Cuckoo Song (14 page)

Only when they were cutting across a park did they dare slow. Ducking into the shadow of a small huddle of trees, they waited for a moment or two to recover their breath, peering all the while
to see if any grey figures were lurching after them. There was nothing.

Pen doubled up, resting her hands on her knees, and silently coughed up clouds of silver dust. Her skin was still colourless and luminous. As Triss watched, a moth circled giddily around
Pen’s head before settling on her cheek, evidently drawn by the light. Pen brushed it off and continued gasping, until at last patches of sallow pink started to reappear in her face.

Triss could feel the breeze cold on the back of her neck. She was no longer panting from the run; now her breath was heaving with the storm of feelings that filled her when she looked at Pen. In
the end she could not contain them. She grabbed her sister by the shoulders and shook her hard.

‘You little
monster
! You asked that man to kidnap me!’

Pen stared at Triss for a second, then, without warning, launched herself forward and threw her arms around Triss’s middle.

‘Triss! Is it really you?’ It was the tiniest croak. Pen’s voice was choked by tears, but also sounded oddly distant, as if beyond a wall. ‘Triss, Triss, Triss! You
don’t know how glad I am to see you!’

Triss stared down at the top of Pen’s dishevelled silver head feeling furious and thwarted. She wanted to hit out, but that had now become strangely difficult.

‘Oh, stop it!’ she hissed instead, with all the venom she could muster. ‘You tricked me out to the Grimmer! Did you hope he’d drown me?’

‘No!’ Pen let go and pulled back a few steps, looking wild-eyed. ‘He just said he’d take you away! It was supposed to make things better! It was supposed to make Mother
and Father better – instead of angry and miserable all the time!’ It was rather hard to follow Pen’s words. Her voice cut in and out like a faulty engine. During the patches of
silence, Triss thought she could see white lettering trying to appear behind her, curling around the bark of the nearest tree and glistening on a few of the leaves.

‘You
stupid
. . .’ Triss trailed off, as if she too had been tainted with silence.

Pen scowled hard and muttered something. It looked a bit like ‘sorry’, but it was soundless, and the lighted word that appeared behind was scattered by the leaves, a small galaxy of
unreadable glimmers.

‘But you’re here!’ Pen continued, more audibly. ‘Triss. Triss – what happened? Where have you been? How did you get back?’

‘Back?’ Triss stared at her. ‘Where have I been? I’ve been following
you
. I saw you sneaking out of the house, so I came out after you and tailed you to the
cinema. What did you think I’d been doing?’

Across Pen’s face a collage of silver moved and danced, as if some invisible moon was casting its light on her through shifting foliage. As Triss watched, the younger girl’s
expression changed to one of realization, her eyes becoming hard and wretched. The silvering seemed to get worse again as she grew more distressed.

Pen screamed a single silent word. This time the letters that curled across the bark behind her were large enough to be read, despite the rough bark and daylight.

Y
OU!

Pen backed away a few steps, her expression tormented.

I
T
’
S
Y
OU!
Y
OU TRICKED ME!

‘Me?’ Triss screamed, no longer caring that they were in a public park. ‘
I
tricked
you
? Look what
you
did to
me
!’

Triss grabbed at a few strands of her own hair, yanked them out, hardly feeling the pain, and held them up. Within seconds she could feel them changing in her grip, becoming dry and crumbling.
Then the wind was teasing fragments of filigree leaf from between her fingers, bearing them away like brown confetti.

‘I’m falling apart!’ Triss could hear all her anguish escaping into her voice, making it so harsh she barely recognized it. ‘Why is this happening to me?’

Still wearing the same bright, half-mad look, Pen watched the last brown specks fall from Triss’s fingers. Triss sensed the change in the younger girl’s posture even before Pen
turned to flee, and pounced quickly enough to catch her by the arm. Pen screamed silently and tried to claw away Triss’s restraining hand, even tried to bite her sister’s knuckles.
There was no mistaking the desperation in her eyes. But Triss was desperate too. With a force she had not quite intended, she stepped forward and pushed Pen hard, so that she fell down into a
tangle of tree roots. Pen gave a smothered yelp, and lay there clutching her arm.

‘What did he do?’ screamed Triss. ‘What happened at the Grimmer? Tell me!’

‘Leave me alone!’ shouted Pen, her voice returning with a shrillness that sounded almost angry. ‘You know what happened! You were there!’

‘But I don’t remember! I don’t remember anything about that day! I don’t remember lots of things . . . I hardly knew who
you
were at first, or Mother, or Father.
And home looks strange, and I keep seeing things that can’t be real, and I’m hungry all the time – and it’s all your fault!
What did that man do to me?
’

Realization washed across Pen’s face, leaving behind it a look of hypnotized horror.

‘You
don’t know
?’ she whispered. ‘But . . . but you
must
do! You must remember coming out of the Grimmer!’

Triss hesitated, as the odd impressions bobbed to the surface of her mind again, like dead fish.
Surrounded by cold, murky water, light overhead, the silhouettes of two men above . .
.

‘No!’ she erupted. ‘It’s just . . . pieces! And I don’t remember how I fell in at all!’

‘That’s because,’ Pen said, in a tight and tiny voice, ‘
you didn’t.
’

And Triss was standing on the brink again, just as she had been during her midnight excursion to the Grimmer. Standing on the edge of a terrible truth, something that after all she did not want
to know. But she had drawn too close this time, and turning to run and run and run would not help.

‘What?’ she heard herself ask faintly.

Pen was breathing heavily. Her eyes still wore that hard, bright look that made her look mad and desperate.

‘They put a big bag over her,’ she said rapidly. ‘She tried to kick them but they bundled her up and put her in a car. And then they came back with all the things I gave them
– the brush and the diaries and everything – and they threw them in the Grimmer.

‘And then they brought out this big doll, made of leaves and twisted sticks and briars, and they threw that in too. Then the short man made some noises that sounded like the wind in the
trees. And the wind answered. And then there were ripples and something started coming out of the water. Walking out. And it was made of sticks and paper and bits and bobs and thorns and painted
eyes, but after the water ran off it, it started to look like Triss.

‘And then it climbed out on to the bank and stood up. And it smiled. And I ran away, back to the cottage. But it came after me. It turned up at the cottage, dripping. And everybody thought
it was Triss.’

The ground no longer seemed steady under Triss’s feet. Some stealthy sea seemed to be stirring under the turf, its waves rising and falling with each of her breaths.

‘But I
am
Triss,’ she said. Now it was her own voice that sounded distant and unreal.

Pen said nothing, but just stared up at her, her eyes as hard as bullets.

‘I
am
Triss!’ Triss tried to give the words more force.

And still Pen’s dark eyes just stared and stared.

‘I
am
Triss!’ screamed Triss, using all the power in her lungs, as if she could force the words to be true. ‘You’re lying!’ The wind was building, and as
the clamour of the leaves increased, it sounded as if the very air was seething.

Pen made a lunge to the side, scrambling over the exposed roots away from Triss. As the younger girl stumbled to her feet, Triss leaped forward and lashed out, slapping Pen across the face as
hard as she could. Pen gave a high, thin shriek of shock and pain and reeled back against a tree, clutching her cheek. She gave Triss one last hard-eyed, maddened glance, and far too late Triss
realized what the look meant, what it had always meant. Not anger, not hatred at all, but terror.

Then Pen turned and fled unsteadily towards the park gate, the film-light still coruscating over her small form.

The girl who had been left behind did not chase her. Slowly she turned her hand and stared down at it, noticing the hint of red dampness on the tips of her middle three fingers.

I hurt Pen. I really hurt her somehow. I made her bleed.

She stared at those faint brown-red smudges for a long while, while the wind roared like a great page tearing in two.

‘I’m Triss,’ she whispered.

But she knew it was not true.

Chapter 13

Not-Triss stood in the park with reddened fingertips, and wanted to run. Run, run, run from the monster. How could she though? She was the monster.

But she ran anyway, pounding street after grey street into numb thunder with her foot-soles. The wind blasted into her face and she bared her teeth against it until they ached with the cold.

Where could she run? Home?

Mummy Daddy make it better make it not be true . . .

But they could not make it better. They could not change the truth. And she was not their little girl. Why would they even try to help her? If she told them what she was, they would surely
recoil in horror.

Not-Triss tore her way into an alley across which washing lines zigzagged. As she raced through this rippling labyrinth, she wailed and lashed out, feeling cloth rend under her fingers. The
sound that came from her mouth was not one a human girl could have produced. In it she heard the splintering lament of wind-felled trees, the steel cacophony of gulls, the whining note at the heart
of a storm wind.

On all sides she heard doors slam and voices raised in consternation. She hurled herself onward, making herself scarce before anybody could come to investigate.

She burst out of the alley and into the next, and her feet carried her through one walled byway after another. There was a reek in her nose, a slick dark green smell of water that was old enough
to be clever and dangerous. The paving stones gave way to worn cobbles, and then her feet were drumming on a wooden jetty and the wind was as clammy as a dead man’s kiss. The sky opened out
before her like a wide white page scrawled with tiny bird shapes. And there surged the Ell, its grey skin rippled and scuffed, so broad that the far shore was fringed with toy trees and matchbox
houses.

At the jetty’s edge Not-Triss’s legs gave way and she dropped to her knees. Her sobs sounded more human now at least. Tears misted her vision now, but they stung bitterly and clogged
her lashes. When she dabbed at her eyes, the tears came away in long, clinging strands, not blots of salt water. She stared at the gleaming gluey threads in confusion before realizing what they
were.

Spider-silk. She was weeping spider-silk.

Numb with despair, she stared down at the glossy coffee-coloured river, hearing it click and lick against the quay supports.

She felt as if it had been lying in wait for her. She had climbed out of the Grimmer. Perhaps these waters before her were destined to close over her head, completing the circle.

Triss’s parents could not make everything go away. The river could. Perhaps it would be better for everybody else if Not-Triss did let herself tumble forward into the water and took the
monster out of the world . . .

‘But
I
don’t want that!’ she exclaimed aloud, frantically rubbing the cobwebs from her cheeks. ‘Even if I’m not Triss, I’m still real! I’m
still somebody, even if I don’t have a name! And I don’t
want
to drown myself, or fall apart! I don’t want to die!’

And
, whispered a sly, unworthy voice in her head,
the real Triss is gone. Why can’t
I
be Triss now instead? If I fix myself and don’t tell anyone where I came
from, I could be a really
good
Triss – help round the house, maybe even be kind to Pen. I could be a better Triss than the real one.

Almost as soon as this thought formed in her mind, however, Not-Triss recalled Pen’s description of the kidnap, of her other self being bundled into a car despite her struggles. Where was
the real Triss now? What was happening to her? Was she in danger?

‘I don’t care!’ Not-Triss clamped her hands over her ears, as if she could shut out her own thoughts. ‘It’s not my fault! And . . . and
I’m
Triss
too! They’re
my
family too! It’s
my
home too! I’ve got nowhere else to go!’

But she did care. She could not help it. Somewhere her namesake was the captive of the Architect, and might be weeping just as bitterly. Perhaps she was tearfully waiting to be rescued by her
loved ones, unaware that nobody knew she was even missing.

Nobody. Nobody except me and Pen. If I don’t do anything, she’ll be murdered, or eaten by cinema screens.

‘But . . . if she comes home, what happens to me?’ Not-Triss whispered, her face in her hands, tear strands tickling at her fingers. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

It was fairly plain that she needed to do something. If she did not, soon there might be no Trisses left whatsoever.

The world looked different as Not-Triss walked back. It was as if she was letting herself see with her true eyes for the first time, no longer trying to convince herself that
everything looked normal. There was a new glisten to everything. Walls and trees conspired as she passed, their silent murmurs spreading through the air like blood into water. She was noticing
things, like the way her own feet made little sound however fast she walked.

Before, she had felt desperate and terrified, but all the while she had at least sensed the safety net of her parents’ love stretched invisibly below her. Now she knew how small a tug
would be needed to drag it from beneath her. Her thoughts performed the same manic carousel all the way home.