The walls begin to shudder. The crashing sound begins far away, and then it is all around me. The hall shivers like a bad TV picture. The floor is a sea, tossing.
I pad to the front door, slipping andyowing. Just because I am deciding to be brave doesn’t mean I’m not scared. I am so scared. What I see through my peephole isn’t really the outdoors. I understand that now. Now, I see with a shiver that the three locks are not fast. The door is unlocked, of course. I don’t have to go up, I have to go out. And everyone knows how you get in and out of a house. I give a littlerow. I didn’t really want to be right. I stand on my hind legs and pull on the handle with my paws. The door swings wide. The white flame greets me. I am blinded; it’s like being inside a star. The cord is a line of fire, burning about my neck. What will happen? Will I burn up? I kind of hope so. I don’t know what’s out there.
I step out of the house. The cord burns hot as a furnace, surrounds me in a forge of white heat. The world tosses and flips. Blinding stars suck me out into nothing. Nausea rises and I choke. All the air is crushed from my lungs.
The blinding white retreats; the stars shrink to small holes in the hot dark, through which I catch flashes of movement, colour, pale light. Moonlight, I think. So that’s what it looks like.
The world tosses like a boat on rough seas. Ted’s familiar scent fills my nose. We are being carried on his back, in a bag I think, or a sack – there are small holes stabbed in it, for air I suppose. I am too big. My skin is exposed and hairless like some kind of worm. My paws have become long fleshy spiders. My nose is not an adorable soft bump but a horrible pointy thing. Worst of all, where my tail should be there is a blank nothing.
Oh Lord. I wriggle but I can’t move. I think we’re restrained, tied up maybe. All around, there is sound. Leaves, owls, frogs. Other things I don’t know the name of. It all has a clarity I have never heard before. The air is different too. I can feel that, even through the bag. It’s cooler, sharper somehow – and it’s moving.
Lauren sobs, and I feel it burst up through my unfamiliar chest, my cavernous ribcage. I feel the tears coming from my tiny weak eyes. It’s just as horrible as I thought it would be.
I made it, I tell her silently.I’m in the body.
‘Thank you, Olivia.’ She squeezes me tightly, and I squeeze back.
Lauren, why is the air moving, like it’s alive?
‘It’s wind,’ she whispers. ‘That’s wind, Olivia. We’re outside.’
Oh my goodness. Oh gosh.For a moment I am too overwhelmed to think. Then I ask,Where are we?
‘We’re in the woods,’ she says. ‘Can’t you smell it?’
As she says it, the scent hits me too. It is incredible. Like minerals and beetles and fresh water and hot earth and trees – God, the scent of the trees. Up close, it’s like a symphony. I could never have dreamed it.
‘He has the knife,’ Lauren says. ‘Can you believe it? He buried it.’
Maybe he’s just taking us for a walk, I say, hopefully.Maybe he’s got the knife because he’s scared of bears.
‘Kittens don’t come back from the woods,’ she says.
We are quiet after that. More than anything I want to go back inside. But I can’t leave Lauren alone. I have to be brave.
He walks for an hour on rough ground. He climbs steep rock faces and wades across streams, goes through valleys and over hills. Very quickly we are in the wild.
He stops in a place that smells of stone where trees speak to one another in the night, over the sound of running water. From what I can see through the tiny opening at the neck of the sack,we’re in a shallow gulley with a waterfall at the end. Ted makes camp with a lot of rustling and groaning. Light flickers through the dark fabric that contains us. Fire. Overhead, I can hear the wind stroke the leaves.
I can’t see much but I can feel the vastness of the air. Wind crashing into clouds.I wish I’d never known the truth, I say to Lauren.The outside is terrifying. There are no walls. It goes on and on. How far does it go, the world?
She says, ‘It’s round, so I guess it goes on until it comes back to you again.’
That’s terrible, I say.I think that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. OhLORD, preserve me…
‘Focus, Olivia,’ she says.
Is he going to let us out of this bag?I ask.To pee or whatever?
‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t think he will.’ I can hear her mind running furiously. ‘It’s a change of plan,’ she whispers. ‘That’s all it is. We pivot. We adjust. He has the knife. I felt it against his hip. So you get it from him, is all, and kill him. Same plan. Better, actually, because we’re in the middle of nowhere and no one will come to help. We can make his plan work for us, see?’ I wonder if she’s been at Ted’s bourbon because she sounds exactly like he does when he’s drunk. Fear can make you slur your words as badly as drink does, I guess.
I think of the body, our weak, thin body, against Ted’s bulk, his might. The wind strokes my fur with cold fingers. I breathe it in. It is both ancient and young at once. I wonder if it is the last thing I will feel.
Wind is lovely, I say.I’m glad I got to feel it. I wish I had got to taste real fish, though.
‘I wish you had too,’ she says.
I can’t do it, Lauren. I thought I could but I can’t.
