The world tips as Dee limps towards Ted’s body. ‘Shhhh,’ she says. ‘Be quiet. You’re not real.’ She presses her palm over his nose and mouth. He squirms and struggles, kicking up leaves and dirt with his heels. She holds her hand fast until he goes still. It’s hard to tell through the mess but she thinks he has stopped breathing. She stands, wearier than death. The world goes grey at the edges. Her arm is shiny, blackened and swollen.
She stumbles to Ted’s backpack, through wisps of white cloud. She finds a yellow pouch. The snake on the label rears out at her and she flinches, gasping. The instructions swim before her eyes. She puts the tourniquet on and places the suction cup on the mouth of the wound. The flesh there is pudgy and dark. It hurts. She pumps and blood fills the chamber. Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but she feels better already, steadier, more alert. She pumps a couple more times, then gets up. That will have to do.
She sees the surgical glue tucked into a pocket of the backpack. She throws it into the fast-running stream. ‘Just in case,’ she whispers. After all, dead rattlesnakes still bite.
She thinks of her hand over Ted’s nose and mouth as he fought for breath. It’s fine, because he deserved it. Everything will work out. As for the moment when the man spoke with a little girl’s voice, that was just confusion caused by the poison. Her vision blurs, but she quests patiently, until she sees her yellow blaze on a distant tree trunk, marking the path out of the valley. She stumbles towards it. Dee will find Lulu and give her a place to live, and they will be so happy, and hunt for pebbles together. But not at a lake. Never there.
‘Lulu,’ Dee whispers. ‘I’m coming.’ She staggers through the forest, through pillars of dark and light. Behind her she hears a dog baying. She hurries on.
Olivia
It’s not your body, Lauren. I am crying now. It’s his. We live in Ted.
‘Yes,’ she says with a sigh. ‘But not for much longer. Thank God.’
Why, why? I am rowing like a kit. You made me kill us. All of us.
‘I needed your help to end it. I couldn’t do it on my own.’
I thought I was so smart – but Lauren led me so easily down this path, to this moment, to our death.
You lied, I say. All that stuff you said, about the vinegar and the freezer …
‘That was all true,’ she says. ‘Though it happened to him and me both. You don’t know what we have been through. Life is a long tunnel, Olivia. The light only comes at the end.’
I can see her in my mind, now. Lauren is slight with big brown eyes. Everything she said about her body is true. Murderer, I say to her.
Somewhere, Ted is panting. There is a really bad sound in it, a wet red whistle. He raises our hand, where it has been clutched against the wound in his abdomen. We all watch as our blood runs down our palm, hot and stinking slick. It drips to the ground and the earth drinks it. Ted’s body, our body, is failing.
Oh, Ted, I say, trying to reach him. I am sorry, so sorry. Please forgive me, I didn’t mean to hurt you …
‘You can’t hurt him,’ Lauren says, voice both a whisper and a scream. ‘We take his pain. You take it from his heart, I take it from the body.’
Be quiet, I say. You’ve done enough talking. Ted, I call. Ted? How do I fix it?
He is bleeding from the mouth, a thin line of red. The words are slurred but I know him well so I understand. ‘Listen to them,’ he says. All around, in the dawn, the birds are singing in the trees.
The cord is white and soft, glowing. It connects the three of us, heart to heart. Then the white light grows, spreads over the earth, and I see at last that actually the cord runs not only through us, but also through the trees, the birds, the grass and everything, out across the world. Somewhere, a big dog bays.
The sun has risen. The air turns warm and golden. The lord is here, before me, a burning flame. He has four delicate paws. His voice is soft. Cat, He says. You were supposed to protect. I cannot bring myself to look up into the lord’s face. I know that, today, it will be my own.
Ted
Dimly, above, someone is pressing their hands to the hole in my stomach. Someone’s breath is warm by my ear. He presses down harder and harder but the blood comes out all slippery anyway. He curses to himself. He is trying to draw me back up from the black, into the sunny morning.
We could have told him it was no good. We are dying, our flesh is cooling to clay. We feel it as it happens, each one of us. Our blood comes in slow pumps, spilling out all our colours and thoughts onto the forest floor; each breath is harder, slower, leaving us colder. The safe tattoo of our heartbeat is broken; now it beats like a kitten playing or a bad drum: growing fainter, more irregular.
There is no time for goodbye, there is only the cold stillness that creeps over our fingers and hands, our feet and ankles. Crawling up our legs, inch by inch. The little ones are crying, deep down in the pit. They never did anything to anyone, the little ones. They never had a chance. The bright burning world falls into darkness.
Sun lies in long stripes across the bloodied forest floor. Nearby, far away, a dog whines.
Now nothing.
Olivia
I’m back in the house, I don’t know how and it doesn’t matter. There is no time to feel relief at having
