Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

He could see her, up top; he was trying to say something. Like a wingless bird, he guttered and struggled in the water, and his struggles gave her a feeling that she could not name. The words broke from his mouth in an indistinct burble as he slipped under, flailing, and was gone, nothing of him visible but a weedy tuft of hair, bubbles foaming white at the slimy surface.

All quiet, bubbles boiling. Up he burst again: his face melted-looking somehow, his mouth a black hole. He was clutching at some floating boards but they wouldn’t hold his weight and as he crashed back into the water his wide eyes met hers—accusatory, helpless, the eyes of a guillotined head held up before a mob. His mouth worked; he tried to speak, some glubbing gasping incomprehensible word that was swallowed as he sank.

A strong wind blew, raising goose bumps on Harriet’s arms, shivering the leaves on all the trees; and all at once, in a single breath, the sky darkened to slate-gray. Then, in a long sweeping gust, raindrops rattled across the roof like a shower of pebbles.

It was a warm, drenching, tropical-feeling rain: a squall like the ones that blew in on the Gulf Coast during hurricane season. It clattered loudly on the broken roof—but not so loudly that the gurgles and splashing from below were dinned out. Raindrops leaped like little silver fish on the surface of the water.

Harriet was seized by a fit of coughing. The water had gone in her mouth and up her nose, and the rotten taste soaked her to her marrow; now, with the rain driving in her face, she spat on the boards, turned on her back and rolled her head to and fro, driven nearly mad with the wretched noise that was echoing up the tank—a noise, it occurred to her, that probably was not much different from the noises that Robin had made as he was strangling to death. She’d imagined it happening clean and quick, no floundering or ugly wet strangles, only clapped hands and a puff of smoke. And the sweetness of the thought struck her: how lovely to vanish off the face of the earth, what a sweet dream to vanish now, out of her body: poof , like a spirit. Chains clattering empty to the floor.

Steam rose from the hot, verdant ground. Far below, in the weeds, the Trans Am was hunched in a disturbing, confidential stillness, raindrops shimmering on the hood in a fine white mist; a couple might have been inside it, kissing. Often, in the years to come, she would see it just so—blind, intimate, unreflecting—off in the thin speechless margins of her dreams.

It was two o’clock when Harriet—after pausing to listen (all clear)—let herself in through the back door. Apart from Mr. Godfrey (who didn’t seem to have recognized her), and Mrs. Fountain, who had given her an exceedingly strange look from the porch (dirty as she was, striped with dark filaments of slime that had stuck to her skin and baked on in the heat), she had encountered no one. Cautiously, after looking both ways, she scurried down the hall to the downstairs bathroom and bolted the door behind her. The taste of decay fumed and smoldered in her mouth, unendurable. She stripped off her clothes (the smell was horrific; the Girl Scout shirt coming over her head made her gag) and threw them into the bathtub and turned the faucets on them.

Edie often told the story about the time she almost died from an oyster at a New Orleans wedding. “Sickest I’ve ever been.” She’d known the oyster was bad, she said, the moment she bit into it; she’d spit it right out in her napkin, but within hours collapsed and had to be taken to Baptist Hospital. In much the same way, from the instant she tasted the water in the tank, Harriet had known it was going to make her sick. The rottenness had seeped into her flesh. Nothing would wash it away. She rinsed her hands and mouth; she gargled with Listerine and spat it out, cupped her hands under the cold tap and drank and drank and drank, but the smell permeated everything, even the clean water. It rose from the dirty clothes in the bathtub; it rose ripe and warm from the pores of her skin. Harriet dumped half a box of Mr. Bubble into the tub and ran the hot water until the foam churned up outrageously. But even under the numbing mouthwash, the taste lingered ugly like a stain on Harriet’s tongue, and it called up vividly and quite particularly the bloated creature half-sunk and bobbing against the dark wall of the tank.

A knock at the door. “Harriet,” called her mother, “is that you?” Harriet never took baths in the downstairs bathroom.

“Yes ma'am,” called Harriet, after an instant, over the pounding water.

“Are you making a mess in there?”

“No, ma'am,” called Harriet, looking bleakly at the mess.

“You know I don’t like you to bathe in that bathroom.”

Harriet couldn’t answer. A wave of cramps had gripped her. Sitting on the side of the tub, staring at the bolted door, she clamped both hands over her mouth and rocked back and forth.

“There’d better not be a mess in there,” her mother called.

The water Harriet had drunk from the tap was coming right back up. With one eye on the door, she got out of the bathtub and—doubled over by the pain in her abdomen—she tiptoed to the commode as quietly as she could. As soon as she removed her hands from her mouth, out it poured, whoosh , a clear, startling gush of putrid water that smelled exactly like the stagnant water Danny Ratliff had drowned in.

In the bath, Harriet drank more water from the cold tap, washed her clothes and washed herself. She drained the tub; she scrubbed it with Comet; she rinsed out the slime and grit and climbed in again to rinse herself. But the dark odor of decay had soaked her through and through, so that even after all the soap and water she still felt pickled and drenched in foulness, discolored, wretched, hanging her head with it, like an oil-soaked penguin she’d seen in a National Geographic magazine over at Edie’s house, standing miserably in a wash pail, holding its little greasy flippers out to the side to keep them from touching its befouled body.

Harriet drained the tub again, and scrubbed it; she wrung out her dripping clothes and hung them to dry. She sprayed Lysol; she sprayed herself with a dusty bottle of green cologne that had a flamenco dancer on the label. She was clean and pink now, dizzy with the heat, but just beneath the perfume, the moisture in the steamy bathroom was still heavy with the suggestion of rot, the same ripe flavor that lay heavy on her tongue.

More mouthwash, she thought—and, without warning, another noisome spout of clear vomit came up, pouring out of her mouth in a ridiculous flood.

When it was over, Harriet lay on the cold floor, cheek against sea-green tile. As soon as she was able to stand she dragged herself to the sink and cleaned up with a washrag. Then she wrapped herself in a towel and crept upstairs to her room.

She was so sick, so giddy and tired that—before she’d realized what she’d done—she’d pulled down the covers and climbed into bed, the bed she hadn’t slept in for weeks. But it felt so heavenly that she didn’t care; and—despite the griping pains in her stomach—she fell into heavy sleep.

She was awakened by her mother. It was twilight. Harriet’s stomach ached, and her eyes felt scratchy like when she’d had the pink-eye.

“What?” she said raising herself heavily on her elbows.

“I said, are you sick?”

“I don’t know.”

Harriet’s mother bent close to feel her forehead, then knitted her eyebrows and drew back. “What’s that smell?” When Harriet didn’t answer, she leaned forward and sniffed her neck suspiciously.