother if I’d only moved faster. He also sees the secret I’ve been working so hard to keep from myself—
I snarled, ‘Don’t you dare accuse me of that – don’t you fucking dare.’ My fingers curled into fists that ached to punch out. ‘Madeline, means nothing to me. I’m not obsessed with that woman – I never will be!’
The figure on the stair didn’t move – not a single, wise old bone in that crust stirred.
I sighed. ‘Mom always used to say …’
Grief comes in a wave. You see it approach, you know it’s coming; only you can’t dodge it, or reduce its power over you. The wave hits, overwhelms … you, too, have experienced grief. There’s no need for me to elaborate.
A day wrapped in fog. Sleeping, waking, eating cold cuts, nausea: the food rebounds. As the day passed in a blur I alternated naps poisoned by nightmare with checking that Eve was still safe. In the afternoon, gales brought rain that lashed the house with the force of a whip. Draughts made human sounding groans in the chimney. Ice-cold air filled rooms as i
f they became a doppelganger of the swimming-pool prison filled with icy water. While Eve slept, I delivered clothes along with food to Madeline out in the garage. Cool logic dictated that I take either Mom or Eve’s clothes to the woman. But I saw only too vividly how Eve would freak at the sight of Madeline – the she-monster who wore my face – wearing either her clothes or our mother’s. So the garments I presented to the woman huddled in the back seat of Mom’s car had to be mine. Even though Madeline’s a hundred per cent female, with no trace of becoming hermaphrodite, the woman closely matched my height.
‘Put these on.’ I dropped the clothes through the vehicle’s open window. ‘There’s a hairbrush in the glove compartment.’ Rain clattered against the garage roof as if drawing the world’s attention to these strange events taking place. Come look at this, the rain-on-roof code seemed to say, the woman looks like him; soon she’ll be slipping into his clothes. Where do these freaks go from here?
‘Thank you.’ Madeline’s shyness mingled gratitude. She not only studied the garments but squeezed the fabric between her sublimely feminine fingers. This was no beauty pageant finery; I’d dug out a white T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, black jeans, sneakers – all pretty much unisex anyway. Did I bring underwear? Think about it: supplying my own underwear would have made Sigmund Freud sit up in his grave and commence some furious note scribbling.
In the confines of the rear car seat she shrugged off the towels, then the T-shirt she’d worn in the cell. When I turned away to avoid watching the rear-of-car strip show I glimpsed a figure skim by the garage window.
An Echoman? It had to be. It made sense for them to follow us home from their homemade jail then finish the job. Taking just enough time to grab a wrench from a shelf I raced out of the garage. Thoughts of Mom lying drowned in the swimming pool, hair fanned out, eyes staring, boiled up inside of me. If I could get my hands on one of the bastards … the heavy steel wrench felt good in my hand at that moment.