Sweet Sixteen, Chapter 21 ~ River Rising

Russ was shaken, and not just because he’d seen Elly Ann disappear.

This was not the first time he had killed, but it was different.  Before he had only killed in defense, when there was real danger to his own life.  He’d never pulled someone sleeping out of bed with the sole intent of beating him to death.  Not before.

And he knew Sam.  As horrible as what Sam had done to Elly Ann, the fact remained that the dead body he found himself staring at on the floor was someone he knew, had known for a long time, had spent long months with.  They hadn’t exactly been friends, but he did consider Noah a friend.  And as soon as he’d done it, as soon as the vengeance was exacted, he found himself unable to stop thinking about Noah.  He’d just killed Noah’s brother.

He didn’t regret it, not yet; there was no forgetting Elly Ann’s hysterical voice on the phone or the sight of her on walking in the door — disheveled, half naked, and somber.  But now she had looked at him in horror and run away.

Half an hour ago he’d known exactly what he was going to do, and had set out to do it without remorse.  Now he had no idea what to do.  Elly Ann was outside somewhere, and even when he opened the door he couldn’t see her and couldn’t follow her.  Marc was upstairs with a dead body.  He, Russ, had just killed Noah’s younger brother.  Somehow, he knew that “He deserved it,” was not going to be a good enough explanation.

There was only one thing to do, then, he had to get rid of Sam’s body and all the evidence that any of them — Elly Ann, Marc, himself — had even been there that night.  Getting rid of the body was as easy as entering an Edgeworld and tossing Sam into the black abyss, but the rest. . . .  For one, people had been sure to see Elly Ann leave the party with Sam, and once he disappeared she would become the last known witness to his whereabouts.  He didn’t know if Elly Ann or Marc were up to the challenge.  He regretted bringing Marc along.

He wanted to go after Elly Ann, and did spend some time outside quietly calling her name, hoping she’d relent and come back.  He hadn’t forgotten the disappearing trick, but explanations on that would have to wait till later.  A lot later, it would seem, for Elly Ann did not respond or reappear.

He went back inside.  Marc had left the body and come down, and was now sitting on the bottom step.  It was hard to tell exactly what he was feeling, by looking at him.  He just sat there, waiting.  When he saw his father, he stood up and asked, “Where’s Elly?”

“She’ll be back,” said Russ.  “She just needed some space.”

“You killed Sam.”

“Yes.”

“I figured you would,” Marc said, with a shrug, and that was all Russ needed to tell him that he had Marc’s full support and approval.  “What should we do?”

Russ knew he shouldn’t be bolstered by his son’s cold-bloodedness, but he was.  “We’re going to move Sa — the body — into my car.  Then we’re going to get rid of any evidence that we were here.  Fingerprints, anything that’s out of place.  Anything Elly Ann might have left.”  He paused, overcome with difficulty when he thought about clothing of Elly Ann’s left on the floor in Sam’s room.  It was painful to think of her, a victim of rape, now horrified with him and alone outside; confused, hurt, and afraid.

He would fix it all somehow.

Elly came back to the house a different person.  She passed through the security gate, which was hanging open, and wondered briefly how her father had managed to get through.  But he was her father, after all, if she could turn invisible and make things disappear and talk to the dead, nothing her father could do should surprise her.

She was calm, now.  She’d run through the dark until she found herself walking, quietly, thinking about what should be done now.  She couldn’t fix anything; she couldn’t turn back time and make things what she wanted them to be — her with Sien, wherever his strange ways took him, Sam alive, her father missing her but not having killed for her.  But she could clean up after her mess.  At least that would be easy.

She entered the house and found Marc and Russ carrying Sam’s body down the stairs.  They’d wrapped him in the blanket from his bed, which still smelled of sex, and Elly almost laughed at the morbid irony of it.  Oh yes, she was much calmer now.

“Where are you taking him?” she asked, and they nearly dropped the body in shock.

“Elly Ann,” Russ said, clearly relieved, and put down his half of the body.  Marc let his down and just stood there, looking awkward but not otherwise bothered by this act of covering up a murder.  “I’m going to take care of it,” Russ told her, “you don’t have to worry.”

“I can take care of it,” she said, walking up to the body.  Russ tried to stop her, but she said, “I have to see this,” and crouched down next to it.

“Elly Ann, you don’t.”

She looked up at him, eyes dark and serious.  “I need to tell you something and you’re not going to like it.”

Russ just looked at her.

“I lied to you.  I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me, but, well, it’s so much worse now.  I don’t know if it matters, really, maybe you’d have killed him either way, but I can’t stand you treating me nicely now that you’ve gone and killed Sam for me.  It doesn’t help for you to think I’m a good girl when I’m not; I’m the exact opposite.”

“What are you saying?” Russ asked slowly, as if he could guess but didn’t want to believe it until she said it.

“Sam didn’t rape me.  Not really.  I came here because Sien left and I was mad, and I wanted to have sex with Sam.  Not because I liked him, exactly, but because I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore and I knew he’d take care of that for me.”

Russ was silent, looking at her as if he didn’t believe her even when she said it all so clearly.  Marcus just said, “Fucking hell,” and sat down on the steps.

“And I lied to you because I didn’t want to get into trouble,” Elly added, stifling the wild urge to laugh at just how badly that had backfired.

“You’re only sixteen,” Russ said, distantly, as if he were somewhere else reminiscing on it.  “I’d kill him for touching you.  It doesn’t change anything.”

Elly somehow doubted it; perhaps he’d want to kill Sam, in theory, probably beat him up, in reality, but without the horrifying idea of her rape in his mind probably wouldn’t go so far as to actually murder Sam.  She was almost certain.

“Anyway,” she said with a sigh, “I have to look at him.  Before I . . . I mean, I may as well have killed him myself so I have to look before I make him disappear.”

“You what?” asked Marc, catching onto the last part.

Elly ignored him, and pulled back the blanket.  Russ didn’t stop her.

She was surprised by what she saw.  She’d expected Sam’s face to be so badly beaten that he’d be a bloodied mess.  She’d imagined her father savagely beating him to death.  In reality all he had was one livid bruise on the left side of a his face, and a deep gash above his right eye.  She looked up at Russ, and he said, still remotely, his mind clearly on other things; “I only hit him once and he fell down.”

Sam’s bed, Elly knew from having been in it so recently, had a large wooden frame with a solid edged footboard.  She could see how taking a blow and falling against that edge could kill a person . . . people were, after all, so strangely fragile.  Now it made her wonder if her father really would have beaten Sam to death, if he’d been left to it.  Surely he meant to, but if it wasn’t for that chance fall, would he really have carried it out?  Or would his anger have been satisfied with wounding Sam and returning sanity prevented him from actually bashing his bandmate’s head in?

There was no knowing that, now.  If Sam had fallen differently, maybe, but he didn’t.

Elly came back meaning to make Sam’s dead body disappear.  She knew she could do it, and the same for any other evidence that might betray what had been done.  Now looking at his solitary gash she felt a strange sort of impotence, because she knew she couldn’t just make the gash disappear and bring him back to life.  It didn’t work that way.  To remove the wound she’d have to remove the wounded flesh and bone, an action that even if he were still clinging to life would very definitely kill him.  What good was this ability of hers, anyway?  She could take away but create nothing, heal nothing, help no one.  All she could do was hide, cause ruin, and cover up the sin.

In that moment of self loathing, Elly lifted her eyes to see the Lost One had returned.  And she remembered the echoed plea, Build a house for me.

“I can’t build you anything,” she said, confusing her father and brother.  “What am I supposed to do for you when I can’t even fix this?”

The Lost One looked unsettling as a rule, but at that moment there was something even more ghoulish about her.  It was like the night in the campground when she had appeared as if drowning, naked, wet, spewing dark water from her mouth.  Only now she seemed even less like the apparition of a child and more like a creature escaped from a dark, wet hell.

Her eyes, like black pits, seemed to beckon Elly to fall in and lose herself in them.  Her mouth opened wide when she spoke, and the voice that came out was not the Lost One’s but a multitude of ancient voices.

“Leave it to us, Eliasha.  You are so powerful, but so young, like a god just born.  But we will help you, if you do one thing for us.”

Elly stared open mouthed, and realized that it was not the Lost One at all.  The thing before her barely had a human form, though it tried to create a face to look out at her.  That this had something to do with the Lost One, she was somehow certain, but without the familiar guise of her lost sister, she was not so comfortable with it.  But she responded, anyway, “What do you want?”

“Place your living hand on the dead man, and give the other to us, so that we may enter.”

Elly was vaguely aware that her father was saying something to her, but she was fixed by looking at the thing before her.  “I want River,” she said, giving a name to the nameless without even knowing why she did so.  “I want to see River.”

The barely human face changed into the small guise of the Lost One, and she said, “He may wish you left him dead,” but held out her hand with the warning.

Elly took it.  It felt strange to hold a hand that was not really a hand.  She felt something cold and otherworldly wrap itself around her wrist and wind up her arm.  She put her hand on Sam’s head, on the wound which had killed him, and stared fixedly into the Lost One’s black eyes.

She barely thought about what she was doing, only that if the spirits were to be believed, her father would no longer be a murderer for her sake.

Elly felt something cold pass through her.  Her eyesight swam to a vision of blackness and wet like drowning before it passed on down her arm and through her hand to Sam’s head.

And then he woke up screaming.