Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Tara ran up the slanted cul-de-sac, through Hardy's driveway, up her front steps, and through the open doorway. When she peeled into the kitchen, she stopped, her chest heaving up and down up and down, the sunlight filtering in through the window, and she was listening.

A woman's voice moaned from down the hall, sounded like it had come from Hardy's bedroom. Tara stepped through the hallway, and looked inside. A cop sat with her back against the wall, beside Hardy's bookcase. She held her right hand to her left shoulder, and through the gaps in her fingers, Tara could see a dark stain moving outwards through her blue uniform.

The sound of the cop's radio cackled, men's voices relaying their location to one another, and for a moment there, the cop's gaze locked onto Tara's face, staring at her.

"I'm not Hardy," she said. "Where did she go? What happened?"

The woman made to stand up, but Tara took a step backward. She watched her inch her back upwards, along the wall, and then she cursed and groaned, clutching her wound.

"House, come in," she said into her radio. "Another girl is here. Over."

"Here," the voice said through the radio, and Tara recognized it as the other cop who had been down in the basement with herself and Hardy earlier.

Tara pivoted on her heels, her sneakers making a squelch sound as they turned on the floorboards, and petered back down the hallway. A police car's siren circled through the house, and then Tara was forced to turn around again, and run toward the basement door.

As she was about to pass Hardy's bedroom, the cop's arm reached out, and wrapped around her neck. Tara fell on her butt, and she felt the woman's legs wrap around her thighs, and the back of an arm slip into a guillotine around her throat.

She tried to tell the woman to let her go, but she couldn't breathe. The sound of the police siren shut off from outside, and was replaced with the sound of a door slamming, feet hurrying up the steps.

Tara wiggled around, back and forth, and then butted the back of her head backwards, into the cop's chest. She heard her chest release air, and the grip around her throat loosened.

Tara knocked her head backwards again and this time she realized she had hit the cop in her bullet wound.

"Fuck, fuck," the cop said, groaning, and Tara pulled the woman's right arm up and over her head. She ducked under her arm, and then pelted down the hallway, and pulled the basement door open. She looked back and saw the officer standing there, her eyes contorted, narrow, shut off and black, and Tara felt her body respond to her gaze by sprinting down the basement stairs, through the basement, and out through the basement door.

She ran through Hardy's backyard, the place identical to her own, she even recognized the tattered soccer balls, baseballs, and chewed-up dog toys. The back fence had a gate that Tara knew Hardy's father had built into the fence for Hardy when she was still a toddler, and she ran her finger along the back of the lock now, feeling the rust come away in her fingers, hearing the way the hinges groaned and creaked as she put weight on the gate.

She was off then, into the woods beyond the house. The trail overgrown now, and she slipped upwards to the left out of memory, not out of any visual cue from the verdant grass, weeds. Her ankles whipped through the branches of small shrubs, thorn bushes, and she pushed forward, blueberry bushes and cherry trees growing wildly on either side of her.

She came to the head of the trail where the path split off into two directions: to the left where the back path merged into the old railway line, now stripped of its tracks and groomed into a walking trail that ran like one long, broken artery, through Norriswood entire. And down and to the right, where the brush grew thicker, mud swamped the ground, and Tara knew that the path here, if she could call it a path, would eventually wind her down toward a farmland where horses were kept, and the farmer would mutter aloud to himself if he thought someone was around on his property.

Tara stood there a moment, unsure where to go, and then she thought she could hear the sound of feet pattering on the old railway bed, coming from behind her. She snuck down the path to the right, and then jumped off it, into the bushes on the left hand side, evergreen branches smacking and scraping her arms, her face.

She wondered if the other cop who had just shown up in Hardy's driveway would come through the woods after her. If he'd had any sense he'd stop and help the woman cop, make sure she was in an ambulance before leaving her at the house where'd she'd been shot, but then again, she didn't know if he had any sense, and didn't know how to bet.

She stepped back onto the trail, and then began to tear down through it, through the water and the mud and the rocks that crept up through and stuck out through the bog. Her feet sloshed through the thick, brown liquid, and stuck to the edges and the bottoms of her shoes, and she slipped and her knee plunked down into the puddle, flies buzzing and humming around her face now in a swarm.

She flicked them off, stood up, and kept running. She ran until the evergreens on the right side of the path cleared out, and were replaced, by taller, slimmer maples, and birch trees. Their trunks standing up straight, slim and narrow, and Tara darted toward them, off the path, running through the spaces between the trunks.

She ran straight through a spider web, and almost screamed. The marsh she stepped through now was damp, and she sunk a few inches into the yellow, green moss. She remembered being fifteen then, out in these woods on a Friday night and one of her boyfriends taking his shoes off, ignoring her cries that he'd become frostbitten, and mashing and mashing his toes into the green moss.

They'd boiled some mushrooms they'd picked down on the farmland on a makeshift fire they'd made in the woods. Nathaniel, the guy she was with, had taken a saucepan out of his backpack, and emptied water into it from a Mason jar he'd brought from his house. He'd said the farmland used to have cows roaming on it back when his grandparents first moved to Norriswood, and so the ground could still grow the kind of mushrooms that would make you trip out. You just had to be there after the first frost of the fall, in the morning, before the mushroom caps shrivelled up and died, their life expectancy something like five sober hours.

Tara pushed Nathaniel out of her mind, remembering that she wasn't actually in Norriswood, at least, not her Norriswood, and had no idea if there was a Nathaniel Powers in the place. She crept forward, over the marsh, and stepped slow now, making sure her footsteps couldn't be heard from afar, making sure not to step on a branch, twig, loose gravel that might be lying there on the ground.

Eventually she came to a place in the woods a couple hundred meters away from Hardy's back fence. She crouched, and peered through the branches: she could see the red fence standing drunk down the slanted lawn.

From the house, she thought she could hear voices. She crept closer, emerged out of the thicket of brush that ensconced her, and crawled on her haunches toward the fence. She looped her fingers between the spaces in the fence, and pressed her head on the tired wood.

She could see the driveway and the cop car painted blue and black and white parked there, and from an open window on the back of the house came a voice, a voice she never wanted to hear again, but was hearing now, and leading her to turn now on her hams and move back, back into the brush.

"Tell me where she is or I'll kill you," Bobby said, his voice muffled from the inside of the house. From above her, as she ruffled passed, a flock of crows parted from the branches where they had been nesting and let loose into the September sky a shrill psychopathic scream.