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

the image away. This is not a dream. There is no nest of human hair. Her arm pulses, like it has its own heart. She knows that if you are bitten, you are not supposed to move. It spreads the poison. Too late, she thinks. The poison got me long ago.

She follows Ted westward. She turns off her flashlight. The moon is bright enough. Ted keeps his on. It must be difficult, keeping his footing with all that weight on his back. Maybe the weight is moving, fighting him.

With her good hand she fingers the claw-hammer in her pocket. It is sticky with drying snake blood. She burns; her anger leaps and licks at her insides. Ted will pay. Every fifty feet she blazes another tree with reflective yellow. She has to believe that she will be coming back this way, with her sister.

She follows as close as she dares. Even so, she loses him. His light dances out of sight, and then he’s gone. The ground begins to fall sharply, and Dee stumbles, panics. But then logic reasserts itself. She can hear water running somewhere below. He will probably stop by water. Dawn is not far off, she can smell it in the air. Dee leans against a slippery trunk and breathes. She just needs to be patient for a little longer. She can’t risk falling in the dark. She needs dawn. She knows it won’t be long.

Dull sunrise paints the world pewter. Dee staggers down a rocky escarpment towards the sound of water. She comes to the lip of a deep defile. At the bottom, a stream runs hard and silver over the rock. By the narrow shooting water, there is a sleeping bag, open like a slack mouth. A dying fire sends up threads of smoke in the dawn-grey air.

So this is the weekend place. Now that the moment is upon her, Dee feels solemn. It seems almost holy, the end of so many things.

She picks her way down, shakily. Her arm feels heavy as stone, weighed down by venom. The rock by the stream is spattered with dark drops. Blood. Something has happened here.

She follows the drying blood into the stand of birches. That’s right, she thinks. Animals go into hiding to die. But which one, Ted or Lulu? It is familiar, the dim dappled tree light. The quiet conversation, leaf to leaf. This has happened before. Dee went into the trees and when she came out, someone was dead. This time overlays that, like a drawing on tracing paper. But of course, it was a summer afternoon, that time, by the lake. And it was pines that day, not silver birch. She drops white static over these thoughts.

She does not see it at first, the body. Then she glimpses a hiking boot, half torn off a foot, poking out from a tangle of briar. He is splayed at an angle, face down. Dark stuff leaks from his mouth. She thinks, Oh, she got away and he is dead, and joy surges through her. Then she thinks, But I wanted to kill him.

Ted groans and turns, slow as a world revolving. Dirt and leaf mould cover his flesh like a dark tattoo. The knife is still stuck in his abdomen. Blood bubbles up around it, pulses out in a glossy stream. He sees her, and his expression of surprise is almost comical. He has no idea how well she knows him, how closely she has watched, how intertwined are their fates. ‘Help me,’ he says. ‘You’re hurt too.’ He is looking at her arm.

‘Rattler,’ Dee says, absently. She stares at him in fascination. She knows how the snake feels, now, approaching the mouse.

‘My bag, by the stream, surgical glue. There’s a snakebite kit too. Don’t know if it works.’ She finds it wonderful that at this moment he’s concerned for her well-being. Of course, he thinks she’s going to help – he needs her.

‘I’m going to watch you die,’ she says. She watches as disbelief spreads over his face.

‘Why?’ he whispers. Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.

‘It’s what you deserve,’ Dee says. ‘No, it’s just a little of what you deserve, after what you’ve done.’ She looks around in the dim air. Nothing else stirs between the trees. ‘Where is she?’ Dee asks. ‘Tell me where she is and I will make it quick. Help you end it.’ She thinks of Lulu, alone and frightened, under the big uncaring sky. She wags a finger back and forth in front of his face. His eyes follow it. ‘Time is running out for you,’ she says. ‘Tick-tock.’

Ted gasps and red bubbles form at his lips. He makes a sound. It is a sob.

‘So sorry for yourself,’ Dee says furiously. ‘You didn’t have any pity to spare for her.’ She stands. The world sways and greys at the edges, but she steadies herself. ‘I’m going to find her.’ Lulu will come home to live with her. Dee will have the patience for the years of healing she will need. They will heal one another. ‘Die, monster,’ she says and turns away, towards the sound of the waterfall, towards the day, where the sun is breaking gold through the cloud.

Behind her, a little girl’s voice whispers, ‘Don’t call him that.’

Dee turns, thrilling. There is no one there but her and the dying man.

‘He’s not a monster,’ the girl’s voice says, coming reedy and weak through Ted’s blue lips. It is the same voice that was recorded on the cassette tape. ‘I had to kill him – but that is between Daddy and me. You keep out of it.’

‘Who are you?’ Dee asks. The rushing of red wings fills her ears.

‘Lauren,’ the little girl says through the big man’s mouth.

‘Don’t try to trick me,’ Dee says firmly. It must be a hallucination, some side effect of the poison. ‘He took Lulu. He takes little girls.’ This must be true, or everything collapses.

‘He never did that,’ the girl says. ‘We’re