For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

Through the rain she imagines her father’s eyes, his feelings towards her spelt out in their glare like chalk on a blackboard. He never wanted a girl. He never wanted her.

Faster.

More eyes join her father’s, the eyes of her mother, teachers, family friends, churchgoers. Every pair of eyes in this damned town.

Eyes like knives.

She sees the clock tower, her sanctuary. Or is it her prison? Why should she be banished to a cold, stone chamber? She sees the bruises around her mother’s practised smile. She sees her father’s fist. She sees that godforsaken house – the boy’s heaven, the girl’s hell.

Faster.

The fields become a speeding haze of grey. The rain’s angle of descent twists until horizontal, as if the car were flying into the sky.

Then the shape.

In years to come, her subconscious will embellish the dreams with details inaccurate to the fact; there is no fire, no brimstone, no flames from the sky or the breaking apart of the car, and the red spade does not lie on the passenger seat. The shape in the road, however, will be the same. A part of her psyche will bury the whole episode; another part will exhume it.

It hovers in the distance, that bright yellow spectre, bullets of rain flying from its outline towards the approaching Cortina. Indeed, for a short time it remains a constant size. There was time, but the opportunity to slam the breaks came and went. The girl’s eyes narrow. Her knuckles whiten around the wheel. A book called Horror Highway leaps into her mind, in which a pickup truck tore through someone standing in the middle of a road.

Easy. Oh, so easy.

The headlights grab the yellow shape and stretch it to fill the windscreen. It cracks off the glass and disappears over the roof. The shape is gone.

The rain twists back to a vertical descent as the girl brings the car to a halt. The sound of the engine’s idling purr is accompanied by the rain’s tapping on the roof. She stares out the windscreen, fists still locked around the wheel. At this point the girl’s thoughts are a jumble, more like that of a baby’s; simple images and concepts are predominant in the mental narrative trying to form.

She knows she hit something.

She knows it was wearing a yellow raincoat.

She knows it was holding a bucket and spade.

She gazes through the windscreen at the two beams of light shining from the car. Her hands peel from the wheel and push open the door. She steps out. Rain soaks her face and trickles underneath the collar of her jacket. Her eyes follow the headlights until she suddenly becomes aware of something behind her, something in the car’s wake. The girl turns and walks the length of the vehicle, running her fingers dreamily along the scratches in the paintwork. The scene is painted red by the idling car’s tail lights. The shape is still in the middle of the road, except now it’s on the ground in a puddle of rain.

She goes to it.

The shape still has a head, two arms, and two legs – that remains unchanged – except one of said legs is now bent at the knee to a perfect right angle…forwards, not back. Something protrudes from the torn skin where the leg bends, something cleaned by the rain to what may usually be, when not lit by these strange red lights, a brilliant white. She’s somewhat intrigued by how little blood the thing seems to have shed. Then she sees the blood.

Guess that puddle wasn’t rain after all.

‘Daddy gonna be mad at Lenata,’ it splutters. ‘Lenata gonna get it.’

Funny, it doesn’t even weep.

The girl picks up the spade by its side. Time to dig for wolms. Lips quivering, the thing looks up at its sister as she holds the spade high into the rain.

It shakes its head.

‘Lenata?’

She swings.

One

It wails.

Steel tears down upon the shape.

Two

Another scream.

Three

A crunch as it ploughs into the exposed bone. The resulting pain is too profound to merit a scream, only a choking whimper as it twitches on the ground.

Four

Its outstretched hand gets mangled.

Five

Details begin to resonate in the girl’s mind: curly hair, gaps in its baby teeth, the raincoat, all cast in that ominous red of the watching tail lights. She knows this shape. She knows this seven-year-old. The spade freezes over her head.

He opens his mouth to either beg or scream, she’ll never know which. Blood from the back of his throat gurgles then explodes from his lips like a burst water balloon, dripping down his chin and polka-dotting the raincoat. The girl stares at his twitching eyelids, both repulsed and fascinated. The suggestion of vomit pushes up from her stomach, and yet at the same time she is elated, watching from high above in the storm. The adrenaline turns her veins into electricity, the spade her conductor. The suggestion in her stomach recedes. She finds herself once again thinking of that moth in the larder. How easy it would have been to—

Another burst water balloon from his mouth. The polka dots are running now. Her brother’s bloodshot baby-blues are bulbous, begging, reaching for his sister’s humanity. His quivering, upside-down clown mouth of despair gapes wider, revealing chattering milk teeth, the tiny crevasses in-between threaded with blood. Maybe we all have a little flood in us, Mother had said. Something about strength, about being strong. Was this what she’d meant?

Noah gazes into the eyes of the flood, into infinity, into Renata Wakefield.

She swings.

Six

Water ricochets off steel.

Seven

Blood flows.

Eight

Knuckles white around the wheel.

Nine

Foot pressed into the pedal.

Ten

Splintering bone.

Eleven

The spade slices through soft skull.

Twelve

She massacres the thing, and with it her father, mother, teachers, church goers, family friends,