Dee

Dee

Dee puts the tape recorder on the table. It was not easy to find. None of the electronics outlets stock them. In the end she overpaid for this one in a vinyl store downtown.

She puts the cassette in and presses play with a trembling finger.

‘Please come and arrest Ted for murder,’ a little, anxious voice says. ‘And other things. They have the death penalty in this state, I know that …’

It’s a short recording, lasting maybe a minute. Dee listens without breathing. Then she rewinds and listens to it again. Then she listens further, in case there is another recording after this one. But it’s just some medical student’s notes. A woman with a slight accent Dee cannot place, and a voice like a clear bell.

She sits back. It is Lulu. Older, yes. But Dee cannot mistake her sister’s tones. Now that the moment has arrived and she has proof, Dee does not know what to do. She puts a hand on her heart, which is pounding. It feels swollen, likely to burst.

She should tell tired Karen about all this, take her the tape. She will, as soon as she can lift her head from her hands.

There comes a familiar sound from outside. Thunk, thunk, thunk.

Dee’s body becomes electric. She goes to the darkened window. Ted has come out into the back yard. He stands for a moment, listening. He looks around. Dee stays still as a post. She hopes the moonlight reflecting on the windowpane will hide her silhouette. Apparently it does, because Ted nods to himself, and goes to the tangle of blue elder that overruns the eastern corner of the yard. He digs with his hands.

Ted takes something from the ground. He shakes it free of earth, and then slides it briefly from its sheath. A long hunting knife. The blade reflects the moonlight. He puts the knife on his belt and goes into the house.

When he emerges again some minutes later, he has a bag on his back. He goes slowly out of his yard, towards the forest. As Dee watches, the bag seems to move. She is sure it’s twitching in the faint light.

Dee’s mind clears. Everything becomes cold and hard. There is no time for Karen. Lulu must be saved – and there is a monster to be dealt with. Get it done, Dee Dee, she thinks.

Dee runs to the closet and grabs the spray can of fluorescent paint, the claw-hammer and the thick, snake-proof boots she bought for this moment. She throws on her hoodie, jacket, ties the laces with shaking hands. She emerges from her house and closes the door quietly behind her, in time to see Ted vanish under the trees. His flashlight dances on the night air.

Dee bends low to the ground and runs after him on silent feet. This time nothing will stop her.

Fifty feet into the forest, where the streetlight can still be glimpsed through the branches, she stops and blazes the trunk of a beech tree with the reflective yellow paint. Branches brush her face and drag at her legs. The forest at night is slippery, it clings. She tries to quiet her breath.

The words she heard on the tape run through her mind over and over. Nothing but the peaceful dark. Lulu.

Ted leaves the path, and overhead the moon is obscured by reaching branches. Dee blazes a trunk every fifty feet. She keeps Ted’s flashlight in her sights, focusing on it so hard that it blurs into a starry glow. After a time she feels the woods change. Dee is no longer in the place where families walk. She is in the wild, where bears roam and hikers’ bones are never found.

The whisper of leaf to leaf begins to sound like a rattle shaken by a sinuous tail. Shut UP, she thinks, exhausted. There is no god-DAMN rattlesnake. How long has she been a prisoner of fear, she wonders? Years and years. It is time to be free.

Dee’s foot slips on a muddy branch. The branch slides under her foot in a muscular movement. At the same moment her torch beam catches it, just ahead of her right toe on the forest floor. The diamond pattern is all too familiar. The sharp, light rattle, like dried rice shaken in a bag. The snake rears back slowly with the grace of a nightmare, poises to strike, eyes reflecting green. It is about four feet long, young. Dee’s torchlight dances crazily over the cairn of rock behind, which most likely serves as its home.

Fear spreads through her veins like ink. She screams but it comes out as a slight whistle. The snake sways. Perhaps it is sluggish having just awakened, maybe it is blinded by the flashlight, but it gives Dee the moment she needs.

Keeping the beam steady, she steps forward and swings. She knows that if she misses, she is dead.

The claw-hammer hits the snake’s blunt, swaying head with a crack. At her second blow the snake drops limp to the forest floor. Dee leans over it, panting. ‘Take that,’ she whispers.

She pokes the long body with a finger. It is cool to the touch, limp and powerless, now. She picks up the dead snake. She wants to remember this for ever. ‘I’m going to make a belt out of you,’ she says. Joy rolls through her. She feels transformed.

As she lifts the dead snake, meaning to put it in her pocket, the head twitches and turns. Dee sees it happen in slow motion – the snake’s head lunging, burying its fangs in her forearm. Dee feels her mouth widen to a silent scream. She shakes her arm, trying to detach it. The long limp body shakes too, lashing in mimicry of life. Some things survive death. The pain of the bite is bad. But it is nothing to the horror of having the thing attached to her, like a monstrous part of herself.

At last Dee hooks the claw-hammer into the dead jaws and pries them open. The fangs are pale and translucent in the torchlight. She throws the mangled body into the forest, as far as she can.

Something bubbles up inside her. Don’t scream, she tells herself. But it’s laughter. She is racked with it, wheezing with it. Tears stream down her face. There was a snake, after all.

She doesn’t want to look, but she has to. The flesh around the bite is already swollen and discoloured like a week-old bruise.

Get it done, Dee Dee.Still giggling, she rips her sleeve off at the shoulder to relieve the pressure on her ballooning flesh. She is a good hour away from help. The only thing to do is go on, and finish it. Ahead, Ted’s light dances away through the trees. Unbelievably, the encounter with the rattlesnake took less than a minute. Dee stumbles after his light.

She begins to feel sick. Other things happen, too. It seems to her that the trees are becoming whiter, and there are red birds darting among the trunks. She gasps and tries to blink the image away. This is not a dream. There is no nest of human hair. Her arm pulses, like it has its own heart. She knows that if you are bitten, you are not supposed to move. It spreads the poison. Too late, she thinks. The poison got me long ago.

She follows Ted westward. She turns off her flashlight. The moon is bright enough. Ted keeps his on. It must be difficult, keeping his footing with all that weight on his back. Maybe the weight is moving, fighting him.

With her good hand she fingers the claw-hammer in her pocket. It is sticky with drying snake blood. She burns; her anger leaps and licks at her insides. Ted will pay. Every fifty feet she blazes another tree with reflective yellow. She has to believe that she will be coming back this way, with her sister.

She follows as close as she dares. Even so, she loses him. His light dances out of sight, and then he’s gone. The ground begins to fall sharply, and Dee stumbles, panics. But then logic reasserts itself. She can hear water running somewhere below. He will probably stop by water. Dawn is not far off, she can smell it in the air. Dee leans against a slippery trunk and breathes. She just needs to be patient for a little longer. She can’t risk falling in the dark. She needs dawn. She knows it won’t be long.

Dull sunrise paints the world pewter. Dee staggers down a rocky escarpment towards the sound of water. She comes to the lip of a deep defile. At the bottom, a stream runs hard and silver over the rock. By the narrow shooting water, there is a sleeping bag, open like a slack mouth. A dying fire sends up threads of smoke in the dawn-grey air.

So this is the weekend place.Now that the moment is upon her, Dee feels solemn. It seems almost holy, the end of so many things.

She picks her way down, shakily. Her arm feels heavy as stone, weighed down by venom. The rock by the stream is spattered with dark drops. Blood. Something has happened here.

She follows the drying blood into the stand of birches. That’s right, she thinks. Animals go into hiding to die. But which one, Ted or Lulu? It is familiar, the dim dappled tree light. The quiet conversation, leaf to leaf. This has happened before. Dee went into the trees and when she came out, someone was dead. This time overlays that, like a drawing on tracing paper. But of course, it was a summer afternoon, that time, by the lake. And it was pines that day, not silver birch. She drops white static over these thoughts.

She does not see it at first, the body. Then she glimpses a hiking boot, half torn off a foot, poking out from a tangle of briar. He is splayed at an angle, face down. Dark stuff leaks from his mouth. She thinks, Oh, she got away and he is dead, and joy surges through her. Then she thinks, But I wanted to kill him.

Ted groans and turns, slow as a world revolving. Dirt and leaf mould cover his flesh like a dark tattoo. The knife is still stuck in his abdomen. Blood bubbles up around it, pulses out in a glossy stream. He sees her, and his expression of surprise is almost comical. He has no idea how well she knows him, how closely she has watched, how intertwined are their fates. ‘Help me,’ he says. ‘You’re hurt too.’ He is looking at her arm.

‘Rattler,’ Dee says, absently. She stares at him in fascination. She knows how the snake feels, now, approaching the mouse.

‘My bag, by the stream, surgical glue. There’s a snakebite kit too. Don’t know if it works.’ She finds it wonderful that at this moment he’s concerned for her well-being. Of course, he thinks she’s going to help – he needs her.

‘I’m going to watch you die,’ she says. She watches as disbelief spreads over his face.

‘Why?’ he whispers. Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.

‘It’s what you deserve,’ Dee says. ‘No, it’s just a little of what you deserve, after what you’ve done.’ She looks around in the dim air. Nothing else stirs between the trees. ‘Where is she?’ Dee asks. ‘Tell me where she is and I will make it quick. Help you end it.’ She thinks of Lulu, alone and frightened, under the big uncaring sky. She wags a finger back and forth in front of his face. His eyes follow it. ‘Time is running out for you,’ she says. ‘Tick-tock.’

Ted gasps and red bubbles form at his lips. He makes a sound. It is a sob.

‘So sorry for yourself,’ Dee says furiously. ‘You didn’t have any pity to spare for her.’ She stands. The world sways and greys at the edges, but she steadies herself. ‘I’m going to find her.’ Lulu will come home to live with her. Dee will have the patience for the years of healing she will need. They will heal one another. ‘Die, monster,’ she says and turns away, towards the sound of the waterfall, towards the day, where the sun is breaking gold through the cloud.

Behind her, a little girl’s voice whispers, ‘Don’t call him that.’

Dee turns, thrilling. There is no one there but her and the dying man.

‘He’s not a monster,’ the girl’s voice says, coming reedy and weak through Ted’s blue lips. It is the same voice that was recorded on the cassette tape. ‘I had to kill him – but that is between Daddy and me. You keep out of it.’

‘Who are you?’ Dee asks. The rushing of red wings fills her ears.

‘Lauren,’ the little girl says through the big man’s mouth.

‘Don’t try to trick me,’ Dee says firmly. It must be a hallucination, some side effect of the poison. ‘He took Lulu. He takes little girls.’ This must be true, or everything collapses.

‘He never did that,’ the girl says. ‘We’re part of one another, he and I.’

The world tips as Dee limps towards Ted’s body. ‘Shhhh,’ she says. ‘Be quiet. You’re not real.’ She presses her palm over his nose and mouth. He squirms and struggles, kicking up leaves and dirt with his heels. She holds her hand fast until he goes still. It’s hard to tell through the mess but she thinks he has stopped breathing. She stands, wearier than death. The world goes grey at the edges. Her arm is shiny, blackened and swollen.

She stumbles to Ted’s backpack, through wisps of white cloud. She finds a yellow pouch. The snake on the label rears out at her and she flinches, gasping. The instructions swim before her eyes. She puts the tourniquet on and places the suction cup on the mouth of the wound. The flesh there is pudgy and dark. It hurts. She pumps and blood fills the chamber. Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but she feels better already, steadier, more alert. She pumps a couple more times, then gets up. That will have to do.

She sees the surgical glue tucked into a pocket of the backpack. She throws it into the fast-running stream. ‘Just in case,’ she whispers. After all, dead rattlesnakes still bite.

She thinks of her hand over Ted’s nose and mouth as he fought for breath. It’s fine, because he deserved it. Everything will work out. As for the moment when the man spoke with a little girl’s voice, that was just confusion caused by the poison. Her vision blurs, but she quests patiently, until she sees her yellow blaze on a distant tree trunk, marking the path out of the valley. She stumbles towards it. Dee will find Lulu and give her a place to live, and they will be so happy, and hunt for pebbles together. But not at a lake. Never there.

‘Lulu,’ Dee whispers. ‘I’m coming.’ She staggers through the forest, through pillars of dark and light. Behind her she hears a dog baying. She hurries on.