My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry(97)

Alf goes back into the house and down into the garage to fetch Taxi.

When the police car swings around the corner at the end of the street, Elsa and the wurse and the boy with a syndrome scurry out of the front entrance and across the street and into Audi, which is parked there. The children jump in first.

The wurse stops midstep. Its hackles rise.

Probably only a few seconds go by, but it feels like forever. Afterwards Elsa will remember that it felt both as if she had time to think a billion thoughts and as if she didn’t have time to think at all.

There’s a smell inside Audi that makes her feel surprisingly peaceful. She doesn’t quite know why. She looks at the wurse through the open door, and before she has time to realize what is about to happen, she wonders if maybe it doesn’t want to jump into the car because it’s in pain. She knows it is feeling pain, pain the way Granny had pain everywhere in her body at the end.

Elsa starts getting out a cookie from her pocket. Because no real friend of a wurse would leave home nowadays without at least one cookie for emergencies. But she doesn’t have time, of course, because she realizes what is causing that smell in Audi.

Sam comes darting out from behind the backseat, Elsa feels the coldness against her lips when his hand closes over her mouth. His muscles tense around her throat; she feels the hairs on his skin scraping like gravel through the gaps in the Gryffindor scarf. She has time to see the brief confusion in Sam’s eyes when he sees the boy. It’s the moment when he realizes he’s been hunting the wrong child. She has time to understand that the shadows in the fairy tale didn’t want to kill the Chosen One. Only steal him. Make him their own. Kill whoever stood in their way.

And then the wurse’s jaws close around Sam’s other wrist, just as he’s making a grab for the boy. Sam roars. Elsa has a split second to react, when he lets go of her. She sees the knife in the rearview mirror.

And everything after that is black.

Elsa can feel herself running, she feels the boy’s hand in hers, and she knows that they have to make it to the front entrance. They have to have time to scream so Dad and Alf can hear them.

Elsa sees her feet moving, but she’s not guiding them herself. Her body is running by instinct. She thinks that she and the boy have had time to make half a dozen steps when she hears the wurse howling in horrendous pain, and she doesn’t know if it’s the boy who lets go of her hand or if she lets go of his. Her pulse is beating so hard that she can feel it in her eyes. The boy slips and falls to the ground. Elsa hears the back door of Audi opening and sees the knife in Sam’s hand. Sees the blood on it. She does the only thing she can do: picks the boy up as best she can and runs as fast as possible.

She’s good at running. But she knows it won’t be enough. She can hear Sam straining behind her, feels the tug at her arm as the boy is torn from her grasp; her heart lurches, she closes her eyes, and the next thing she remembers is the pain in her forehead. And Maud’s scream. And Dad’s hands. The hard floor in the stairwell. The world spins until it lands, swaying upside down in front of her, and she thinks that this must be how it is when you die. Like falling inwards, towards who-knows-what.

She hears banging without understanding where it comes from. Then the echo. “Echo,” she has time to think, and realizes she is indoors. She feels as if she’s got gravel under her eyelids. She hears the light feet of the boy running up the stairs as a boy’s feet can run only when they have known for many years that this could happen. She hears the terrified voice of the boy’s mother, trying to keep herself calm and methodical as she runs after him, as only a mother can do and only when she has grown accustomed to fear as the natural state of things.

The door of Granny’s house closes and locks behind them. Elsa feels that Dad’s hands aren’t holding her up, they’re holding her back. She doesn’t know from what. Until she sees the shadow through the glass in the entrance door. Sees Sam on the other side. He’s standing still. And something about his face is so deeply uncharacteristic of him that, at first, Elsa can’t quite shake off the feeling that she is imagining the whole thing.

Sam is afraid.

In the blink of an eye another shadow descends over him, so enormous that Sam’s shadow is engulfed in it. Wolfheart’s heavy fists rain down with fury, with a violence and a darkness no fairy tale could describe. He doesn’t hit Sam, he hammers him into the snow. Not to make him harmless. Not to protect. To destroy.

Elsa’s dad picks her up and runs up the stairs. Presses her against his jacket so she can’t see. She hears the door flung open from inside and she hears Maud and Lennart pleading with Wolfheart to stop hitting, stop hitting, stop hitting. But judging by the dull thumping sounds, like when you drop milk cartons on the floor, he isn’t stopping. He doesn’t even hear them. In the tales Wolfheart fled into the dark forests long before the War-Without-End, because he knew what he was capable of.

Elsa tears herself free of Dad and sprints down the stairs. Maud and Lennart stop screaming before she has reached the bottom. Wolfheart’s mallet of a fist is raised so high above Sam that it brushes the stretched-out fingers of the cloud animals before it turns back and hurtles down.

But Wolfheart freezes in the middle of the movement. Between him and the blood-covered man stands a woman who looks so small and frail that the wind should be able to pass right through her. She has an insignificant ball of blue tumble-dryer fluff in her hand, and a thin white line on her finger where her wedding ring used to be. Every ounce of her being seems to be yelling at her to run for her life. But she stays where she is, staring at Wolfheart with the resolute gaze of someone who has nothing left to lose.