The road outside Oxford is dark, a handful of stars piercing the night sky. The car is thick with a gamy, animal smell, a whiff of storm-rain. Hot air shoots out through the Renault’s vents while the Common Misfits spill out over the speaker. Ooooh, baby, baby, where’d it all go so wrong? Nothing’s as good as it used to be.
I’ve got the music blasting so I can’t hear the noises—if there are any. From the back.
Exhilaration skates along my nerves. Through the front windshield I can see the two-hundred-foot chimney of the cement works silhouetted against the pearl-edged clouds. It’s halfway medieval in the gloom. Signs everywhere say KEEP OUT and NO TRESPASSING. But there’s nothing but a rusted padlock on the front gate. I stop the car, get out and bash off the lock with a chunk of concrete the size of a softball. Drag open the gate.
The Renault shudders along a shoddy gravel road, pitted and broken up, toward the cement works. Great tranches of water reflect the moonlight like giant silver platters. It takes time to navigate the car around deep potholes. I glance at the nearby buildings for something I can use, snatching glimpses of burnt-out silos with rotted doors. No good, no good. They’re all too exposed to the elements. But something about this place feels right: maybe just the wildness of it, the look of abandonment. No one will find her here. She’ll be safe.
Rainwater has lengthened the quarry lake, feeding into a labyrinth of ditches. The headlights shimmer on the bottle-green surface of the lake, tingeing it with an electric glow, and thick mist hovers over the water. I can make out a building the shape of a boot, an ancient conveyor belt and a flooded pit. There are jagged arches that look like an ancient Roman bathhouse.
This place reminds me of all those fairy tales I used to read her in bed. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.
I’m out of the car and into the darkness, the body bag in my arms. Pressing my back against the rusted metal door. The hinges resist. I keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Finally the door creaks open. I have to struggle with her now, aware of the fungal softness of her body beneath the vinyl. My arms are rubbery with fatigue. I lower her to the ground and drag the bag inside, leaving a deep muddy groove behind me.
Inside the building there’s only a thin wedge of light from the car. The tower telescopes toward an open roof.
I can do this. I have to do this.
When I touch the zipper it isn’t cold anymore. I tug it most of the way down—there! The gleam of the shaved head, pale as an eggshell. Her skin is glazed and nacreous. She still looks like my sister. Her lips, her chin, the slight snub nose. Her eyes are closed.
Soff, am I playing dead?
No, Kiki-bird, the dead don’t talk.
Tiny tremors ripple though her muscles. I lean forward. Is this it then? Is this what I wanted to happen? A gust of cool, yeasty air escapes her lips. It happens again. And again. The smell is unfamiliar, faintly sickening.
What have I done?
I scrabble to my feet, my heart racing, numbness crawling across my skin. Kira’s body has begun to shake violently. The smell of decay. The noise of her limbs shuffling against plastic skritch skritch skritch. The sound of something coming awake, trying to free itself.
Oh god.
I thought I could handle this. That I would be strong enough. What is she?
Now I’m running through the door of the tower, slamming it shut behind me. Climbing into the driver’s seat of the Renault.
My foot slams the accelerator and the tires squeal. The headlights explode the cement works into blocky shapes, a strange geometry of angles and curves. I crack my head viciously against the window as one of the front tires drops into a gash in the broken concrete. My vision swims but I don’t slow down. I speed through the open gate.
Trees flash by as the car sails up Bunkers Hill. Mud gums up the tires, making the wheel jerk in my hand. I’m fighting for control now. I need to be careful. I need to concentrate.
There’s a drop on the left of the road. Not a cliff, I remember, but a thirty-foot tumble through partial woodland. No safety rails, no shoulder, and the slick runoff makes it hard to stay in control. The Renault’s back end keeps fishtailing. Then the rear tires hit gravel, making an awful sound.
My fists clench as I try to wrestle the car back under control. Focus. The road curves, shoots up and then dips as the Renault crests the hill.
And all at once the fear drops away, transmuted into something else. A giddy, slaphappy high. I could loosen my grip on the wheel. And what? Disaster? The feeling is amazing. Adrenaline rattles my nerves but it heightens my senses too. Shadows peel away from one another beyond the circle of my headlights. A shiver slides along my spine, a watery feeling in my stomach. The thought of something moving out there, of Kira moving.
My eyes flick to the rear-view mirror. The tower has been swallowed by the forest and darkness. The beams of my headlights catch the thick bars of tree trunks as branches whip against the side of the car. My heart is pounding. The Common Misfits croon, Why can’t it be like it was, sweet baby? I would have stayed like that forever…
Then the wheel skitters in my hands. I have a drunk’s sluggish sense of things spiralling out of control. Headlights coming my way, so bright I’m blinded. Left is the edge of the road. Left is the thirty-foot drop. Veer right, I have to veer right…I don’t veer right—instead, I let go of the wheel. The car lurches into the trees like a rampaging animal. I should be terrified, but I’m not, not even a little bit. As branches splinter against the windshield and the night fragments into a spiderweb of cracks, my body lights up with a feeling close to joy.