Fearful Symmetries (39 page)

Given what Lynch recalled of his early moments on the road that had led him away from the place of his decease, he was skeptical of Melinda’s plan. On the other hand, he hadn’t encountered any dinosaurs on that route, so maybe it was worth a try, after all. He turned right at the first intersection. To his left, a dozen streets deeper into the town, the firehouse’s siren sent up its mournful call. The falling snow seemed to dampen it.

“The trailer,” he said.

“You hope,” Melinda said.

A left onto a side street, a right onto a road that ran between rows of weather-beaten houses, another left onto a long driveway that dead-ended in a small parking lot, brought them there. The Highway commenced at the other side of the parking lot, a flat path whose dull white surface appeared to consist of some kind of rock. Lynch did not see anyone in the parking lot, nor on the road. He pulled the parking brake, went to turn the key.

Melinda said, “Wait.”

He did. “What?”

“Take us out there,” she said.

“Is that allowed?”

“Is there anyone stopping us?”

“That’s not the same thing,” he said, but he released the brake and rolled the car onto the Highway. The snow was streaming down, large white flakes whose individual designs he could almost pick out. Although they eddied around the car, none of them landed on the windshield, the hood, or stuck to the windows. On either side, the plains were veiled by white.

Lynch felt the dash for the controls to the radio. “What are you doing?” Melinda said.

“Trying to find the radio.”

“You want to listen to music, now?”

“It calms—”

“Hang on,” Melinda said, “what’s that?”

“What?”

“That.” She pointed at a spot on the road maybe ten feet ahead on the right. Lynch slowed the car to a crawl as he followed the direction Melinda indicated. For a moment, he could pick out nothing except snow falling behind snow, then the shape Melinda had noticed came into focus. The size of a small bird, it appeared to be floating a couple of feet off the ground with a lazy motion that reminded Lynch of a balloon. Which was ridiculous. He brought the car to a stop and flipped on the headlights. The snow caught most of the light and flung it back, but the shape did not. By the glow of the headlights, Lynch saw that it was a human hand, an adult’s, most likely, severed at the wrist. Palm up, fingers outstretched, it rotated in a slow circle.

Nor was it alone. Suspended at different heights along the road in front of them, a variety of body parts formed a grisly constellation: a pair of hands, one clenched, one open; a foot, toes pointed down as if for ballet; an arm and part of a shoulder, ribbons of blood trailing from its ragged edge; and a head in the approximate center of everything, the open eyes reflecting the headlights, the mouth slack, the heavy white hair swaying around it.

“God . . .” Stunned, Lynch did not register the massive shape looming behind the carnage. When the Tyrannosaur lunged forward, sending body parts spinning off like marbles, its vast jaws open, he hesitated, shocked, before dropping the car into reverse. The MG jolted to the right as the beast’s jaws smashed the windshield and tore the roof. Lynch cried out and threw his arms in front of his face. With a shriek of torn metal, the T. Rex pulled its head up, taking the roof and half of the windshield with it. Snow rushed into the car. Lynch simultaneously let out the clutch and floored the gas. The car lurched backwards, heading for the edge of the road. He caught the steering wheel, cut it to the right, and once the car was in the center of the Highway, straightened out. He half-turned in his seat, to see the direction he was reversing. As he did, he saw Melinda’s seat empty, the top half of it bitten away.

Lynch crested the bluff overlooking the battlefield, downshifted into second, and plunged down the dirt road that led into the thick of the continuing battle. The road was smoother than he had anticipated; though not enough for him to shift to third. At least the snow seemed to be abating. Hooves thudding on the ground, a brown horse carrying a painted Sioux warrior galloped in front of him. A trio of soldiers fired their rifles after the man, and Lynch heard the bullets zip overhead. The stink of gunpowder clotted the air. A Cheyenne warrior aimed his rifle at the three soldiers, and his shot struck the MG’s trunk with a hollow ping. On the left, a pair of cavalry officers, their pistols held out in front of them, raced past.

He had been hoping to cover half the battleground before the Tyrannosaur arrived. He was maybe a third of the way when its roar split the air. A glance over his shoulder showed the creature already rushing down the road after him, its great head swaying from side to side as its powerful hind legs propelled it forward, its tapered tail out behind it as ballast.
Big
. It was so big. He had never appreciated how stupendously big these animals had been. He heard young Anthony’s voice saying that a full-grown T. Rex would have been longer than a city bus, but that had been an abstraction, an illustration on a page, two-dimensional. In no way had it prepared him for the beast in 3-D, its bulk, black and yellow, the back ornamented with what appeared to be feathers, its mouth jammed full of razored fangs, its sheer, relentless vitality. He had assumed he would have to drive slowly enough for the Tyrannosaurus to keep up with and keep its interest in him. He had been wrong. From the start, the creature had moved with a speed and stamina that had required what skill he possessed as a driver to outrun, even as he steered the road winding out here. Now, hampered by this dirt road he was struggling not to skid along, he was losing the slender lead he’d maintained on the animal.

A bullet chipped a piece off what was left of the windshield. Lynch flinched. A Cheyenne warrior leapt his horse across the car. The Tyrannosaur’s roar drowned out the rifles cracking around him. He looked back, saw its jaws almost at the trunk. He stomped the gas, heard the bite crash where he’d been. He shifted to third, fighting to hold the car to the road as it bumped and bounced over it. Bullets rang on the passenger door. With a thunder of hooves, half a dozen cavalry flanked the car, keeping pace with it. Lynch saw the men looking at him, seeing him, attempting to fit him to the scene in which they’d acted for so long. In a few of their expressions, a terrible knowledge hovered. One man waved his pistol at Lynch, who couldn’t tell if the gesture was intended as threat, or request for him to pull over. The T. Rex bit the man off his horse, taking a chunk of the horse’s back with him. The horse screamed and thrashed, mortally hurt. The other riders peeled away, only to circle around and begin firing their guns at the creature. In an instant, it was off the road and among them, knocking one soldier and his horse to the ground with a blow from its head, then falling on them. A swipe of its tail took the legs out from under another horse, rolling it over on top of its rider. A quartet of soldiers bunkered behind the carcasses of their horses shifted their aim from the Sioux warriors racing past them to the beast and delivered a volley into its flank. It wheeled and leapt at them. For their part, the Sioux swung their rifles away from the soldiers and sighted on the thing’s head.

Halfway across, the access road leveled off and ran straight to the foot of the slope where the twin cannons were positioned. Lynch saw the soldiers stationed at them pause in their duties to consider the situation unfolding below them. To either side of him, Native warriors and U.S. soldiers had stopped their bloody routine to observe the monster fighting their colleagues. A few were riding or running in the direction of the new threat. The MG’s engine whined as Lynch raced the remaining distance to the bluff. Behind him, the Tyrannosaurus roared in answer to waves of gunfire. Funny, he thought, how in movies, you were supposed to find these creatures sympathetic, even root for them against the humans—whereas his sole desire at present was to return this example of the species to the extinct category.

When the road climbed the far slope, Lynch put in the clutch and let the car’s momentum carry it part of the way up; then, before it slowed too much, he dropped into second and closed the rest of the distance to the cannons. Once he was beside the artillery, he braked hard, letting out the clutch too fast and stalling the car. It didn’t matter. He flung open his door and ran to the handful of men in sweat-stained blue shirts and grimy grey pants. They watched him approach, their eyes enormous. Young—most of them were Anthony’s age, younger; the oldest couldn’t be more than thirty.
Orders
, he thought.
These boys are soldiers. They need orders.
“Who’s in charge, here?” he said.

A fellow with yellow sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve stepped forward. He had a long nose, a droopy mustache, a checkered bandana knotted around his neck. Voice raspy, he said, “I am.”

“How good is your aim?” Lynch said.

“Good enough.”

Lynch pointed toward the T. Rex. “If you can hit the head, do it. If not, the chest. I don’t know how fast you are; I do know how fast that thing is. If you miss the first time, you might have a second. The beast won’t give you a third.”

The sergeant nodded. Turning, he said, “All right: you heard the man.”

While the soldiers prepped and aimed the guns, Lynch surveyed the battlefield. As far as he could see, every last man on it had forsaken the round of actions that had occupied him the last century and a half to join the attack on the Tyrannosaur. Sioux, cavalry, Cheyenne rode this way and that around the animal, weaving in and out of one another’s paths as they emptied their rifles and pistols into its hide, searching for weak spots. From positions farther out, men on foot maintained a steady stream of fire at the animal. For its part, the Tyrannosaurus ranged amongst its attackers, darting its head to bite the head from a horse, catching a man under one of its rear legs and crushing him to the ground, spinning and knocking a pair of men from their mounts with a blow from its tail. In the short time it had been on the field, the creature had cut the number of men on it in half. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay strewn across the earth. Overhead, the low, dark cloud that Lynch had observed during his previous visits to the site seemed to draw down closer to the earth.

Someone tapped his shoulder: a private, his features waging their own struggle to keep up with what was happening. “Sir?” he said. “Sarge says you may want to cover your ears.”

Lynch clapped his hands to his head a second before the cannons erupted, venting fire and smoke in a pair of blasts that buffeted him. One shot went wide, but the other struck the T. Rex on the right hip, staggering it almost off its feet. Enraged, the creature swung in the direction of this new assault. Sighting the soldiers hurrying around the cannons—as well, Lynch thought, as the car it had chased here, in the first place—the thing bellowed and began a halting run towards them. What men remained on the battlefield, realizing the hurt that had been done the Tyrannosaur, renewed their efforts. A group of Sioux and Cheyenne ran at the animal’s wounded leg, long clubs and knives out in their hands. A cavalry officer shot close enough to the dinosaur’s left eye for it to whip its head around and bite him in half. Next to Lynch, the soldiers loaded the cannons. A Sioux warrior drove his knife into the creature’s right foot; it jerked the foot up and out, impaling him on its claws. Despite its injuries, the beast was almost at the start of the bluff. It was met there by the dark cloud, which had been descending from its place above, drawing in on itself as it went, gaining in definition, until what crashed into the T. Rex was almost the same size, a smoky assemblage of limbs that reminded Lynch of nothing so much as a great hand, seizing the Tyrannosaur in its outsized grip.

A vision of Anthony and Jordan at play flickered before his eyes. Anthony was on his back, laughing, the Matchbox MG held aloft in his left hand, his right hand grabbing Jordan’s toy Tyrannosaurus, which Jordan, who was sitting on Anthony’s stomach, was pushing forward with both hands.

The cannons boomed, the slap of sound deafening. The first shot punched through the cloud-thing and the Tyrannosaur’s chest behind it. The second shot struck the dinosaur high in the throat, blowing out the back of its skull. The combined force of the impacts toppled it onto its side. The cloud-creature fell with it.

Afterward, there was no cheering, no celebration. Looking as if they had awakened from a particularly savage nightmare, the few men who remained began to walk in the direction of the town and, Lynch supposed, the Highway. His hearing had not returned to normal, so he was startled by the soldier who appeared beside him. His mouth moved, and Lynch heard his words as if through ears stuffed with cotton. “Sir,” the young man said, his eyes darting between Lynch and the MG, “are you an angel?”

What would Melinda have said to that? The memory of her stilled his urge to laugh. Instead, he shook his head. “Just a man.”

“This,” the soldier said, the word straining to carry the weight of the men lying in whole and in part across the landscape, the enormous ruin of the Tyrannosaurus, the cloud-thing draining into the earth, even Lynch and the car. “What is all this?”

How should he answer? A game played by his son and grandson? A dying hallucination? The posthumous firing of a few, random brain cells? He considered the soldier standing there, swaying as if drunk. Whatever fantasy this might be, Lynch decided, he could remain loyal to it.

“I suppose,” he said, “you could call it an exorcism.”

For Fiona, and for Nick Langan

Sometimes I pretend I’m a Roman lady in my Roman villa in a countryside which has got long pointy trees and marching soldiers and wide tinkly rivers with ducks and swans. I used to spy on mum watching a TV show called
Rome
and that’s where I got the idea. There was lots of blood and guts and sex in it and mum’s face went pink when she found my hiding place behind dad’s armchair and she told me to close my mouth and sent me to my room and told me never to spy on her watching it again.

But sometimes when mum’s busy with Wobs I sneak into the kitchen and pour some of her baking raisins into the bowl that she grinds stuff up in and then some Ribena into the chipped wine glass next to the sink cause I can’t reach the good ones. I get the old dust sheet from under the stairs and wrap it round me as many times as I can and still breathe and sometimes I try to pile my hair up on top of my head using string or elastic bands but it doesn’t usually work.

There’s an old shezlong in the living room that came in a van after granny M died. It’s just a couch really—with a low back and only one side—but after I asked mum if granny M died on it and she said no it became the thing that I sit on all the time. Especially when I’m being a Roman lady.

That was what I was doing when mum shouted on me. When she screamed.

Now I’m scared. I’m
more
scared. I’m in a strange room in a strange place and there’s people outside it but I don’t know who they are. I think they might be policemen and policewomen but they don’t have uniforms on.

I don’t know where mum is. I don’t know where Wobs is. But all the people outside want to know is where dad is and I don’t know that either. On Fridays after school he and Sadie-who-tries-to-make-me-call-her-mummy wait outside our house in their car to pick me up. Mum doesn’t come out and she thinks I don’t know it’s ’cause she hates them and then they take me to their house and it takes a while to get there. Their house is much bigger than ours is but I don’t like it as much. But I like my room okay. It’s painted with big yellow daisies.

I don’t like this room. It’s wee and white and it smells like the stuff mum puts on my cuts. In it is a bed and a table and a chair and a window that doesn’t open ’cause I’ve tried. I don’t like the bed. It’s metal and cold. Even the bit where my head goes when I’m sitting up. My bedroom at home is yellow and green and the window opens and has Angelina Ballerina curtains (I’ve told mum I’m a bit old for them now). My bed is soft and squishy all over and I’ve got a really cool Lord of the Rings light that stays on all night ’cause I still don’t like the dark. There’s only one light in here and it’s just a bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling.

I hear the door creak and I open my eyes and swing my legs round so I can get up off the bed. My knees are shaking but I pretend they’re not. I close my mouth and make sure with my fingers. A man comes in. He’s fat and hairy and he’s wearing a stripy jumper that’s too small. He’s got a white something over his arm. He says “hello, Joanne” and then “can I sit down, Joanne?” and then he does it anyway when I don’t say yes.

“Where’s my mum?”

“I’m not here to talk about your mum just yet, Joanne.”

“Where’s my mum? Where’s Wobs?” I put my hands on my hips and pretend to be mad. Mum says I’m a stroppy little madam but she smiles when she says it so I think it’s a good thing. And sometimes it gets me what I want.

The man tries to smile but his lips won’t stretch right. I think there’s something wrong with his nose ’cause he sounds coldy and I can hear his breath. I can see his teeth. I can see his
tongue
. It’s got white bits on it.

“Let’s get you sorted out first, Joanne. I’ve got you some new clothes to get changed into.” He shows me the white things: a T-shirt and joggy bottoms.

“Where’s my mum? Where’s Wobs?” I’m starting to get scared again. I keep checking my mouth in between speaking ’cause I have to open it to do that.

The man makes a big rattly sigh that makes me feel a bit sick. His eyes look red like dad’s used to when he came home late from work. “Wobs is Colin, yes?” He doesn’t wait for me to say yes. “He’s okay, Joanne. He’s in the room right next to you, snug as a bug. He got changed into his new clothes without any fuss at all.”

I roll my eyes and forget to be scared. “He’s a baby.”

The man blinks and tries to smile again. I can’t stop hearing his horrible breath. I think I can hear a buzzing noise too and my heart gets jumpy. “Nevertheless—”

“Where’s my mum?”

“Joanne.” He screws up his fat hairy face. Now he looks the same as dad did when he lied and said he had to go away for a bit. He uses the same kind of voice too. “You
know
what happened to your mum, sweetie.”

I shriek when he gets up off the chair and starts coming towards me and then remember to clap my hands over my face. I step backwards and the bed bangs cold at the back of my legs. I think the buzzing is getting louder. Nearer. I look at his horrible tongue and his horrible teeth.

“You should shut your mouth,” I say through my fingers.

“We’ll talk about your mum soon, I promise, sweetie.” His fat face looks worried like he’s done something wrong. “Just not yet.”

“Shut your mouth!”

“Joanne—”

I’m angry and hot and scared and the backs of my legs are cold
cold
against the bed. “You’ll catch flies,” I whisper.

He doesn’t listen. He keeps on breathing his horrible breath through his horrible mouth and I can tell that he’s getting angry now too. He throws the white clothes on the white bed. “You need to get changed, Joanne. You don’t have to do it now while I’m here, but you—”

“I’ve got clothes on!” I shout and one of my fingers slides over my teeth.

He steps back away from me and folds his arms. “But they’re dirty, aren’t they, Joanne?” he says in dad’s voice again. “Look at them. They’re dirty.”

I look at them. I have to take my hands away from my mouth or else I can’t see. I’ve got on a pair of jeans and my favourite yellow jumper. It’s got daisies on it. And blood. Lots of blood. Even though it’s dried and even though it’s nearly brown. I still remember that it’s blood.

I didn’t cry when granny M died even though I think I was supposed to. Granny M was mum’s mum but she was very strict and very cross and very ugly. When she came round to visit she sat at the table in the kitchen with her cross face and a china cup of tea. She had no lips and lots of wrinkles so her mouth looked all sewed up like a scary puppet.

When she saw me or heard me she’d say to mum “you let that child get away with far too much, Mary.” To me she always said “you’ll catch flies, girlie!”

Mum said that to me too—all the time in fact, ever since I could talk I bet—but she didn’t
just
say that and nothing else. She was fun so it was okay. She let me paint flowers on the walls in our garden and we had Mad Hatter tea parties and when I helped her with dee-I-why and other boring stuff she said things like “hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go” and “triumph begins with try and ends with umpf!” just to make me giggle I think. Sometimes we danced around the living room to loud music with the curtains shut and she laughed and went pink and forgot to look scared. Sometimes when she tucked me into bed and switched on my Lord of the Rings light and stroked my hair and whispered “I love you, Jojo” I wanted to cry. But it was a nice kind of wanting to cry.

When she shouted for me—when she screamed for me—I got off the shezlong and ran to the stairs. My heart was beating very fast but I still stopped at the bottom to unwind the dust sheet before going up. I wondered if I was in trouble—if she’d heard me saying things like “bastards of Dis!” and “you piss-drinking sons of circus whores!” while I’d been pretending to be a Roman lady. I knew it wasn’t that though. I was just trying not to be scared.

Mum had stopped screaming when I got to the landing. I went into Wobs’s room on tiptoe though ’cause I was still scared. She was standing next to his cot and her hands were over her mouth. I started to do the same but then she took hers away.

“It’s okay now, I think. I’m sorry, Jojo, I didn’t mean to frighten you again.”

The sun was going down to sleep and the room was full of yellow. It made mum look like an angel. Her face was bright and her hair was glowy like my nightlight. Wobs was still sleeping in the cot like always. His fuzzy hair was sticking up and his dummy tit was taped to his big pink cheeks so I couldn’t see the rubber sucky bit inside his mouth.

Colin is a really stupid name for a baby. Before dad left to make new babies with Sadie-who-tries-to-make-me-call-her-mummy he’d give me piggybacks around the landing and dangle me upside down till I screamed “uncle!” and then he’d laugh and say “Joanne has got the Collywobbles! Wobbles have her Colly got!” I didn’t know what it meant but he laughed even more when I started to call Colin Wobs. Mum didn’t like it at first but now she calls him it too.

“Is Wobs okay?” I whispered.

“Yes, sweetie, he’s okay.” Mum looked like she was going to cry again and I didn’t like that. I hate it when she cries. Me and Wobs are the ones who are supposed to cry. After dad left she was sad a lot. We didn’t have many Mad Hatter tea parties anymore and she got scary letters that she tried to hide and she thought I didn’t know what all the brown boxes full of our stuff in the hall meant but I thought I did. “Thank you for coming when I called you, Jojo.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Can I go away now?”

Mum smiled but I saw her closed lips wobble. “Can you stay here for a wee while maybe?”

I wanted to ask why but I didn’t ’cause I thought I knew anyway. I was thinking about the last big time she cried—more than when granny M died or dad went away—the day when the Really Bad Thing happened to mister and missus S next door. Their house is all boarded up now and the for sale sign has fallen over but lots of people still come and point and stare. “Okay.”

She left Wobs to come over and cuddle me. My nose went funny when I smelled her—it was like the smell in dad’s tool shed: like the big metal vice on the wooden bench. The big metal vice with its wide wide teeth. Mum usually smelled like the flowers in our garden.

“What would you have done if it wasn’t okay, sweetie?”

“Mum—”

She pinched my arms till it hurt a bit.

“I know it!” I said. “I know what to do!” ’Cause then I knew for sure she was talking about mister and missus S and I didn’t want to talk about it back. It made me think about all the screams and then the quiet and the policemen and the black trolleys on wheels that dripped black stuff down the path like the slime behind a slug.

“I know you do, Jojo,” she said and she let me go and went down on her knees to give me a proper cuddle. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I’m sorry.”

I cuddled back but I could still smell that nasty smell and she felt funny too. Cold but wet. And I knew what both those things meant. It meant mum was still scared.

“It’s just that it’s getting worse, sweetie. It just keeps on getting worse.” Her breath tickled my ear but I didn’t want to laugh. She’d said that a lot since granny M died. She’d said it nearly every day and every night.

I wake up and it’s night time again. The horrible hard bed creaks as I sit up and then stand up. The floor is cold. The stupid white clothes don’t fit me. The T-shirt is too tight and the joggy bottoms are too long—they swish on the floor as I creep to the door.

There’s a funny feeling in my tummy. Mum said I would feel it one day and now I do. It’s not horrible like I thought but fluttery like there’s birds inside me. Which there isn’t.

The fat hairy man said dad’s coming tomorrow. He’ll take me and Wobs to his and Sadie-who-tries-to-make-me-call-her-mummy’s big house and I won’t be able to dance around the living room with the curtains shut or have Mad Hatter tea parties or pretend to be a Roman lady in her Roman villa anymore.

Mum always says that I’m older than my age but I don’t think anyone else thinks so. Whenever something went wrong (usually during dee-I-why cause I’m clumsy mum says) I’d shout “fils de pute!” or “me cago en todo lo que se menea!” and mum would laugh and choke and tell me never to say things like that in front of any other grownups or else they’d take me away. And now they have.

I push down the handle and pull open the door. It creaks again but not too much. When I’m in the corridor I let the door go slowly till it stops moving and then I roll up my joggy bottoms to my ankles. The corridor is cold and shiny. I know Wobs is in the room next to mine but I don’t know which one. I tiptoe left and my tummy is flapping and flapping inside. Before I can try the black door next to mine I hear voices and freeze.

“It’s a crying shame” a lady says. “An absolute crying shame.”

I can hear other people muttering and yes-ing but they don’t get closer. I hear the roll of a chair on wheels and look at my room door and pretend I can’t feel the birds inside me.

“We think there’s abuse.” It’s the fat hairy man—I can tell by his wheezy nose. “I phoned the school, spoke to the girl’s teacher. It runs in the family. Apparently she refused to speak at all for the first three years.”

“A crying shame,” the lady mutters again like it’s the only thing she can say.

They’re talking about me and mum and Wobs and maybe even granny M. Bastards, cunts, and short-arsed shits. I think it inside my head just like mum told me to. The fat hairy man is the son of a Narbo scrotum. My tummy jumps and flutters and then I remember that I’m trying to find Wobs.

I turn round and go back past my horrible room. The door on the other side of mine has a little window in it. I try to look inside it but it’s dark. I try the handle and the door opens with no creak. I put my hand over my mouth and I go inside but it still stays dark. I don’t like the dark. I wait till the door shuts again and then whisper “Wobs?”

I don’t hear anything back. It’s stupid that I wanted to—he’s just a baby. But that fluttery funny feeling in my tummy is getting worse and I know it’s cause he’s in here. I know it’s cause he’s in here and the flies are coming and there’s no mum to look after us anymore. No mum to feel a fluttery funny feeling in her tummy and know what to do about it. Or to tell me what to do about it.