‘I’m a good climber. So why were you sad?’ Noon says. She turns Riley’s hand over, palm up and looks at it, the bones protruding sharp from the wrist. She reaches for Riley’s upper arm and holds it for a moment, assessing. She’s gentle, Riley doesn’t feel the revulsion she usually gets at the touch of others. It’s like Noon is a doctor or something.
‘He doesn’t feed you,’ Noon says. ‘But he’s big enough.’ The house still holds the scent of the fried bacon and eggs Riley made Cousin for his dinner. In the beginning, when they first moved in with Cousin, Riley was very hungry. Now the scent of food, like fat and eggs bubbling in the pan tonight, just makes her feel sick. It’s Oliver she worries about.
‘Where I live,’ Noon says, ‘we catch fish from the streams and roast them on open fires. We grow our own vegetables. If we need something we can’t grow or catch,’ she leans in and whispers in Riley’s ear, ‘we come to town and we steal it.’ Her warm breath fills the spaces in Riley’s head. The scent is all around her but now it seems like sun-warm earth and something spicy.
Riley draws a deep breath, head swimming a little. ‘You can’t stealme.’
Noon grins her mask-like grin. ‘I don’t want to steal you.’
‘No?’ Riley feels a flutter of something, fear or something else, hard to tell.
‘No. Come because you choose to. Don’t you want to be free? Live in the mountains, under the sun and the stars, where everyone gets love and respect? We’re all kids, we all escaped something bad. And we decided to make a better place.’
Riley’s hand tightens on Noon’s. ‘It’s a good story,’ she says sadly.
‘Come and see for yourself. Climb out the window right now and come.’
‘I’d fall …’
‘I’d catch you.’
‘I can’t leave Oliver,’ Riley says.
‘Bring him too.’
‘We can’t walk through the mountains now, it’s night.’
‘Maybe we’ll fly.’
Riley laughs. But as she looks at Noon, hanging there in the dark, she thinks she sees again that slight rise and fall to her as if she were hovering in the air.
Riley starts at a faint sound from the hallway. Cousin is going to the bathroom.
‘I have to go,’ she whispers.
‘Here.’ Noon pulls a scrap of paper from her pocket. It’s smudged, laboriously written in block capitals. ‘I wrote it all down. Directions.’
‘Directions to what?’
‘Nowhere,’ Noon says. ‘Come and find us.’
‘That place,’ Riley whispers. Her fear returns with a cold blow, it races up and down her spine with small feet. ‘My mother told me about Nowhere.’ She whips her hand out of Noon’s grasp. ‘Leaf Winham’s place, where he killed those people.’ She looks at Noon with dawning horror. ‘How are you really staying up here at my window?’
The toilet flushes. Cousin is coming out.
‘Go away,’ Riley says. ‘Don’t follow me again. You’re a dream. If you’re real, I’ll call the police.’ She draws the window closed as quickly and quietly as she can. Riley crumples the directions in her fist and looks frantically for a place to put them. Cousin does not allow a trash can in their room. He inspects each morning, and sometimes wakes them in the night for extra checks. He looks through their drawers and smells their sheets for evidence of the demon. He checks under the mattress, the insoles of sneakers and in every pocket. If he finds food or candy or any writing or drawings that are not schoolwork, it means the quiet room in the basement. Riley doesn’t want to go there. She wonders if the paper with the directions on is too big to eat and decides that it is. She tucks it quickly into her underwear.
As she hurries into bed she glances out of the window. No one is there, just the yellow circles of streetlights and behind that the dark, and the cloud-haloed moon over distant mountains.
By the time the bedroom door squeaks open and Cousin’s shape fills the doorway, Riley is lying quiet, her breathing even, her body still as death. Even after the door closes behind Cousin, Riley stays still. Sometimes he listens, ear to the wood.
Under the blankets Riley raises her middle finger, as she does each night, at the old man in the sky.Eff you, she mouths at him.Until I finish school I’ll keep going. Only four more years. Then I take Oliver and we go.The words beat a pulse in her brain, pounding black and white until the black takes over and they follow her into sleep.
In the morning she wakes with an unusual glow in her, a feeling she vaguely recalls from some time past. It’s happiness, she realises, though that doesn’t make any sense at all. She knows that the boy/ girl at the window was a dream. The memory has that feel – of otherness, of being neatly lifted out of reality. But when Riley told the girl to go away she felt the flare of anger and for just a moment she was herself again.
Something feels scratchy. Riley puts her hand gently into her underwear, to find the folded paper resting against her skin.
Riley got caught, the first time she stole the milk from Mountain Foods and Goods.
