A STORYTELLING OF RAVENS Read online

  ‘Pollyanna,’ Smiler said, ‘this is Callie Crossley. Callie, this is Pollyanna.’

  ‘Why are you here?’ Pollyanna asked. Her voice was a bronchial croak, each of her breaths a wheezy labour on lungs which Callie imagined must be damp with mucous and shrivelled with decay. Her eyes were large and impossibly black, surrounded by papery skin smudged grey with bad health and bitterness. Definitely not enough love. When she brought her hand up to take a draw on the cigarette the movement was slow and stiff, making Callie wonder if she’d got her all wrong. Pollyanna looked adolescent and yet, at the same time, the way she moved seemed ancient. Thirteen going on ninety, her frame osteoporosis-fragile.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Callie said, reluctant to be drawn into whatever spat the girl was baiting for. ‘I won’t be here long.’

  Prompted by this admission, Smiler set off running up a flight of creaky stairs to the first floor. His bare feet slapped noisily on bare wooden boards, creating gun-shot echoes in the lounge that suggested an emptiness much emptier than the room actually was. Before disappearing through an open doorway at the top, he called back, ‘Gimme a few minutes.’ Then slammed the door shut.

  ‘Time remains stagnant in this place.’ Pollyanna said, her voice strangely monotone. She was gazing out at the lake and Callie wasn’t sure if she was talking to herself.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  The girl’s eyes remained on the lake. Her hair was long and untamed and Callie thought it looked like it hadn’t been trimmed or combed in forever. It shone the colour of autumn leaves, Hallowe’en-orange in brilliant morning sunshine. Only there was no brilliant sunshine in this place. Just waxy, lazy light. Curling a strand of red hair around her forefinger, winding and wrapping, again and again, Pollyanna looked circumspect. A grey – it might have been black at some point – shirt dress sat above her knees and she wore nothing on her feet. Her knee joints were swollen knots of cartilage and gristle on skinny legs and her hands were adorned with skeleton-fingers. She took another slow draw on the cigarette, then breathed smoke from her nose. ‘Why are you here Callie Crossley?’

  ‘Not by choice, I can tell you,’ Callie said, unsure which was worse to inhale: the girl’s second-hand smoke or the cabin’s mould spores. Both of them, she imagined, were now coating her airways and clinging to her lungs. She coughed into her hand, an attempt to dislodge them.

  ‘And you think we chose?’ Pollyanna flicked ash onto the floor. She did it with such instinctive casualness that Callie was offended. She rose onto the balls of her feet, so the carpet, an unfathomably coloured organism, touched less of her. ‘I dunno,’ she said, finding it hard to conceal her disgust, ‘you tell me.’

  But Pollyanna, it seemed, was done talking for now and slow seconds passed where neither of them said anything. At least, not out loud. Everything was quiet except for the muffled noises of Smiler getting dressed upstairs. Eventually it was Callie who broke the silence by asking, ‘I take it there’s no telephone in here?’

  An untrustworthy smirk played about the girl’s lips. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Pollyanna.’

  ‘I figured that already.’ Smart arsed little shit. ‘But who are you? Where are you from?’

  ‘Why would where I’m from define who I am?’

  Callie took a slow, deep breath and counted to three. ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘Where else? The garden?’

  Keep going. Just keep pushing me. Callie’s worn patience was turning to deep agitation and her voice became strained. ‘Does anyone else live here with you?’

  ‘You already know the answer to that.’

  ‘There’s just the two of you then?’

  Pollyanna nodded and cast a sideways glance at Callie, her impossibly old eyes sly and calculating.

  Callie pretended not to see. She glanced around the lounge again and ran her hand along the mantelpiece. Why am I here? She looked at her fingertips. They were black. ‘Does Smiler look after you?’

  At the suggestion Pollyanna’s eyes seemed to darken, if that was at all possible. ‘I look after myself, thank you very much!’ she said, betraying her act of grown-up cool with a churlish tone.

  Callie smiled, pleased to be a source of such irritation. ‘But you must only be what? Thirteen? Fourteen?’

  ‘Your point being?’

  ‘That you’re pretty young to be fending for yourself, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well really it’s none of your business.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ Callie decided to try a different angle.

  Pollyanna puffed on her cigarette. She blew smoke in Callie’s direction and looked up to the right in thought. ‘How long? Let’s see. How long does it take to fly to Orion’s belt and back?’

  Callie blew out her cheeks, exasperated by this new nonsense. ‘That’s impossible to say.’

  ‘Even more so if you have to unbuckle it.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Just answering your question.’

  Callie couldn’t comprehend the girl or the situation. Wasn’t sure she wanted to. Again she took a deep, aggravated breath. Counted to four. ‘Alright, Little Miss Cryptic. Whatever. Now tell me who owns this place.’

  Pollyanna laughed; an awful grating sound. ‘Nobody owns this place, stupid. It owns you.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It’s not supposed to.’

  ‘What’s not supposed to?’ Smiler was standing at the top of the stairs now, fully clothed. He was wearing a washed-out Guns ‘N’ Roses t-shirt and worn blue jeans. He’d pulled his hair back into a ponytail, but looked no less dreadful.

  Callie scowled. ‘Why are you living in the middle of nowhere with a little girl, Golden?’

  He rubbed the back of his neck and his face reddened. ‘I, er, it’s not what you think!’

  ‘You think you’re so bloody great don’t you?’ Pollyanna said, glaring at Callie with an intensity so hateful that it could only express a yearning for sudden death. ‘Flouncing in here with your big hair and big tits like you own the place. Well, just so you know, you don’t! You don’t know a thing either. You have no idea what’s going on. You’re a nobody in here. Everyone’s a nobody, but especially you. Understand? You’re nobody.’

  ‘Whoa calm down, Poll,’ Smiler hurried down the stairs, his hands held out in some effort to placate her. ‘Let’s just go, shall we?’

  ‘Go? Where do you expect to go?’ Pollyanna turned on him, no less riled.

  Callie sighed. ‘To the nearest village to call the police would be a good fucking start.’

  Again that awful, humourless laugh. ‘This is what I’m talking about,’ Pollyanna said. ‘You don’t know a thing. There is no village.’ Then for no sane reason that Callie could think of, she stubbed the cigarette out on her own bare thigh, all the while staring Callie down. She didn’t even flinch.

  ‘There is a village,’ Smiler said, his voice sounding wearied. He kept his attention on Callie and didn’t react at all to Pollyanna’s display of self-harm. Perhaps it was as normal an occurrence, Callie thought, as the raven-noise outside.

  ‘So we’ll go there,’ she said, desperate by now to get going.

  ‘There’s nothing there though,’ Smiler told her. ‘Nothing but empty houses and shops. No people.’

  ‘So we go further afield, what’s the problem?’ Callie was feeling increasingly impatient. ‘Wherever the road takes us. It’s not like we’re on the fucking moon, is it? There’s got to be loads more villages. Towns even. Hell, cities if we keep going.’

  ‘Won’t work,’ Pollyanna said.

  ‘What won’t?’

  ‘The car.’

  Callie crossed her arms. Counted to five. ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Just do.’

  ‘Full of optimism, aren’t you?’

  ‘Optimism’s for idiots.’

  Calli
e’s hands flexed. She imagined them around Pollyanna’s neck, squeezing and crushing till the last ragged breath rasped out of the girl’s wizened lungs, rendering her as silent as the cabin’s dust motes that swirled all about them. The thought was so sudden and vivid it shocked Callie, but she felt no guilt. Only a faint pang of regret that she wouldn’t actually do it. ‘I’ll tell you what I think’s idiotic, sitting about doing nothing!’

  Smiler sighed. ‘She’s right, Poll. We have to at least try.’

  ‘And preferably before whoever brought me here comes back for his fucking car and finds me not in it!’ Callie moved to the window, pulsing her fists, and peered out at the Bentley. It was waiting on the lawn. The lake beyond seemed to imitate its blackness.

  ‘Yeah,’ Smiler agreed. ‘Whoever it was must be out there somewhere.’

  ‘Probably watching us right now.’ Pollyanna turned her head and smiled, her eyes displaying sadistic glee.

  Smiler didn’t retort, he simply frowned at her in a way that a low-profile father might chastise his vocally errant child in public. To Callie, he said, ‘Are you sure you have no idea who might have done this to you?’

  Callie huffed and slapped her thighs in a display of extreme aggravation. ‘Yes, I’m bloody sure.’

  ‘It’s just that note, Dead to me. It sounded pretty personal.’

  ‘Of course it sounded pretty personal,’ she said, running her fingers through her hair and squeezing her eyes shut. ‘This whole fucking thing is personal! A complete bloody nightmare in fact.’

  ‘And for you,’ Pollyanna observed, ‘it’s only just begun.’

  Callie counted to six. Balled her hands. Felt like punching a wall. She saw orange, not red, behind her eyelids. And when she opened her eyes again she still saw orange: Pollyanna’s hair. ‘I can’t take anymore of your shit.’ She turned and headed towards the hallway, the dirty, dry cat’s tongue fibre of the carpet scraping the bottom of her feet. ‘You can stay here and be nobodies together if that’s what you want. But me? I’m leaving.’

  When she got to the door and pulled it open Pollyanna called out to her in a voice that was unruffled; its portentousness somehow substantiated by the creeping dread given off by the cabin itself, ‘No you’re not. This place won’t let you.’

  7

  ‘Pollyanna you have to come.’ Smiler’s words came out broken, thick with lingering adolescence.

  ‘No. No, I don’t.’ Pollyanna remained by the large window, looking out across the lawn towards the Bentley. Smoke-polluted sunlight captured her in a retro-photo haze like she’d been there since the 60s. She looked like a skeleton vacuum-sealed in white shrink-wrap skin with hair, an exotic orange fungus sprouting from holes that had been pecked in the plastic by demented birds.

  ‘Okay, you don’t have to,’ he said. ‘But I’d like you to.’

  ‘Liar.’ Still, she turned to see his expression. To see if he meant it.

  ‘No I’m not.’ Frown lines fell into place too comfortably on Smiler’s face, adding an extra twenty years, easy. ‘I do want you to come.’

  She regarded him for a while longer, unspeaking, her mean, anaemic lips pulled tight.

  ‘Please,’ he urged.

  She huffed to convey some annoyance – at her own doubt or his persistence, he couldn’t tell – and there was a deep rattling noise in her chest as she did so, like a cat purring miserably. ‘What’s the point?’ she said, turning back to face the Bentley; the black atrocity that had delivered Callie Crossley straight to their door.

  ‘Smiler!’ And there was her voice, calling from somewhere outside. ‘Are you coming or what?’

  ‘Yeah!’ Smiler raised his eyebrows at Pollyanna in sheepish apology.

  Silence then followed; an unbearable indicator of two resolute decisions having been made and coming between the two teenagers, perhaps marking the end of their forced friendship. A friendship they’d both come to depend on, because misery enjoys company and, aside from a few items of worn clothing, Smiler and Pollyanna had had nothing but each other for quite some time.

  Reluctant to look at him now, it was Pollyanna who spoke first. ‘Better be quick, mustn’t keep the fat cow waiting.’

  ‘Hey, that’s not nice.’

  ‘I’m not nice.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Look, if you won’t come with me now I’ll send someone back to fetch you.’ Smiler’s right leg was shaking with nervous adrenalin and he was twisting the hem of his t-shirt into a ball in his fist, making it even more creased. ‘We’ll get out of this, I promise. We will. Haven’t I always said that?’

  Pollyanna’s own fists were in her lap, tightly closed like oyster shells. Tightly closed like her mouth. Words were her pearls now and she decided he could no longer have them.

  ‘Poll? Please. Come on.’ He made eyes at her, which in the past might have won her over. ‘It’s not too late to change your mind.’ But she didn’t look. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t be swayed. He slammed his palm down on the bannister and swore, then ran outside in case Callie Crossley left without him.

  As it was, Callie was standing in the middle of the lawn, arms folded over her chest, accentuating a cosy cleavage. She was glamorous but bedraggled in a morning-after kind of way and she stood out against a backdrop of stippled grey sky and a dark lake that had been spilled onto harsh greenery. Harsh because it was an unknown wilderness that stood between her and home. Overgrown plants bordered the lawn, their barbed stems, for the most part, prickly and unkind. The only flowers that bloomed belonged to weeds. This was a hopeless place.

  ‘What’s her problem?’ Callie asked.

  ‘Leave her be.’ Smiler shook his head. ‘She’s been here a long time. It can’t have been easy.’

  ‘I didn’t say it had.’ Callie turned and started towards the Bentley, across the lawn that was strewn with clover patches and unblown dandelion heads. ‘I’m in no mood to take shit from teenagers though.’ She scowled back at him, her long blonde hair catching in her mouth as she did. ‘So you’ve been warned.’

  ‘Hey, I’m nineteen!’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Whoa, condescending much?’ Smiler jumped off the veranda and hurried to catch her up, his loose shoelaces flapping about. ‘I’m an adult.’

  ‘Just about.’ Callie opened the driver’s door of the Bentley and breathed in deeply. The smell of leather upholstery was glorious compared to the cabin’s insides, but something didn’t feel right. The key in the ignition should have made her sag with relief; instead it felt too easy. Too considered. As though her kidnapper had laid a meticulous trap and she was playing right into his or her hands. But what else could she do? What choice did she have?

  None.

  ‘Get in, boy,’ she said to Smiler over the car’s shiny roof. ‘Let’s go for a drive.’

  Without needing to be told twice, Smiler jumped into the passenger seat and rubbed his hands together. He turned and smiled at her. Subtle dimples in his cheeks turned into crevices, reminding her, oddly, of spoon gouges in freezer-burnt ice-cream. ‘I can’t believe this is really happening,’ he said.

  Callie settled into the driver seat, running her hands over the steering wheel, and played out, in her head, the conversation she’d have with the first policeman they came by. She’d list off times, whereabouts and the names of people she’d last seen, and the dark-haired, bearded constable with the kind, brown eyes would be impressed by her calm manner and perhaps even in awe, but quietly so, that she was Callie Crossley. He would probably ask for her autograph and a selfie, if he was playful enough. Maybe he’d even offer to buy her an after-work drink at his local, to help ease the shock of her ordeal. That would be nice. Really nice. But all the deep concern she imagined etched onto his ruggedly handsome face faded to nothing when she stepped on the Bentley’s brake pedal and turned the ignition key.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried again. Not eve
n the faintest of chugs. She checked to make sure the automatic transmission was in neutral. Three times. It definitely was. Still nothing. Slamming her hands against the steering wheel, she screamed through gritted teeth and felt her eyes brimming hot.

  No! No! No!

  Smiler was watching her with dread. His complexion had taken on a new level of sickliness and the deep spoon-crescents in his cheeks were gone. ‘What is it?’ he asked, even though he could surely see what the predicament was.

  Callie reached down to the foot well and popped the bonnet, too upset to answer, too angry to address sheer idiocy. Her hands were shaking and she wasn’t sure what to do next: open the bonnet, look inside, then what?

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Smiler echoed her thoughts, adding pressure she didn’t need. His voice sounded reedy with desperation. It annoyed her immediately.

  She got out of the car and stomped round to the front. ‘Does it look like I know what I’m doing?’

  ‘Er…?’ He wasn’t sure. So he went to stand with her.

  It soon became apparent that it wouldn’t have mattered if Callie was the most highly skilled mechanic in the world, because when she opened the bonnet there was nothing where an engine should be. Nothing but a gaping hole of fresh air. An engine bay framing lawn. Both of them stood gawping for an indeterminable amount of time before Callie broke the spell of shocked silence with, ‘Un-fucking-believable.’

  Smiler was hunched over the bonnet, standing so close to Callie that the hairs on his arm tickled the skin on hers. ‘Where’s it all gone?’

  Callie straightened. She squared her shoulders and gave him a hard stare. ‘Maybe you’d like to tell me.’

  ‘What?’ He took a cautious step back and started picking at a scab in the corner of his mouth. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Because you two creepy little shits are in on this together.’ Callie pointed to the cabin’s lounge window where they could see Pollyanna watching. ‘Wednesday Addams is fucking loving this.’

  ‘No.’ Smiler shook his head. ‘We had nothing to do with it. I swear.’

  ‘Then how come she knew the car wouldn’t start?’