Coldbrook(20)

There might be mountains up here, she thought, or lakes, or cities or ruins, or something unrecognisable. And when at last she reached the top of the ridge and stood staring out over the vista ahead of her it took her breath away.

The mountains stretched to the horizon, as they did at home, and beyond the valley the landscape was more familiar. The muted sunlight bathed its features, forest and bare slopes alike, and the darker depths of the valleys could have held any number of mysteries. What disturbed Holly so much was the mystery of what might lie beyond them.

Exhausted, scared and feeling more lost and alone than ever before, she managed to walk a dozen steps to a small mound of rocks. Here she sat, leaning back with her eyes closed to catch her breath. The breeze was stronger up here, and it was fresh and untainted by the tang of industry. That doesn’t mean anything, she thought, and she pictured that shuffling, monstrous thing once again. She opened her eyes and stared directly at the sun. She’d never been able to do that at home. The whole sky was tinted a faint pink. Maybe this sun is dying, she thought, and she wished Jonah were here to tell her why that might or might not be possible. The last time she’d seen him was when he’d been pressed against the glass wall, his face slackened by hopelessness as he watched events unfolding in Control. She looked into the valley as if those things had happened down there, but the breach was hidden from her now by the curve in the hillside.

‘I’m so far away,’ she said, her voice surprisingly loud. She rested her elbows on her knees, her head on her forearms, and then she saw the single word carved into a smooth rock at her feet.

Exit.

The word seemed to pin Holly to the rocks. She glanced to the left, and saw that another of the seemingly random stones had a sharp, regular edge. She hadn’t looked for it before, but now she could see.

Exit.

She heard movement behind her, sliding, slithering, skin over wet stone. And as she stumbled from her perch and turned around she realised that she was not alone. The thing was rising from beneath thick vegetation atop the stones, lifting through twisted roots, parting leaves. It looked old and withered, similar to the man in Control, except this being had once been a woman. And she wore the scrappy remnants of clothes.

As the gaunt thing reached out something flicked at Holly’s hair, whistling past her ear, and an arrow buried itself in the woman’s face.





Sunday



1


JUST BEFORE DAWN on the day when the world changed for ever, Jayne Woodhams wished that she could die. For her it was not an unusual thought, and neither was the anger that followed.

‘Okay, babe,’ Tommy said. ‘It’s okay.’ And she groaned some more because it never was.

Dawn made the Knoxville skyline beautiful. Their second-floor apartment looked out over Fort Dickerson Park, and the Appalachian Mountains were silhouetted against the sky by the new day emerging from beyond. Such beauty sometimes held Jayne entranced and gave her every reason to live, but some mornings – like this one – it passed her by. The first pains of the day forbade beauty, and today the agony seemed worse than usual.

Tommy knelt beside her on the bed. He’d thrown back the covers even as she stirred, and now he was slowly massaging her feet and lower legs, working the feeling back in, pressing away the nightly muscle paralysis that her condition brought on. A year ago they’d seen a consultant in Cleveland who’d told her to wake every hour and exercise for five minutes. That had reduced the pain by maybe a fifth, but she spent her life exhausted, and the tiredness brought on a more fiery discomfort later in the day. Two years before that, a herbalist in Nashville had prescribed a paste to be applied to her worst-affected parts every night before bed. For three weeks Tommy had followed the herbalist’s instructions, mixing the gloop and smearing it across her lower legs and knees, elbows, shoulders and hips. There had been no obvious change, and at the beginning of the fourth week Tommy had shown her the weeping sores between his fingers from where he was having an allergic reaction to something in the paste. Medicines, muscle relaxants, hypnosis, acupuncture, a hydrotherapy bath, and more: they had gone from consultant to doctor to quack in their search for something that would ease her pain. And, in the end, they had learned to trust themselves.

Jayne slept badly, woke in agony, and Tommy was there every morning to massage her back to life. In the last six years, since she was sixteen and he fifteen, there had been perhaps twenty mornings when he had not been there to welcome in the dawn – and its pain – with her. His devotion had precluded college, and a job which meant frequent travelling, and he had settled into an easy, unfulfilling office job just so that he could be with her. She’d protested every step of the way, but her protestations made him angrier than she had ever seen him. They had soon stopped. I’ve never done anything I didn’t want to do, he’d told her, as if that made the limiting of his life for the sake of hers more acceptable.

She felt his hands moving up towards her knees and winced in readiness.

‘Knees now. Ready?’

‘No.’

‘Here we go.’

‘Touch me there and I’ll f*cking kill you, you f*cking torturer.’

‘Big talk.’ Tommy started working the area around her knees with his fingertips, a steady pressure to start with, growing harder and stronger as he plumbed the depths of her pain.

Jayne gritted her teeth, but she had long ago given up trying to hold back her tears.