The Hiding Place(69)

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.