“And then maybe bandage him up? I don’t think he’ll thank us for that, Gwen. Remember the last time I went in there?”
“He’s hurting, dying—more afraid than we are.” Fear would be the last thing the dog knew, that and isolation. Gwen could imagine the screaming fear of
alone
. Compared to that, pain was nothing.
Sadie took the flashlight from Gwen’s hand and went off down the aisle of mushroom tables. When she came back, she had the light trained on a jar of dog biscuits sodden with water. White pills were dissolving in the mix.
She gave Gwen the flashlight. “Keep it on the dog.” Sadie was only a vague shape in the dark as she walked into the circle of the dog chain, heading for the prone body in the flashlight beam. The dog cried once more, but couldn’t lift his head again.
Gwen’s eyes widened as Sadie did the unthinkable. She put her hand into the jar to extract a glob of the soggy mixture and held it to the dog’s mouth. The large rough tongue hung out between his jaws as he licked the food from her tiny white fingers. Gwen, who loved all animals, knew she could never have done this thing.
Sadie remained with the dog, petting him and crooning soft nonsense syllables. Gwen saw nothing vicious in the animal anymore. His eyes were all loving sorrow and gratitude. He continued to lick Sadie’s fingers long after the food was gone.
And then the dog was dead. Gwen had seen the moment come and pass. All that she was unsure of was whether death had caught him breathing in or breathing out. Now the carcass was more like a picture of a dog, an idea of one. He was no longer in his body. Only the living dwelled in their skins, their soul bags. Had the dog been surprised, or had he sensed it toward the end and even invited death to hollow him out?
Sadie returned to sit beside her in the dirt.
Gwen hugged her knees. “I’m ready to go back to the hole now.” She shivered under the cloak of towels. Her parka was not yet dry. The mercury in the thermometer outside the white room continued to drop. It was now thirty degrees. When they had settled back into the grave, Gwen asked, “Do you think the dog has a soul? Maybe he’s still here, walking around the cellar like Griffin in
The Invisible Man.”
“Claude Rains, 1933,” said Sadie. “Mr. Caruthers was wrong when he said you were too literal. You see a lot of things that aren’t there.”
And with this pronouncement the dog was altogether gone.
Brave dog.
Gwen looked around at the hole they sat in, more literally a grave. “What do you think our parents would say if they could see us now?”
“Well,
my
mother would say I was in my element. She says that every time I die.” Sadie got up and put a piece of the plastic over her head as a makeshift umbrella. The flashlight beam swung back and forth as she walked into the dark trees, saying over one shoulder, “I’ll be back.” The light disappeared around the thick trunk of an oak.
Gwen listened to the patter of rain on the leaves. She believed her pain was easing, but she was only losing the distinction between the black of the cellar and the blackness of eyes closing as she was sinking below the level of consciousness.
When she awoke again, with a stabbing sensation in her leg, the rain had stopped. It was so quiet. Gwen strained to catch a sound, any sound at all. The silence was enormous—bigger than the trees, and suddenly she was overwhelmed by it. Was she alone? The silence loomed over her, it was everything, bigger than the sky. “Sadie!” she screamed.
Sadie came running back, her shape forming out of the darkness in slices of the darting flashlight beam as she pounded across the floor of the forest. She was covered with dirt.
“What have you been doing?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“You were digging another hole, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. It’s near the Samuel tree. Very shallow, just the cover of dirt, okay? So we can get out quick. He’ll never think to look for us underground. So while he’s looking in the back of the cellar, where all the good hiding places are, and the door is propped open, we can—”
“I’m not going to be buried.” Gwen thought of the bugs squirming next to her skin, their antennae twitching, probing, looking for a way to get inside of her. “I can’t do it, Sadie. I can’t go back in the ground.”
Sadie climbed into the hole with Gwen and put her arms around her. “You’re in the ground
now
. You just don’t have any dirt in your eyes, that’s all.”
Gwen shook her head. She didn’t want to think of graves. And there was something else that bothered her. “He had a gun. Why did he just go away like that?”
“The Fly? You saw the dog bite him.”
“But he wasn’t even limping.”
“Neither did you, not right away. He probably went off to patch it up. Then he’ll come back.”
“But he had a gun, Sadie. He heard you yell the Geronimo command. Why didn’t he—”
“Shoot me and get it over with? Think, Gwen. What did he do next? He turned off the lights and the heat, right?” Sadie shined the light on her friend’s face. Now she could see that Gwen was not following her. “That’s the biggest part of the game—anticipation. It’s the most important part of a good horror movie. Do you get it now?”
Gwen nodded and bowed her head, whispering, “He’s dragging it out, torturing us. Like the dog. The way he—”
“Right. The dog is dead. We’re his new dogs.”
Gwen took the flashlight and trained the beam on the animal corpse lying in the dirt. “The horror movie keeps changing on me.”
“No. It’s the same movie, Gwen. The element of surprise is everything.”
“But it hasn’t worked so far.”
“A mere technicality.”
“It’s Christmas. Miss Vickers will be back tomorrow. She always comes home the day—”
“Gwen, I don’t think she’s ever coming home.” Sadie took the flashlight and pointed the beam at the stack of journals. She plucked up the one for the current year and flipped through the pages to the final entry. “See the squiggly line that goes off the page? I think this is where Miss Vickers knew she was dying.”
“You don’t know that. She was only tired.”
“What about the pills she spilled on the floor in the white room? See anything
else
out of place in that room? And the squiggly line? Tired, huh?” Sadie flipped through all the pages. “See her getting tired anywhere else?” She picked up another book and opened it to page after page. “See any other lines like that one?”
And now Sadie was pulling out all the journals and holding them out to Gwen, one by one, as she ripped through the pages.
“Stop it!”
“She’s not coming back, Gwen. If we wait for—”
“Stop! All right—you win. Help is
not
on the way.” She put up both her hands in surrender.
“Finally.” Sadie smiled as a reward for her dullest pupil.
“But I’m not going to be buried in the ground.” She would not be able to stand that. Gwen already had the sense that she was leaving, bit by bit, disappearing from the world. “Once I go into the ground, I’ll never be able to get out again.”
“We’ll work on that.”
“You know it’s true, Sadie. I won’t be going anywhere. But you could make it out of here.”
Sadie upended the flashlight to shine it on her widest grin, apparently amused by this odd idea that she could leave without her best friend.
Gwen drew back from the light, wanting the cover of darkness so nothing could be read into the tears flooding her eyes, the weak tremble of her mouth. Her friend would never know that—given the choice and two good legs to run with—she would have left Sadie behind. Gwen pressed hard on the wound to make it sing and shriek with pain.
ten
Sadie wore a canvas sack around her
shoulders to ward off the cold and the damp as she finished changing the bandage, and then rolled down Gwen’s tattered pant leg.
“Take my parka,” said Gwen. “I don’t need it. I’m—”
“No,
you
wear it.” She wrapped both feet in cloth tied on with twine at the ankles. It was too cold to go barefoot. Done with this chore, Sadie walked about under the trees, gathering up the debris of the dummy and collecting it in one pile. She sat cross-legged on the ground, took up her blade and stabbed it into the material of the sweater, over and over again.
Gwen leaned back against the trunk of the dead Samuel tree and watched. “I’m burning up. I don’t need the parka.”
“Well, I don’t want it.” Sadie returned to the rock wall and the less violent work of honing the blade. “Remember the tape we played last Saturday—the really hokey axe murders? Joan Crawford made them keep that movie set at fifty-eight degrees. She said it gave her focus.”
“Sadie, you’ve got to be freezing.”
“Keep it. You have to stay warm. You don’t want to get worse, do you?”
Could
she get any worse? She unzipped the red parka and wiped the sweat from her face. Her skin was hot to the touch. The sound of the metal grating on stone was relentless. “Why do you keep doing that?”
“I’m working on plan B.” Sadie rubbed the broken garden tool back and forth across an outcrop of irregular rock. “The blade needs to be sharper. He’ll be wearing a coat, so it has to cut through a few layers of heavy cloth. That’s one of the worst flaws in the movies—when the knife just slides into the body. It’s harder in real life. Hey, Gwen, watch this.” She dropped the knife on the ground, then sank down on her knees. With her legs hidden behind her, Sadie walked forward on her kneecaps. “Who am I?”
“You’re Blizzard, the legless man in
The Penalty
.” Gwen paused for a moment, stuck on the date. “Is it 1920?”
“Right. Good.” Sadie stood up and clasped her hands behind her back so nothing of her arms could be seen, only the small wings of her shoulder blades. “Now who am I?”
This one was entirely too easy. “Alonso the Armless from
The Unknown
, 1927.”
Sadie began to revolve in a very slow turn. When Gwen saw her friend’s face come round again, she sucked in her breath. Sadie had a mouthy grin of razor-sharp teeth. But how? Paper—her mouth was full of paper with ink-drawn teeth.
Gwen laughed and applauded. “You’re the vampire in
London After Midnight,
same year. Good one. You scared the shit out of me.”
Sadie pulled the paper from her mouth. “I’m building up your horror muscles.” She picked up her blade and returned to the dummy’s torso and torn limbs.
Gwen stared at the half-moon shape of discarded paper teeth. “You know what makes a really
good
horror movie?”
Sadie looked up from her stabbing. “Horror? Sorry—too obvious. I must be getting tired.”
“Well, it’s not the monsters, the really ghouly ones. The scariest thing is one shock in an ordinary world—like your paper teeth. No—like blood on Santa’s beard.”
“I got it.” Sadie hunkered down in the dirt and trained the flashlight on the lifeless body of her old enemy the dog. She redirected the beam to light up her face and a smile of wholesome innocence. “We could eat him.”
“That’s not funny.” Gwen shook her head, for evidently Sadie had completely misunderstood. “The dog isn’t . . .” Her words trailed off. She was stunned as she watched Sadie working over the dead body, taking blood from the dog’s wound and smearing it on her face. Then Sadie looked up to show her that she
had
understood—perfectly, though this didn’t seem the most practical implementation, not quite what Gwen had in mind. “I don’t think he’ll be afraid of—”
“I bet he’s never had an enemy larger than a little kid. He’s a coward.” She said this in anger, an alien tone that took Gwen by surprise. Sadie’s voice gentled as she ran one hand across the pelt of the dead animal. “This dog was more of a man.”
“He’s too big, Sadie. He’s going to—”
“Think it through. You had the right idea—the blood on Santa’s beard. The Fly
is
bigger. All the power is on his side, right? So when
we
go after
him
, he’ll be totally weirded out. It’ll be the last thing he ever expected.” She dragged one bloody finger down the side of her face in a jagged line. “He’ll pee in his pants. Does this look like a lightning bolt?”
Gwen nodded.
Sadie admired her reflection in the sharpened blade that had once been half of Miss Vickers’ garden shears. “I wish I had my Technicolor blood kit. We can improvise with the real thing, but it’s just not the same.”
“Sadie, we can’t hurt this man. We tried. If the dog couldn’t do it,
we
can’t.”
“What about
Freaks
?”
Gwen nodded, conceding the point gracefully, but not with her whole heart. Sadie was alluding to the movie’s dwarfs and midgets who had brought down an enemy of adult stature. And then the little people had quite literally cut their opponent down to size. She still had the occasional nightmare about this vintage film, the pride of Sadie’s collection.
“You know what Mr. Caruthers would say.” Sadie stroked her imagined gray beard and stared into space with a squint. “It’s an interesting problem in logic.” Then she was all Sadie again. “If we just sit here, he’ll come down and kill us.” She sank her blade into the dummy. “So we’re going to kill him first. An hour ago, you were all for it.”
Gwen covered her eyes to block out the beam of light, not wanting to see what the other child was doing with the dog’s blood. There was no way to explain this change of heart, not in any way that would make sense to her best friend, the master of terror. Bravery came in moments. Gwen could not sustain it for an entire hour. Perhaps a moment would come again—perhaps not. Though the dead dog lay only a few feet away, the concept of killing was as far from her as the moon.
To kill a
man
—this was unthinkable, impossible.
“It’s wrong to take a life.” Gwen knew this was a lame substitute for truth, but plausible. She watched a spider crawling along the ground near her foot. She was terrified of the bugs that lived under the ground. However, this arachnid seemed fairly benign, all eight legs heading in a definite direction, a creature with places to go and things to do. “Father Domina says life is sacred. All life.”