Bottle Grove by Daniel Handler

Author:Daniel Handler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER 5

Go home, the streetlights say to Rachel. For weeks now she’s been creeping around her neighborhood at night, reminding herself of the doomed girls in gory movies, alone and unprotected from fangs and chainsaws and what have you. In this case, nothing. Go home, but she doesn’t. She’s pregnant. She can’t drink and doesn’t want to eat, she’s tired but can’t sleep, she’s growing a baby but not always sure she wants a family. She’s a woman alone on the streets, but her rovings take her no place but the long-asleep residential blocks and one little business patch. Here’s the grocery store that never seems to carry anything. Here’s the palm reader she visited once years ago, with other drunk bridesmaids, where for seventy-five dollars she learned everything was going to be fine. Here’s the big lopsided Victorian, a fallen cake that she’s heard is an assisted-living center, where a woman sits each morning in the lobby, brandishing a rolled-up magazine over her knobby knees. And here’s the Kitsune School—an early education place her kid would likely attend someday, given its location and well-purchased reputation—and—

There’s a man on top of the building.

He’s between two solar panels, crouched down or seated, hooded. If she sees him, he must certainly see her. Like a gargoyle he waits there, and for a moment Rachel thinks that must be what he is, something the Kitsune children made together, an art project to decorate the roof, a papier-mâché something to fool passersby, like the plastic owls that spook pigeons away. It’s not that, though. The building is just two stories tall, close enough that Rachel can see the pulse of breath under his hooded garment. Is that possible? It seems so, alone at night. For a moment it, the man, looks perched to leap down upon her, and Rachel strains for what to do besides perish here, on a foolhardy walk, a foolhardy victim. But then she watches it rise to an upright position and walk carefully to the edge—and then, terrifyingly, the man’s body swings itself off and begins to climb down the drainpipe, steady and with very little creaking. The arms move wide and slender, as if the man were swinging from tree to tree. Rachel steps out of the circle of light and runs, runs. She runs past the lobby of the Victorian, empty but lit, and considers hurrying up the creaky-looking steps to pound on the glassy doors, but she’s seen that movie too: cornered against a building, or the man on the roof is harmless but past the doors is a pack of violent cannibals.

So she keeps at it with the fleeing, her breath rasping hot in her mouth and her feet clopping and clopping, until it seems the man is chasing her on the back of a horse he has managed to find. She will lose the baby, she worries, from running and fear. It’s a little baby, so little it’s not even a baby. Onscreen she read it’s the size of a lipstick, but, Rachel knows frantically, she loses lipsticks all the time.

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