Some people attract death. It loves them, twines around them like ivy, follows them all their lives. Riley has suspected for some time that death is just a step or two behind her. So when the boy in green follows her down the street that summer day she wonders – if only for a moment – whether he might be death, catching up with her at last.
Riley is on her way home – or back to Cousin’s house anyway – when she feels him in her wake. He moves from shadow to shadow. He’s thin, about her age, as far as she can see. Green t-shirt, jeans streaked green at the knees like he’s been climbing trees or skidding down hills. He slips into the shadow of Higgers drugstore, then behind a car. Each time she turns she just catches him – a flash of thin limbs. If he wasn’t trying so hard to hide Riley probably wouldn’t have noticed it.
It’s an unseasonably warm early summer and behind the city the white snowline has crept back up to the very tips of the mountains. The asphalt is warm and stray dandelions poke up from the cracks in the sidewalk. People are starting to come outside, walking slowly through the heat the day has left behind, tugging their hat brims down against the sinking sun.
She leaves the avenue with the convenience store on the corner and turns down the quiet street, lined with worn-out Victorians. Riley can almost hear the paint bubbling and cracking in the heat. Like a twig cracking underfoot, she thinks. The sound comes again and Riley realises with an indrawn breath that the sound is not just in her imagination. It’s out here in the world with her. It’s not paint cracking in the sun. It is footsteps, someone walking with a quiet tread, in her wake. Riley turns quickly, breath held, searching the shadows thrown by fences, sheds, the tall weathered gables of the houses. The street just stares back, sun-warm. She can’t see anyone. A bumblebee wavers drunkenly past her, over the fence into a nearby garden. She feels the buzz of it right through her body. Riley knows better than to believe the street, with its air of lazy summer peace. Someone is following her.
Riley turns and walks – quickly, but not too quickly. She can feel the gallon of milk she took from the grocery store sloshing in her backpack. She keeps her gaze forward and unwavering. Riley knows, as every kid knows, that ignoring fear is camouflage. Close your eyes and the bad thing – the tall thin shape in the dark at the foot of your bed, or the footstep behind you in an empty street – could miss you. It’s noticing the bad thing which makes it notice you. It feeds on attention – fear and your slanted glance.
Riley turns the corner onto the street where Cousin’s house sits squat at the end of the close. Riley speeds up; she strides fast, just short of running. This is another rule: you mustn’t run. Only things that are prey run. There’s a scent now in the air, something like charred meat, and she knows it comes from him, the boy. He’s close, she almost feels his breath on the back of her neck.
Riley shoves open Cousin’s rickety gate and now she is running, racing up the path, throwing herself in the front door. She slams it behind her. Riley locks the door, rests her back against the wood and breathes. She’s inside now, so she’s safe. Monsters can’t cross boundaries unless you let them. It’s important to believe that.
She settles her breath before calling out. She doesn’t want her fear to touch him.
‘Oliver?’
Only silence answers, but she feels her brother’s warm little presence. He has three hiding places, and she knows which one he will have picked today.
‘Where could he be?’ she remarks as if to herself as she climbs the stairs. ‘Where is my Oliver Olive?’
Oliver was scared this morning, Cousin made him do boxes for an hour. So Riley knows that Oliver will want to be in his small dark place, close to the floor. When he’s happy he goes up high, crouches on top of the kitchen cupboard like an eaglet.
Riley goes to the little bathroom they share with Cousin. She pulls open the cupboard under the cracked sink.
Oliver is folded up so tight she is afraid for a moment that he can’t be alive, not contorted like that, bent at angles like a folded switchblade. But his eyes are bright and dark on hers.
‘Come,’ she says briefly. ‘Quick, his shift ends at four.’
Riley pours milk into an empty jelly jar she found under the kitchen sink. She doesn’t want to touch the array of mugs and glasses in the cabinet. Cousin is very precise. He will know if anything like that has been moved.
Cousin gave them each a bowl of rice yesterday and fruit for breakfast this morning. No more. You starve a demon out, everyone knows that.
‘Drink,’ Riley says.
Oliver tips the gallon jug to his mouth. He drinks too quickly, coughing and swallowing air. Riley hits his back gently. ‘Come on,’ she says when he stops. ‘More. But slowly.’
‘Again,’ Riley says when he finishes the jar.
He drinks the second one willingly.
‘Again.’
By the end of the fifth jarful he is rubbing his stomach. ‘No more, Riley,’ he says. ‘I can’t.’
‘Sure?’ she asks, hearing the desperation in her voice. ‘Are you sure you can’t handle a little more, Oliver Olive?’
He shakes his head and burps, tears in his eyes.
‘Ok,’ she says. ‘That’s ok.’ She tips the plastic gallon jug back and swallows the rest, her throat working in pulses. She fills herself with milk, tight as a drum.
‘Better?’ She strokes Oliver’s hair.
Oliver shrugs, pale. Riley hopes he doesn’t puke. He needs to keep that milk down. It’s full fat, almost cream, and it will keep him going for a day or two. Oliver’s knees are knobs projecting from his thin legs. His face is simian in its starved lines. A couple of his teeth are loose, she felt it while brushing them last night. Maybe it’s just his age, he’s losing his milk teeth. But Riley is afraid. He was so mischievous once, plump with childhood.
‘Did the demon make us disobey?’ Oliver asks.
Riley feels a cold moment of unease. Sometimes when she eats or drinks she can almost feel the demon inside her licking its lips, enjoying the nourishment. She shakes herself. ‘There is no demon, remember, Oliver Olive? Just Cousin telling stories. Right?’
‘Right, Riley.’ He smiles at her and she smiles back.
Riley washes the empty plastic milk jug in the sink, then creeps out back. She puts the milk jug deep in the neighbour’s trash. She breathes in and out, in and out, hand on the plastic trash-can lid which is still warm with sun. Calm, she tells herself. Cousin is not god or anything. He can’t see everything she does.
