The Book Eaters(98)
The story’s complexity had baffled Devon as a child, but she understood it well enough now. The truth was, Nycteris never really escaped. Oh, she got a prince and a castle and the cruel witch died at the end. But Nycteris could not ever leave the cave, because the cave was a place in her mind; it was the entire way she thought about reality.
Princesses like that couldn’t be rescued.
Devon’s last thought before falling asleep on the bus was to wonder if actually, she’d had it the wrong way around. Maybe everyone was living in a cave, and Nycteris was the only person smart enough to recognize it.
* * *
The bus arrived in Eastleigh, another town whose name Devon found confusing to pronounce. Her geographical knowledge was scatty, even with the maps she’d eaten.
“G?odny,” Cai pleaded as they exited the station in near-torrential rain. “G?odny, g?odny, g?odny!”
“I’ll get you food, very soon.” Devon hugged him close, then yanked back in alarm when he nuzzled at her ear.
She should have found him someone sooner. Much sooner. Only, it filled her with horror, the idea of “hunting” a victim; she wasn’t ready. She would never be ready.
But Cai was starving. She was running out of time.
They found another hotel—good God, why did everything cost so much? There had to be a cheaper solution—and left him alone, again, with just the Game Boy and the television. Time to feed her son. Somehow, she had to do it, manage it.
Through pure happenstance, Devon sourced her first victim before she’d hardly gone a block. An inebriated old man started swaying after her down the street, asking if she had a spare fiver for a drink and hey hey, where ya going, girl, on those big tall legs of yours?
Devon stopped, turning back to look at him. “Are you a good person?” And then, because that didn’t seem specific enough, she added, “Are you kind?”
“Huh?” He squinted, eyes red from too much whiskey. “Will ya gimme a fiver if I say yes, tall girl?”
Over sixty years old, she reckoned, if he was a day. Long enough to have lived a full life.
“Sure, I’ll take you back to my room and give you a fiver if you say yes.” She regretted the offer almost instantly. He was sure to misinterpret what she meant and say whatever he thought she wished to hear.
But he surprised her by pausing and giving the question serious consideration. The rain came back in a depressed drizzle and still he stood, musing, a little sad, very drunk.
“I wanted to be good,” he said eventually. “When I were younger. Me mam would’ve liked me to be a good bloke. But being good is hard, bloody hard. Life keeps grabbing ya by the collar, kicking you about.”
“True that.” Devon felt an unexpected heat behind her eyes. “Come on, I’ll bring you out of the rain. I’m not offering you my bed, but I’ll get you a drink and some cash, aye?”
So simply and easily was a life given away. If shame were an open wound, his handshake was a dose of salt and lemons.
Devon brought him upstairs to a starving Cai, then locked herself in the bathroom and cried into her fluffy hotel towels while her son fed to satiation outside. She kept fingers in her ears and the phone resting on her knees, always present, in case Jarrow called.
He didn’t call. The mobile lay silent, inert and indifferent to her prayers like one of the humans’ innumerable distant gods.
At last, all quiet in the room beyond.
Devon got up and exited her refuge. A messy scene greeted her, of sheets and blankets tumbled to the ground. A chair knocked over. Cai lay fast asleep on an unmade bed next to the old man’s cooling body. Peace in the midst of that chaos.
These were the early days, before Devon had learned to be careful, or what the phrase ongoing police investigation might mean in relation to victims left behind. She simply carried the corpse to the bathroom and left him propped up against the toilet. He hadn’t survived the feeding.
A problem for tomorrow. Grief rendered her exhausted and she needed sleep.
Later that night, crammed into the single bed, Cai talked to her while dozing on her arm.
“I never hurt anybody,” he muttered. “Only a little. Only when she were getting on me nerves. Them fucking coppers, always taking the woman’s side. God, I loved her, but I were no good to her. I coulda been a good man, if only I’d not loved.” He twisted around. “My missus cried like you do. But I didn’t do aught to you, only her. Why’re you crying, tall girl?”
“It’s too hard to be good,” she said through clenched teeth. “Life keeps grabbing me by the collar, kicking me about.”
“Ain’t that the way of it,” said her son, and for a horrible inside-out minute she felt as if it were Cai who’d died, his body inhabited by the spirit of the old man he’d absorbed. But then he said, with a crisper accent, “Good night, Devon. I’m so glad I know English again.”
“Night, love,” she managed, choking out the words from some withered memory of maternal comfort. “Sleep well.”
Long after Cai, or whoever he was now, drifted to sleep, the weight of everything settled across her like a second skin, tightening until she could hardly breathe or move. It occurred to her that she could just leave. Get up, walk away. A few days from now, Ramsey would detonate that bomb and Cai would be no more. Meanwhile, she herself would be fleeing somewhere, fast, solo, off on adventures and cut loose at last—