They beat on the metal until they’re sure the men are gone. They lean against the warm rocks and pant. Riley sees her grin mirrored on the others’ faces. They won. They’re a castle with the drawbridge up.Now hereforever.
‘Sometimes they come back,’ Noon says. ‘Someone should keep watch today.’
‘I will,’ Riley says. She kind of wants them to come back, to pound the metal gate and scream at them like a ghost, to see the fear in their faces.
‘Can you use this?’ Noon asks. Riley nods and takes the gun.
She leans against the warm rock in the sunshine. Home, she thinks, yes. She has found it at last. She can’t suppress the thought – will a day come when the men at the gate are not fans – when they are looking for Riley? No one knows she’s here. Why would they look for her at Nowhere?
The high voices fade into the distance. Everyone’s a little delirious as they head back to Home Barn. Riley sits, but her senses are alert. Beyond the gate, the wind rustles in the leaves. The air is still as a pond, there’s no breeze. She bends silently and looks through the gate. There is movement in the undergrowth opposite. Something is coming. Riley reaches for the pistol.
A deer moves out of the shadow of the forest and stands in the ruins of the road. It must be a buck, its antlers are graceful and pointed – on one side, anyway. When the buck turns its head, Rileysees that that on the right side, the top half of its antlers have been snapped off. It’s horrible, somehow, this maiming, the disfigurement. Riley’s breath catches in her throat. The deer raises its head and bounds away back into the dim forest.
13Marc
Kimble and Marc lie staring at the dark like children who can’t sleep. Crickets and frogs sing in the forest. They just finished the last of the tequila they brought. It has been another day of searching. The woods seem endless. Marc is starting to wonder if everyone has imagined this tunnel. But they got some good B-roll and Linus told a story about how he saw the fire that day so it was kind of ok.
‘Marky Mark?’ Kimble asks, drowsy.
‘Mm.’
‘We’re here because we want to understand them, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Not because we are them. Not because it wants us here. The house.’
‘What do you mean?’ But cold thrills are already crawling on Marc’s skin.
‘You know what they say. Nowhere draws lost kids to it. Are we lost kids too?’
‘Wish I’d had a camera on you for that,’ he says. ‘Poetic.’
She laughs. ‘I am that.’
Marc drifts, everything blurring through his eyelashes. ‘You’re my best friend, Kimble,’ he says, half into his pillow. ‘You’re like my sister. I wish you were my sister.’
‘Thank you, Marky Mark.’ Her voice trembles with amusement but it’s not mean.
‘We love each other, me and you,’ he says, sliding towards the dark.
‘Maybe we do.’
‘I wish you’d forgive me,’ he whispers.
‘Don’t,’ Kimble says, sharp. ‘Do not ask me to comfort you, not about that and not when you’re drunk.’ All the warmth is gone from the air. Marc stares at the spinning dark. A dull ache begins to throb at the back of his head. He waits, mouth dry and heart pounding, for this to pass.
Kimble and Marc had the idea for the documentary on the Nowhere children at exactly the same moment. They were in Vegas covering something terrible, like always. People had died.
‘It can mean something, right?’ Kimble says, stirring her drink with her straw. ‘This job. It doesn’t have to be bullshit. Or not all of it.’
‘I used to think that.’ Marc tosses back his third tequila shot. He takes out a cigarette, feeling a rush of joy at the knowledge that he can smoke it right here, indoors. He misses the tip of the cigarette with the lighter on the first pass but gets it on the second, squinting.
‘It must be hard,’ Kimble says, ‘being away from Silvie.’
He nods, because it is. ‘I love her so much. I didn’t believe in love before her.’
‘People think romantic love is the only kind,’ Kimble says. ‘Or at least the main kind.’ She snorts. ‘It’s so reductive. Romance is totally overrepresented in books and film and the way we talk …’
