Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The thistles and the needles cut into Rosalyn's shins, and the marsh sunk and squished beneath her feet. She had Tara's mother's hand in her own, and blinded they ran up the hill, the evergreens moved into black shapes before them. The ground all twigs, and tall grass which dripped dew, wetted Rosalyn's pants, t-shirt.

There was a small gap ahead of them, between two evergreens where the earth sloped down, and Tara's mother pulled Rosalyn into it. She bent, her torso hung over her feet, her lungs gasping and pulling air into them.

"I don't think they saw us," Rosalyn said. She had sat down on a rock, and was staring up around her. The trees branched out, and formed a kind of roofless snow fort around them.

Tara's mother just continued to breathe, a rasp to her inhale, smoker's lungs. "You don't even know my name, do you?" she said. Rosalyn shifted her butt on the rock. Funny, she thought, the way Tara, and Phil never spoke of this woman. She remembered the only time she'd seen her was in an old photo album Tara had dug out from beneath the couch one day after high school when they both had been bored.

"I'm sorry," Rosalyn said.

"Deidra," she said, and Rosalyn took her outstretched hand.

"I could use some water," she said.

Rosalyn coughed, agreeing with her. "We need to try and get Phil out of there," Rosalyn said, and Deidra stood up, her curly grey hair bristling against the pine needles.

"Yes. We've already been gone for too long," she said, and then she was ducking herself out of the tree cave. Rosalyn stood, and followed her out.

The view from the hill rose up before Rosalyn then, and she realized how far they'd run. The mill shrank down to the size of an A-frame, the smokestack a small chimney, talking in smoke signals, and still the forest ebbing out behind it, creeping outwards beneath the night sky.

Rosalyn pushed herself down the hill. Her quadriceps croaked up at her, as she bent her knees and shifted down the damp hill. Her head afloat, her sinuses stuffed, her left ear burning bright red like a Bunsen burner.

When they neared the main road, Deidra stretched her arm out to halt her.

"We should go one at a time – do you want to go first?"

Rosalyn flexed her ears, but couldn't hear anything. "Sure," she said.

She drifted down over what was left of the hill, and then snuck out onto the edge of the main road. When she flung her head to either side, all she could see was the grey road reaching out in either direction, the yellow lines in the middle jumping out in the dark. She ran to the other side of the road, and then signalled for Deidra to follow.

Rosalyn watched her move across the main road. Her knee's gone, she thought. The way she seemed to shuffle, lean her weight on her right leg, while the left kicked at the asphalt.

Rosalyn rushed out, and grabbed her under her left arm, Rosalyn's hand shifting the woman's weight onto hers. The sound of human legs galloping on the asphalt reverberated around Rosalyn, and she began hopping off the road, onto the slanted mill road, and down.

After a hundred meters or so, Rosalyn helped Deidra drop onto the earth, and then she threw herself down, her cheek pressing into the wet pebbles. The runners passed by on the main road, their footsteps echoing backwards, as they moved further into the distance.

When Rosalyn and Deidra reached the front entrance of the mill where less than 20 minutes before, two men were shot and the mill workers had swarmed Tara's father, fingers prying into his eyeballs, knuckles colliding with his temple, orbital bone, three officers stood now, looking strayed. Police tape marked the entrance off from normal people.

"Can I help you?," one of the officers said. She was young, Rosalyn noticed, her blonde hair flowing out from her cap looked highlighted, bits of amber running through it.

"What happened to the man that was here?" Deidra said. "The man who had been kidnapped –"

"I'm sorry ma'am, but due to the nature of this investigation, I cannot tell you that particular person's – "

"I'm his wife." Deidra sifted her right hand through her coat pocket. A moment later, it offered the officer a slim piece of rectangular plastic. "My I.D.," she said. "Please tell me where he is."

The officer scanned the card and then tossed a look back at the two male officers. One of them held a flashlight out, while the other was crouched, mapping the ground near where the front doors stood blacked out, the building empty.

"He's been taken to emergency," the officer said. "You can go there, but I can't guarantee they will let you see him."

Rosalyn watched Deidra turn to go.

"Wait," the officer said. She asked Deidra if she would mind giving the police a statement, once she'd been to the hospital. She said sure. The officer asked Rosalyn if she was related to the victim, and she shook her head. "Just a family friend," Rosalyn said.

"The other man who was shot tonight," the officer said. "Do either of you know him?"

Rosalyn watched Deidra's green eyes spring open, as she fumbled thoughts through her head, thinking of what to say.

"I'd never seen him before," she said, and felt the officer's pale blue eyes search her face, comb over the faint twitches of her eyelashes, the pink hue of her cheeks.

"Well, he's been reported missing. We couldn't find him after he'd been shot, and after taking a close-range bullet like that, the man doesn't have much time to live, unless he receives immediate treatment. If you hear of anything, contact us, yeah?"

Rosalyn swallowed, nodded. "But what do you think happened to him?" she said. She saw the way the officer's eyes flitted around her own.

"Was he something to you?" the officer said.

"No. I just...I saw him get shot. I thought maybe he..."

She thought of Tara, Hardy – Had they somehow made it back to save Terry?

She heard Deidra's foot spur on the ground beside her, and realized that Deidra's mind was racing towards the same red light as her own: where was Tara? And how were they going to find her?

One of the male officers near the bloodstained sidewalk called to the woman officer in front of them, and she walked away. Rosalyn turned, but while she walked back to the main road she tossed a glance back towards the mill – how could the place that had been the reason her version of Norriswood came to such fruition also be the cause of such darkness, destruction?

Deidra's arm dropped onto her shoulder.

"We should maybe get a cab," Deidra said. "I can hardly walk."

Rosalyn watched her thoughts race toward Terry's truck, where she knew it had been parked about a click down the main road. But then she thought of Tara, Hardy – what if something had happened to them? What if they hadn't gotten to Terry – what if he was dead?

But no, Terry was missing. Which meant he had to be alive. Which meant he was still out there, and if they were ever going to get out of Norriswood, Rosalyn would have to find him.

"If you let me use your phone, I can call," she said.