Christopher Conlon - Savaging the Dark

Connor cries out suddenly, “Mona! Oh my God!”

“What?”

“Pull up her pants! Pull up her pants, Mona! Oh my God!”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I say, looking at her mud-spattered knees and thighs and privates.

“Please, Mona!”

I can see he’s going to become hysterical, so I lean down and do what I can. It’s almost impossible with a dead body, mud, darkness, rain. A few feet away I can hear Connor vomiting in the bushes.

“There,” I say, standing again. “I did it. Now come on.”

He follows as I drag Kylie to the edge of the muddy hole, pull her partway into it, step around the side to pull her farther along by her arms. Finally she’s in place.

“Get her things from the car, Connor.”

He doesn’t protest this. While he’s gone I move to the bathroom again, look for evidence of her presence. I find none other than the urine everywhere, which we’ll clean before we go.

He returns with Kylie’s things in her little rucksack, a pitiful collection of relics: Kleenex, asthma inhaler, a notebook with unicorns on the cover, pen, pencil stub, gum wrappers, and, of course, a thick fantasy novel. I leave it all in the bag and push the bag down beside her. I can hardly see in this rain, this interminable rain.

“Is that everything?”

He nods. He’s crying.

“Then take the shovel, Connor.”

“Wait,” he says weakly.

“We don’t have time to wait.”

“Wait.”

He steps to the edge of the grave, looks down at the dead girl. Mud is all over her, her body, her shirt, her ruined red-splashed face. Her hair is askew. I can see that he’s thinking of trying to tidy her up. He moves from one side of the grave to the other, running his hands through his drenched hair. At last he steps near her head and takes something from his pocket, crouches down to her.

It’s her glasses. He places them gently onto her pulpy nose and over her ears and then turns away weeping, still crouched, mud covering his pants.

I take the shovel myself and finish the task.

After that Connor is all but useless. He sits on the sofa, arms wrapped around himself, shivering. His eyes are wide, staring at nothing in particular. His breathing seems erratic. He makes little gasping sounds. Sometimes his breathing speeds up for a moment and he starts to cry, big tears running down his drenched face. Then he grows quiet again. I’m left to do everything myself. It takes hours, far longer than I’d imagined. The urine in the bathroom is the worst, taking all the towels we have in the cabin to clean up. I have to run hot water over them in the bathtub, wring them out again and again. Then I have to wipe up the mud we’ve tracked in. There’s a brown path of it leading from the back door to the bathroom. I’m on my knees scrubbing, cleaning. At last I’m as done as I can be and I take the towels and my own clothes and toss them into the washing machine. Naked, I go to Connor and pull off his things. He doesn’t resist. He seems hardly aware that I’m there at all. I lead him to the shower, we wash, I towel us both dry. Then I wrap a blanket around him, push him gently over on the sofa, put a pillow under his head.

“Sleep, sweetheart,” I say softly. “When the clothes are all done we’ll go.”

They take nearly two hours to wash and dry. Connor doesn’t sleep, his eyes stay open and wide, but neither does he cry anymore. He doesn’t do anything but just lay there, staring into space, breathing shallowly, shivering. I bring another blanket for him, tuck it carefully over him, kiss him on the forehead.

“You’ll be okay, sweetheart. Try to sleep.”

At last the clothes and towels are done. I’m amazed to realize that it’s already four o’clock in the morning; dawn will come soon. I know we have to get out of here, far away, to the end of the earth if possible. As I pull the warm things from the dryer I wonder what’s happening. Mrs. McCloud would have called Bill hours ago, maybe six hours back, when it became apparent we were late. He would have said he didn’t know but not to worry, his wife would have called him if anything had gone wrong. Would Mr. Blue have called? Did he even realize his son wasn’t home?

At least I saved Connor from him, I think. Rescued him from that violent drunk of a father. I did that for Connor. Yes.

By now there must have been more calls. Bill is worried by now, I’m sure he is. I wonder if he realizes that his grandfather’s pistol isn’t in the drawer where it belongs. No, he’s had no reason to check it. He’s on the phone, or has been, calling the Youth for America number, trying to find out if we got to the conference. But nobody’s answering now, not at four a.m. Maybe he’s in an uneasy sleep right now, waiting to hear the sound of my car pulling up in the drive and ready to hear the wild story of what delayed us so drastically, why I didn’t call. He’s kept Gracie calm, I know, told her there’s nothing wrong, Mom will be home soon, don’t worry. Part of me feels sad about this in an abstracted way but in truth, Bill and Gracie are no longer real to me. Mrs. McCloud, Mr. Blue are mere ghosts. Kylie a faraway memory. Cutts School a dream. All of them gone, vanished, no longer part of reality, if they ever were.

All that exists now is Connor. Connor and Mona, Mona and Connor. I know we have to get away. If they haven’t already, the police will start looking, they’ll check with the people who ran the conference, they’ll find that we duly registered and that participants remember us. Yes, we were definitely there. But afterwards we seem to have vanished. I never stopped anywhere after we left the convention center; there will be no one to identify us as having gone north. I wonder how long it will take Bill to think of the cabin. And yet the cabin is a hundred miles from what our destination had been. No doubt the search will focus on the main roads and side routes leading from the convention center home, at least for a while. The police will put out—what do they call it in the old crime movies?—an APB on us, on the car, with a description and the license plate number. A woman and two children, a boy and a girl. Wild scenarios will ensue. Perhaps we were carjacked, some crazed criminal forcing his way into the vehicle at a traffic light, holding a gun on me and forcing me to drive—where? It might be anywhere in the country. He might do anything, make us stop the car in the middle of nowhere, rape me, rape Kylie, rape Connor, shoot all of us. By mid-morning everyone connected to the school will know, everyone will be trying to stay calm and hope everything has a simple explanation even as they will have their own scenarios of what might have happened. Not one will bear any resemblance to the truth because not one of them knows about Connor, Connor and me.

I fold and put away all the towels and then go to the sofa, whisper, “Honey? We have to go, honey.” He seems to have dropped into a light doze but instantly his eyes pop open. He passively allows me to dress him. “We’ll get some breakfast a little later, sweetheart,” I say, slipping his sweater over him—he didn’t bring his big coat—and adjusting it. I gather up my bag and whatever we’ve left lying around, lead him out to the car. He seems dazed, unable to walk a straight line. I have him lie down in the back and tell him to go to sleep again while I return to the house, make a final check of things, turn off the lights and lock up. I consider going around back and taking a last look at where we left the girl but I covered it well with bushes and branches and cleaned the shovel we used thoroughly. They’ll find the makeshift grave eventually, of course, but with any luck even if they think to come to the cabin they’ll find no immediately obvious evidence that we’ve been here, never bother to search behind the building.