Riley feels a cold moment of unease. Sometimes when she eats or drinks she can almost feel the demon inside her licking its lips, enjoying the nourishment. She shakes herself. ‘There is no demon, remember, Oliver Olive? Just Cousin telling stories. Right?’
‘Right, Riley.’ He smiles at her and she smiles back.
Riley washes the empty plastic milk jug in the sink, then creeps out back. She puts the milk jug deep in the neighbour’s trash. She breathes in and out, in and out, hand on the plastic trash-can lid which is still warm with sun.Calm, she tells herself. Cousin is not god or anything. He can’t see everything she does.
When Riley comes back in Oliver is resting his head on crossed arms on the kitchen counter. He’s tired. She has to keep him alert, at least for a little longer. Once he sleeps she won’t be able to wake him up, and he has to be awake when Cousin comes home.
‘Shall we read a story?’ Riley asks Oliver brightly. ‘Come on. Let’s snuggle.’ She doesn’t know if she’s doing the right thing, trying to comfort him – to make it normal. Shouldn’t she be screaming and crying? What if Oliver comes to believe that this is what life is supposed to be like? Sometimes Riley even misses their mother.
Oliver leans into Riley on the couch, warm and solid against her side. He picks a book about a disobedient pug dog, and she reads. Oliver giggles at the jokes and points to things he likes in the illustrations. Or he follows along, sounding out the words silently. He is so smart it makes Riley want to cry. She doesn’t allow her voice to catch. She keeps reading in a steady tone.
They finish that book and are halfway through a Dr Seuss when Cousin comes in. His tread is heavy like a storm, it shakes the house. He hangs his coat and takes off his tie. Riley and Oliver listen, bodies like taut wire. Riley quickly slips Dr Seuss under the couch cushion. She takes up thePhonics are Fun!exercise book from the coffee table and pushes a pencil gently into Oliver’s hand.
Cousin stands in the doorway. He scratches his cheek and looks at them, head cocked to one side.
‘Hello, Cousin,’ Riley says, bright. ‘How was your day?’
‘Adequate,’ Cousin says. He checks his wristwatch and says, gently, ‘Boxes, Oliver. An hour.’
Riley sits in the room she shares with Oliver and listens to him labouring up and down the stairs, carrying the cardboard box filled with bricks. His breath comes in gasps. He stumbles sometimes and Riley’s body clenches, but Oliver recovers, he does not fall. By the end of the hour Oliver is staggering.
Riley can hear Cousin murmuring, ‘Come on, old chap.’ Cousin likes to sound British, thinks it makes him fancy. He copies the accent from masterpiece theatre on PBS.Bit of this, bit of that. Give and take; win some, lose some. Swings and roundabouts.Riley wants to go out and help Oliver but she knows what will happen if she tries to help.
Riley brushes Oliver’s teeth gently, trying not to move his canine and incisor, both of which are loose. There’s a little blood on the toothbrush when she’s finished so she washes it quickly under the tap before he can see. She doesn’t know whether he’s supposed to be losing so many teeth so fast. Maybe it’s normal at this age, Riley can’t really remember. Everything that happened before their mother died is hazy. Oliver’s eyes close intermittently and he sways. With so little food and doing the boxes each day, he sometimes falls asleep on his feet.
Riley tucks Oliver in and then goes to her own bed under the window. She lies down but doesn’t sleep. Instead she stares into the dark and tries, just like she does each night, to fix her mind on how they will get out. Riley is allowed to go to school, which means she’ll get her GED. Oliver is home-schooled. Mostly this seems to mean boxes and the Bible, along with that old phonics book Cousin found at the goodwill. Riley thinks the only reason Cousin lets her go to school is he wants her to help at the funeral home. Bookkeeping. Riley acts like she will stay and do this. Otherwise he would pull her out of school too. Riley listens as Oliver’s breath grows slow and regular. At least he can rest now.
The scent comes sudden and strong, hits her as if someone has just opened an oven door. Meat, burning, roasting. It’s fainter than it was this afternoon but that’s not even good because it’s coming through the window, creeping through the cracks. Riley sits up. Her heart hammers. The sound when it comes shocks her, quiet though it is.
Tap, tap, tap.Riley clutches her blanket.
Tap, tap, tap.A fingernail on the glass, a summoning.
Calm, she tells herself.Stay calm.If it wanted to kill her it wouldn’t tap at the window first, would it?
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound is growing sharper, more insistent. It sounds impatient. Riley thinks anxiously of Cousin sleeping across the hall. She wonders if you can shatter a windowpane with a fingertip.
She leans forward and looks.
Behind the glass is the boy in a green t-shirt, grinning like a mask. His bright straw hair is cropped short all over, and he’s thin. Perhaps he is fifteen or sixteen. His brown eyes are wide; they should look innocent but all Riley can see in them is pleasure. The boy covers his mouth with one hand and laughs at the horror on her face. He must be clinging to the window frame with only one hand now, but he’s steady, easy as if he were floating mid-air. He motions with a finger for her to raise the sash.
Riley gently slides the window up an inch or so and bends to look through the crack. She understands that events are now out of her control. There’s a momentum to what’s happening that can’t be stopped. The scent is very strong now; the reek comes in through the window – char and flesh and smoke.
‘You followed me from the store,’ Riley says. ‘What do you want?’ She wonders exactly how the boy is going to hurt her. She accepts hurt now, as a part of things. Demons might not be real but people are.
‘I just wanted to talk to you,’ the boy says, startled, and hearing the voice, Riley realises her mistake. ‘You looked sad. And I saw you steal the milk.’
‘You’re a girl,’ Riley says.
‘Sure,’ says the girl. She touches her shorn head. ‘I had to cut it off, it was knotted like a rat king.’
The smell that surrounds the girl is mostly dirt, woodsmoke and unwashed clothes, Riley realises – not meat and sulphur.
‘My name’s Noon,’ the girl puts a hand through the open window for Riley to shake, and the gesture is so homely and regular in spite of the strangeness of it all that Riley can’t help but smile. The girl’s hand is warm and dirty, with the calluses and scratches that come from work. It’s a normal hand. She gives Riley’s hand a quick squeeze and holds on.
‘How did you get up here?’ Riley asks. ‘What are you standing on?’ She hates heights and even thinking about the girl clinging on to her windowsill two storeys up is terrible.
