In the Woods

"Yeah. OK." Damien hugged himself, hands dug deep into the sleeves of his sweatshirt. "Then she twisted over onto her stomach and she was kind of crawling towards the door, and I-I hit her again. With the rock, on the side of her head. I guess I did it harder this time-adrenaline or something-'cause she collapsed. She was unconscious. But she was still breathing, really loud, sort of moaning, so I knew I had to…I couldn't hit her again, I just couldn't. I didn't…" He was close to hyperventilating. "I didn't…want to…hurt her…"

"So what did you do?"

"There's these, these plastic bags on the shelf. For finds. So I got one of them, and I…I put it over her head and kept it twisted till…"

"Till what?" I said.

"Till she stopped breathing," Damien said at last, very softly.

There was a long silence, just the wind whistling eerily through the air vent and the sound of the rain.

"And then?"

"Then." Damien's head wobbled a little; his eyes looked blind. "I picked her up. I couldn't leave her in the finds shed or you guys would know, so I was going to take her out to the site. She was…there was blood all over the place, I guess from her head. I left the plastic bag on her so the blood wouldn't go everywhere. But when I got out to the site there was-in the wood, I saw this light, like a campfire or something. Somebody was there. I got scared, I was so scared I could hardly stand up, I thought I was going to drop her… I mean, what if they saw me?" His palms turned up to us in appeal; his voice cracked. "I didn't know what to do with her."

He had skipped the trowel. "So what did you do?" I asked.

"I took her back to the sheds. In the tools shed, there's these tarps, we're supposed to use them to cover up delicate bits of the site when it rains? But we almost never need them. I wrapped her up in a tarp so that-I mean, I didn't want…you know, bugs…" He swallowed. "And I put her under the rest of them. I guess I could've just left her in one of the fields, but that felt-There's foxes and-and rats and stuff, round there, and it might've been days before anyone found her, and I didn't want to, just to throw her away… I wasn't thinking straight. I thought maybe by tomorrow night I'd, I'd know what to do…"

"And then you went home?"

"No, I-first I cleaned up the finds shed. The blood. It was all on the floor, and on the steps, and it kept getting on my gloves and my feet and…I got a bucket of water from the hose and I tried to wash it off. It was-you could smell it…I kept having to stop 'cause I thought I was going to throw up."

He looked, I swear, as if he expected sympathy. "It must have been awful," Cassie said, sympathetically.

"Yeah. God. It was." Damien turned to her in gratitude. "I felt like I'd been there forever, I kept thinking it was almost morning and the guys would be there any minute and I had to hurry, and then I thought this was a nightmare and I needed to wake up, and then I got dizzy… I couldn't even see what I was doing, I had the torch but half the time I was too scared to turn it on-I thought whoever was in the wood would see it and come look-so it was all dark, and blood everywhere, and every time there was a sound I thought I was gonna die, like actually die… There kept being these, these noises outside, like something was scratching at the walls of the shed. Once I thought I heard it, like, sniffing round the edge of the door-for a second I thought it could be Laddie, but he's chained up at night, and I almost-Jesus, it was…" He shook his head, dazed.

"But you got it cleaned up in the end," I said.

"I guess, yeah. As much as I could. I just-I couldn't keep going any more, you know? I put the rock behind the tarps, and she had this little torch so I put it in there, too. For one second-see, when I lifted up the tarps the shadows did something weird and it looked like, like she was moving-God…"

He was starting to look green again. "So you left the rock and her torch in the tools shed," I said. He had skipped the trowel this time, too. This didn't bother me as much as you might think: at this stage, anything he shied away from became a weapon for us to use in our own time.

"Yeah. And I washed off the gloves and put them back in the bag. And then I locked up the sheds, and I just-I just walked home."

Quietly and without restraint, as if it was something he had been waiting to do for a long time, Damien began to cry.

* * *

He cried for a long time and much too hard to answer questions. Cassie sat next to him, patting his arm and murmuring soothing things and passing him tissues. After a while of this, I caught her eye, over the top of his head; she nodded. I left them to it and went to find O'Kelly.