Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“So you’re not going to camp?”

“Not if I can help it,” said Harriet. For weeks, she had watched the mail for the registration forms; when they arrived, she tore them up and hid them in the garbage. But the danger was not yet over. Edie, who was the real menace (her absent-minded mother hadn’t even noticed that the forms were missing), had already bought Harriet a knapsack and a new pair of sneakers, and was asking to see the Supplies list.

Hely picked up the picture of the baboon and examined it. “What’s this for?”

“Oh. That.” She explained.

“Maybe another animal would be better,” suggested Hely. He disliked Edie. She was always teasing him about his hair and pretending that she thought he was a girl.

“Maybe a hippopotamus. Or a pig.”

“I think this is pretty good.”

He leaned over her shoulder, eating boiled peanuts from his pocket, and watched as Harriet glued the snarling baboon face over Edie’s, so that it was artfully framed by her own hairdo. Fangs bared, it glared aggressively at the viewer as Harriet’s grandfather—in profile—beamed raptly at his simian bride. Beneath the photograph was written, in Edie’s own hand:

Edith and Hayward

Ocean Springs, Mississippi

June 11th, 1935

Together, they studied it.

“You’re right,” said Hely. “That is pretty good.”

“Yes. I thought about a hyena but this is better.”

They had just put the encyclopedia back on the shelf and replaced the album (embossed, in gilt, with Victorian curlicues) when they heard the crunch of Edie’s car turning into the gravel drive.

The screen door slammed. “Girls,” they heard her call, business as usual.

No answer.

“Girls, I decided to be a good sport and bring the cat home so you could give him a funeral, but if one of you doesn’t answer me this minute I’m turning right around and taking him back out to Dr. Clark’s.”

There was a stampede to the front room. All three children stood in the doorway, staring at her.

Edie raised an eyebrow. “Why, who’s this little miss?” she said to Hely in mock surprise. She was very fond of him—he reminded her of Robin, except for the horrible long hair—and had no idea that by what she regarded as good-natured teasing she had incurred his bitter hatred. “Can that be you , Hely? I’m afraid I didn’t recognize you beneath your golden tresses.”

Hely smirked. “We were looking at some pictures of you.”

Harriet kicked him.

“Well, that can’t have been very exciting,” Edie said. “Girls,” she said to her granddaughters, “I thought you’d want to bury the cat in your own yard so I stopped on the way back and asked Chester to dig a grave.”

“Where’s Weenie?” said Allison. Her voice was hoarse, and she had a crazy look in her eye. “Where is he? Where did you leave him?”

“With Chester. He’s wrapped up in his towel. I suggest you don’t open it, girls.”

“Come on,” said Hely, bumping Harriet with his shoulder. “Let’s have a look.”

He and Harriet were standing in the dark tool shed in Harriet’s yard, where Weenie’s body lay swaddled in a blue bath towel on Chester’s workbench. Allison—still crying her eyes out—was inside digging through drawers for an old sweater the cat had liked to sleep on and that she wanted to bury with him.

Harriet glanced out the toolshed’s window, which was furred with dust. At the corner of the bright summer lawn was the silhouette of Chester, stepping down hard on the edge of the spade.

“All right,” she said. “But quick. Before she gets back.”

Only later did Harriet realize that it was the first time she had ever seen or touched a dead creature. She was not expecting it to be such a shock. The cat’s flank was cold and unyielding, hard to the touch, and an ugly thrill ran through her fingertips.

Hely leaned in for a closer look. “Gross,” he said cheerfully.

Harriet stroked the orange fur. It was still orange, and as soft as ever, despite the frightening woodenness of the body beneath. His paws were stretched out rigid, as if he was bracing himself against being thrown into a tub of water, and his eyes—which even in old age and suffering had been a clear, ringing green—were clotted with a gelatinous film.

Hely bent to touch him. “Hey,” he yelped, and snatched his hand back. “ Gross .”

Harriet didn’t flinch. Gingerly, she slid her hand to touch the pink spot on the cat’s side where the hair had never quite grown right, the place the maggots had eaten when he was tiny. Weenie, in life, would never let anybody touch him there; he would hiss and take a swipe at anybody who tried it, even Allison. But the cat was still, his lips drawn back from the clenched needles of his teeth. The skin was puckered, rough like brushed gloveskin, and cold cold cold.

So this was the secret, what Captain Scott and Lazarus and Robin all knew, what even the cat had come to know in its last hour: this was it, the passage to the stained-glass window. When Scott’s tent was found, eight months later, Bowers and Wilson lay with their sleeping bags closed over their heads and Scott was in an open bag with his arm thrown over Wilson. That was the Antarctic, and this a breezy green morning in May, but the form beneath her palm was as hard as ice. She ran a knuckle over Weenie’s white-stockinged forefoot. It seems a pity , Scott had written with his stiffening hand, as the white closed in softly from the white immensities, and the faint pencil letters grew fainter on the white paper, but I do not think I can write any more .

“Bet you won’t touch his eyeball,” said Hely, inching closer. “I dare you.”

Harriet scarcely heard him. This was what her mother and Edie had seen: outer dark, the terror you never came back from. Words that slid off paper into emptiness.

In the cool dim of the shed, Hely drew closer. “Are you scared?” he whispered. His hand stole to her shoulder.

“Cut it out,” said Harriet, shrugging away.

She heard the screen door slam shut, her mother calling after Allison; quickly, she tossed the towel back over the cat.

It would never wholly leave her, the vertigo of this moment; it would be with her for the rest of her life, and it would always be mingled inextricably with the dim toolshed—shiny metal sawteeth, the smells of dust and gasoline—and three dead Englishmen beneath a cairn of snow with icicles glittering in their hair. Amnesia: ice floes, violent distances, the body turned to stone. The horror of all bodies.

“Come on,” said Hely, with a toss of his head. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’m coming,” said Harriet. Her heart was pounding, and she felt breathless—not with the breathlessness of fear, but with something very close to rage.

Though Mrs. Fountain had not poisoned the cat, she was nonetheless pleased that it was dead. From the window over her sink—the observation point at which she stood for hours each day, watching the comings and goings of her neighbors—she had spied Chester digging the hole, and now, squinting through the kitchen curtain, she saw the three children gathered around it. One of them—the little girl, Harriet—held a bundle in her arms. The big girl was crying.

Mrs. Fountain pulled her pearly-framed reading glasses low on her nose, and shouldered a cardigan with jeweled buttons over her housedress—it was a warm day but she got chilled easily, she needed a wrap when she went out—and pegged along out her back door and over to the fence.