Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

Harriet’s palms were wet and her heart slammed like a tennis ball in her chest. Then, down on the street, she heard a car coming.

They froze. The car whooshed past without stopping.

“Dude,” she heard Hely whisper, “ don’t look down .” He was several inches away, not touching her, but a palpable corona of damp heat radiated from him head to toe, like a force field.

She turned; gamely, in the spooky lavender twilight, he gave her the thumbs up and then stuck his head and forearms through the window like a swimmer doing the breast-stroke and started through.

It was a tight squeeze. At the waist, he stuck fast. Harriet—clutching the aluminum siding with her left hand, straining up on the sash with her right—shied back as far as she could from his frantically kicking feet. The incline was shallow, and she slipped and nearly fell, catching herself only at the last moment, but before she could swallow or even catch her breath Hely’s front half fell inside the apartment, with a loud thump, so that only his sneakers stuck out. After a moment’s stunned pause, he pulled himself in the rest of the way. “Yes!” Harriet heard him say—his voice distant, jubilant, a familiar ecstasy of attic darkness, when they scrambled on their hands and knees to cardboard forts.

She stuck her head in after him. In the dim, she just made him out: curled in a heap, nursing a hurt kneecap. Clumsily—on his knees—he rose and walked forward and seized Harriet’s forearms and threw his weight backward. Harriet sucked her stomach in and did her best to wriggle through, oof , kicking in mid-air, like Pooh stuck in the rabbit hole.

Still writhing, she fell all in a tumble—partly on Hely, partly on a dank, mildewy carpet that smelled like something from the bottom of a boat. As she rolled away, her head bumped the wall with a hollow sound. They were indeed in a bathroom, a tiny one: sink and toilet, no tub, walls of particle board laminated to look like tile.

Hely, on his feet now, pulled her up. As she stood, she smelled an acerbic, fishy smell—not mildew, though intertwined with mildew, but sharp and distinct and entirely vile. Fighting the bad taste at the back of her throat, Harriet hurled all her rising panic into battling the door (flapping vinyl accordion, printed to look like woodgrain), which was stuck firmly in its tracks.

The door snapped and they fell on top of each other through it into a larger room—just as stuffy, but darker. The far wall bellied out in an overstuffed curve which was blackened with smoke damage and buckled with damp. Hely—panting with excitement, heedless as a terrier on the scent—was yanked up suddenly by a fear so sharp it rang on his tongue with a metallic taste. Partly because of Robin, and what had happened to him, Hely’s parents had warned him all his life that not all grown-ups were good; some of them—not many, but a few—stole children from their parents and tortured and even killed them. Never before had the truth of this struck him so forcefully, like a blow to the chest; but the stench and the loathsome swell of the walls made him feel seasick and all the horror stories his parents had told him (kids gagged and bound in abandoned houses, hung from ropes or locked in closets to starve) all at once came to life, turned piercing yellow eyes on him and grinned, with shark’s teeth: chop-chop .

Nobody knew where they were. Nobody—no neighbor, no passer-by—had seen them climb in; nobody would ever know what had happened to them if they didn’t come home. Following behind Harriet, who was heading confidently into the next room, he tripped over an electrical cord and nearly screamed.

“Harriet?” His voice came out strange. He stood there in the dim, waiting for her answer, staring at the only light visible—three rectangles traced in fire, outlining each of the three tinfoiled windows, floating eerily in the dark—when suddenly the floor plunged beneath him. Maybe it was a trap. How did they know nobody was home ?

“Harriet!” he cried. All of a sudden he had to pee worse than he’d ever had to pee in his whole life and—fumbling with his zipper, hardly knowing what he did—he turned from the door and let rip right on the carpet: fast fast fast, mindless of Harriet, practically hopping up and down in his agony; for in warning him so vigorously about sickos, Hely’s parents had unwittingly planted in him some strange ideas, and chief among these was a panicky belief that kidnapped children were not permitted by their captors to use the toilet, but forced to soil themselves wherever they might be: tied to a dirty mattress, locked in a car trunk, buried in a coffin with a breathing tube….

There , he thought, half-delirious with relief. Even if the rednecks tortured him (with clasp-knives, nail-guns, whatever) at least they wouldn’t have the satisfaction of watching him wet himself. Then, behind him, he heard something, and his heart skidded like a car on an ice slick.

But it was only Harriet—her eyes big and inky, looking very small against the door frame. He was so glad to see her he didn’t even think to wonder if she’d caught him peeing.

“Come see this,” she said, flatly.

At her calmness, his fear evaporated. He followed her into the next room. The instant he stepped in, the rotten musky stink—how could he not have recognized it?—hit him so hard that he could taste it—

“Holy Moses,” he said, clapping a hand over his nose.

“I told you,” she said primly.

The boxes—lots of them, nearly enough to cover the floor—glinted in the faint light; pearly buttons, mirror shards, nail heads and rhinestones and crushed glass all shimmering discreetly in the dimness like a cavern of pirate treasure, rough sea-chests strewn with great careless sprays of diamonds and silver and rubies.

He looked down. In the crate by his sneaker, a timber rattlesnake—inches away—was coiled and switching his tail, tch tch tch . Without thinking, he leapt back when through the screen at the corner of his vision he caught sight of another snake pouring itself quietly toward him in a mottled S-shape. When its snout butted the side of the box it snapped back, with such a hiss and such a powerful lash (impossible movement, like a film run backwards, rope rising from a puddle of spilled milk and flying upwards and back into the pitcher) that Hely jumped again, knocking into another crate, which spat with a perfect ebullition of hisses.

Harriet, he noticed, was shoving an up-ended box away from the mass and towards the latched door. She stopped and brushed the hair from her face. “I want this one,” she said. “Help me.”

Hely was overcome. Though he hadn’t realized it, up until this very instant he hadn’t believed she was telling him the truth; and an icy bubble of excitement surged up through him, tingling, deadly, delicious, like cold green sea rushing through a hole in the bottom of a boat.

Harriet—lips compressed—slid the crate through several feet of clear floor space, then tipped it sideways. “We’ll take him …” she said, and paused to rub her palms together, “we’ll take him down the stairs outside.”

“We can’t walk down the street carrying that box .”

“Just help me, okay?” With a gasp, she wrenched the crate free of the tight spot.

Hely started over. The crates were not nice to wade through; behind the screens—no more than window-screen, he noted, easy to put a foot through—he had a vague consciousness of shadowy motion: circles that broke, and melted, and doubled back on themselves, black diamonds flowing one after the other in vile, silent circuits. His head felt full of air. This isn’t real , he told himself, not real, no it’s just a dream and indeed, for many years to come—well into adulthood—his dreams would drop him back sharply into this malodorous dark, among the hissing treasure-chests of nightmare.