The Flash

The flash went off before I understood that I was inside the alley.

It was a white explosion, a silent slam of light, as if someone had thrown a bucket of milk at my eyes. It burned a perfect picture on the dark: the wet brick walls, the cobbles, the drainpipes, my own black shadow lunging out behind me across the stones. A shutter clicked, loud as a bone. And a voice at the far end of the lane said, softly, in the gentle tone of a man calling a child in from the garden:

"Found you."

I did not close my eyes.

I want that understood. It was the one thing I did right that night, and I've held on to it ever since. Every part of me wanted to. My lids were fluttering and my eyes were streaming and a great purple blot, the shape of the lens, was floating in the middle of my sight. But I had learned something in a bathroom, in a fire, with a pillow of smoke pressed to my face: if you shut your eyes you miss it. There is always one small thing, in the worst moment, that matters. And if you've blinked, you'll never know what it was.

So I stared. I stared through the glare and the tears and the purple. And I stared at my mother's hand.

…

I had not noticed how I'd got there.

That's the truth. It's the horror of it. I'd stood at the head of the alley on the edge of the amber light with my toes on the line. I had pulled my foot back, I'd said I was not allowed. Now I was standing in the middle of the lane, forty yards from where I'd begun, with the walls on either side of me going up into a sky the color of a bruise, and I did not know how many steps it had taken.

I looked behind me.

The amber lamp was dead. The street beyond it was a flat black cutout. And across the mouth of the alley, where there had been a clear view of a bus shelter, a van, a cab, a soft-lit block of ordinary Cleveland, hung a great steel curtain: a rolling gate, ribbed and gray, such as a shopkeeper pulls down over a window. I hadn't heard it fall. It had dropped, I think, in the very instant of the flash, in the white, while my eyes were full. Behind it, muffled and tiny, someone was shouting my name. Someone was hammering. It sounded like a man beating on a drum with a shoe.

Devon, I thought.

"Don't turn round," said Rhonda Tillis, at my elbow. "Please. Just look at him."

She was walking beside me. When had she begun to walk? She had come to my elbow in the flash and put a hand on my sleeve, light as a leaf, and I'd gone with her like a sleepwalker. Now she stood close at my right side, as stiff as a rod, with her chin up and her left hand tucked in the opposite sleeve of her coat. She was trembling. I could feel it through the wool, a fine thrumming tremor like the hum in a power line.

And something stuck out of the cuff.

It was only an inch. A small dull gleam, a bit of metal in the dark. I looked at it, and then, because I had learned to, I looked away at once and did not look back. But I'd seen what it was. A key. A folded key, the kind that closes on itself like a penknife, with a long blunt blade and a brass bow. She was holding it very tightly.

She has a key, I thought. And she's afraid.

And she's never used it.

…

"Come here," said Voss.

He had not moved. He stood in the red light like a man in a photograph, one hand on my mother's neck, the camera resting against his chest. Sixty feet separated us. I could see him quite well now. He had taken off his mask. His face was pale and calm and soft, and there was a long scratch down one cheek, dried black. The rimless glasses were gone. The eyes without them looked smaller and paler and wetter than I'd remembered. He looked like a man who had just finished a very good meal.

"Come here, June. Come into the light. I'd like to see you."

"Let my mother talk."

"I'm sorry?"

"Take the tape off." I stopped. I'd stopped on my own, twenty feet short of the circle of red, and I stood with my feet apart and my hands out of my pockets. "I want to hear her say something. Then I'll come."

"You're in no position—"

"I want to hear her say my name."

For a moment he did not answer.

Then, with a small gesture of the head, with a courtly half-smile, he leaned down over my mother's shoulder. He put two fingers to the edge of the tape. He peeled it back, a slow inch at a time, with the unhurried care of a nurse removing a dressing, and I saw my mother's mouth come free, bruised and swollen at one corner, and her lips move.

"June," she said. It was a croak. "June, go."

"Not yet," said Voss pleasantly. He put the tape back.

…

I looked at her hand.

It was her left. I had been looking at it since the flash, as I'd told myself I would, and now, across the red, I could see it plainly, hanging limp and white beside the leg of the chair. They had tied her wrists behind her, but the knot was cheap, and her forearm had slipped from it. The hand dangled over the edge of the seat, fingers loose, and the fingertips just brushed the bare wood of the rung.

They were moving.

I didn't see it at first. The red light was heavy and the shadows were deep. But the nails were making a sound. A tiny, patient, dry sound, so small that I heard it only because the whole alley was silent. Tap. Tap. Tap. And then, after a gap, the length of a breath, a different one: slow and heavy.

Tap.

Three short. One long.

I went so cold I thought my heart had stopped.

She was looking down at the ground. She was not looking at me. Her head hung forward on her chest and her hair fell over her face, and the fingers on the chair rung went on, small and steady, again and again, as if they belonged to someone else. Three short. One long. Three short. One long.

I knew what she was saying.

She was saying it to me. She was saying it in the one language that Voss had never learned, because Grandma had taught it only to the two of us, in the dark, by the bed, with a fingertip on a small back. This is a pointer. This is a road. It is not the place.

What he's showing you is not the real thing.

Don't believe it.

It's only the front.

I looked at the red lamp, and the chair, and the camera. I looked at the man with his hand on my mother's neck. And a very small, hard, clear thing, the size of a pea, settled at the back of my mind and began to grow.

He's showing me a stage, I thought. All of it. The lamp. The chair. The camera. He's built a set.

Which means the play isn't here.

…

"Don't make me ask again," said Voss.

His hand tightened on my mother's neck. I saw the cords stand out under his thumb and heard her breath catch through her nose, a thin sharp whistle. The chair creaked. Beside me Rhonda made a small sound, hardly more than a hiss.

"You touch her again," I said, "and I forget everything I know."

My voice came out thin and steady. I hardly knew it.

Voss did not take his hand away. But he tilted his head, with a faint, curious, patient interest, as one looks at a dog that has begun to speak.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said, you touch her again." I breathed in. "And I forget it. All of it. I'll stand here and I'll look at you and I'll say the sky is blue and the grass is green and I never saw my grandmother in my life. You can ask me as nicely as you like. I'm thirteen. I'm a kid. I forget things all the time."

"A thirteen-year-old," said Voss, "bargaining."

He laughed. It was a low, rich, rather charming laugh. It rang in the alley, and the echo came back off the brick, and for an instant I saw it plainly: this man in his good coat, in his scratched-up face, with the red on his cheeks, enjoying himself. It was a laugh a man might give to a clever joke at a dinner party. He was not angry. He was entertained. That was the terrible part. He had never in his life been afraid of a person who was smaller than he, and he saw no reason to begin.

"I'm not bargaining," I said.

"No?"

"I'm telling you something." I held his eyes. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. "You've been looking for it for twenty years. You've dug up every box. You've burned every house. You've sent boys in caps and men with masks and women with keys, and every single time, you ended up with a lie." I took a step. One. Just one. "And you're still standing here. In a dark alley. At night. With a child."

"And?"

"And you don't know where it is. You don't know the way. Nobody does. Only one person left alive does, and she's looking at you."

Silence.

"Right now," I said, "you only have me."

…

For a long moment he said nothing at all.

I heard the drip of a pipe. I heard, behind the gate, the hammering stop, and a heavy male voice, a bellow of fury and fear, shouting, Break it. Break it down! I heard Rhonda breathe in a ragged little gasp beside me and hold it. And in the stillness, in the red, I watched Desmond Voss's face do something I'd not seen it do.

It stopped smiling.

It did not turn cruel. It did not contort. It only smoothed, like a pond when the wind drops, and I saw behind the smoothness a cold, flat, enormous attention, a thing that had been waiting patiently for a very long time and had at last heard its name.

"You've become interesting," he said quietly.

"Yes."

"Your grandmother would be proud." He lifted his hand from my mother's neck. He took the camera up in both arms and cradled it, absently, against his chest. "All right. Let us see how much you remember."

He turned his head.

He looked up at the building behind him, the high blind back wall of a brick warehouse, three stories tall, which closed the end of the lane. I followed his eyes. There was a lamp above the red one, a rusted tin hood on a bracket, swinging faintly in the draft. Beneath it, hanging crookedly from a single chain, was a sign.

It was old. It had once been painted, white letters on a green ground, and the paint had flaked in long gray scabs. The wood had warped. Two of the letters had gone altogether. But the others had been done in a good thick sign-painter's script, and I could read it, looking up through the cold red glare with the chill running down my arms, as plainly as if it had been lit for me.

Ri erview Photo.

The v had lost a stroke.