Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Harriet, gripping the rail with both fists, lay on her stomach too terrified to breathe. Because her feet were above her head, all the blood had drained down to her face so that her heartbeat crashed in her temples. The screams from the car had ceased, the sharp high animal wails that had seemed as if they would never end, but even the silence seemed stretched and torn out of shape by those unearthly cries.

There he still stood, Danny Ratliff, down on the ground, looking very small in the flat, placid distance. It was all as still as a picture. Every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree seemed combed and oiled and slicked into place.

Harriet’s elbows were sore. She shifted slightly, in her trying position. She was unsure what she’d seen—she was too far away—but the gunshots and the cries she’d heard plainly enough, and the afterburn of the screams still rang in her ears: high-pitched, scalding, intolerable. All movement in the car had stopped; his victims (dark forms, more than one, it seemed) were still.

Suddenly he turned; and Harriet’s heart clenched painfully. Please, God , she prayed, please, God, don’t let him come up here ….

But he was walking towards the woods. Swiftly—after a backwards glance—he stooped in the clearing. A band of custard-white skin—at odds with the dark brown tan on his arms—appeared in the crack between his T-shirt and the waistband of his jeans. He broke the gun and examined it; he stood, and scoured it clean with his shirt. Then he threw it towards the woods, and the gun’s shadow flew dark over the weedy ground.

Harriet—peeping over her forearm at all this—fought a strong impulse to look away. Though she was desperate to know what he was doing, still, it was a curious strain to keep her gaze fixed so intently on the same bright, distant spot; and she had to shake her head against a kind of fog that kept creeping over her vision, like the darkness that slid over the numbers on the chalkboard at school when she stared at them too hard.

After a while, he turned from the woods and walked back to the car. There he stood, with his sweaty, muscled back to her, his head slightly down, his arms rigidly at his sides. His shadow lay tall before him on the gravel, a black plank pointing at two o’clock. In the glare it was comforting to look at, the shadow, restful and cool to the eyes. Then it slid away and vanished as he turned and began to walk towards the tower.

Harriet’s stomach dropped away. The next instant she recovered herself, fumbled for the gun, began to unwrap it with stammering fingers. All at once, an old pistol that she didn’t know how to shoot (and wasn’t even sure she’d loaded right) seemed a very small thing to put between herself and Danny Ratliff, especially in so precarious a spot.

Her gaze skipped around. Where to position herself? Here? Or on the other side, a little lower down, maybe? Then she heard a clang on the metal ladder.

Frantically, Harriet glanced around. She’d never shot a gun in her life. Even if she hit him, she wouldn’t drop him instantly, and the rickety roof of the tank afforded no ground for retreat.

Clang … clang … clang …

Harriet—feeling it in her body for a moment, the terror of being bodily grabbed and thrown off the side—floundered to her feet, but just as she was about to fling herself, gun and all, down through the trapdoor and into the water something stopped her. Arms walloping—she reared back and recovered her balance. The tank was a trap. Bad enough to meet him face-on, in the sunlight, but down there she wouldn’t have a chance.

Clang … clang …

The gun was heavy and cold. Gripping it awkwardly, Harriet crawled sideways down the roof, and then turned around on her stomach with the gun in both hands and inched forward on her elbows as far as she could without actually sticking her head over the edge of the tank. Her vision had narrowed and darkened, and squeezed itself down to a single eye-slit like the visor in a knight’s helmet, and Harriet found herself looking out through it with a curious detachment, everything distant and unreal except a sort of sharp desperate wish to squander her life like a firecracker, in a single explosion, right in Danny Ratliff’s face.

Clang … clang …

She edged forward, the gun trembling in her grasp, just enough to see over the side. Leaning out a little more, she saw the top of his head, about fifteen feet down.

Don’t look up , thought Harriet frantically. She balanced herself on her elbows, brought the gun up and centered it on the bridge of her nose and then—looking down the barrel, lining up the shot as straight as she could—she closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.

Bang . The pistol struck her square in the nose with a loud crack and she cried out and rolled over on her back to clutch her nose with both hands. A shower of orange sparks spat up in the darkness behind her eyelids. Somewhere, deep in the back of her mind, she heard the pistol clattering to the ground, striking the rungs of the ladder with a series of hollow clangs that sounded like somebody running a stick down metal bars at the zoo but the pain in her nose was so fierce and bright that there had never been anything else like it. Blood gushed between her fingers, hot and slippery: it was all over her hands, she could taste it in her mouth and as she looked at her red fingertips she couldn’t remember exactly where she was for a moment, or why she was there.

The explosion startled Danny so badly that he nearly lost his grip. A heavy clang rang out on the bar above him and the next instant something hit him hard on the crown of the head.

For a moment he thought he was falling, and didn’t know what to grab for, and then with a dreamlike jolt he realized that he was still holding tight to the ladder with both hands. Pain swam out from his head in big flat waves like a struck clock, waves that hung in mid-air and were slow to dissolve.

He’d felt something fall past him; it seemed to him that he’d heard it hit the gravel. He touched his scalp—a knot was rising, he could feel it—and then he turned around as far as he dared and looked down to see if he could make out what had hit him. The sun was in his face and all he could see below was the elongated shadow of the tank, and his own shadow an elongated scarecrow on the ladder.

In the clearing, the windows of the Trans Am were mirrored and blind-looking in the glare. Had Farish rigged the tower? Danny hadn’t thought so—but now he realized he really didn’t know for sure.

And here he was. He took a step up the ladder, and stopped. He thought of going down again, to see if he could find the thing that had hit him, and then realized that it would only be a waste of time. What he’d done there, down below, was done: what he had to do now was keep climbing, focus on getting to the top. He did not wish to be blown up, but if I am , he thought desperately, looking down at the bloody car, fuck it .

There was nothing to do but keep going. He rubbed the sore place on his head, took a deep breath, and started to climb again.

Something in Harriet snapped to, and she found herself in her body again, lying on her side; and it was like returning to a window that she’d walked away from, but to a different pane. Her hand was bloody. For a moment she stared at it without quite knowing what it was.

Then she remembered, and sat up with a bolt. He was coming, not a moment to waste. She stood, groggily. Suddenly a hand shot out from behind and seized hold of her ankle, and she screamed and kicked at it and—unexpectedly—broke free. She lunged for the trapdoor, just as Danny Ratliff’s battered face and blood-spattered shirt rose up behind her on the ladder, like a swimmer climbing from a pool.