Red Spikes (7 page)

He held her tight and carried her out of town the misty, marshy way, the way no one walked – but then, no one had such long legs as these; he gathered up his patchwork nightgown and stepped across the marsh’s lumps and glimmers. Her feet swung out in the cold like bell-clappers, but struck noise from nothing. The man waded in among trees, where it was still misty, and then onto drier ground. He put Oll down, and pinned her with his foot while he lifted a door in the side of a mound of earth.

He carried her inside, and the door closed and entombed them.

Dizzy, her eyes full of stars that weren’t there, no voice to scream with and no breath to cry, Ollyn stayed limp where he had laid her, on wood as scratchy as Ma Keller’s fingers. Her eyelids turned dimly red as he made a light. Such a smell!

He frightened her eyes open, speaking close. ‘Let’s look at you.’ He was there with a smutchy lamp. She was on a table, and he sat down by it. The dark parts of his eyes skated about on his eyeballs. He propped her upright, took a tool, cut through the rag around her mouth and hooked the wax out. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Squeak to me. Squeak as loud as you like.’

When she did not, he poked her in the tum. ‘Blink, then. Show me how you can blink.’

This she did, and it delighted him. His delight was all brown teeth and spittle and spongy hands clapping.

Oll blinked some more; blinking was better than being eaten.

‘Yes, that’ll
do.
’ He smacked her so that she fell sideways on the table. ‘No need to be a
smarty
-britches.’

He brought his face close to hers, pointed to his own staring eyes with his flat fingers. ‘You see these?’

She nodded, still dazed from the blows.

‘Do you see blinkers? Do you see any lids?’

Ollyn shook her head.

‘You know what my name is, by those that rule the world, those mums and da’s, those butchers and merchants and clerks and councillors?’

She shook her head again. Maybe if she did not utter, he would not harm her.

‘Wee Will Winkie. “Wee” because I am so
big
, you see. “Winkie” because I
cannot
wink. I cannot wink, or blink, or sleep. I can barely
see
for my dry eyes and their irritations; do you see how red are these eyes?’

Oll nodded.

‘I will show you,’ he said. He darted away, darted back. ‘Cannot wink, or blink, but
aahh
he can think, this one. And you shall help me.’

He went off and rummaged in the shadows. ‘I have hid them, in case of intruders,’ he said in a muffled voice.

‘Beasts, you know, or thieves.’

The lamplight did not push back much of the darkness. Boxes, she thought, were stacked in a corner.

There was a heap of cloths, another heap of scrambled dark shapes – firewood, perhaps, from some twisty kind of tree. A fire snoozed in a filthy, rusted stove; the rotten smell near-smothered her.

‘Here.’ Out of the corner the giant came. He placed – either side of the lamp so that they lit up like lamps themselves – two large finger-smudged flasks made of glass.

They were nearly full with clear water. Its rocking stirred the fine white sediment on the bottom, which spiralled up slowly. In each flask something like a mottled pig’s ear hung from grey threads that passed up through a wax-sealed hole in the flask’s broad cork and trailed off across the table.

‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ said the giant. ‘So much work in them.’

Ollyn examined one pink-and-brown glowing shape. The work was— ‘

Stitches,’ she said, surprised into speech. It was clumsy stitches.

‘Yes!’ he said ‘Stitches-stitches, in the softest skin!
Many
nights’ work. And look along the bottom – what do you see there?’

‘Uh . . . a – a
fringe
.’ A fringe of tiny spikes. Of hairs.

‘Of real lashes.’ He breathed the words into her face. ‘Of
real
lashes! Can you believe it?’

‘It’s. It’s. It’s.’ She waved a hand helplessly at the flasks, thinking she might faint, or be sick, from this smell and this sight, the fleshy patchworks hanging, glowing. She looked away, but the only other thing to see besides the giant’s face was his nightgown, which had so much the same appearance, the different colours, the seams, the shapes of arms and chests, but splayed out, spread out as if flayed from—

‘I want my ma,’ she said to him, trying not to boohoo it, trying to speak as if she were one giant talking to another. Tears weaselled out of her eyes. ‘I want Ma and Pa, and Huvvy and Daff and all my brothers. You must let me go home.’

He seemed startled, but when she was unable to stifle a hiccough and a teary sniff, he relaxed again. ‘How about,’ he sing-songed, ‘a nice hot cup of tea, eh? And a bit of . . . cake. I have a cake.’

‘I don’t want a cake,’ whispered Oll, but he went looking. She pulled her legs up under her nightdress and wept into her knees, as he moved things and dragged things and muttered.

‘Was over
here,
’ he said. ‘I put the child
here,
’cause it was broken, and the cake
here
. Although, maybe I have mixed that up. Maybe it is among—’

He started to rearrange the pile of twisty firewood. The bad smell was much worse all of a sudden. Oll choked into the knee-cloth of her nightgown, trying to see through her tears.

‘Agh,’ he said. ‘Well, how about – these is good for a snack, after they’ve lain awhile.’ He looked doubtfully at the pile. He had one in his hand, by its little blackened leg. As Oll watched, the leg came out of its rotten hip socket, and the rest of the baby fell back onto the pile.

The sounds of the breaking, of the falling, stayed in the air a moment.

Then, too fast to think, Oll exploded off the table. She could not be faster than him, but she beat him to the door. She was not strong enough, but she lifted the heavy wooden hatch. She was not very clever, but she ran behind the mound and flattened herself to the grass there, and when Will Winkie burst out of the hatch and stood howling towards the town she clawed a stone out of the ground, and she knelt up and threw it high into the mist, so that it splashed down into marshwater far out in front of him.

The giant plunged after it, still howling. It will not fool him long, Oll thought. He will come back and search here. And she crept down and slipped into the marsh’s edge and found a place where she could crouch and rest her head against a hummock, to look like another hummock. It was shockingly cold, that water, but she must hide. And when she was hidden, if she kept very tight and still, wrapping her arms about her bent legs, there was a small amount of warmth that she could harbour there, and her feet and ankles warmed their mud socks just a tadge, and she would not quite die.

She lifted her head. She was in the Kellers’ upper room.

‘Did you sleep well?’ said fat Anya without turning over.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Ollyn, timidly.

But then all the Keller kids got up at once, and their faces were mud, and their nightwear was soaked with it and they trooped wetly to the stairhead, mud sliding from their hanging fingers, trailing mud behind them on the floor, and they slopped downstairs to Ma Keller who was frying something and calling them in her fluting voice.

Oll woke under the stars. It was quite warm in the water now. The shivering had stopped. She did not want to move; certainly she did not want to feel that night air on her wet skin. Besides, if she were not carried by a giant, she could not get across the marsh without drowning. She must wait for daylight and find a way, hummock to hummock, somehow.

She opened her eyes. Sparse golden leaves on black branches moved against a blue sky. She was a warm baby, at home, without thoughts or cares. Voices somewhere spoke of everyday matters, quietly so as not to disturb her, without urgency or anger.

Her eyes blinked open. The stars had tilted in the sky. Other lights, midsummer lights, flashed and moved on the marshwater. Voices spoke, the voices from her dream, nothing to be afraid of. She laid her head against the hummock again; perhaps she could sink back into that dream?

They were raising her from the marsh – her corpse, for she was surely dead; she could do nothing with her legs and arms, only feel them hanging off her like quartersacks of grain.

‘He killed me, then,’ she said.

‘What’s that, Olliepod?’ Huvvy’s head was huger than a giant’s against the stars.

‘She spoke?’ said Pa somewhere.

‘He threw me on the pile,’ Oll managed. ‘He . . . he cut off my eyelids for his jar, for his own.’

‘Ollie, are you in there?’ said Huvvy, frightened. ‘Is our Ollie in there, or is she bewitched somehow?’

She
did
have eyelids; they drooped across her sight. She was wrapped like a baby in rough, dry cloth. She was shivering, shivering. The shivering shook her whole body and almost all her mind. She was cold against her pa. He was chafing her arm and shoulder back to life through the blanket.

‘Did you go into his house?’ she said through her shivering jaws. ‘Did you see all those babies?’

‘That house there?’ Pa pointed and she saw the mound fading into the moonlit mist.

‘Did
you
cleave it?’