Free The Killing Lessons by Saul Black Page A

jacket loose around her tangle of dark hair. There was a little puddle of blood by her mouth. Beyond her the land was sculpted white. Snow still fell heavily through the darkness. The ravine was twenty yards away. Across it, the forest climbed the western slope, confected evergreens, like an overdose of Christmas. The light from his open door showed her footprints – or rather leg-prints, since every step had taken her at least shin-deep – trailing away north towards the bridge.
    Dead
.
    The blood by her mouth.
    The body’s posture of indifference, as if she’d lain down to take a snooze on a sunny beach.
    A dead child. Here. Now.
    For perhaps three seconds adrenalin blocked Angelo’s pain when he moved – but he could feel it pushing to get back through to him by the time he’d staggered to where she lay and dropped to his knees beside her. Thoughts smashed and dead-ended:
    Check for pulse…
    Don’t move her…
    This is because…
    Too late for…
    No phone, nothing to…
    This is because…
    From Ellinson, one of the houses…
    Be breathing, be breathing…
    They’ll think I’ve…
    Blank of all but instinct Angelo put his ear as close to her open mouth as he could.
    And seemed to wait for ever.
    Then it came. Faint. But warmer than the air on his skin. She was breathing.
    If she had broken bones then moving her would be risky. But if he didn’t get her out of the snow she might be dead in seconds. No contest.
    Except he could still barely move himself. If he tried – and succeeded – in picking her up, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t fall, or drop her. Plus he still needed one hand for his stick. It was awful but he was going to have to – very gently –
drag
her inside.
    Angelo knew even as he was bracing himself what that was going to cost him. But there was no alternative. Still on his knees, he loosened the girl’s jacket zipper around her neck, then carefully turned her onto her back. The snow helped. He took hold of the back of the hood with his left hand, got his stick ready in his right, then pushed himself, by degrees, to his feet.
    And almost collapsed immediately, the pain was so bad. In the first instant of getting his spine unbent by more than ninety degrees he felt his body’s reflex to go back down onto its hands and knees. He cried out involuntarily – and cried out with every step until he had her in front of the stove. Then he collapsed, weeping, and though the cabin’s front door was still open on its perfect winter wonderland, there was nothing he could do for a while.
    The girl didn’t stir. Angelo wondered if she was in a coma. Her jacket was waterproof but her jeans were soaked and half frozen. He wasn’t the man for these situations but he knew you weren’t supposed to leave someone in wet clothes. The evaporating water lowered the body temperature. He had a vision of the girl coming to and finding him undressing her. The terror that would overwhelm her, instantly. But there was nothing else for it. For all he knew she was in the last stage of hypothermia. He remembered reading somewhere that in cases of
extreme
hypothermia, the most obvious symptom – shivering – stopped. And this little girl wasn’t shivering.
    Do it now
, Sylvia’s ghost said. She was very close to him just now, very engaged. (He would never, since childhood, have said he believed in ghosts. His rational self still didn’t. But since Sylvia’s death his rational self had been left far behind on the beach of his time, along with much of the clutter of who he was. He was a stranger to himself now and his life was a dream he no longer questioned. Vaguely, since he’d begun sensing her presence – in his head if not in the air around him – he was well aware of what his rational self would have had to say about it: that her ghost was nothing more than the generative power of his own obsessed memory. But it made no difference to him. She came when she came. It was what he still lived for. It was