Risk Street8

Harry shut the bottom segment of the caravan door pushing the bolt into place. The lavender smell of woodwork spoke of routine and there was a logbook lying open on the table, but Coke, or some other liquid had been spilled making an island, perhaps a smudged Australia. There was something hypnotic about Helen’s pacing and strutting outside the boundaries of the salt line. The most unsettling part was even when Angela had called Helen’s name, she did not look up, but simply continued her footslogging. There was also movement in the darkness, beyond the canal path, that made Angela think that there were others like Helen, pacing in larger circles, like great planetary wheels, repelling each other, but keeping their distance. Only when Harry spoke to Helen in what sounded like an archaic language did her red-rimmed eyes rise from the ground. She stopped and her head and neck twisted in an unnatural way to look at them with unblinking rooster red eyes.

There was something sinuous about the shape of her mouth and tongue when she finally spoke in some variant of Harry’s language. It was not the glottal stops that startled Angela, but that Helen had broken her silence. The effect on Harry was more pronounced. He did not reply, but backed away into the rationed toy light of the candle. He stumbled over his cot and sat down heavily, no longer looking in Helen’s direction. Angela was nevertheless able to work out that Harry had asked some kind of question, but the answer, although unexpected, was not to his liking. He sat with his head between his hands, ignoring the insects that plagued that end of the caravan and the growing smell of shit from the sewage works nearby.

Angela couldn’t quite work out if she preferred Helen’s pacing, or the way she stood looking at them silently, like a carnivore at an all-you-can-eat meat convention. But it was Harry that broke first. He stumbled past Angela and once more shut over the top of the caravan door sealing them inside. Angela felt claustrophobic with the door closed. She tried to gulp down her fears.

Angela cocked her head. ‘What was that?

He grunted in reply and looked straight through her as if she was a ghost. His eyes flickered and almost shut, and his body jerked as if he was falling asleep. When she looked at him again, he looked to have aged suddenly, an old man lost somewhere in the maze of his own head. Angela took the initiative and hauled the door open. Helen was no longer there. The night sky blinked indifference and cosmic silence, and there was no noises of traffic, or the shuffling of wildlife. Angela hugged her arms to her body.

‘It’s a trap.’ Helen’s muffled voice came from the end of the path, beyond the dull shadow shapes of the fence posts.

Angela, of course, recognized her voice immediately. She sounded better than normal. She sounded like her best friend-forever. Angela unbolted the bottom section of the door and stood at the top of the steps.

‘Don’t go out. It’s a trap.’ Harry’s words mimicked Helen’s warning. He tried to get up and made a belated grab for the candle, which seemed to topple in stages rather than fall.

Angela strained her eyes looking into the darkness, trying to decipher what she had heard and then back to the upturned candle. At first Harry seemed to beat out the flames. Then the fire caught on a bit of writing paper, which fell to the floor onto crumbled old newspapers, which he seemed to be hoarding for some reason. Whilst Harry stamped that out, a calendar-January, February, March- went up in flames, almost catching the treated canvas and tar of the bow shaped room. Harry was out of breath and wheezing when she joined the fight, going to the sink and flinging a pot full of water at the growing flames. She almost laughed; despite the grey choking smoke, her one simple action had stopped the fire in its tracks. It was just a matter of stamping out a few remaining tongues of flames around the pull down bed. Harry stood static, as if in shock. She brushed past him, determined that the fire would not take hold again.

The slap of the blow to the back of her neck sounded around the caravan and flung her to the floor. She saw the second blow coming, but could do little to avoid it other than fan her arms out and try to divert the weight of his farmer’s hands. She crouched in terror trying to squeeze into the space between his bed and the table, but the fire had once more begun to nip and lick at the walls. This time it was gaining purchase. Harry’s measured steps took him to the door and she was already coughing and spluttering ready to follow him outside. He spun as if he could read her thoughts. She heard the bolts shutting from the inside. He seemed in no hurry to escape the fire. She pulled the blanket over her head. As the flames crackled and burned, she heard quite clearly voices screeching, like a radio tuning inside her head,

‘You are you. We are we. All hands link. A happy family.’

Black smoke filled her lungs, the roof began to crumble above and the debris falling onto her blanket; instinctively she crawled underneath the table. She coughed and spluttered. The audio hallucinations seemed to disappear as she regained her breath.

Angela heard another voice. She couldn’t place it at first. Then she knew it was outside her raddled head; outside the burning caravan. ‘Get out. Get out,’ it said, ‘break the chalk line.’

Some part of her mind spun away like a spark into the night sky and it felt as is she was looking down on the burning caravan, indifferent to its destruction. She could see all manner of things. The fire couldn’t touch Harry. He had taken his true incubus form and was singing to her, mocking her, in the tone of the radio-voices that had been in her head.

‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath
Are stored;
He had loosened the fateful lightning of his terrible swift
Sword;
His truth is marching on…
He had sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call
Retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before the judgement
Seat…’

But Angela felt no attachment to her body below and no emotions. From her vantage point she could see that the caravan was the beating heart in a pentagram of fields and footpaths, the canal and bridge, and streets stretching and intersecting with concrete pathways in which Harry’s gypsy home glowed luminescent as the moon.

‘Break the chalk line.’ It was like a chant coming from outside, but also the static inside her head.

Angela was bent double with phlegm fleshed coughing fits. The roof of the caravan was almost gone, when she made a desperate run for the door. Harry stood in her way and she bounced off him. His clothes were on fire and his flesh was burning, but he was grinning at her.

‘Break the chalk line.’ It was an invocation, growing in volume.

Angela didn’t know what, or when, or how. She tried to think of some prayer, but couldn’t seem to remember anything. His grin began to extend outwards into a horror show and she could feel him unmasked, penetrating and pushing his cold aura into her virgin mind, filling it with himself and his lascivious needs.

‘Mummmm,’ she shouted. ‘I want my mum.’ Her hand reached out grasping for something, anything, to hit him with and her fingers clutched at the bowl that he’d used to mark out the chalk line.

‘Break the chalk line.’ Helen’s voice cut clearly through the din in her head; a command; a bugle call to action. And others voices outside the caravan, joined hers and they grew in strength.

Angela felt his sudden retreat; shadows scuttling and disappearing in her mind. The chanting grew louder. Harry shook off the effects of the fire like an old dog shaking off spring rain and scrambled away from her, pulling at the locks on the door. She flung some salt up in the air and felt it fall around her like wind-dust. There was a whooshing noise and the flames in the caravan flickered and dulled as if the energy that fed them was not combustion, but Harry’s aura. She picked up more salt and flung it at his arched back. He screamed an inhuman cry and the flames around her flashed briefly back into life. She had been beaten down and couldn’t seem to breath. The burns to her arms and legs had begun to sting and she’d all but given up. Her last act was to fling the bowl at his head. But it hit his jumper and clunked harmlessly to the floor. He stopped as if he had been shot, turned to look at her, to gloat as she cried. She watched as a blue flame appeared, like a pilot light, visible inside his body. He stumbled outside his flesh melting until the subcutaneous fat began to run into liquid and his face became a howl hole.

Angela crawled outside to join him, no longer caring if she lived or died. She vaguely recognized Helen, and a crowd of other kids from town. They had gathered outside waiting and watching their prognathous jaws moving as if chewing over Harry’s remains. They sniffed the air, but ignored Angela as she passed them, wearily going home to her mum.

‘It’s not finished.’ Helen turned to watch her go.

She sounded normal, like the old Helen, but as Angela limped away she felt as if she would never know what normal was again.