The Dead Lands

It is then they hear a noise. The thudding of what at first sound like footsteps. She puts a hand to his mouth and says, Shh. He shoves the hand away and says, “What?” and she returns the hand, muzzling him. She faces the dark hallway. Her scissors rasp open. And then the thudding comes again and she recognizes the sound. “Someone’s at the front entrance.”

 

 

Simon pushes her hand away again, and this time she lets him talk when he says, “It’s night. No one’s supposed to be out.”

 

She closes the scissors with a snap.

 

“Maybe we should ignore it,” Simon says.

 

But the thudding stubbornly continues, trembling the air.

 

He stands from the chair. Cut curls fall from his shoulders and feather his feet. Ella pushes him back into a seated position. “You stay here.” When he opens his mouth to protest, she points the scissors at him and says, “And whatever you do, don’t make a sound.”

 

*

 

 

 

Sometimes it happens. Someone comes knocking late at night. Usually the feebleminded. The occasional drunk deep in his cups. Lewis will hiss and snap at them, burn them with a lantern, push them down the steps, send them hurrying off. But that was in the days before the enforced curfew. And now Lewis is not here to help. There is only her. The boy doesn’t count. A broken-armed, thin-necked thief. He is as threatening as a gumming puppy. He is to be protected, not offer protection.

 

She knows who it is. She wishes she didn’t, but she does. She can feel him out there—in the same way the old-timers say they can feel storms—when she grips the scissors tightly and follows the staircase to the first floor and approaches the double doors, which shake in their frames. She waits there a long time, willing the sound to stop, but it won’t. Not until she undoes the lock, opens a crack, peers out.

 

In the darkness, in his black uniform, his face appears like a moon hovering over her. He presses a hand against the door to open it wider, but she presses back, giving him only these few inches, enough for him to see her unyielding expression.

 

“You took quite a long time to answer the door.”

 

“I was busy.”

 

“Doing what?”

 

“Sleeping.”

 

“You sleep with the light on? I saw the light on.”

 

“I was getting ready to go to sleep.”

 

“Are you with someone?”

 

“No.”

 

“I didn’t have to knock, you know. I was just being polite.”

 

“What do you want?”

 

She cannot stop him now, though she tries. He leans into the door and it gives way. Her strength is a child’s compared to his.

 

“You haven’t heard from him?”

 

“Who?”

 

“Lewis? Who else?”

 

“No, of course not.”

 

The door clicks closed. “What’s behind your back?”

 

She almost says nothing, but she knows that will only make him angry, will make him step toward her, grip her arm and twist it into view. Slowly she reveals the scissors.

 

“There’s hair on these scissors.”

 

“I was cutting my hair.”

 

“That’s not your hair. It’s not the same color.”

 

“Then I was trimming the clots off a stuffed ground sloth.”

 

“I thought you said you were getting ready for bed?”

 

“You ask too many questions.”

 

“Do I? I have so many for you.”

 

He snatches the scissors from her. His fingers, too fat, don’t fit into the grips, so he must use two hands when he opens and closes them. “Hold still a moment.” He steps close to her and she slides back her feet and he says, “I said hold still.” She does as he says but will not allow him to observe her fear. She crosses her arms and stares straight ahead when he circles her, teasing the blades across her shoulders, the back of her neck, down her arms. Finally he chooses a section of sleeve, a moth’s wing of fabric, that he snips away, and it disappears into his pocket.

 

She prides herself on her strength. Not just the muscles that ball in her arms, but her heart, her ability to bully back anyone who might take advantage of her. But she feels weak now. Slade makes her feel weak. She almost cries out for the boy. That will only make the situation worse, she knows, give Slade another target to prod with a blade, another line of questioning to delay his stay and renew his suspicion of her. But the scissors are so sharp and his mouth is so close, his breath mingling with hers.

 

She is close to kicking at his crotch, when just in time Slade drops the scissors. They clatter on the floor. He walks away. He opens the door and pauses at the threshold to regard her. “I could hurt you, you know. And nobody would stop me.”

 

She has to swallow several times before she can say, “I know.”

 

“Good.” He pulls the door behind him, his eye in the crack the last thing she sees of him.

 

*

 

 

 

Ella won’t speak to Simon, not at first. He asks her what happened. He asks her what’s the matter. He asks how can he help. She paces the hallway and then their room, stomping her feet, brushing a hand through her hair, slashing the air with the scissors.

 

“What?” Simon says, and after a few minutes she starts to talk under her breath and Simon says, “I can’t hear you,” and her voice grows louder and louder and comes out finally as a shout when she goes over all the things she should have said and done but didn’t.

 

He waits for her to finish and then says, “I hate him too.”

 

This seems to irritate her. As if hatred were water and there was only so much to go around. “You hate him? Why would you hate him? What do you even care? What does this have to do with you?”

 

When he says Slade killed his father, she tucks the scissors into her belt and says, “Oh.”

 

“I’ll kill him for you. I’ll kill him for both of us.”

 

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