‘What did you do?’ I had to know. Even if it was only her version of the truth.
She winked at me. ‘Plan B. I reminded him of the bad things.’
‘He was just a kid,’ I sobbed. How bad could they be?
Arden seemed faraway. She was smiling to herself. ‘He held up a service station. When he was fourteen. Got away with it, too,’ she said. ‘I just took him back to remind him, get a slushie, you know…I didn’t think the same guy would be working there.’ She snorted. ‘Fucking priceless. Silence walks in, realises it’s the same guy, and the guy recognises him. Then this guy launches over the counter and comes at us with a fucking machete, screaming that he was going to chop him off at the knees…’
I gasped and she remembered I was there.
‘He’s okay, I mean, obviously he didn’t catch us, otherwise…’ she ended on a sigh. ‘He was okay.’
So that was it. Silence had decided he wanted to be somebody else, somebody good. He’d wanted to start over. He’d tried to ask her to let him go and Arden had rubbed his nose in his past. She’d destroyed what little hope he had left.
‘Did you really think I’d let you take him?’
‘What? I wasn’t taking…’
‘See it from my side. You wanted Silence. You tried it on with my brother, and with Malik.’ Her eyes were deadly slits. ‘I made you part of my family and you tried to take everyone away from me.’
Thoughts were grappling, but nothing made sense. Her brother? Wish was her brother? Shock started in my centre and spread. The skin on my arms broke out in blotchy welts as if I’d been smacked. Right then, I hated Wish, too. I couldn’t separate them—any feelings I had for him became entwined with my hate for her—it felt like someone was burning holes in my brain.
‘I took your money.’ Arden smirked. ‘I know you think it was Darce, but I took it.’
I hadn’t asked, but she’d told me anyway.
‘It was getting boring. I needed to change the dynamic—you were going to leave.’ Her voice got low. ‘I wish I had just let you.’
It was something we both agreed on. If I had left back then, would Silence be dead? Was it some kind of random butterfly effect, or Arden’s orchestration? I thought of Vivienne’s belief in magic, omens, luck, whatever. There was no magic. No cosmic balance of right and wrong. No signs. There was only death and ego and madness.
The insolence of Arden in confession mode left me feeling sick. I staggered upright and wrapped my arms around my waist.
‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘You can’t own people. You can’t make people love you.’ I spat it out like a poisoned dart but she didn’t flinch. ‘You can’t force them to respect you.’
‘You sound like a fortune cookie,’ Arden said, then as an afterthought, ‘Wish came for you, you know.’
‘What?’
‘He came that afternoon.’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said.
‘It does matter. He didn’t come to see me, he came to get you.’ She gave a catty smile. ‘I told him you’d already gone. But I came back for you, didn’t I?’ She made it sound like a threat.
I had to have the last word, whatever happened next.
‘You killed him,’ I said and a fat tear rolled down to my chin. ‘In a hundred different ways, you killed him, starting from the moment you took him from that train station. And you still think you saved him.’
Arden made a gagging noise.
Right then, Bree peered from behind Malik. ‘We have to go now. The trailer’s packed, and the car.’ Her eyes were wide and fearful. ‘The road’s going under.’ She looked at me, back at Arden. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Tell everyone to get in the car, Bree.’ Arden drilled Malik with a stare that was loaded with meaning.
Malik took a sidestep in my direction.
They were going to leave me behind.
Malik wrapped an arm around my waist and lifted me as if I weighed nothing. I kicked out at Arden with my boots as he dragged me past her, but she dodged, an expression of distaste on her face.
A quick flash of Bree, running after us. Carrie shouted something I couldn’t understand. Malik’s hand covered my mouth and nose. I sucked air through his fingers but I couldn’t get enough.
My body hit the stairs that led beneath the church; pain registered in my head, my back, my elbows and knees. Everything blurred. And the weird thing was, even with my fear of enclosed spaces, it seemed like the safest place to be.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Darkness. Darkness for an eternity.
Pain all over, liquid pain that had no centre. It was everywhere. Even my hair hurt. How long? Minutes. Hours. I opened and closed my eyes but nothing changed. I was stuck in an underworld, a cold, damp ever after.
I shifted one leg and it shuddered like an unoiled hinge. I tested each finger as if playing a scale on a piano. Unbroken, just stiff. My clothes were wet. The ground should have been hard, but it was doughy. Sludge. Sensation hit slowly.
One.
Thing.
At.
A.
Time.
Think.
I am Liliane Brown. There. The cortex for other thoughts. I am alive. Under the church. I’m alive under the church.
It was quiet, except for my own breathing and a musical tinkle like a wind-chime in a breeze. But there was no breeze. Dead air, the air inside a tomb. Four walls of darkness, pressing down.
I felt my face: straight nose, puffy lips, eyes that had cried. One tender cheekbone. Stickiness in the hair behind my left ear.
There were things at the edges of my mind, waiting to get in.
I twisted onto my back. Straightened my arms and legs. Stretched and flexed. Vitruvian Man, star jumps, snow angels in the dirt. I tried to remember things I’d seen, things I’d done. My memory was in small, scattered pieces.
I am Liliane Brown. I am alive.
Is that all there was? Was it enough? Shouldn’t there have been more?
I reached out my hand and locked it onto something cold, cylindrical. Vertical. The leg of a chair. I squeezed tight, pulled, levered my body upright. The chair gave, objects toppled and fell. I rolled sideways and butted against the bottom of the steps. Crashes, thuds. The chairs settled and there was silence.
Silence. This was one of the thoughts waiting at the edges of my mind.
I had to get out.
Blood was flowing again. My feet tingled and burned. I felt for the steps: one, two, three, four. They were wet.
I walked up on my hands and knees, stopping on each step to feel the space in front of me. Splat. Splat. Sounds, like stomping in puddles of rain. How many steps? Five more. Nine steps. The last one, rotten and splintered. A piece stuck into my palm. I found it with my lips, pulled it out with my teeth. The pain made every other ache seem distant. It woke me up.
I pressed up with my uninjured hand. The hatch door. Freezing drips ran along my palm, down my forearm to my elbow. My teeth tapped together. I bit down, clenched my jaw. I pushed harder but the door wouldn’t budge. I put my shoulder into it, the side of my head and neck. Nothing.
As I pushed, the droplets fell faster. Rain? I pressed my ear to the door and listened. Muffled sound, like it was travelling through a tunnel. A symphony of drips—bong, bong, bong, ting-ting, bong. I thought I was delirious, dreaming.
Ting-ting. Bong.
My exhaustion was bone-deep. My heart drummed a slow beat like an animal closing down for hibernation. Was this the start of hypothermia?
I shuffled back down to the bottom of the steps and stood up. I jogged on the spot and tried to rub some feeling back into my fingers. Then, arms stretched in front of me like a sleepwalker, I mapped out my surroundings, feeling around in the space, pacing out the steps. The stairs were behind me, a collapsed stack of chairs and pews, in front. To my left, Silence’s belongings under the rotten tarpaulin, and to my right, crumbling crates and a narrow path that led further under the church.
T
here should have been some light; the church had more leaks than a sieve. I thought maybe it was night outside—but that would mean I had been unconscious for hours. My sense of missing time was more disorienting than the endless dark and the cramped space. How long had I been there? Had they left without me?
Silence’s things, suspended above the wet ground, were still dry. I unzipped his sleeping bag, wrapped it around my shoulders and climbed up onto a crate. The bag smelled like dust and emptiness—nothing of him. The wood flexed but held. Dampness seeped through the thin material, but so did warmth. Intoxicating warmth.
My whole body was numb. I’d heard or read somewhere that the ability to feel pain is the first thing to go.
That’s not true. The ability to care goes first.
I wanted to rest, close my eyes, just for a moment. A few minutes, that was all.
I woke. Kept my eyes squeezed shut. Loosened the knots in my muscles. I said something out loud, involuntarily, but at least it proved I was still alive.
‘Water.’ It was a croak. Two parched syllables on a shallow breath. I cleared my throat, said it again. ‘Water.’ My thirst was unbearable.
I opened my eyes.
Slivers of light sluiced through the floorboards above. There was water all around me. It was everywhere. The river, pouring in. I could hear it, running, trickling, sloshing, sucking, slurping—all the sounds that water makes. There was too much, not enough.
Water drags you under, weighs you down, makes you sink.
I slid off the crate, still wrapped in the sleeping bag. My boots filled up. The water was up to my knees. Outside, the river must have broken its banks. It was drowning the town. The bag soaked it up and I let it fall. It went under. My pulse was picking up pace, throbbing in my temples. Fear, like grasping fingers, squeezed my throat.
I scooped a handful of the river water and sniffed. It was foul, muddy, strung with weed. The first salty mouthful I spat, the second I swallowed. The third I brought back up in a convulsive dribble. The next few slid down into my empty stomach and hit with the force of a jackhammer. Even though it tasted like sludge, I kept drinking slowly until I wasn’t thirsty anymore.
As I drank, one clear thought, a single technicolour image, surfaced: a tiny caterpillar thawed from ice crawls out onto a glacier and, driven by instinct, seeks the one thing it needs to sustain life. It doesn’t know that the odds are against it. It doesn’t think that it will probably die tomorrow. There is only the will to survive from this moment to the next because without the present, there is no future.
An uncertain future seemed like the one thing I wanted more than anything else. It wasn’t fair for my mind to give up when my body clearly wasn’t done.
I sat for a while, legs hanging over the edge of the crate, dangling in the water. My boots weighed me down like anchors. My pounding head calmed. My stomach settled. In that short period of waiting the tide rose another two inches. I watched it and gave in to the terror. Finally, my brain seemed capable of stringing ideas together.
The logistics were these: the floor of the church was built up, raised about a metre above ground level. So far, the water was only coming through the sides, which meant the water level outside was less than a metre deep. If it rose above the level of the floor it would pour through the floorboards, the cellar would flood—and I would drown.
But if I put the logistics aside and focused on what I knew—how I felt—it was hopeless. There was only resignation, and fear. Put the two together and you had a recipe for self-destruction.
The fluid in Vivienne’s lungs, Alicia Brown lying face-down in a ditch, the cord wrapped around Belle Brown’s neck—on one side, Vivienne’s truth, the only truth I’d ever known, and a curse that wanted the end of me.
On the other side, free will. The chance to plot my own destiny. So much of what I believed was founded on what Vivienne had said; her stories were woven through my entire existence. But if Vivienne’s stories weren’t true, then this was not the curse. The water was not dogging me, the last of the Brown women, to carry out a predetermined fate. This was Mother Nature: indiscriminate, brutal and unstoppable, but not vindictive. Not evil. Not like a human being could be evil.
I could choose not to believe.
The way I see it, you have two options. Run, run like hell, Vivienne had said. Or dive in.
Water can make you float, I thought. And I can swim like a goddamn fish.
I scrambled up the steps. Water poured out of my boots. There was only one way in or out—through the hatch door, which was probably pinned by the weight of the water outside. Above, the floorboards were held together by caked dirt and rusting nails. In places, they were rotting through. Could I punch a hole big enough for a person, or prise them apart? I tested the gaps with my fingers. The floor above my head was solid and far too thick, but beneath the pulpit, where Arden and Malik had slept, it was worn thin, ready to collapse.
I waded through the floating debris. Further in, the ceiling—or the floor—was lower and I had to half-crouch, half-swim. Near where the pulpit should have been there were too many things in my way. I pulled down boxes and chairs and set them adrift. In the far corner, above pieces of furniture so old and rotten they’d fused into one solid piece, was a square cut into the floor.
Another hatch.
I crawled to the top of the pile. My foot plunged through hollow wood and my calf was shredded. I could taste the tang of blood from my bitten lip; my eyes were gritty with falling dirt. I clawed at the square and pressed my fingers desperately into the gaps, but there was no give.
The ceiling started to rain.
I screamed. Out of sheer hopelessness and fear, I screamed. The sound forced its way up from my lungs, through my throat. It reached a pitch I’d only heard in horror films; it echoed around the cellar and burst home against my eardrums.
And when the scream died away, the ceiling above me shuddered. Dirt, shaken loose from the square opening, showered down. The roof was collapsing. I cowered and put my arm over my face.
A crack, a groan, and the hatch door lifted.
Shafts of brilliant light, a stairway to the afterlife. A hand.
When I backed away, it beckoned.
An empty hand.
I reached out. I took it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
‘I couldn’t,’ Darcy sobbed as she hauled me up and out. ‘I couldn’t.’ She was wet through and shivering, her clothes streaked with red mud. ‘I heard you screaming down there.’
‘It’s okay. I know,’ I said, breathless. I found myself patting her shoulder, even though my legs were giving way under me. I collapsed onto the floor of the pulpit. ‘They’re not far behind,’ she gasped and tried to pull me. ‘Malik had to carry AiAi. The water’s nearly up to here.’ She flattened her hand mid-thigh. ‘If Arden finds out I let you…’
‘Why did you come back?’ My voice was raspy, not my own. ‘Why did you let me out?’
She let go of my hand and looked down at her feet.
‘The car got bogged,’ she said. ‘We spent the night out there. There’s no water and no food left.’ She pulled my hand again. ‘Come on, hurry! They’ll be here soon.’
‘Why did you let me out?’ I demanded.
Darcy looked directly at me for the first time. I noticed her eyes were green, deep-set, intelligent. She’d never lied or pretended she was something she wasn’t. There was nothing two-faced about her.
‘I figured you’d know what to do,’ she said and started crying again. ‘Tell me what I have to do.’
That was the big question. What to do. ‘I don’t know,’ I shrugged helplessly. ‘I’ll find the car. But she has to think I’m still down there.’
She nodded.
‘I’m going,’ I said and panic flickered across her face. ‘But I’ll be back.’
I unlaced my boots, slipped them off and dropped them into the hole. They tumbled down the stack of furniture and disappeared underwater.
‘I’l
l think of something, don’t worry.’
She nodded again and helped me up. The church floor was going under.
‘You should try to get the others onto a roof. This one’s too high, maybe one of the houses. Can you do that? Can you swim, Darce?’
‘A bit. Enough. Can you?’
‘I can swim.’
I wanted to tell her, I’ve been running away from this my whole life.
I left the church and dropped low into the floodwater. It was shallow enough to wade, but I would have been too visible. Only the top of my head and my nose cleared the surface. Floating branches and other debris made a soup, swirling with deadly missiles. The water was freezing but the sun blazed overhead.
I swam away from the church, heading for the track that ran behind it.
‘There!’ somebody yelled.
I ducked under with only half a breath. There was no way to navigate by sight. In seconds, I was lost. My body fought to float so I grabbed handfuls of grass and pulled myself under. I crawled along the bottom for as long as I could until my lungs were bursting.
I came up in plain sight, only metres from where I went under. A sea of brown water with a head sticking up—I couldn’t have been more conspicuous if I’d been waving a flag.
Arden and Malik were behind the others, AiAi draped over Malik’s shoulders. Bree and Carrie were at the front. Joe was pointing straight at me.
Carrie yelled, ‘Shit. We thought you had drowned.’
I almost answered, but then I saw Darcy.
She was waving frantically from the top step, drawing attention away from me. They were looking at her. They hadn’t seen me at all.
I dived under again. My leg was stinging where I’d scraped it but the cold soon left me numb. I stayed under until I was sure I was out of sight. I surfaced when my hand hit an obstacle and I couldn’t swim any further without getting my bearings.
I was behind the church, near the stack of wood. Through the gaping window above, I could hear voices inside. Arden was shouting, Bree was crying.
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