The Last House on Needless Street(72)

She pokes the long body with a finger. It is cool to the touch, limp and powerless, now. She picks up the dead snake. She wants to remember this for ever. ‘I’m going to make a belt out of you,’ she says. Joy rolls through her. She feels transformed.

As she lifts the dead snake, meaning to put it in her pocket, the head twitches and turns. Dee sees it happen in slow motion – the snake’s head lunging, burying its fangs in her forearm. Dee feels her mouth widen to a silent scream. She shakes her arm, trying to detach it. The long limp body shakes too, lashing in mimicry of life. Some things survive death. The pain of the bite is bad. But it is nothing to the horror of having the thing attached to her, like a monstrous part of herself.

At last Dee hooks the clawhammer into the dead jaws and pries them open. The fangs are pale and translucent in the torchlight. She throws the mangled body into the forest, as far as she can.

Something bubbles up inside her. Don’t scream, she tells herself. But it’s laughter. She is racked with it, wheezing with it. Tears stream down her face. There was a snake, after all.

She doesn’t want to look, but she has to. The flesh around the bite is already swollen and discoloured like a week-old bruise.

Get it done, Dee Dee. Still giggling, she rips her sleeve off at the shoulder to relieve the pressure on her ballooning flesh. She is a good hour away from help. The only thing to do is go on, and finish it. Ahead, Ted’s light dances away through the trees. Unbelievably, the encounter with the rattlesnake took less than a minute. Dee stumbles after his light.

She begins to feel sick. Other things happen, too. It seems to her that the trees are becoming whiter, and there are red birds darting among the trunks. She gasps and tries to blink the image away. This is not a dream. There is no nest of human hair. Her arm pulses, like it has its own heart. She knows that if you are bitten, you are not supposed to move. It spreads the poison. Too late, she thinks. The poison got me long ago.

She follows Ted westward. She turns off her flashlight. The moon is bright enough. Ted keeps his on. It must be difficult, keeping his footing with all that weight on his back. Maybe the weight is moving, fighting him.

With her good hand she fingers the clawhammer in her pocket. It is sticky with drying snake blood. She burns; her anger leaps and licks at her insides. Ted will pay. Every fifty feet she blazes another tree with reflective yellow. She has to believe that she will be coming back this way, with her sister.

She follows as close as she dares. Even so, she loses him. His light dances out of sight, and then he’s gone. The ground begins to fall sharply, and Dee stumbles, panics. But then logic reasserts itself. She can hear water running somewhere below. He will probably stop by water. Dawn is not far off, she can smell it in the air. Dee leans against a slippery trunk and breathes. She just needs to be patient for a little longer. She can’t risk falling in the dark. She needs dawn. She knows it won’t be long.

Dull sunrise paints the world pewter. Dee staggers down a rocky escarpment towards the sound of water. She comes to the lip of a deep defile. At the bottom, a stream runs hard and silver over the rock. By the narrow shooting water, there is a sleeping bag, open like a slack mouth. A dying fire sends up threads of smoke in the dawn-grey air.

So this is the weekend place. Now that the moment is upon her, Dee feels solemn. It seems almost holy, the end of so many things.

She picks her way down, shakily. Her arm feels heavy as stone, weighed down by venom. The rock by the stream is spattered with dark drops. Blood. Something has happened here.

She follows the drying blood into the stand of birches. That’s right, she thinks. Animals go into hiding to die. But which one, Ted or Lulu? It is familiar, the dim dappled tree light. The quiet conversation, leaf to leaf. This has happened before. Dee went into the trees and when she came out, someone was dead. This time overlays that, like a drawing on tracing paper. But of course, it was a summer afternoon, that time, by the lake. And it was pines that day, not silver birch. She drops white static over these thoughts.

She does not see it at first, the body. Then she glimpses a hiking boot, half torn off a foot, poking out from a tangle of briar. He is splayed at an angle, face down. Dark stuff leaks from his mouth. She thinks, Oh, she got away and he is dead, and joy surges through her. Then she thinks, But I wanted to kill him.

Ted groans and turns, slow as a world revolving. Dirt and leaf mould cover his flesh like a dark tattoo. The knife is still stuck in his abdomen. Blood bubbles up around it, pulses out in a glossy stream. He sees her, and his expression of surprise is almost comical. He has no idea how well she knows him, how closely she has watched, how intertwined are their fates. ‘Help me,’ he says. ‘You’re hurt too.’ He is looking at her arm.

‘Rattler,’ Dee says, absently. She stares at him in fascination. She knows how the snake feels, now, approaching the mouse.

‘My bag, by the stream, surgical glue. There’s a snakebite kit too. Don’t know if it works.’ She finds it wonderful that at this moment he’s concerned for her well-being. Of course, he thinks she’s going to help – he needs her.

‘I’m going to watch you die,’ she says. She watches as disbelief spreads over his face.

‘Why?’ he whispers. Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.

‘It’s what you deserve,’ Dee says. ‘No, it’s just a little of what you deserve, after what you’ve done.’ She looks around in the dim air. Nothing else stirs between the trees. ‘Where is she?’ Dee asks. ‘Tell me where she is and I will make it quick. Help you end it.’ She thinks of Lulu, alone and frightened, under the big uncaring sky. She wags a finger back and forth in front of his face. His eyes follow it. ‘Time is running out for you,’ she says. ‘Tick-tock.’