The Cabin at the End of the World(31)
Sabrina jogs into the bathroom and comes back out with an armload of towels. She sets the stack down on the floor to Andrew’s right and spreads two towels (one is brown, the other a fraying and tattered Harry Potter towel featuring the cover of the first novel) over the blood on the floor. She stirs the towels around with her feet, halfheartedly mopping up the mess.
Leonard is on the deck and paused with Redmond’s body half in and half out of the cabin. Hunched over, Leonard says, “Watch out,” to Adriane. He lunges backward and the body goes with him, passing over the glass slider’s metal tracking in the doorway and thunking down onto the deck. The wooden planks knock and echo with the body-relocation effort until Leonard parks Redmond up against the banister railing opposite the doorway and past the picnic table; the body is not out of sight from the interior of the cabin. Leonard inspects his hands and his red-smeared shirt and pants, and then looks at his watch twice. The first peek is autonomic, a reflex. The second look lasts longer and is a conscious attempt at determining the time. It occurs to Andrew that Leonard has been obsessively checking his watch ever since the four of them entered the cabin.
Adriane covers the body with the blue blanket, tugging and pulling the corners over Redmond’s legs. The blanket tents over his feet and its extra length pools over his head and against the railing. Picking the screen slider back up (which has seen better days; the wire mesh is misshapen and sags near the corners of the warped frame), she speaks and gestures with motions of her head at the body and then inside the cabin.
Leonard says something and he, too, points inside the cabin, and then he turns and walks away from both Adriane and the body. He pauses and says, “I don’t want to look at him, either.” As he ducks into the kitchen the sunlight dies. How quickly it becomes dark inside the cabin alarms Andrew, and he can’t help but imagine the light inside and outside continuing to dim until there is no light at all.
Eric
Leonard stands in the same area of the common room where Eric saw whatever it was he thought he saw in the moments before the attack on Redmond: an amorphous image hovering in the air, a bas-relief made of light and outlined in more jagged light, which became a head and shoulders, then a full figure in a swirl of glint and glare. He wants to dismiss it as an illusion, a result or symptom of his injury, but in his memory, the figure animates before disappearing; it turns inexorably to face him.
Did Andrew or Wen or any of the others see the figure, too? No one reacted like they did.
To Eric’s right, Andrew shivers like he is freezing. Wen stands on Andrew’s left, arms around his neck. She is in profile to Eric, facing the front door. Her eyes are open and they don’t blink often enough. Did Wen watch the death of Redmond? Eric can’t remember if she was looking when Adriane first swung her weapon. Had she turned away before that? He thinks so but he can’t be sure. Did she see the figure made of light? Is she seeing it now in front of the door and staring back at her?
“I’m truly sorry that had to happen and that you had to see it.” Leonard’s voice wavers and has active fault lines. He stares at his hands, opens them and closes them. “But we had no choice. We have no choice.” His apparent sincerity, or his sincere belief in his own words, is appalling and frightening. Eric believes for the first time that they will never leave this cabin alive and prays silently.
When there is no response to his apology and explanation, Leonard slumps and shuffles to the couch. He paws around the cushions and finds the remote control. He turns on the television and Wen’s Steven Universe winks back on, filling the black screen on the wall. Eric recognizes the episode as having seen it before, but he does not remember what is going to happen next or later. Is it an episode he watched previously this summer or is it the same episode that was on earlier, before Leonard turned off the TV? Had everything happened in fifteen minutes? Ten minutes? Less? Eric doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know what time it is or how long the four have been inside the cabin and he can’t remember when or how he was tied to his chair. He fears that he is forgetting other stuff, too, the most important stuff. Because of the concussion, he is also exhausted and is having trouble keeping his head up and eyes open.
With her show back on, Wen turns around. She stands unnaturally straight and wooden, her body devoid of the kinetic energy with which she normally emanates. Her thumbs are again inside her fists and held against her mouth.
Andrew says, “Wen, don’t look outside.”
Wen shakes her head no. Eric isn’t sure if the no is defiance or an agreement or a meaningless automatic response.
Sabrina carries the kitchen trash bin to the middle of the floor. She wipes her hands on her jeans as though her hands have already handled the towels and are covered in blood. She bends and lifts the sludgy, blood-soaked towels off the floor, and drops them heavily into the bin and two black flies spin into the air like whorls of smoke.
With Redmond’s body outdoors and now the towels disposed of, the smell in the room improves enough that inhaling through his nose doesn’t totally flip his stomach. The floor is still slick with blood; it’ll never be clean again. Previously invisible gouges in the wood are angry slashes, scars that won’t heal. Floorboards are tinted red in a trail leading to the deck. Taking the two remaining towels from the stack she brought out of the bathroom, Sabrina spreads them over the floor, end to end. She doesn’t mop or push the towels around; they’re left to be rugs. Then she covers the towels with the slider curtain. The flies briefly crawl on the curtain and then flit away disappointed.