But it’s cold....
The smell of that dark place was strong and unmistakable—but what was it doing out in the light, in the real world? How could it be there? I don’t understand, she thought. It doesn’t make sense.
And then her eyes slid away from Robert, following the scent. She saw the plaited hair hanging over her—and she remembered.
She remembered her fingers working in the dark, finding the beautiful patterns, one by one. Winding in every scrap of thread she could snatch, every possible strand of wool. She remembered the cold and the loneliness and the fear. And—as fierce and real as the icy air washing over her now—she remembered being on her own in the black room. For ever and ever.
That was her life. That was what she’d come from. And she knew she never wanted to go back there.
Every instinct told her to run away. It would be easy. All she had to do was grab Bando’s hand and scramble up the fallen earth into the tunnel opening. The others were coming now—she could hear their voices somewhere in the distance—and she belonged in the cavern with them. In the place where she was Lorn. All she had to do was run and hide.
But ...
The face that was hers and not hers was staring down at her. She could see the red marks on its cheeks where the hands had hit, punishing every sound. She could see its wary eyes and the skin of its scalp, pulled cruelly tight by the braids. And she remembered what it was to live that life. If she only knew what I know, she thought. If she only understood....
It was impossible to run away. Impossible to hide that knowledge without sharing it. Slowly, standing on tiptoe, she reached up her hand.
SLOWLY, WONDERINGLY, HOPE STRETCHED DOWN INTO the earth, holding out one finger toward the tiny shape below.
Tom held his breath and bit his lip to stop himself from making any sound. Let it work the right way, he thought desperately. Let Hope be free.
He had forgotten about Mr. Armstrong. They’d all forgotten him. Nothing seemed real except the two hands moving to touch each other. The whole universe had shrunk to the tiny space between those outstretched fingers.
And then Mr. Armstrong grabbed.
He bent down and put his arms around Hope’s body, gripping her hard through the blankets. Tom turned like lightning, furious with himself for being so careless. He seized Hope as well, not gently, but putting his whole weight into it. Desperate to keep her where she was, just for another second. Just long enough ...
“Let go!” Mr. Armstrong spat. “She belongs to me!”
“You can’t have her!” Tom said. “She’s a person.”
And then she was running away through their hands, like water through a funnel. Sliding and shrinking and disappearing, until they were left with nothing between them except a bundle of empty blankets and a few old clothes.
34
AFTER WHAT SEEMED A VERY LONG TIME, MR. ARMSTRONG began to feel the blankets, squeezing them stupidly and fumbling among the layers.
“Where is she?” he said.
“She’s not here,” said Emma, in a strange, uncertain voice. “You haven’t got a daughter. Remember?”
Hope’s empty clothes dropped out of the blankets and landed on the ground in a little heap. Tom looked down at them.
“There she is,” he said. “Your nonexistent daughter.” His voice was as shaky as Emma’s. “Why don’t you take those home and keep them under the floor?”
Mr. Armstrong picked the clothes up and shook them, looking bewildered. “Where has she gone? What have you done to her?”
“You were here,” Robert said. “You saw the same as we did.”
But Mr. Armstrong hadn’t seen anything. They could tell that by the way he turned around, looking wildly into the woods. He didn’t even glance at the ground in front of their feet or at the patch of raw earth where Helga had dug into the molehill. Instead, he stepped back over the ditch and began going back and forth through the trees, shouting Hope’s name. They heard him calling for a long time, getting farther and farther away. Finally, there was the cough of an engine starting up in the parking lot, and the long gray car slid away, down the road.
When the sound had died away, Tom looked down at the hollow in the hedge bank. There was nothing there now. It was just a dip in the earth, lined with rotting leaves and moss.
All their attention had been focused on the empty blankets, on Mr. Armstrong’s face, and his greedy, grabbing hands. While they were concentrating on those, Hope had slipped away from them. And the little figures at their feet had escaped back into the ground.
Helga came slinking back and put her nose into Tom’s hand, and he patted her head absentmindedly.
“Did you see them go?” he said slowly. “Did you see her— after it happened?”
Emma shook her head. “I wasn’t expecting anything like that.”
“Nor was I,” Robert said, still gazing down at the mole’s empty den. “I thought I’d understand if I found Lorn. But it’s worse. Why wasn’t it the same for her as it was for me? What happened?”
“Do you think she’s all right?” said Emma. “I mean—” Her words tailed away.
“How can we ever know?” Robert said bitterly. “If we’d been looking—if we’d seen her—we might have been able to tell. But it’s too late now. We’ll never know.”
That’s not right, Tom thought. Somehow, instinctively, he knew that Robert was wrong. But it took him a moment or two to figure out why he felt so sure.
When he did, he almost shouted for joy.
“We do know! Just think what happened. The minute she had a chance to get away, she took it. Zap! Hope wouldn’t have done that. Not the way she was before. She’d still be there, sitting in the bottom of the hole.”
“Yes.” Emma nodded slowly, taking it in. “If she’s escaped, then she’s all right. And that means she’s Lorn.” She looked up at Tom and a huge grin spread across her face. “We did it, didn’t we? We saved her.”
Robert nodded slowly. But he didn’t smile. “We saved Hope,” he said. “But we haven’t rescued Lorn. She’s still down there in the cavern—and winter’s almost here.”
Emma patted his arm. “Don’t worry, Rob. It’ll be OK. We’ll look after her.”
Robert didn’t reply. Tom looked at his stiff, miserable face for a moment. Then he knelt beside the hole, pushing Helga away when she tried to join him. “Here’s one thing we can do right now,” he said.
He started to scoop the earth back into the hole, blocking off the end of the tunnel. After a few seconds, Robert knelt next to him and began to help, patting the loose earth flat as it was shoveled in.
Tom waited until they’d almost finished. Then he leaned sideways and muttered, very softly, “We had to do it, Robbo. You know that as well as I do.”
Robert picked up a handful of dead leaves and scattered them over the patch of earth he’d just flattened. “I suppose so,” he said under his breath. “But why does it have to be so hard?” His mouth twisted and he turned away, hiding his face from Tom.
For once in his life, Tom didn’t try to give an answer. He just waited. It took a while, but at last Robert looked back at him.
“Well, there’s one good thing, anyway,” he said lightly.
Tom raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?”
“You believe me now. I finally got you to change your mind about something. That has to be a first.”
Tom made a face at him. “Don’t count on doing it again.” Then he grinned and raised his voice, making sure Emma could hear. “Anyway, there’s a much better first coming up soon.”
“Oh yes?” Emma had stepped across the ditch, away from them. But she took the bait—just as Tom had meant her to. “What’s that, then?”
Tom looked up at her, innocently. “Well, we’ll have to go home and change now, won’t we? We’re all pretty muddy. And that means—” His grin widened. “You’re going to be late for school, Emma Doherty!”
For an instant he thought she was going to s
hout at him. Then she glanced down at her watch and grinned back. “You want to bet?”
Before either of the others could reply, she had jumped across the ditch and started to run. She was out of the woods and on the grass before they caught up with her.
“ONCE UPON A TIME,” ZAK SAID, “THERE WAS A MAN whose baby daughter died.”
No, Lorn thought. No, I don’t want to hear this.
The words connected with the angry, ugly memories that filled her mind. They were all sliding together now, making a dark pattern, full of pain and grief. She still didn’t understand everything, but she remembered now. She knew. And it was almost too much to bear.
How could Zak be asking her to cope with more?
She wanted to crawl away and curl up in a shadowy corner. But that would be going backward. Retreating into another dark corner, on her own. She was Lorn, and her place was in the circle. So she sat still, like the others, listening.
Zak’s face was tired and lined in the firelight. “The man couldn’t stop his daughter from dying,” he said. His hands moved over the drum on his lap, not making any sound. “The doctors and nurses and social workers and experts came and took her away from his house. She was his, but they shut her away inside a hospital and stuck her full of needles and tubes and medicines. And when she died, they said to the man, It’s your fault.”
On the other side of the circle, Bando suddenly lifted his head. He was lying on the stretcher they had used to bring him back along the tunnels—a length of thick white cloth wound tightly around two heavy wooden posts. No one knew what it was, but it had appeared in the cavern like magic, just when they needed it to carry him back along the tunnels.
He still looked pale and dazed, but that didn’t stop him from interrupting the story. “It’s not fair!” he said indignantly. “They were the ones who took her away. How could it be the man’s fault if she died?”
The left side of Zak’s mouth curled up into a half smile. “That’s just what the man said. It’s not my fault. He blamed the doctors for not saving his daughter’s life. He blamed the nurses and the social workers and the experts. She belonged to me, and they took her away and killed her.”
He stroked the drum skin, and it murmured softly under his fingers. They all waited for him to go on, but he didn’t speak. After a moment, Perdew prompted him impatiently.
“What happened next?”
Zak stroked the drum skin again. “For a long, long time nothing happened at all. Only the voice in his head, shutting out everything else. It wasn’t my fault.... It wasn’t my fault.... For years and years and years. And then—”
“And then?” Annet said, leaning forward eagerly.
Zak’s fingers began to beat out a slow, insistent rhythm. “And then,” he said, “the man had another daughter....”
Lorn wanted to block her ears. She wanted to shut out his voice. But she knew she had to hear the story. She put her hands in her lap, knotting her fingers together to keep them there while she listened.
Because she could hear it now. She was ready to understand.
35
TOM ALMOST MADE IT TO SCHOOL IN TIME. As THE LAST bend came into view, he saw Robert and Emma ahead of him, running flat out. Robert glanced back over his shoulder, and when he saw Tom, he stopped to wait for him. Emma went on, flying around the corner at top speed.
So she wasn’t going to be late after all. Well, if she could do it—so could he. Tom broke into a run, determined to beat the bell.
“Come on!” he said as he passed Robert. “Let’s catch her!”
In two strides Robert was beside him. The two of them raced around the corner together—
—and bumped into a man coming the other way.
Tom cannoned straight into him, knocking himself off balance. He staggered sideways, and if he hadn’t caught hold of Robert’s arm, he would have fallen into the gutter.
“Sorry,” Tom said, looking up apologetically.
In the same moment, Robert caught his breath. “You?” he said. “Aren’t you the one—?” And then he broke off, without finishing.
The man didn’t speak at all. He just stood still, looking straight back at Tom. And his eyes were as clear as water, as blue as a cloudless sky.
I’ve seen you before, said a voice inside Tom’s head. But he couldn’t think when or where. All he could do was stare at his own reflection in the center of those blue eyes while the man looked gravely back at him.
He didn’t know how long he went on staring. It could have been for a split second or for an hour. While it lasted, there was nothing except the bright, dazzling blue.
And then, suddenly, it was over. The man stepped past them and disappeared around the corner, and they heard the school bell begin to ring.
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