by Guy Burt
“Yeah?”
“When are you grown up?”
She raised her eyebrows. “What, for good? I don’t know. I think it’s different for different people. Some people take longer than others. Do you mean your body, or the way you think?”
“Both, I think,” I said.
“Your body’s just about finished by the time you’re sixteen or seventeen, roughly,” she told me. “Or at least, it doesn’t change so much after that. Your mind’s different, though. I don’t know about that. I think we’re expected to grow up when we’re about eighteen, so most of us do. Perhaps if we were expected to grow up at fourteen, we’d grow up then instead.” She drew breath, and then laughed. “Where have all these complicated thoughts come from, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I got thinking about it last night.”
The woods were a warm green, thick with low sunlight and swimming with insects. Instinctively, I started to head for the track down to the quarry floor, but Sophie stopped me.
“Let’s go over here, first,” she said, pointing to the left. We scrambled through the undergrowth until we came to the fence; we had approached the quarry from the south side, the side where the cages were, where I had once stood and thought about launching the model Spitfire I had built a year ago. Wondering what Sophie was doing, I followed her as she climbed over the fence at much the same place that I once had, where a fallen branch had dragged the palings and tangles of barbed wire down to ankle level. I stepped over after her and we stood together on the four or five feet of turf between the fence and the lip of the quarry. I could see the far end of it, where the tall weeds had grown strong and green in the sun, curling purple flowers at their heads.
“This was the very first secret place,” Sophie said, looking down. “Do you remember? I brought you here and we sat in the sun and I waved flowers for you, and drew pictures on slate.”
I thought back. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“You were pretty small. I had to carry you up here. Took me most of an afternoon, but I wanted you to see. I used to come here on my own, before that. And then you got older, and you had that craze with fossils.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I gave you a fossil, once.”
“I’ve still got it. Come forward a little.” We went farther towards the edge, and more of the quarry came into view. The centre of the quarry floor, where we normally sat, with its familiar rocks and boulders, was stretched out below us, the pale colour of the slate in shadow now from the declining sun. There was only a crescent of light on the east side, at the top, where the track cut down, and even this was slipping surely away as we talked.
Sophie said, “Will you come here? When I’m away?”
“I don’t know. Should I?”
“Yeah, if you like. It belongs to both of us. It’s pretty good, sometimes, to just sit somewhere and know that no one’s going to find you. You need that, sometimes.” She exhaled gently. “People can get—very difficult to deal with. And secret places make that easier. You understand?”
“I think so,” I said.
“If you don’t right now, you probably will one day soon. Anyway.” She shaded her face and looked across to where the sun was starting to dip below the line of the hills. “Come here a sec.”
I edged forward a little way, until I was level with her. She was only a couple of feet from the edge.
“Be careful,” I said. “It cuts under all round here.”
“I know. I want you to see as much of it as possible. It’s safe enough.” She took a step back, behind me, and rested her hands on my shoulders. “This place is just as much yours as it is mine,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t remember when you first came here. Don’t let anyone else come here, OK?”
“OK,” I said. I was only a foot from the edge, and the drop to the quarry floor made my head reel. “Can we go back now?”
Sophie shifted her hands a little on my shoulders.
“Can we?”
Gently, she pulled me back a little way. “Yeah. I just wanted you to see it. Come on.”
We made our way round to the path down, and followed it until we were standing in the middle of the darkened quarry. Moving to one side, I could just see the tops of trees flaming in the light of the dying sun, but otherwise the empty quarry was a lake of shadows.
“I want to write something,” Sophie said. She went off to the cage and took the bag from beside it, returning to sit down next to me. “Won’t take long.”
I kicked stones from place to place, looking up at the rim of the quarry where we had been standing minutes before. Directly below that point was one of the cages; I charted the motion of an imaginary rock falling from that point, and then went over and stood on the place where I guessed it would fall. Looking up, the dark earth of the grass overhang was visible, a continuous flange running along the top of the rock. Looking back over to Sophie, I saw that she had finished her writing and was packaging up the books again. She really hadn’t taken long; I was surprised.
“Shall I take the bag back?” I asked, when I had rejoined her.
“No,” she said slowly. “No, I’m doing it this time.” She thumped the bag with her hand, and the tin inside made a muffled noise. “You want any of the fossils in here?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“Yeah, I thought not. We’re done with this stuff now, I think.” She walked briskly across to the farthest cage with me following. We stopped just outside it, and again I felt that queasy distaste in my stomach at the smell of it. In shadow, you could see hardly any distance into it at all. The thick iron bars and the huge padlock, thick with verdigris, stood mute sentinel.
I noticed that Sophie’s breath was coming quite quickly, as if she had run a short distance. The light was such that I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that her face was pale.
“Right,” she said quietly. Holding the bag in one hand, she worked it between the bars of the cage until it was hanging freely inside. I had a sudden, horrible vision of something rushing up to the bars from the inside to snatch at it, and felt my heart hammer abruptly in me. Sophie pushed her whole arm through, then swung the bag back and forth several times before letting go. It sailed a long way into the darkness, and there was a muted clatter as it fell among the beer cans and loose rocks of the cage. Sophie withdrew her hand carefully, rubbing streaks of rust from the sleeve of her anorak.
“That’s taken care of,” she muttered, more to herself than to me, it seemed. Then, more brightly, “Come on. I promised you a walk, didn’t I? Let’s get out of here.”
I glanced back at the cage as we walked away from it. The opening was dark and silent, and when I swallowed, my throat was dry.
“You said that you’d read the quarry books,” I say.
“That’s right. I went back there—afterwards—with the key to the cage. They were still there, in the same place.”
“You had the key?”
“Yes.” He says nothing more.
I search for something else to ask. “Why did you go back?”
“I wanted to be sure about everything. To find out as much as possible about you. To try to get to know you.”
“Why?”
He exhales. “Because I’d realized, by then, that I hardly understood my sister at all. I’d thought that I did, but I was wrong. I wanted to start again, to have another chance. . . . After you went away, it became important to do that. There was nobody to stop me, so I went back to the quarry, and I read the quarry books.” He smiles slightly. “It was a foul afternoon, drizzling, really cold. It seemed appropriate, somehow.”
“When was this?” I ask.
“When I was sixteen. I’m not sure why it took so long. I knew where they were, after all. Part of it was just—recognizing that I needed to see them, and part of it was working up the courage. I didn’t really want to go back. I hadn’t been back to the quarry since that night.”
“Not at all?”
He
closes his eyes. “Not at all.”
“Tell me about when you did go back, then,” I say.
As I walked out along the road to our house, things hardly looked different, although I hadn’t been this way for five years. The sky was thick with clouds, and I could see a grey veil of rain drifting across the hills towards the horizon. I followed the road out of town, taking the same route that Sophie and I had walked every day after school. Fallen leaves were banked heavily to either side of the road, under the hedgerows. As I walked by the farm, the black, skeletal struts of the barn stood up sharply. There was a line of barbed wire across the top of the gate, and a notice warning of unsafe buildings. Slates had been torn from the roofs by the storms of several winters, and thick clumps of browning nettles rustled against the walls.
By the time I left the road and started up the hill towards the wood, the first drops of rain had started to strike the ground. The path, tight up against the stone wall, seemed much smaller than I remembered it. The rain began properly, then. It fell without much wind, slanting down into the hillside, until running water was carving little gullies in the path as I watched. The coat I was wearing was waterproof, but made not much difference; rain ran down my neck and soaked my shirt, and my shoes and the bottoms of my trouser legs were stained dark with mud. I continued up the hill, feeling the cold now through my clothing.
When I reached the woods I ploughed on through the undergrowth, trying to ignore the tugging brambles that had trailed across the path. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, the woods were as dark as dusk, lit by eerie storm light, hissing and thrumming with the falling rain. The way down the shallow side of the quarry was slippery, the shale loosened and treacherous. I made it halfway down without falling, and then had to sprint the rest of the way as the rocks began to shift and slide under my feet. I ran out a little way across the floor of the quarry and then turned to see what damage I had done; a delta-shaped slide of loose debris had slumped four or five feet down, and there were little streams of loose pebbles and pale mud running from it.
The quarry floor was dancing with the rain. It was falling more heavily now, so that the cages were almost obscured, reduced to dark blurs through the curtain of heavy drizzle. My hair was plastered down against my head, and I found I was shivering. I rubbed my arms against myself as I headed towards the cages. Once there, I grabbed the bars to steady myself, and, automatically, found myself looking to the right of the cage, at the place beneath the overhang where the quarry bag had always been. It wasn’t there any longer, of course. That was why I was here.
With numb fingers I fumbled in my pocket for the key-ring. The padlock on the cage door was, when you looked at it closely, relatively new compared to the iron bars. I unlocked it, took it off and set it on the ground. Then I shook myself, and heaved. The door was very rusty, and the hinges did not give easily. I set my foot against the rock of the quarry wall and, braced, pulled again, using my legs and back as well as my arms. There was a sound of tearing metal, a low shrieking, and the cage door came open. I rubbed my hands on my trousers, leaving ochre stains, and picked up the rucksack. The rain kept falling in the quarry as I shrugged at the heavy material of my soaked clothing, and ducked my head as I stepped inside the cage.
The quarry bag had fallen quite a long way back inside. I took out my torch, set it down on the floor, and into its triangle of light I set the tin. The metal had rusted thoroughly. I squatted among the rubbish on the floor and stared around me. The floor was littered with fragments of glass and old cans, gaping with rust holes. The cage, from inside, was more like a tunnel, leading back into the rock face and sloping upwards slightly. The rock was dry.
The lid was difficult to prise off after all this time. I managed it in the end by turning it on its side and stamping on it, forcing the metal out of shape so I could secure a fingerhold. Inside, the plastic bags were intact. Sophie had tied their necks, that last time, and the books appeared well preserved. I took them out, tucking them inside my coat carefully, and put the tin back in the quarry bag. The sound of rain outside was growing lighter.
I picked up the torch, and shone it for a second down into the throat of the cage. I could just make out the curve of rock where the tunnel angled to the right. I shivered, and turned again towards the quarry.
As I had thought, the rain had slackened. The quality of light was different. I set my shoulder to the cage door and pushed, sending miniature avalanches of slate cascading down from my feet. I rested against the bars for a moment, and then retrieved the padlock, locking it firmly into place. It was a solid, heavy-duty model, far stronger than the cheap ones that secured the other cages.
I checked the quarry books were safe, grimacing at the discomfort of my sodden clothing, and then headed off back across the quarry. Above me, the first grey hints of late afternoon sunlight were visible through the clouds.
“I translated them all,” he says. I have come to recognize the vacant, tranquil expression that comes over him at times like this. It shows he is trying to deal with something that is difficult for him. I keep quiet and let him talk without interrupting.
He says, “The earlier codes were the easiest. I expected that, of course. The later ones took much longer. You kept changing them. It’s astonishing, I suppose—the way you kept them all in your head. You used to write them without even thinking.” He stops, turns his head slightly. “That’s strange. You know, I can’t ever remember you reading things from the quarry books. You never looked back in them. You just wrote things. I never thought of that before.” There is a long pause, and it starts to look as if he is not going to speak.
I say, “Maybe that’s what they were for. Just to write things down.”
“Yeah. I think so, too. That’s how it felt, when I read them.”
Carefully, I try to draw him out a little more. “What did you think? When you’d read them?”
He doesn’t look at me. His eyes focus instead on the dying candle, and he gets up to light a new one from it, kicking the spent stub from the floorboards and rolling it absently into a corner of the room.
And I realize. Abruptly, without warning, I realize, and I am suddenly terrified. Something inside me freezes. I say nothing. I try to show nothing. But the fragments are falling into place, and I can see at last the picture that they create.
He is talking again, but I can hardly hear him over the rushing in my ears.
Translating the quarry books was painstaking, and although I used every spare hour that I had, it still took two months before I had finished the last of them. Because of what they were, I had to use one of my secret places so that there was no chance of anyone discovering them, which limited the opportunities I had to work on them still further.
There were things in them that I had suspected, and other things I had not. I guessed that they began when Sophie was five or so. I made little sense of the earliest entries; they referred to things that I had never heard of, and people I had never known. She mentioned me often; it surprised me. And then, as the entries progressed, I began to notice references to things I recognized.
bad dreams still i try to make things ok but theres only 1 way to do that properly which will have to wait shes getting worse and i wont have her scaring him hes too small to know now but i will tell him someday
She talked about Ol' Grady, and for a time I thought that perhaps I had the answer to the mystery of how she killed him. But the only entry in the quarry books that came close to a description of that incident was, itself, mysterious, and I never understood it fully. It was too short—perfunctory—almost as if she was unwilling to talk about it.
longer than i thought so i had to wait two days ago when mattie was asleep i did it so now ol greedy is back where he used to be i wish i could finish it now but i am too young we both are
The last phrase I did understand, and it chilled me.
The Sophie of the quarry books was different to the Sophie I’d known; revealed starkly, through words
, she lost all her humour and warmth and became perplexing, unnerving, even alien. More than at any other point, I realized just how right Andy had been when he told me she was not normal. The Sophie of the quarry books was too deliberate, her actions too sharp. I began to feel that I had known her hardly at all. She had inhabited a different world; things had happened, after I was asleep at night, that I had never known about. As I read the quarry books, I found myself reliving events that had been buried for years.
its going to be anyway last night i waited very late so they were all in bed and at 4 i went down the hall and downstairs to see if they were asleep and they were so i went upstairs and did it i didn’t want to but it was important everything would have come apart otherwise strange how it felt very warm when i touched it and quite soft so i stroked it with my fingers keeping calm and it moved just a little i was very quiet i shut the door before i started so then i knew i was going to do it properly now and i was breathing quickly i knew from the biology books where to touch where the opening was so i rested my hand there on it with my fingers where soft places were it was very dark but i could see all right and then i did it and squeezed as hard as i could very hard with my hand on the soft places and then it moved a lot and its eyes came open but it didnt make any sound when i finished i could see the dents in its head where the books said the openings were when it was over and not moving i checked the door again and stroked it some more and closed its eyes so it looked like it was sleeping and wiped the spit from its mouth where it had come out and it had wet itself but i left that i opened the door and went back to my room and waited for them to find out then i slept
I got to know her through the entries in these coded diaries—got to see our childhood through her eyes for the first time. So I understood that she had done everything not out of impulse, or because of perverse pleasure, but in order to protect the two of us. Sophie, far more than I, was aware of the threat that the rest of the world posed. She disguised certain things, like her careful masking of her own abilities, and she anticipated others, like her decisive experiments with adolescence. And some, intrusions that she saw as endangering the two of us, she dealt with. To begin with, when I read these entries, I was horrified; but eventually—when I had read them again and again—I began to understand. To understand Sophie wasn’t easy, because the quarry book writings made no concessions, no explanations, no excuses. I thought at first that this was because Sophie had never intended anyone else to see them. I was wrong in that, of course.