Until his torch went out; and this was not how he wanted the world to be, utterly dark and cold and empty, nothing in reach of his groping hands.
Groping, his hands found nothing but his eyes did. Knock knock, cool and stiff like fingers but not that, not fingers: lightly knocking against his eyes and knocking again like crooked fingers while he only stood there, too much knocked upon.
Moaning, he heard his voice say “Mama”; but all moans sound more or less like mama, and he hadn’t called her that since he was a child, not since he was very small indeed.
He stepped backwards, away from the knocking; and kept his hands rigidly at his sides not to grope again, not to feel.
Not to find.
His feet found a wall for him, and he kept his shoulder against it until they came to the rise of the stairs. And so up, still in darkness and that rushing sound in his ears changing now, turning rhythmic, turning to kicks; and the door closed at the top but his barging shoulder crashing it open and his stumbling feet carrying him out into the cool and shadowed bath-house which was so much warmer, so very much brighter than what lay below.
And still he couldn’t leave, and wouldn’t. Not if she were here too, and the girl somewhere in the wood, perhaps: that early glimpse no trick of light or memory, those sounds of kicking no folly of his mind.
He saw his father again across the lake, bound and blindfold, a khaki figure in an early light although the sun was setting.
Beset by his own senses, he struggled for that numb normality he’d worn like a cloak before. Horror was unexceptional, pockets were a proper place for rocks, one deep plunge and never rising after was a fit deed in a nothing, nothing world.
But poking at a rabbit’s eyes wouldn’t do it now, wouldn’t keep him. Not where his father’s eyes were too much on his mind, where his mother dangled always in his thoughts, where the girl might be watching from the wood.
What could keep him, the only thing that might keep him from the slip, from sliding through terror and into its undermath, would be to walk that slip’s edge, to hang on terror’s lips against its speaking. To go back into the bath-house and take possession of the dark below, where his mother currently possessed it.
Gathering cobnuts and filberts at the wood’s edge, his back turned to whatever threatened in the water, he heard a snuffling that might have been tears and saliva backed up in a sobbing girl’s throat. He heard a scratching that might have been a girl’s desperate nails digging furrows in the path, and then a steady heavy thud-and-scrape that sounded like nothing so much as a boot falling and falling, and its metal studs scraping on the path between falls as the foot drew back and lifted to fall again. He could hear breathing too, hard grunts tied to the same rhythm.
He lifted his head expecting to see her, expecting to see her kicked; and saw instead a bloated pink-brown rump swing and rub against a tree, hard enough to shake the trunk. And it swung away and swung back, thud and scrape, and it was only a pig after alclass="underline" a great sow twice or thrice his weight, let forage in the wood or else — more likely, he thought, out here where no one was — escaped its sty and living feral. Unless D’Espérance did this too, throwing up animals unexpectedly and when they were most desired.
He needed this sow badly, and lacked the means to take her.
Means could be made, though. Made or found.
He slipped away quietly, not to disturb her at her scratching, not to startle her off into the depths of the wood where he might not be allowed to follow. If this was her current rooting-ground, then above all he wanted her to keep to it.
He blunted his knife cutting at ash-saplings, hacking them away from their roots. With the blade given an edge again on the granite steps of the portico, he spent the evening trimming and whittling until he had an armoury of sorts, three straight poles each sharpened at one end. He hardened the points in his fire, remembering an engraving in a book that showed cavemen doing the same; and the work absorbed him so that he forgot to look over the water before the light failed, to see if his father were there.
He still listened for the creak of rope in the bath-house or sounds of kicking in the wood, as he turned his spears in the glowing ashes; but he heard neither tonight, only the sow’s noise among the trees. He might have chased her then, but that he was learning to fear the dark, or those things that were couched within it. Instead he trusted her still to be there in the morning, and lay all night fretting in his blankets, doubting her.
Up at first light, he found the sow moved on; but didn’t need his acquired skills to track her. A blindfold man could have followed this trail, the broken undergrowth and the furrowed earth.
He caught up with her quickly, and with no hindrance from the wood: no tripping roots, no hanging branches tangling in his hair. There was hunting, apparently, and there was trying to leave, and they too were different.
Slowing as soon as he heard the sow’s heedless progress, he crept close enough to sight her rump again; and ah, he wanted to do this hero-style, one mighty cast to fell her swift and sure.
But this wasn’t sport, there was no one to applaud, and his spears weren’t made for throwing. Silent as he knew how, as he had been taught, he slid forward into the wind and the sow never heard him, her great flap ears trailing on the ground as she snouted under leaves and bushes, eating nuts and acorns, eating insects, eating frogs.
At three yards’ distance he set two spears to stand against a tree, and hefted the other in both hands above his head. The sow moved one, two casual paces forward, blithe in her size and strength, and oh she was big, she was just what he needed; and he took a breath and ran and thrust, all his strength in his arms as he stabbed down, driving the spear’s haft deep as he could into the sow’s flank.
She screamed, as he was screaming as he stabbed: high and shrill both of them, vicious and unrestrained. But he thought she’d run, or try to; and she didn’t run. She turned, although her hind leg failed her where the spear jutted from it, and her eyes were red in the shadowed wood, and her festering yellow teeth were snapping at him; and he tried to jump backwards, and he fell.
Sprawled on his back, he looked up into a canopy of branches baring themselves before winter, and he saw his mother twist above his head, lolling at the rope’s end. Her bare feet swayed and turned, one way and the other, feeling in the absence for his eyes.
He screamed again, and rolled; and though he only sought to roll away from his mother, he was sprayed with slaver from the sow’s jaws as her bite just barely missed him. Gasping and shaken he scrambled away, and the sow strained to follow, hauling her weight unsteadily on three legs, slipping and rising again, squealing in pain and fury.
Up at last, he wanted only to run; but his eyes snagged on his two spare spears, and this was what they were for, after all, he’d never expected to finish her with one. So he snatched up one of them, holding it two-handed again against her sheer mass; and as she came at him open-mouthed, he rammed its dark point into what was soft at the back of her throat.
And barely released his grip in time as her jaws threshed about its haft, jutting out between them; but she was a spent force now, crippled and gagged, blood colouring her leg and frothing out between her teeth. He could take time to recover his last spear, time to consider his aim before thrusting.
Trying for her heart, he didn’t find it. She fell away, though, all her efforts on breathing now, no fight left in her; and he could work the spear deeper, turning and thrusting and leaning on it like pushing a stick into the earth. At last something vital gave, be it her heart or her spirit. One last shudder, and then the slow moan of leaking air with no breath behind it, and she was dead.