The Cabin at the End of the World(28)
Leonard and Adriane swap positions. They walk between Redmond and the deck, passing through that nowhere space, eclipsing the vision, wiping it out. It’s gone, whatever it is, made of empty space and the whitest light. Eric does not think he saw another person coming in from outside, some secret member of their group, hiding and waiting until the right time to enter the cabin. The vision’s near instant appearance and disappearance only amplifies the wrongness and unearthliness, filling Eric’s head with the snow and crackle of a lost signal’s static. He realizes what he saw is most certainly the result of his injury and misfiring synapses. Still, he’s afraid to inspect too closely the memory of the experience; more than an instinctual fear of the inexplicable that cannot be verbalized, it’s the bone-deep dread of discovery. What if the shimmer and its light did not come from his scrambled brain and was not a trick of the sun?
That question is followed by another that bubbles up and does not present in his typical inner voice or manner. An ever-evolving mental life is impossible to fully detail, even by the owner, and one generally goes from day to day unquestioning one’s own being or consciousness, with absolute faith in this is who I am and this is how I think. The follow-up question does not fit within Eric’s secret mental code, does not use the unique parts of speech of his interior language; it is not of him. To Eric’s horror, the question feels like an intrusion from a different mind or a terrifying answer to an unspoken prayer.
What if the shimmer’s light came from the colder spaces of the infinite sky?
Wen
Nothing that has happened to this point is as scary or creepy as the kneeling and masked Redmond. The outline and contours of his hidden face fill her with the same mix of fascination and dread she felt when she stared at the human skull that was in her classroom. What if the mask is Redmond’s new skin and underneath there is only the whiter white of bone? She imagines his face and head changing shape while hidden away and then Leonard ripping off the mask like a magician to reveal a grotesque, ravenous monster, the kind so terrible and ugly that just looking at it will kill you.
Redmond says, “Thank you.” His puppet mouth opens and closes out of rhythm with the words, an amateur attempt at ventriloquism. The cloth through which he speaks is thin, but his voice sounds garbled, modulated. He shouldn’t sound like he does. Wen covers her ears because she does not want to hear anything else he might say.
Adriane appears from behind Andrew’s chair, floating like a patient ghost, and flanks Redmond’s left side. The bramble of raking claws at the end of Adriane’s weapon passes over her and Andrew’s heads, close enough so Wen can count the tangles of claws and their individual sharpened points plaqued with rust and dirt. Adriane’s face is blank; her facial muscles are rigid scaffolding for her skin.
Leonard stands behind Redmond, as stoic and still as a brick wall. Wen stares at Leonard, wanting and waiting for him to look at her. Despite everything, she hopes Leonard will show himself to be a good person, the person she thought he was when they were out in the front yard together. She considers waving at him but decides against trying to get his attention. He has the same blank, robot face Adriane has. Sabrina has the robot face, too. She drifts within arm’s reach of Eric and settles to Redmond’s right.
Wen darts her eyes around the room, memorizing everyone’s position, where they stand and how they hold their staffs. She turns her head and twists her torso, almost falling off Andrew’s lap. Poor Daddy Eric is alone. He alternates between being wide-eyed and squeezing his eyelids shut, exaggerated blinks like he has something stuck in his eyes and it won’t go away. It appears he’s looking above Redmond (not at him) and into the kitchen or out toward the deck. Wen looks out there, too, and then past the deck to the shimmering blue lake, which is a million miles away.
Wen sinks deeper into Daddy Andrew’s lap and deeper inside herself. Should she go to Daddy Eric? Maybe walking over and simply kissing the back of his head will make him better. Then she’ll talk to him and no one else, shake him if she has to, and tell him she can help if he would just tell her what to do. What are they going to do?
Maybe she should run like Daddy Andrew said, sprint through the room, dodge the turned-over furniture like a mouse through high grass, then onto the deck and outside and away. She can run fast. Her dads tell her that she is fast, so fast, all the time. And they tell her she is shifty. She knows their races are fixed for her to win, but Wen outlasting the catchers in their catch-me-if-you-can games until Eric and/or Andrew are bent over, hands on knees, gasping for air is legitimate. She is shifty. Wen loves that word. It means hard to catch. It means even better than fast; it’s a smart fast.
Leonard and Adriane exchange positions: Adriane is stationed in front of the couch and directly behind Redmond; Leonard is now closer to the kitchen and parked to Redmond’s left. The room is bright and quiet but for Andrew’s heavy breathing. Wen rocks and tilts side to side with his expanding and then collapsing chest.
She knows she’d make it out of the cabin without getting caught if she was to run, but where would she run to? She doesn’t want to accidentally get lost on the dirt roads that fork and branch away leading to nowhere or to worse places than here, and what if she has to ditch the road for the thick woods surrounding the cabin for miles and miles? Her dads were explicit in saying she could not go into these woods by herself under any circumstances because they might never find her again.