The Hiding Place, page 21
I tried to shuffle us backward, toward the steps, where Chris still stood, flashlight hanging uselessly from his hand, illuminating a small patch of moving ground. Beetles cracked and crunched under our feet. Snap, crackle and pop. I felt glad of my heavy boots, jeans tucked in the top, even though I could feel my swollen ankle pressing painfully against the leather. Annie whimpered beside me like a scared animal.
We were almost there when a figure charged out of the darkness. Hurst. In the glow of the miner’s light his face was sallow and slick with sweat. Panicked. And that scared me more than anything.
“Give me your helmet.”
He grabbed for it, knocking me back into the wall. I lost my grip on Annie.
“Get off me!”
“Give me the light.”
He shoved me hard, smashing my head back against the rock. My skull clunked inside the helmet. I heard something crack. The light wavered, clung on tentatively and then faded to nothing. Blackness enveloped us in a dank cloak.
“You fucking moron!” I shoved Hurst away. Desperation clawed at my throat. We needed to get out of here. Now. “Annie?”
“Joey? I can’t see you.” Her voice was full of held-back tears. Still trying so hard to be brave.
I limped in the direction of her voice. “I’m right here. Turn on your flashlight.”
“I can’t. I’ve lost it.”
“It’s okay—” I reached out my hand; my fingers glanced hers.
From the darkness, Marie screamed: “Nooooo!”
I felt a whoosh of air as something sliced past my face. I dived to the floor, landing hard on my elbow. The helmet flew off my head. Pain tore up my arm. But I didn’t have time to focus on it because right then I heard another scream, high-pitched, agonizing, terrible.
“ANNIE?!!”
I scrambled across the ground, scrabbling among the hard shells and scurrying legs. My fingers brushed metal. Annie’s flashlight. I grabbed it, realized a battery was hanging out of the back. I shoved it in, flicked the switch and pointed the light around.
My mind went into free-fall. My heart seemed to fold and expand and shatter all at once. Annie lay on the ground in a small, crumpled heap, still clutching Abbie-Eyes. Her pajamas had ridden up, revealing thin, dirt-smeared legs. Her face and hair were both covered with something dark, red and sticky.
I crawled over to my sister and gathered her awkwardly in my arms. She felt so bony, all angles. She smelled of shampoo and cheese-and-onion chips. Around us, the beetles that had been swarming everywhere had started to retreat, to dissipate and melt back into the walls, their work here finished.
“It was an accident…”
I raised the flashlight. Hurst stood a few feet away, Marie clinging to his arm. The crowbar lay at his feet. I remembered the whoosh past my face. I looked back down at Annie, blood seeping from her head.
“What the fuck have you done?”
Rage rose like burning black bile in my throat. I wanted to charge at him and smash his head into the rock until it was nothing but splintered bone and jelly. I wanted to take the crowbar and drive it into his guts.
But something stopped me. Annie. My ankle was still throbbing. It would be a struggle to get up those steps on my own. I couldn’t carry Annie too. I wasn’t even sure we should move her. I needed Hurst and the others to get help.
“Give me something for the blood.”
Hurst fumbled the tie off his head and threw it to me. His face was slack. He looked like he was waking from a bad dream and discovering it wasn’t a dream.
“I didn’t mean to…”
Didn’t mean to hurt Annie. Just meant to hurt me. But I couldn’t process that now. I pressed the tie against the wound on Annie’s scalp. It sunk in. Not good. Not good.
“Is she dead?” Fletch asked.
No, I thought. No, no, no. Not my little sister. Not Annie.
“You have to get an ambulance.”
“But…what do we tell them?”
“What does it matter?”
The tie in my hand was sodden. I threw it to one side.
“Fletch is right,” Hurst muttered. “We need a story. I mean, they’re gonna ask stuff—”
“A story?” I stared at him. “For fuck’s sake.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Chris move. He bent down and picked something up from the ground. Then he shifted back into the shadows.
“Tell them anything,” I said desperately. “Just get help. Now.”
“What’s the point if she’s dead?” Fletch again. Fucking Fletch. “I can’t hear her breathing. She’s not breathing. Look at her. Look at her eyes.”
I didn’t want to look. Because I had already seen. She was just unconscious, I told myself. Just unconscious. So why weren’t her eyes rolled back? Why was her frail body already feeling colder?
Hurst ran a hand through his hair. Thinking. That was bad. Because if he started to think, started to worry about saving his own neck, we were screwed.
“They’ll ask questions. The police.”
“Please,” I begged. “She’s my little sister.”
“Steve.” Marie touched his arm. I had almost forgotten she was there.
Hurst looked at her. Something seemed to pass between them. He nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
I looked at Marie, tried to signal my thanks, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. She still looked pale, ill. They all shuffled toward the steps. No one offered to stay with me, not even Chris. But that was okay. I didn’t want them here. Just me and Annie. Like it always had been.
At the bottom of the steps, Hurst paused. He looked like he was about to say something. If he had, I think I would have run at him and torn out his heart with my bare hands. But he didn’t. He turned silently and disappeared into the darkness.
I remained kneeling on the cold ground, cradling Annie’s limp body on my lap. I propped the flashlight up against the rock, like an uplighter. Squashed, dead beetles surrounded us. I could still hear the rest of them faintly, in the walls. I tried not to think about that. Tried to listen to the sounds of the others ascending. Tried not to listen to what was lacking.
She’s not breathing.
They weren’t going quickly enough. Faster, I thought. Go faster. After a while their stumbling steps grew distant. They must be near the opening now, I thought. Must be. Then it wouldn’t take them long to run back to the village, to a house, a phone box. To call 999. The hospital was a good twelve miles away but the ambulances would have lights and sirens and if they knew it was a child, if…
A sound. More like an echo. Distant but still loud enough to carry. CLUNG. Like something heavy dropping. CLUNG. Or a metal door slamming. CLUNG.
Or a hatch closing.
CLUNG.
I stared up into the darkness.
“No,” I whispered.
They couldn’t. They wouldn’t. Not even Hurst. Surely?
No one tells. We need a story. They’ll ask questions.
CLUNG.
And who would know? Who would find us? Who would tell?
I tried to rationalize. I might be mistaken. Maybe they had just closed the hatch to keep us safe, or to make sure that no one fell in. I tried. I tried really hard to convince myself, but all I came back to was that heavy metallic sound:
CLUNG.
In that moment I understood things no fifteen-year-old should. About human nature. About self-preservation. About desperation. Panic rose in a tidal wave, filling my throat, making it hard to breathe. I clutched my little sister tighter, rocking her back and forth.
Annie, Annie, Annie.
CLUNG.
And now I could hear another sound. Skittering, chittering. The beetles. They were coming out of the walls again. Coming back for us.
The thought broke my paralysis.
We couldn’t wait here. Hoping for help that might never come.
We had to move. We had to get out.
I laid Annie gently on the ground and forced myself to my feet. If I put most of my weight on my left foot I could just about stand. I bent and lifted Annie under the arms, then realized I had no hands free to hold the flashlight. I dithered. The beetles skittered. I grabbed the flashlight and gripped it between my teeth. Then I picked up Annie again and staggered backward up the first few steps, balancing myself against the rocky wall, dragging her limp body after me. She was slight, but so was I. Her hoodie kept hitching up, her soft skin chafing against the rough stone steps. I kept stopping to try and pull it down, which was stupid. I was wasting effort, and time.
I heaved her up three more steps. My ankle twinged. My head swam. I paused, tried to breathe, readjusted my grip. Then I stepped backward. The stone crumbled beneath my heel. My foot slipped, my legs went out from under me. I was falling. Again. I held on to Annie, but with no way to break my fall my skull cracked hard against the rocky step behind me. My vision wavered and darkness folded in on me.
It was different this time. The darkness. Deeper. Colder. I could feel it moving, around and inside me. Crawling over my skin, filling my throat, burrowing right down into…
My eyes shot open. My hands flailed, rubbing and slapping at my head and face. I was dimly aware of things retreating. A whispering tide of glistening shells receding once more into the rock. The flashlight lay beside me, emitting a sickly, feeble glow. It didn’t have much life left in it. How long had I been out for? Seconds? Minutes? Longer? I was sprawled on the next-to-last step. My body felt oddly light. A weight removed.
Annie.
She wasn’t lying on me. I sat up. She wasn’t next to me, or near me, or at the bottom of the steps. What the—
I picked up the flashlight and scrambled to my feet. My ankle still hurt, but not as badly. Perhaps it was just numb, or I was becoming inured to the pain. The back of my head felt sore. I touched it. A tender bump. No time to think about that.
Annie.
I stepped cautiously back down into the cavern. Bones and skulls still lay scattered across the ground. Small pieces cracked beneath my feet.
“Annie?”
My voice reverberated back at me. Hollow. Empty. Nobody here but us, the empty echo seemed to reply. Nobody here but us chickens.
Impossible. And yet, if she wasn’t here, there was only one explanation—she must have gotten out.
I tried to think back. I never saw her getting struck. Yes, there was a lot of blood and she was unconscious, but head wounds bled a lot, didn’t they? I read that somewhere. Even a small cut could bleed loads. Maybe she wasn’t hurt as badly as I had thought.
Yeah? What about how cold she felt? What about her not breathing?
A mistake. My mind exaggerating. We were all shit scared. It was dark. I panicked, overreacted. And there was something else, wasn’t there? I stared around the cavern again. Abbie-Eyes. Abbie-Eyes was missing. I had left the doll down here but now she was gone. Annie must have taken her.
I took one last look around the cavern and headed back to the steps. I scrambled up them more quickly this time—urged on by hope and desperation—and squeezed through the gap in the rock. A quick scan of the small cave revealed it was also empty. The flashlight flickered. Maybe enough battery life to get me home, maybe not.
Home. Could Annie have made it home?
It was barely a ten-minute walk from our house up to the old mine. If she had made it out, maybe she had made it back? Maybe she was there now, telling Dad everything, and I could look forward to a good belting when I got home. Right then, I would have welcomed it.
I pulled myself back up the ladder. The hatch was partly open (so maybe I had been wrong about that too). Not all the way, but enough for Annie to have squeezed through, enough for me to squeeze through. I stood up in the cool, fresh night air. It stung my throat as I breathed it in. I felt myself wobble slightly, my vision blur. I bent and rested my hands on my knees. I needed to keep it together. Just long enough to get back.
I scrambled over the slag heaps and slipped through the gap in the perimeter fence. Halfway down the street the flashlight finally gave up. But that was okay because now there were streetlights and the occasional glow of lamps through living-room curtains. How late was it? How long had we been down there?
I hurried down the alley that ran along the back of our house, and through the gate. In the yard, I paused. I still had Dad’s jacket and boots on. Shit. I shed them quickly, shoved them in the shed and then limped, in my holey socks, over to the back door. I turned the handle. Unlocked. It usually was, because Dad was usually too drunk to remember to lock it.
In the kitchen, I hesitated. A light glowed in the living room. The television. Dad half sat, half sprawled on his armchair in front of it, snoring. A small collection of lager cans nestled on the floor beside his feet.
I tiptoed over to the stairs, placed a hand on the banister and dragged my flagging body up the staircase. I felt exhausted, sick. But I needed to see Annie. I needed to make sure that she was home. I eased her door open.
Relief. Huge. Overwhelming.
By the light from the hall I could just see a small Annie-shaped mound curled up beneath the My Little Pony duvet. Poking out of the top, a crown of tousled dark hair.
She was here. She made it home. It was all okay.
In that moment, I could almost have believed that everything that had happened before was just some terrible dream.
I started to pull the door closed…
And then I paused. Did I think, for a second, how strange it was that Annie had gone straight to bed and not even tried to rouse Dad, to get help for me? Did I consider, even briefly, going into her room to check if she was all right? After all, she had a head injury. I should have woken her, made sure she was conscious, coherent.
Should have, should have, should have.
But I didn’t.
I pulled the door shut and stumbled into my own room. I took off my dirty clothes and chucked them into the laundry basket. It would all be all right, I told myself. We would sort it all out in the morning. Make up some story about what happened tonight. I would tell Hurst I didn’t want to be part of his gang anymore. I would spend more time with Annie. I would make it up to her. I really, really would.
I collapsed into bed. Something fluttered briefly, like a soft gray moth, in my mind. Something about Annie, in her bed. Something important that was missing. But, before I could grasp it, it was gone again. Dissolved into dust. I pulled the duvet up to my chin and closed my eyes…
29
“And in the morning, she was gone?”
“She never made it back. The lump in the bed was a pile of toys. The hair—a doll.” I shake my head. “A pile of fucking toys. I should have seen it. I should have checked.”
“You sound like you were concussed yourself, not thinking straight.”
But I should have noticed what was missing. Abbie-Eyes. Abbie-Eyes wasn’t on the bed. Annie would never have left her down there. She would have brought her back.
“What happened then?” Miss Grayson asks.
“The police were called. Search parties sent out. I tried to tell them. Tried to explain how Annie would follow me sometimes, up to the pit. How they should look up there.”
“But you didn’t tell them what happened?”
“I wanted to. But by then Hurst had told the police we were all at his house that night. His dad backed him up. No one would believe me. Not my word against his.”
Miss Grayson nods and I think: She knows. She knows I am a liar and a coward.
“You didn’t go back to look for her?”
“I couldn’t get near and the police wouldn’t let me join the search parties. I just kept thinking they would find the hatch. They would find her. They had to.”
“Sometimes, some places, like people, have to want to be found.”
I would very much like to dismiss this as crazy. But I know she’s right. Chris didn’t find the hatch. It found him. And if it didn’t want you inside, you’d never find it again.
“I was going to confess,” I say. “I was going to go down to the police station and tell them everything.”
“What stopped you?”
“She came back.”
And they all lived happily ever after.
Except, there’s no such thing. My little sister came back. She sat in the police station, swinging her legs, an oversized blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Abbie-Eyes clutched tightly in her arms. And she smiled at me.
That was when I knew. That was when I realized what was wrong. So terribly, horribly wrong.
Annie’s head. Where was the wound? The blood? All I could see was a small red scar on her forehead. I stared at it. Could it have healed so quickly? Had I been wrong? Had I imagined the blow being worse than it was? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore.
“Joe?”
“Something happened to my sister,” I say slowly. “I can’t explain what. I just know that, when she came back, she wasn’t the same. She wasn’t my Annie.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t. No one does. And I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to forget it.” I look at her angrily. “You said you know what happened to my sister. You know nothing.”
She stares back at me, her gaze cool and appraising. Then she stands and walks to the desk. She opens a drawer and takes out a bottle of sherry and two glasses.
She fills both to the brim, hands one glass to me and sits back down, clutching the other. I’m not really a fan of sherry but I take a sip. A large one.
“I had a sister once,” she says.
“I didn’t know—”
“She was stillborn. I saw her, just afterward. She looked just like she was sleeping, except, of course, she didn’t breathe, didn’t make a sound. I remember the village midwife—an older woman—wrapping her up and placing her in my mother’s arms. And then she said something I’ll always remember: ‘It doesn’t need to be like this. I know a place you can take her—you could bring your baby back.’ ”
