29
Millbury Peak had survived centuries of torrential rain, but an air of concern never failed to linger amongst the townsfolk during such weather. Set on an incline, the town’s aged drainage system often allowed a build-up of water on the east side, rendering certain routes impassable and creating miniature waterfalls from street stairways. Tonight, the storm-streaked skies issued forth a downpour of dread-inducing proportions upon the town.
Renata flinched as her cheek tore on the claws of a thorny shrub. Her passage through the undergrowth of this unmaintained marshland of a garden had been slow and arduous, exacerbated by the unrelenting rainfall. The flooded soil hungrily swallowed her shoes underfoot. Renata barely noticed.
She silently congratulated Rye on his performance. His rented manor, its driveway having been full when she first arrived, was serving as the headquarters of the search for Sandie. He knew exactly who had his daughter, but was orchestrating all this purely to show the world the hunt was on. He was going through the motions that were expected of him. In reality, he thought of nothing but what a hermit romance novelist named Renata Wakefield was capable of, and how he may reclaim his daughter from her unhinged grip.
A smartly dressed man and woman clutching wads of papers had stepped out of the side door and huddled under an overhang to suck on cigarettes. Renata had watched, toes tensed in a tight curl, as the pair had examined the papers while shaking their heads gloomily. After gazing into the rain through their final long drags, they had flicked their stubs into the grass and headed for their cars. They’d been the last to drive off into the night.
And now, crouched in the bushes peering through the shrubbery, Renata waited for her moment. Her hands ached from the constant typing. She rubbed her throbbing fingers as the rain fell like pebbles against her face. She’d been acutely aware of the house’s rear facing looking out over the garden, with the risk of stray eyes spotting her through one of its many windows. Now, having watched most of Quentin’s staff leave for the night, she knew she had less cause for concern.
She was rising from the bushes when the largest ground floor window suddenly illuminated the garden like a stadium. She tugged the soaked scarf over her face and dropped back down into the thicket. From her vantage point behind a dense mass of overgrowth, she could see two figures through the lit window standing over the counter of a large kitchen. She swept the rain from her eyes and squinted, reaching for the details. It was the same drained woman from the televised press conference: Eleanor Rye.
And him.
Renata could feel the solemnity of Quentin and Eleanor’s words in the movement of their lips. Without warning, the woman threw her hand across the counter sending empty glasses smashing against the wall and the cross around her neck flailing on its chain. She fell sobbing into her ex-husband’s arms. Renata could feel the turtleneck against her face as the woman burrowed into the crook of his shoulder, just as she had done. She could see the sincerity of Rye’s actions in the way he pulled her body into his, stroked her blonde hair, pecked her forehead. This was no game, no experiment. The woman in his arms was no guinea pig.
Renata’s aching hands clenched into fists.
He held Eleanor in front of him and spoke words that caused the woman’s hysterics to abate. As water poured over Renata’s face, she watched the pair gaze silently into one another’s eyes. She knew what was coming, but was still somehow totally unprepared for it.
Their lips met.
Renata stared through the darkness, gouging her palms. Her waterlogged clothes clung to shivering skin as her hands clenched harder. Sparks ignited in her veins and shot through every capillary. She gazed as the rain battered her, fists from above. She felt the rage inside kick like an overdue baby. Something within had awoken from a stagnant symbiosis; what was once dormant now flared with malice.
She watched the couple’s long embrace before Eleanor finally slipped from his arms, kissed his cheek, and left the room. This was her moment.
Renata stood.
She stared as Rye stepped from the side door and stood beneath the overhang, gazing into the rain. It had been hard to tell if he’d seen her when he’d gone to the window to look out after she’d thrown the pebble at the glass, but it was indisputable where his eyes now fell: the trail of tiny, bloodied teeth leading from the side door and down the garden path, glowing in the moonlight like cat’s eyes down a motorway.
He’d reached inside to activate a security light, then stood staring at the trail in horror, trying to make out the blood-spotted white pearls leading down the path, knowing what they were but hanging on desperately to blind denial. He stumbled back, one hand gripping a stone balustrade as the undeniable truth finally hit home. His jaw trembled as his eyes followed the grisly trail, a twisted Hansel and Gretel re-enactment gone wrong, until they met with the dark figure in the shadows. He reached inside to switch off the security light then slowly closed the door, before crossing his arms against the driving downpour and following the trail of teeth to the woman at the bottom of the garden.
Renata, keeping her glare fixed on him, stepped backwards through the rain and behind the vast trunk of a towering elm, leading him further from the house. The distance between them closed. She backed into a brick wall at the foot of the garden, over which red vines stretched like exposed veins.
Rye stood white-faced by the elm, placing a hand against the bark to steady himself. ‘Is…she alive?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing here?’
She rubbed at the pain in her hands. ‘You came to my house, now I’ve come to yours.’ She nodded behind him towards the teeth leading up the path. ‘Those are just a little punishment for your conduct last time we saw each other.’ She reached into her pocket and tossed a single tooth towards him. He leapt back as if it were a live grenade. ‘Punishment for you both, I suppose.’
The giant elm shook overhead as a harsh gale picked up around them. The moonlight lit their faces but little else, two floating, wide-eyed scowls staring each other down in the darkness. The wall of crimson vines was just visible behind Renata, those creeping veins emanating around her. She held her hands out into the rain, scrubbing them like a pre-op surgeon, unflinching as the torrents lashed around her. Rye watched the shadow-cloaked figure from beneath the tree, his chest heaving with quick, adrenaline-fuelled respiration.
‘I need you to do something for me,’ she spoke calmly through the storm. He leant forward to discern her delicate words. ‘It’s O’Connell. I need you to get him to cease his investigation into the disappearance of the girl. I don’t want him bothering me anymore.’
Rye slowly straightened. ‘Maybe I’m happy with him investigating.’
‘Maybe. But if I tell him about your dirty deeds, then you can be happy about it in a prison cell. I’ve seen your operation here, your little search committee. I know you have it in your power to make him stop.’ He stared, unflinching. Renata huffed. ‘Fine, I’ll deal with him myself.’
‘You knew I’d say no.’
‘Yes. I just…’ The corners of her mouth turned up. ‘…wanted to see you.’
He took a step towards her. ‘All right, Renata. I’ll try. But you have to tell me what it is you want out of all this, out of my daughter. Everything I did, I did it for my work. You’re doing this for revenge. What you’ve put Sandie through, she’ll never be the same. I’ll never be the same. Isn’t that enough?’
She ripped a loose strand of hair from her scalp. ‘You know it isn’t.’
A fresh torrent swept over the scene.
‘What do you WANT from me?’ he suddenly yelled through the rain. The figure in the darkness remained still, the whites of her eyes piercing through the night’s blackness. His tone softened. ‘Listen, if I’m responsible for what you’ve become, then you’re responsible for what I’ve become: changed, Renata. What you’re doing to my daughter, my sweet Sandie…’ He forced his quivering lips to settle. ‘…it’s turned me around. Ma
ybe I’m ill. Maybe I need help. But what I put you through, what I did to you…your mother…I see now how twisted it was. I think I’ve found my humanity because of you, and I thank you for that. There has to be some left in you, too. Please, Renata,’ he clasped his hands together as if in prayer, ‘end this.’
End this.
She smeared her sodden hair out of her face. The throbbing in her hands was intensifying – and reminding her of something. A punishment? Yes, her father’s Bible. It reminded her of being made to hold that weighty thing for so long, so very long.
‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God…’ The girl looks up to her father’s glare locked upon her. She returns to the pages. ‘…moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light. And, uh, there was light.’
What was it she’d done? Failed to clean her room, maybe misquoted a Bible verse at Sunday school. It didn’t matter. All punishments were roughly the same. Noah was not yet born, and so her punishments were frequent. The unusual thing about this punishment was her mother’s presence.
There the woman had sat on the sofa, the clicking of her knitting needles trying to keep up with the eternal ticking of the grandfather clock. But the scarf-in-progress draped over her pregnant belly wasn’t growing very fast. She was distracted. The girl would risk a glance at her mother every so often from her hard, rigid seat by the window, only to find she wasn’t even looking at the knitting. She was staring at the floor in front of her, that wooden smile slipping from her grasp as the hours rolled on, as her daughter was forced to act out her punishment: to sit and read aloud the entire tome.
‘And…and it came to pass that in the morning, behold, it was Leah: and he said to Laban, What is this thou hast—’
Her mouth has long since dried up. Grit has formed in her throat.
‘Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service which thou—’
She isn’t even through Genesis. She prays for Exodus after every page turn, but knows fine well she has some way to go before that. Even then, she still has Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy…
‘And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week, and he gave him—’
…Joshua, Judges, Ruth…
‘And he went in also unto Rachel, and he loved also Rachel more than Leah, and served with him yet seven other—’
…the Samuels, the Kings, the Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job…
‘And when the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.’
…Psalms, Proverbs. So much still to go. He can’t expect her to read the entire thing right here, could he? Is that even possible?
‘And she conceived again, and…and bore a…son.’
A son.
The girl’s eyes rise.
Then her mother’s.
Then her father’s.
All eyes return as the reading resumes.
Renata rubbed her moonlit hands in the pouring rain, still throbbing from her long writing sessions. She thought of that bulky Bible and the burning sensation shooting through the ligaments of her nine-year-old hands. She’d finally made it out of Genesis, but by that time her voice was nothing but a rasp. She didn’t get very far through the opening pages of Exodus before her mother broke into tears. The woman clambered from the couch over to Thomas’s armchair, falling to her knees before him, begging for the girl’s punishment to end.
‘I know you don’t agree, but she doesn’t deserve this, Thomas.’ The woman places a hand on her bulbous, pregnant belly. ‘It’s a boy, I swear it. I can feel him inside of me. You’ll have your son. He’ll be here soon and everything will be better. I beg of you, my little girl doesn’t deserve this. Please, Thomas,’ she clasps her hands together as if in prayer, ‘end this.’
Thomas had slowly lowered his newspaper, then stared blankly at the woman as if she’d spoken a foreign language, one of his fingers casually tapping against the crinkled paper in his hands. She’d eventually scrambled to her feet and ran weeping from the living room, her hurried footfall ascending the staircase in the hall.
The girl had stopped reading to watch in a mixture of terror and rage. After her mother’s wails had disappeared upstairs, her eyes met with her father’s. Her instincts told her to bow her head and continue reading, to avert her gaze immediately like she’d been told to do if she ever looked at the sun.
But she didn’t.
She did not resume her reading, instead keeping her gaze fixed on her father’s, a raging sun blazing in each of his eyes, scorching and searing her skin.
Her stinging hands had gripped the Bible in her lap, tighter, tighter with every passing second until she’d thought her fingers were going to break. Suddenly, he’d set down his paper and approached the girl warily, hesitantly – is he frightened?! – reaching down to carefully close the Bible in her lap. He’d then left the room and joined Sylvia upstairs. In more ways than one for Renata Wakefield, the Bible closed for the final time that night.
She still remembered the battle between hate and fear raging in her father’s eyes during that stare down. And now, in this rain-pummelled garden, she saw that same old hate and fear warring it out again in Rye’s eyes.
He was lying. He had found no humanity. As he appealed to whatever trace of compassion may be left within her, she came to understand that they were as barren of benevolence as each other.
She clenched her aching fists by her side.
‘Let her go, Renata,’ pleaded Rye through the downpour. ‘It’s not her you want, it’s me. It’s always been between us.’
‘ENOUGH.’
He froze. Through the darkness he saw her teeth bared like a Dobermann’s, white in the moonlight.
‘You want this to end?’ she growled incredulously, clawing her hands as she stepped towards him. ‘It’s too late. Things have gone too far, you know that.’
Tears formed in Rye’s eyes. ‘I…could still kill you, you know.’
‘Don’t you get it? I loved you,’ she continued, ignoring his words, ‘or whoever that man was. You created him, just like you created me. Why could I never be loved? Why could I never have what everyone else has? I was so close to ending it, so close to being free when you dragged me back here.’ She turned her back to him. ‘All of this, it’s because of you. It’s too late to go back, you know that.’
Rye smashed the tree with his fist. ‘TELL ME,’ he screamed, tears streaming down his face and merging with the rain. ‘Just tell me what to do to get her back. Tell me, goddammit. END THIS.’
Renata looked back at him over her shoulder. He watched her face fall into darkness as a cloud passed over the glowing moon, obscuring its white light. ‘You need to wait, that’s all,’ she said from the void. ‘Just wait.’
‘Quentin?’ a voice called from the house. ‘Quentin, are you out there?’
He turned to see Eleanor standing under the overhang of the side door at the top of the garden. He spun back round to Renata just as the clouds cleared, the moonlight once again lending itself to the rain-swept garden.
She was gone.
30
Renata stood staring at the hair clip. She had to save it. The treacherous things had been slowly escaping over the past months, until now only the current cluster in her head remained – and this final clip. Smearing her hair away from her face wasn’t enough. Loose strands still floated in her periphery, but she had to control herself. She had to remind herself what really mattered. She pocketed the final clip and locked the front door, checked the window shutters, and returned to the cellar. The cold air added to the chill of her clothes, still wet from her excursion to Rye’s manor, but this was of no consequence. All that mattered was the book.
She’d slipped back into a life of writing with little effort. Inspiration no longer floated out of reach like dust in a sunbeam, instead insisting on realisation. Renata was not
hing more than the vessel for its delivery.
What’s more, the chapters were materialising mostly complete. The first draft of a novel was meant to resemble an over-spiced dish; the essential ingredients were there, but buried within a bloated version of its final form. A dish you could remake, holding back on the spices and allowing the thing to speak for itself, whereas with a novel you had to pick out the offending spice grain by grain. But within the pages churned out by Sylvia Wakefield’s typewriter, something different was happening. The thing was coming into existence practically fully formed as fast as a court transcript. With fresh eyes she’d read over previous chapters, pencil in hand, ready to scribble the usual amendments, but had been astonished to find barely anything needing altered.
The dish was spiced almost to perfection.
A blast of inspiration where there’d been none. Focus sharpened to such a degree as to produce a final draft in place of a first. What had changed? What was different? The answer was obvious. It was all thanks to the girl in the basement.
Renata lowered her hands from the keys, took a sip of water, then stepped in front of Sandie. Out cold. She held up the glass and let its contents trickle over the girl’s head, waking her from the sweet mercy of unconsciousness.
‘Puh-please, Renata,’ she stammered, her mutilated gums quivering.
Renata scraped her chair across the concrete and sat in front of the shivering girl. ‘I had a brother once, Miss Rye,’ she said, picking at the palms of her hands. ‘You and I may have been around the same age when he died.’
‘Please, the PAIN, it’s—’
‘He imparted upon everybody a kind of joy I’d seen nowhere else. To everyone, he was an angel.’ She leant forward. ‘Everyone, except me.’
For Rye Page 24