Cuckoo Song

Chapter 12. MONSTER

There was no time to lie prone and breathless. The figures behind the screen were edging forward again.

‘Run!’ Triss scrambled to her feet, and beside her the small, flickering figure of her sister did likewise. As Triss dragged Pen towards the door, she cast a glance over her shoulder and caught sight of the picnickers, all reaching groping hands towards the fleeing girls. The gaggle now all shared one form, one face. They were all the Architect, eyes ice-bright with fury, screaming in silent rage.

The audience of children in the auditorium was making too much noise to notice two girls charging across the gallery. Even as the pair pelted down the stairs, Pen’s feet made no sound at all, and it occurred to Triss’s distracted mind that her own were not ringing out as loudly as she would have expected. Then they crashed through the door into the lobby, rushed past the woman at the counter before she could react and burst out into the street.

The panic halted Triss for a second, then spurred her into a sprint, back the way they had come. As she ran up the hill, Pen kept pace with her like a stumpy silver shadow.

Only when they were cutting across a park did they dare slow. Ducking into the shadow of a small huddle of trees, they waited for a moment or two to recover their breath, peering all the while to see if any grey figures were lurching after them. There was nothing.

Pen doubled up, resting her hands on her knees, and silently coughed up clouds of silver dust. Her skin was still colourless and luminous. As Triss watched, a moth circled giddily around Pen’s head before settling on her cheek, evidently drawn by the light. Pen brushed it off and continued gasping, until at last patches of sallow pink started to reappear in her face.

Triss could feel the breeze cold on the back of her neck. She was no longer panting from the run; now her breath was heaving with the storm of feelings that filled her when she looked at Pen. In the end she could not contain them. She grabbed her sister by the shoulders and shook her hard.

‘You little monster! You asked that man to kidnap me!’

Pen stared at Triss for a second, then, without warning, launched herself forward and threw her arms around Triss’s middle.

‘Triss! Is it really you?’ It was the tiniest croak. Pen’s voice was choked by tears, but also sounded oddly distant, as if beyond a wall. ‘Triss, Triss, Triss! You don’t know how glad I am to see you!’

Triss stared down at the top of Pen’s dishevelled silver head feeling furious and thwarted. She wanted to hit out, but that had now become strangely difficult.

‘Oh, stop it!’ she hissed instead, with all the venom she could muster. ‘You tricked me out to the Grimmer! Did you hope he’d drown me?’

‘No!’ Pen let go and pulled back a few steps, looking wild-eyed. ‘He just said he’d take you away! It was supposed to make things better! It was supposed to make Mother and Father better – instead of angry and miserable all the time!’ It was rather hard to follow Pen’s words. Her voice cut in and out like a faulty engine. During the patches of silence, Triss thought she could see white lettering trying to appear behind her, curling around the bark of the nearest tree and glistening on a few of the leaves.

‘You stupid…’ Triss trailed off, as if she too had been tainted with silence.

Pen scowled hard and muttered something. It looked a bit like ‘sorry’, but it was soundless, and the lighted word that appeared behind was scattered by the leaves, a small galaxy of unreadable glimmers.

‘But you’re here!’ Pen continued, more audibly. ‘Triss. Triss – what happened? Where have you been? How did you get back?’

‘Back?’ Triss stared at her. ‘Where have I been? I’ve been following you. I saw you sneaking out of the house, so I came out after you and tailed you to the cinema. What did you think I’d been doing?’

Across Pen’s face a collage of silver moved and danced, as if some invisible moon was casting its light on her through shifting foliage. As Triss watched, the younger girl’s expression changed to one of realization, her eyes becoming hard and wretched. The silvering seemed to get worse again as she grew more distressed.

Pen screamed a single silent word. This time the letters that curled across the bark behind her were large enough to be read, despite the rough bark and daylight.

YOU!

Pen backed away a few steps, her expression tormented.

IT’S YOU! YOU TRICKED ME!

‘Me?’ Triss screamed, no longer caring that they were in a public park. ‘I tricked you? Look what you did to me!’

Triss grabbed at a few strands of her own hair, yanked them out, hardly feeling the pain, and held them up. Within seconds she could feel them changing in her grip, becoming dry and crumbling. Then the wind was teasing fragments of filigree leaf from between her fingers, bearing them away like brown confetti.

‘I’m falling apart!’ Triss could hear all her anguish escaping into her voice, making it so harsh she barely recognized it. ‘Why is this happening to me?’

Still wearing the same bright, half-mad look, Pen watched the last brown specks fall from Triss’s fingers. Triss sensed the change in the younger girl’s posture even before Pen turned to flee, and pounced quickly enough to catch her by the arm. Pen screamed silently and tried to claw away Triss’s restraining hand, even tried to bite her sister’s knuckles. There was no mistaking the desperation in her eyes. But Triss was desperate too. With a force she had not quite intended, she stepped forward and pushed Pen hard, so that she fell down into a tangle of tree roots. Pen gave a smothered yelp, and lay there clutching her arm.

‘What did he do?’ screamed Triss. ‘What happened at the Grimmer? Tell me!’

‘Leave me alone!’ shouted Pen, her voice returning with a shrillness that sounded almost angry. ‘You know what happened! You were there!’

‘But I don’t remember! I don’t remember anything about that day! I don’t remember lots of things… I hardly knew who you were at first, or Mother, or Father. And home looks strange, and I keep seeing things that can’t be real, and I’m hungry all the time – and it’s all your fault! What did that man do to me?’

Realization washed across Pen’s face, leaving behind it a look of hypnotized horror.

‘You don’t know?’ she whispered. ‘But… but you must do! You must remember coming out of the Grimmer!’

Triss hesitated, as the odd impressions bobbed to the surface of her mind again, like dead fish. Surrounded by cold, murky water, light overhead, the silhouettes of two men above…

‘No!’ she erupted. ‘It’s just… pieces! And I don’t remember how I fell in at all!’

‘That’s because,’ Pen said, in a tight and tiny voice, ‘you didn’t.’

And Triss was standing on the brink again, just as she had been during her midnight excursion to the Grimmer. Standing on the edge of a terrible truth, something that after all she did not want to know. But she had drawn too close this time, and turning to run and run and run would not help.

‘What?’ she heard herself ask faintly.

Pen was breathing heavily. Her eyes still wore that hard, bright look that made her look mad and desperate.

‘They put a big bag over her,’ she said rapidly. ‘She tried to kick them but they bundled her up and put her in a car. And then they came back with all the things I gave them – the brush and the diaries and everything – and they threw them in the Grimmer.

‘And then they brought out this big doll, made of leaves and twisted sticks and briars, and they threw that in too. Then the short man made some noises that sounded like the wind in the trees. And the wind answered. And then there were ripples and something started coming out of the water. Walking out. And it was made of sticks and paper and bits and bobs and thorns and painted eyes, but after the water ran off it, it started to look like Triss.

‘And then it climbed out on to the bank and stood up. And it smiled. And I ran away, back to the cottage. But it came after me. It turned up at the cottage, dripping. And everybody thought it was Triss.’

The ground no longer seemed steady under Triss’s feet. Some stealthy sea seemed to be stirring under the turf, its waves rising and falling with each of her breaths.

‘But I am Triss,’ she said. Now it was her own voice that sounded distant and unreal.

Pen said nothing, but just stared up at her, her eyes as hard as bullets.

‘I am Triss!’ Triss tried to give the words more force.

And still Pen’s dark eyes just stared and stared.

‘I am Triss!’ screamed Triss, using all the power in her lungs, as if she could force the words to be true. ‘You’re lying!’ The wind was building, and as the clamour of the leaves increased, it sounded as if the very air was seething.

Pen made a lunge to the side, scrambling over the exposed roots away from Triss. As the younger girl stumbled to her feet, Triss leaped forward and lashed out, slapping Pen across the face as hard as she could. Pen gave a high, thin shriek of shock and pain and reeled back against a tree, clutching her cheek. She gave Triss one last hard-eyed, maddened glance, and far too late Triss realized what the look meant, what it had always meant. Not anger, not hatred at all, but terror.

Then Pen turned and fled unsteadily towards the park gate, the film-light still coruscating over her small form.

The girl who had been left behind did not chase her. Slowly she turned her hand and stared down at it, noticing the hint of red dampness on the tips of her middle three fingers.

I hurt Pen. I really hurt her somehow. I made her bleed.

She stared at those faint brown-red smudges for a long while, while the wind roared like a great page tearing in two.

‘I’m Triss,’ she whispered.

But she knew it was not true.