To See The Light Return. Sophie Galleymore Bird
he flailed around. His eyes opened and he wailed in fear as he saw the flames and clambered to his feet. Instead of running to the door and safety, he rushed back towards his bed.
‘Nooo!’ Will darted after him and grabbed him by the shoulder, pulling him back. The air in the shack was foul with smoke and he was spluttering and choking as he shouted, over the ever-increasing roar and hiss of the fire, ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’
The old drunk swung back around and rummaged among the rags. Pulling out a rucksack, he started trying to put it on, weaving on his feet.
Shit! Will dived across and took the man out at the knees, sending them both sprawling, then grabbed the fabric of his coat, and pulled with every ounce of strength he could summon. The old man clutched his rucksack to his chest but at least he didn’t resist as Will inched him across the floor towards the door and safety.
The cool, damp night air that met them outside soothed Will’s scorched face but made him cough as it met the smoke in his lungs. He managed to haul the drunk’s dead weight another twenty yards before he collapsed onto his knees, hacking and choking. The old man seemed to have lapsed into unconsciousness again, but when Will forced himself to his feet to drag him further away, expecting the shack to explode at any moment, he fought back, slurring and shouting curses and insults that were too garbled to be coherent. Eventually Will gave up and dropped him, wiping the greasy feel of the coat onto his trousers and stumbling another dozen yards before collapsing onto his back and gasping for breath.
The shack was burning brightly, illuminating the whole of the dock. So much for the Major’s instruction to remain invisible. He grabbed the walkie-talkie out of his pocket, but he must have damaged it when he took down the old man; nothing happened when he pressed the button.
Now what should he do?
Flaming paint cans shot skyward like comets, trailing fire, as the shack exploded.
*
Alise was snoring heavily. The rest of the house was quiet. It was time.
Primrose pulled back the bedclothes and swung her legs out of bed, wincing and suppressing a gasp of pain. The poppy juice had worn off and she fumbled for the glass she had stashed behind the curtain, giving in to the urge to numb herself. The liquid was bitter but she choked it down and put the glass back on the sill.
The corridor and landing were empty and dark, all the candles burned out. Even though she could claim a need to go to the bathroom she couldn’t stop herself from scuttling furtively down the corridor. Once there and with the door wedged closed by a hand towel – there was no lock as Dorcas didn’t trust her charges not to hurt themselves either deliberately or accidentally – she carefully removed the stacks of linens from the cupboard and found the clothes she had stashed. It was too risky to get dressed in the bathroom, in case someone came in or spotted her before she got downstairs, so she bundled the clothes under her nightgown and held them in place over her stomach. Now she looked big again; unless someone got close enough to realise who she was, and knew she had just been harvested, she would look like just another inmate.
There were sounds coming from the kitchen as she crept down the stairs, and light showed under the door. It was perversely reassuring, like a mouse knowing the cat was elsewhere. As she took each step, she was concentrating so hard on being quiet and avoiding the known creaks, she barely registered that the trip down the stairs was far less difficult than last time.
The door was bolted again. After drawing back the bolt – her heart stuttering with fright in case someone came out of the kitchen – she ducked into the downstairs cloakroom and brought the clothes out from under her gown. Shivering from fright more than cold, she pulled on the dress and found that it was far too big, and an ugly shade of brown. The jumper was hand knitted and also too big, hanging halfway down her thighs. Its bottle green clashed horribly with the brown. But they were clothes. The first clothes she had worn in years. The leather shoes were a tight fit, but she managed to loosen the laces to give her toes a bit more room. And the coat was wool and long enough to keep most of her legs covered. And it was black, which would be helpful if she had to hide.
The nightdress she left hanging on a peg among a rack of staff overalls.
The hallway remained silent and empty when she let herself out of the cloakroom. Nothing stirred as she pulled open the heavy front door and felt the cool night wind try to snatch it from her hand. Clinging on to the handle, horrifyingly aware of how weak she was, she stepped outside and pulled it shut behind her. There was a thud and a snick as it closed and the catch caught. She froze, ear pressed to the door to see if anyone was coming to investigate. Nothing.
Shaking, summoning her courage, she pushed herself away from the door and staggered down the stone steps. In contrast to her last escape attempt, there was a sliver of moon over the treetops, though dark rainclouds were massing to the west, and the cool westerly wind made her glad to have brought a coat. Buttoning it and holding it tight around herself, Primrose set off down the drive. The sound of stones crunching under her feet alarmed roosting rooks and pigeons into noisy flight, but no one came to investigate and she hastened on.
Weak though she was from inactivity, she was able to walk much faster now she wasn’t carrying so much weight. The clothes itched, the shoes were rubbing against her bare feet, but her knees and hips were no longer screaming; if she hadn’t had half an ear out for a car engine revving behind her she might even have found herself enjoying her mad, staggering dash towards the village. Maybe it was the poppy juice that was causing a bubble of exhilaration to form in her chest and turning the night sounds that had terrified her last time into a quiet chorus urging her on, but for a moment she felt invincible, like the heroine in some old book, escaping from the castle.
It took her half as long to reach the spot where Dorcas had found her last time, and she barely noticed its significance as she sped on her way. The final uphill slope to Gibbet Cross slowed her considerably, as did the sight of the gallows, the rotting wooden structure in the centre of a grass bank to the north of the crossroads showing black against the night sky. Excitement cooled and congealed into dread.
The last hanging – that she knew about anyway – had been when she was about six years old. She had been forbidden to attend, a fact for which she was grateful now, but she remembered feeling cheated at the time. The corpse had been left dangling from the gibbet as a warning, rotting until the head parted from its body and the remains were removed, to be thrown into a hole in the ground outside the churchyard wall. Before that happened, she and some friends had sneaked away after school one day and seen the corpse swaying in the wind, face bloated, purple, crow-pecked. Her friend had dared her to touch it. She had refused and been called a coward. Stung, she brushed the dangling trouserleg, and screamed when the wind pushed it and its stink towards her. Shrieking, they had run back to the village and their chores.
Primrose hadn’t known why the man had been hanged. She had asked her dad and he said something about rustling, but making noise seemed such a small crime for such a big punishment.
The gibbet was empty now but still she didn’t look fully at it, hurrying past before turning left and away, feeling its presence at her back and imagining the ghosts of its victims dragging themselves along behind her, her spine crawling with a shiver of horror until she turned a bend and the sensation faded.
From there the going got easier; more effort had been made to keep the approach to the village level underfoot, and the gradient was less steep. As she reached the first, tumbledown cottages, hidden behind hedges to her right, she forced herself to slow down so she would be able to hear anyone else out past curfew and find somewhere to hide. Besides, she was starting to pant from exertion, and her legs were feeling wobbly. A sudden fit of faintness forced her to pause a moment, and skeins of colour danced across her vision. Following them with her gaze, she looked up and became mesmerised by the moon’s lambent glow, its bright sickle shape like a curved door into a better, brighter world.
A light drizzle began to fall and clouds stole across the moon. Primrose shivered as cold wet drops pattered onto her upraised face, remembering where she was and what she was supposed