‘How many you get?’
‘What?’
‘Dogs.’
‘Oh, four. Was going for five, though.’
‘Warden pay up?’
Diego nods, reaches into his front pocket, and pulls out two twenties. He holds them up a moment, then slides them back into his pocket.
‘She press charges?’
‘Who?’
‘Genevieve Paulson.’
‘Oh. No. One of these days Andy’s just gonna up and kill her. Shoulda seen her face.’
‘Bad?’
‘Looked like a plum with eyes.’
‘How was Thalia?’
‘Same as always. Full of smiles and hellos.’
Ian shakes his head. It makes him sick to think of what having a dad like Andy Paulson will end up doing to that beautiful little girl. It will end up ruining her, turning her into just one more trailer-park wife whose husband beats her when the foreman at the warehouse gets on him for not loading the trucks fast enough or for not changing the tank on the forklift when it ran out of propane.
‘Someone should talk to Andy.’
‘I went to the feed store and did just that.’
‘And?’
‘He was all sorrys and it’ll never happen agains.’
‘Same as always.’
Diego nods. ‘Same as always.’
‘Warnings won’t ever fix him.’
‘No, he’s not a man responds to words,’ Diego says.
‘Maybe someone should do more than just talk then,’ Ian says.
Maggie sits cross-legged on the mattress in the basement, her empty lunch plate on the floor near her. The light overhead is out and the sun has already passed over to the other side of the house, shadows now beginning to lay themselves out upon the ground. The light in the basement is thin and gray, and the shadows in the corners are dense. She watches them for movement. Borden has disappeared, as he does sometimes, and she doesn’t want him sneaking up on her. She doesn’t trust him after the things he said this morning. She hasn’t seen him since, though she has said aloud that she is not going to try a second escape. ‘It’s too risky,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll just stay down here.’ She said it as if she were talking to herself, but Borden was, of course, her real audience. She hopes that he was listening. She suspects that he is always listening. Maybe it will prevent him from telling.
Even if it does she now knows he cannot be trusted. She thought he was on her side, but he is not on her side at all. He is on his own side and no one else’s. She’ll have to get out soon and she’ll have to be sneaky about her plans. Even when alone down here she’ll have to be sneaky. Because alone isn’t really.
Tonight will mark the beginning of her escape. She won’t make her move yet. She needs to think things through. But tonight will mark the beginning. She will soon escape the Nightmare World. She doesn’t care if Borden can’t leave. In fact, she hopes it’s true. She never wants to see him again. Soon she will escape and she will stand beneath the light of the sun and she will not be afraid.
‘You’re going to make Beatrice sad.’
She looks left, then right.
He’s across the room, in the farthest corner, next to a stack of cardboard boxes. The boxes are full of Christmas ornaments, old magazines with pictures of naked ladies in them, cowboy novels, old clothes saved to be used as rags. He is mostly hidden in shadows, but some of him is visible. He stands very still.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I know you’re still planning to leave.’
‘I’m. . I’m not.’
‘You could stay.’
‘I am.’
‘Beatrice loves you, you know.’
‘No, she doesn’t.’
‘Of course she does.’
‘She loves someone named Sarah.’
‘You could be Sarah.’
‘But I’m not.’
‘You could be, you’ve been Sarah longer than you were anybody else. You could let Beatrice love you. If you let yourself be loved, you wouldn’t hate it here so much.’
‘But this isn’t where I belong.’
‘It is where you belong. That’s why you can’t escape.’
‘I-’ This is not a discussion she wants to have. ‘I’m not gonna try to escape,’ she says.
‘I can see your thoughts.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘You know I’m not. I can see the darkest corners of your mind. There’s nothing you can hide from me.’
Tears begin to well in her eyes. She knows what he says is true. He has responded to mere unexpressed thought before. Throughout the years he has done this: responded with echoes of her deepest fears, fears she never voiced aloud: your parents got a new daughter and don’t even think of you anymore, Henry’s going to put you on the punishment hook one day and never let you down, you’re going to die here.
She blinks the tears away and wipes at her eyes. She stares across the room and into Borden’s glistening, rolling tar-pit eyes. His nostrils flare. His big square teeth form the shape of a smile. It is an ugly thing.
‘I know everything you’re thinking.’
She wipes her eyes again.
‘Because you’re not real,’ she says. ‘That’s how you can do it. You’re not real.’
‘You can never leave.’
‘You don’t want me to leave because if I leave I won’t need you anymore.’
‘You can never leave.’
‘But I don’t need you anymore now.’
‘You can never leave.’
‘You’re not real.’
‘You can never, ever leave, Sarah.’
She closes her eyes and tries to remember when she first saw Borden. It was before she ever came here. It was before she was kidnapped and brought here. She’s sure of it. It was at the petting zoo. She was seven years old and she had just lost a tooth and she was with Daddy and Jeffrey and the sun was out and the world was bright and beautiful. A ten-year-old boy with Chuck Taylor basketball shoes and cuffed Levis and a red button-up shirt that he kept tucked in was there. The shirt was rolled up to his elbows and his hands were in his pockets. She fed the last of her carrots to a miniature horse and the boy pulled a hand from his pocket and in his palm was a piece of celery and he handed it to her and said his name was Danny Borden and she said thank you and fed it to the horse. Danny Borden: a normal boy with freckles on his cheeks and brown eyes and bangs cut straight. This Borden is only a Nightmare World copy of him.
Not the real thing. Not real at all.
She looks up at him. He flickers a moment, vanishing from the room like an image on a TV that’s losing its signal in a storm, like a light just before it goes out. Then he returns. His eyes roll in their sockets and then lock on her.
‘You can never leave,’ he says.
‘You can’t scare me anymore,’ she says. ‘You’re not real.’
Another flicker.
‘You can never, ever leave. If you try, I’ll tell on you.’
‘You can’t tell on me. You’re just pretend.’
He takes a step toward her, a step out of the shadows. He flickers again and she can see through him. She can see the stack of boxes behind him. Then, once more, he is solid. Except he flickers now and then as he takes another step toward her. He seems to be falling apart. An arm becomes a smear before coming back together. A leg flickers out, then returns.
‘You can never-’
‘You’re not real.’
She grabs the plate from the floor and lifts it over her head and throws it across the room. It arcs through the air wobbling like a poorly thrown Frisbee and if he were real it would strike him in the head, right between his eyes, but he is not real, so it flies through him, hits the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, falls to the concrete, and shatters.
Borden is gone.
After a few minutes she gets to her feet. The concrete is cold beneath them. She walks to where the pieces of shattered plate lie, spread outward from the point of impact. She walks with great deliberation, being very careful about where she sets each foot. She doesn’t want to cut herself. Once she is standing among the shards she looks down at them. She will probably get into trouble for breaking the plate.