Dawn (Rachel, Cai, Monk)
It was a bad night, but the sun dawned on a worse morning. She woke up groggy, and got up slowly, unwillingly, and only because she needed to pee. Most mornings she woke up with one of the family tapping on her door announcing breakfast – the whole family ate together, every morning. It was a little like Imogene’s house, in that respect, but breakfast was noisier, and faster, and the kitchen was smaller and warmer.
But not this morning. There was no one in the kitchen, though there were cereal boxes and bowls out like there had been. Rachel swallowed, imagining… she wasn’t sure what. Rapture, maybe. A silent world where she’d been left alone with the ghosts.
But there were voices coming through the window, which was open to let in the soft morning breeze. She pushed back the net curtains and looked out the window; the household was gathered in the neighbours yard, Mrs Carabaldi too, in her dressing gown and gumboots.
Roe raised her face to the window and looked at her. Faye was crying.
Drenched in horror, Rachel went downstairs slowly, and crossed the lawn, and joined the Finch’s on the other side of the gate.
Cai looked up at her, his face pale and set in shock, but softening a little around the edges when he saw her. “Oh Rach,” he said. “Maybe don’t look.”
The blood drained from Rachel’s face as she stood there in her pyjamas, toes curling into the cool grass, hands pressed over her mouth. She took a step back from the mess – the splintered door of the coop that Cai had made himself, the twisted chicken wire, the twisted chickens. Cai reached out to take her hand but she pulled back faster than he could reach, and was it guilt written across her face, or just shock?
If Cai had been a more suspicious person he might have seen guilt. If Zoe was here she would have read things into Rachel’s face that Cai, due to his past or his nature, wasn’t able to. Rachel turned and went back into the house, and Cai stayed outside, to help his neighbour clean up the mess.
It was guilt on Rachel’s face and in Rachel’s heart. She didn’t remember, but she felt it was as certain as anything that somehow this must have been her fault. Snippets of nightmares came back to her, fear and misery without images to go with them. Perhaps she was a werewolf or just a human monster, the same kind of monster that had killed her family. She’d always kind of been scared of the chickens, a petty childish kind of fear that was sort of fun to make fun of but… but maybe that was enough to trigger… whatever it was in her that was capable of killing.
We won’t let them be their parents her dad had said to Imogene, and maybe that meant that she and Indigo were the same thing. Maybe she had monstrous twisted shapes that sprung out of her back, or maybe she just had a demon in her that did these things because it thought it was protecting itself.
Her mother would have left her to die on the kitchen floor the day she broke her arm so her mother had to die.
The chickens freaked her out so they had to die too.
Rachel packed all her things very quickly, going over her whole room to get everything back into her go bag. She couldn’t stay here anymore; the day had come to leave. Before Cai and his grandparents had finished cleaning up, Rachel was gone.
She left Cai’s mother’s silver cross on the table beside the bed. She didn’t think it could save her any more.
~
Monk sounded both happy and annoyed to hear from her after her period of absence. “I thought I’d lost another one,” he said. “Yeah come in tomorrow?”
“Can I come in today?” Rachel asked. “I don’t have anywhere else to go…”
There was a pause and the Monk said “Yeah absolutely.”
She was so grateful, but at the same time she wanted to apologise for bothering him, for relying on him, and the feelings mixed all up and in the end she just said “see you soon” and hung up, wincing. Everything in the world was slipping out of her control – or whatever semblance of control she thought she’d had on it.
The chicken’s necks had all been broken, some of them so violently that they’d lost their heads completely.
She’d been away from home for two weeks and her dad hadn’t called and everything hurt. She was grateful for Cai, but guilty too. She was grateful for Danny, and the nights she was allowed to spend at his house, but again… guilty, and undeserving, and scared to explore these feelings in case they proved to be too much and drowned her.
At least the chickens hadn’t been drowned.
On the way to Monk’s, to the Red River, she paused in front of a liquor shop and realised how much she longed to be very, very drunk. She had a little money in her escape bag, but she was afraid to spend it on booze, in case she needed it for something else. Maybe Monk would let her have a drink. Maybe even if he didn’t let her she would take one. There would be plenty of opportunities when no one was watching her when she could steal a few shots of something.
She squeezed her hands into fists, side by side. Had they torn the heads off half a dozen chickens, last night? She could imagine the crack of their bones, the scratch and soft of their feathers. Could she picture it so clearly if it hadn’t happened?
Rachel walked, because she was in no rush to get anywhere and because she wanted to save her money. Walking was good because it put her in a state of flux, neither in one place nor another. It was why travelling made her feel so…
The word that came to her was familiar, the same word Cai had used to describe his room. It worked, too. Travelling felt familiar. More so than staying in one place. Maybe her home was actually on the road, in the passenger seat of a car or just tramping across the land with a bag on her back and no destination.
Maybe when the others went to Chile without her she would leave London and walk across the country. She’d told Zoe ages ago that she wanted to run to Scotland one day. She could sleep in barns and in foxholes and bathe in rivers. She could steal enough food to fill her stomach and run away if anyone tried to catch her.
The thought made her smile. If she kept moving long enough things wouldn’t catch up with her. And then the others would come back from Chile and… that was way too far into the future to think about.
She didn’t even know where she was going to sleep tonight.
Maybe Monk had a couch.
There was a flat on the third floor above the bar, maybe she could stay there.
Maybe Tobias or Sneha would help. She hoped they didn’t have any pets.
Whatever way it played out, Rachel picked out a common thread in all her plans; they all relied on someone else.
~
It was almost midday by the time she got to work. The Red Rivers doors were closed and locked, she had to go round to the small side door in the alley and knock to be let in. It took so long, her mind wandered. If Monk wasn't here she didn't know what she would do. She wanted to work, because it felt like the only thing she had left. No one here really knew her, and all their conversations would be about unimportant things. She wanted to hear about Tobias's love life, Sneha's hideous roommate. She wanted to hear stories that weren't about her.
She wanted Monk to bleed her till she passed out.
She wanted to crawl into Danny's bed and cry till she was dry, but she was too scared to go to Danny'. What if she killed Wolf? He'd never forgive her and neither would she.
The door opened so unexpectedly. She'd begun to believe it never would, so when it did she felt like he'd opened a new door in reality. "Dawn," Monk said, and with the sound of this name something unwound in her and she relaxed a tiny bit. Relief. Yes, she could be Dawn. Monk hurried her inside and locked the door behind her, guiding her into the bar proper with a hand hovering near the small of her back.
"Help me get this guy upstairs.” On the other side of the bar a young man was kneeling on the floor, back bent and head nearly on his knees.
“What’s wrong with him?” Rachel asked, her voice faint. Hospital? She thought. Shouldn’t we…?
"I'll give you fifty quid, Dawn, just shut up and help."
Maybe then... maybe he was part of this blood thing. Maybe she was helping (something in Rachel knew she wasn’t helping but Rachel was good at ignoring warning voices in her head and besides, fifty quid, and besides… she was curious to see what was in the top room.)
He was heavy and clumsy as Monk pulled him from the ground and took one arm, Rachel took the other and wrapped it around her shoulders, putting her own arm (which felt very small next to him) around his waist, which was more muscled than any waist she’d ever put her arm around before, and warm through his clothes. He seemed a little awake, enough to step forward with them, not enough to speak. But his dark eyes opened and looked at her, terrifying and tainted by the drug, whatever it was, whatever was wrong with him.
Monk unlocked the door at the top of the stairs and let them inside, flicking on the light. There was a threadbare couch and a chipped coffee table, a pile of cinderblocks, a radiator, a whole pile of chains. Monk pulled them all toward the radiator and let the drugged young man sink to the floor.
Rachel stepped backwards.
Monk strapped a thick leather collar around the man’s neck and chained both wrists to the radiator.
Rachel stepped back again, scraping her leg against the coffee table. It didn’t hurt but the thump made Monk look up, and something in his eyes just then made Rachel turn and bolt toward the door. She pulled it open just as he reached her, throwing himself against the door to slam it shut.
“Sorry, Dawn,” he said. “Might need you to stay a little longer.”
"I can't," Rachel quivered, reaching for the handle even though she knew she wouldn't be able to move him enough to escape around him. Monk grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the middle of the room, pushed her down onto the couch.
“Look,” he said, his voice reasonable, barely a threat in there, except he was holding some kind of gun so the threat was there, made worse by his calm voice, made worse by the weapon. “See this? This thing took him out easy but the dose is so high it’d probably kill you. Be nasty, too. Convulsions, vomiting. Be a long, terrible way to die and I don’t want to use it on you. So, you want to stay sitting, quietly, and let me tie you wrists.”
“I don’t want to die,” she whispered, and she didn’t. Sometimes, yes, but not like this. Not horribly, not slowly, not by someone elses hand. Hadn’t her mother warned her of all the horrible, surprising, sick ways the world could kill someone. Plane crashes and evil men.
“Course not,” Monk said softly, looping a thick rope around her wrist and tying the other end to one of the cinderblocks. “No one does. I certainly don’t.” The other wrist too, tied to another cinderblock. They sunk into the thin cushions on the couch next to her. “I don’t need to gag you, do I?” he asked, and Rachel shook her head frantically.
He grabbed her chin and tilted her face up toward him. “Say you’ll be good, sweetheart.”
“I’ll be good,” she whispered. “Please don’t kill me.”
“I won’t,” he said, but Rachel wasn’t comforted. Monk picked her go-bag up off the floor and left the room with it, with her money and her phone and everything she might have been able to use to save herself. Left her with nothing but cinderblocks and a barely conscious companion and her thoughts of dying.
Dying horribly like her mother always said she would. For a second she was angry - pointlessly angry at how unfair it was - what sort of mother were you?? You weren't supposed to scare me with so much death! Make me want to kill myself before anyone else could do it. My choice, my choice ...
But it never was, was it? She had lived and now someone else was taking her choice away, and it hurt. More than it scared her, the injustice of it hurt.
She needed a drink and she needed to pee. She needed to stare at the coffee table in front of her and try to vanish into vapour.
There was a small clink of chain shifting against the radiator, and Rachel closed her eyes. Maybe if she made everything dark enough, she would wake up in Cai's house.
She wished she'd told him she was sorry about the chickens.
She tried to stop wishing anything. She tried to stop wishing and listening and existing. She would ignore everything... everything around her. She would just ignore it and maybe it would go away.