The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

should tell tired Karen about all this, take her the tape. She will, as soon as she can lift her head from her hands.

There comes a familiar sound from outside. Thunk, thunk, thunk.

Dee’s body becomes electric. She goes to the darkened window. Ted has come out into the back yard. He stands for a moment, listening. He looks around. Dee stays still as a post. She hopes the moonlight reflecting on the windowpane will hide her silhouette. Apparently it does, because Ted nods to himself, and goes to the tangle of blue elder that overruns the eastern corner of the yard. He digs with his hands.

Ted takes something from the ground. He shakes it free of earth, and then slides it briefly from its sheath. A long hunting knife. The blade reflects the moonlight. He puts the knife on his belt and goes into the house.

When he emerges again some minutes later, he has a bag on his back. He goes slowly out of his yard, towards the forest. As Dee watches, the bag seems to move. She is sure it’s twitching in the faint light.

Dee’s mind clears. Everything becomes cold and hard. There is no time for Karen. Lulu must be saved – and there is a monster to be dealt with. Get it done, Dee Dee, she thinks.

Dee runs to the closet and grabs the spray can of fluorescent paint, the claw-hammer and the thick, snake-proof boots she bought for this moment. She throws on her hoodie, jacket, ties the laces with shaking hands. She emerges from her house and closes the door quietly behind her, in time to see Ted vanish under the trees. His flashlight dances on the night air.

Dee bends low to the ground and runs after him on silent feet. This time nothing will stop her.

Fifty feet into the forest, where the streetlight can still be glimpsed through the branches, she stops and blazes the trunk of a beech tree with the reflective yellow paint. Branches brush her face and drag at her legs. The forest at night is slippery, it clings. She tries to quiet her breath.

The words she heard on the tape run through her mind over and over. Nothing but the peaceful dark. Lulu.

Ted leaves the path, and overhead the moon is obscured by reaching branches. Dee blazes a trunk every fifty feet. She keeps Ted’s flashlight in her sights, focusing on it so hard that it blurs into a starry glow. After a time she feels the woods change. Dee is no longer in the place where families walk. She is in the wild, where bears roam and hikers’ bones are never found.

The whisper of leaf to leaf begins to sound like a rattle shaken by a sinuous tail. Shut UP, she thinks, exhausted. There is no god-DAMN rattlesnake. How long has she been a prisoner of fear, she wonders? Years and years. It is time to be free.

Dee’s foot slips on a muddy branch. The branch slides under her foot in a muscular movement. At the same moment her torch beam catches it, just ahead of her right toe on the forest floor. The diamond pattern is all too familiar. The sharp, light rattle, like dried rice shaken in a bag. The snake rears back slowly with the grace of a nightmare, poises to strike, eyes reflecting green. It is about four feet long, young. Dee’s torchlight dances crazily over the cairn of rock behind, which most likely serves as its home.

Fear spreads through her veins like ink. She screams but it comes out as a slight whistle. The snake sways. Perhaps it is sluggish having just awakened, maybe it is blinded by the flashlight, but it gives Dee the moment she needs.

Keeping the beam steady, she steps forward and swings. She knows that if she misses, she is dead.

The claw-hammer hits the snake’s blunt, swaying head with a crack. At her second blow the snake drops limp to the forest floor. Dee leans over it, panting. ‘Take that,’ she whispers.

She pokes the long body with a finger. It is cool to the touch, limp and powerless, now. She picks up the dead snake. She wants to remember this for ever. ‘I’m going to make a belt out of you,’ she says. Joy rolls through her. She feels transformed.

As she lifts the dead snake, meaning to put it in her pocket, the head twitches and turns. Dee sees it happen in slow motion – the snake’s head lunging, burying its fangs in her forearm. Dee feels her mouth widen to a silent scream. She shakes her arm, trying to detach it. The long limp body shakes too, lashing in mimicry of life. Some things survive death. The pain of the bite is bad. But it is nothing to the horror of having the thing attached to her, like a monstrous part of herself.

At last Dee hooks the claw-hammer into the dead jaws and pries them open. The fangs are pale and translucent in the torchlight. She throws the mangled body into the forest, as far as she can.

Something bubbles up inside her. Don’t scream, she tells herself. But it’s laughter. She is racked with it, wheezing with it. Tears stream down her face. There was a snake, after all.

She doesn’t want to look, but she has to. The flesh around the bite is already swollen and discoloured like a week-old bruise.

Get it done, Dee Dee. Still giggling, she rips her sleeve off at the shoulder to relieve the pressure on her ballooning flesh. She is a good hour away from help. The only thing to do is go on, and finish it. Ahead, Ted’s light dances away through the trees. Unbelievably, the encounter with the rattlesnake took less than a minute. Dee stumbles after his light.

She begins to feel sick. Other things happen, too. It seems to her that the trees are becoming whiter, and there are red birds darting among the trunks. She gasps and tries to blink