Hills End Page 10

  She waded into the flood, but the water pulled at her and she wasn’t really sure where she was standing. Because she was alone and no one could see, she had a good cry, and then waded back to the road, where she stood, drooping in the rain, until her tears dried up.

  Maisie couldn’t reach her house, either. It had moved in a most peculiar way. It had stood high on tall stumps, and a landslide, or perhaps a washaway, had swept beneath it, unseating the foundations, as a scythe-cut would topple stalks of grass. The house had then slid forward, riding over the foundations, flattening them, until it had come to rest halfway down the garden at a crazy angle.

  She was afraid to go near it, afraid it might suddenly groan and fold up flat.

  She couldn’t see their dog anywhere. He was a beautiful boxer and had cost her father twenty-five guineas. She was rather cross with herself for thinking of that. She wasn’t really worried about how much money the dog had cost; she had thought of it only because it was a lot of money and her mother and father had had angry words about it. Her mother had said the money should have gone towards an encyclopaedia for the children’s education.

  Maisie sat on a rock in the open, in the rain, and thought about her mother and father, her sister, and her two brothers. Gradually she felt sadder and sadder and she had to bite harder on her trembling lower lip. She wanted her family; she wanted a nice hot dinner and a nice warm bed and a lovely long sleep.

  When she opened her eyes again she was shivering and it was getting dark.

  Paul would have been all right if Gussie had not been with him. With Gussie, one was always poised at the brink of a whirlpool. Gussie felt everything so deeply. If the cat caught a bird she would weep for an hour, and once she had been badly scratched trying to save the life of a robin. Every wounded creature of the forest she brought home to care for, and buried those that died in a graveyard at the top of the garden. She made pets of lizards and beetles and worms. Everything that lived was sacred to Gussie—except flies, fleas, bull-ants and mosquitoes.

  At first sight their home seemed to be almost undamaged. Trees were down; a chimney had sunk but hadn’t fallen; the glass in the front door was splintered and the cat was sitting on the veranda. Why their house should have been so favoured they didn’t know, unless in some way the contours of the hill had protected it.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Gussie, ‘at least we’ll be able to sleep here tonight and not in that horrible shop.’

  They plodded up the veranda steps, leaving a trail of red mud to be washed away by the rain, and then Paul tried to open the door. He couldn’t make it budge. He glanced at Gussie, but she was too busy making a fuss of the cat to notice anything.

  He put his shoulder against the door, turned the latch again, and gave it a shove with all the weight he had. A few pieces of glass tinkled on the floor, but the only other result was an ache in his shoulder.

  He wondered about it. Perhaps the tremendous wind had twisted the frame of the house and so jammed the door. Perhaps everything was so wet that the timbers had swollen. Anyhow, the front door was stuck and he’d have to try the back.

  Before he turned away he peered through a gap in the glass. Theirs was a house that had been built to an open plan in the American style, and the interior was wrecked. The first thing he saw was the huge hole in the ceiling, and then the water-storage tank that had stood for years on a high platform at the rear of the house. It had been swept from the platform and dumped into the house and had exploded its five hundred gallons of water like a bomb burst. Rafters were down, ceiling joists were smashed, plaster hung in ragged sheets and—heaven forbid—Gussie’s aquarium of goldfish was smashed on the stone hearth.

  Paul gasped. At that moment he couldn’t imagine anything worse. It was a catastrophe. Gussie would scream blue murder. She’d raised those blooming fish from pups, or whatever they were called when they were little. Only two thoughts were in his mind—his gratitude that the door was jammed and his need to get away from it in double-quick time.

  He grabbed Gussie’s hand and dragged her down the steps.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she bellowed. ‘Lemme go!’

  She shook herself free. ‘I don’t want to go back to the shop. I want something to eat. I want my clothes. I’m not going back to the shop.’

  ‘You’ll do as I say,’ growled Paul, and forced her towards the road, but she got away from him and scuttled back to the house. He caught her at the bottom step and he was breathless and pale.

  ‘Gussie,’ he pleaded, ‘be a pal. Don’t try to get in. It’s in an awful mess. We’ll come back tomorrow. Please, Gussie.’

  She glared at him because she was angry that he had manhandled her. ‘You’re not my boss. If I want to go in, I’ll go in.’

  ‘No, Gussie. Honest, Gussie, you might get hurt. It’s too dark. It’s too wet. Let’s come back in the morning. Please.’

  She looked at him warily. ‘You’re trying to hide something, aren’t you?’

  He couldn’t completely lie to her, and he nodded. ‘The tank’s come through the roof. That’s what’s happened. And I don’t want to go in now. My model yacht’s all broken. Mum’s piano’s all ruined. Let’s leave it till the morning, Gussie.’

  ‘You are upset, aren’t you?’

  He nodded, and realized that he was.

  ‘But I want to have a look, Paul.’

  He shook his head vigorously. ‘It won’t seem so bad in the morning, in broad daylight.’

  She put her hand in his and squeezed it and they walked back to the road.

  Ben Fiddler’s house, in keeping with its owner’s importance, was the largest home in Hills End. Ben had employed a highly paid stonemason to build a series of magnificent terraces from the local rock, and these rose up a step at a time from road level to the big excavation on which the house stood. Two or three years ago the stonemason had returned and for several months had busied himself stripping the weatherboards from the walls and replacing them with a veneer of stone. There was no doubt about the result. It was a magnificent deception. Ben’s house looked strong enough to withstand the tempests of a thousand years. In fact, the people had often remarked that Ben would need to live for a thousand years to get his money’s worth, but those remarks could have been prompted by jealousy. They were certainly not prompted by any real understanding of how good or how bad the house was. To give the stonemason his due, his work had stood up to the storm extremely well, and in the few places where the walls cracked it was not from any failing of his. Where the house did fail was in the roof, that one part where stones really would have looked out of place. The wind had caught the overhanging eaves and lifted the huge roof like a hat and dumped it halfway down the hill.

  That was where Adrian found it, though he had known long before then that the roof had gone. He wasn’t really worried about the damage. He was old enough to understand that there were such things as storm and tempest clauses in insurance policies and that all this havoc was not going to cost anyone a great deal of money, except the insurance companies. Adrian knew it was going to cost the insurance companies a packet. What it was going to cost the people was the loss of things that money couldn’t replace, such things as self-respect and pride. That was what it was going to cost Adrian and his father, because Ben Fiddler had boasted to his family that there wasn’t a finer house than his in all the country, and Adrian had repeated the boast at school. Adrian would never forget that day, because Miss Godwin had overheard. She had said, ‘The fortunate ones who live in fine houses should remember that when the Son of the Great Builder came down to earth He had nowhere to lay His head.’

  Then she had left him in the middle of his mates, stranded, blushing, angry, and unrepentant, certain that she had been cruel and nasty. He had told his father, expecting his eyes to flash as they sometimes did, expecting him to thunder with rage, but Ben Fiddler had turned slowly into his study without a word. When Adrian had peeped in his father had been on his knees.

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nbsp; Adrian plodded round the wreckage of the roof, not sure whether he was still bitter or not. Perhaps in a way this was a further lesson; perhaps in another way it removed the barrier that always separated him from his friends because his father was rich. Now it looked as though they were all really equal for the first time—all homeless. The finest house in the world, if it had lost its roof, wasn’t a scrap better than a slab of bark against a tree.

  Adrian, in some ways, was different from the average boy. No one ever knew quite how to take him. Sometimes he was warm and human, but other times he was hard and arrogant and vain. He scared easily, too, but perhaps no one had realized that until the last couple of days. And Adrian was scared now, because he had guessed, as Frances and Paul had, that death had visited Hills End. He knew that Frank Tobias hadn’t gone to the bluff and that Butch and Miss Godwin had not returned, and he didn’t feel equal to facing what it might mean. He still saw the wireless as their one hope, because how could a few children, half of them only in the fifth grade, possibly hold out against danger and sickness and the constant risk of injury in a ravaged and deserted town?

  Then he stopped on the path beside the house and shivered, stopped by a tall pole that had snapped and borne a tangle of wires to the ground.

  The wireless was no longer a source of comfort. Even if he found it to be undamaged, he still couldn’t use it. The aerial was down—and, of course, there wasn’t any power.

  10

  Peril in the Night

  The oppressive cloud that usually they saw only in the wet season oozed down the hillsides into the valley, deepening the gloom and shortening the dying day.

  One at a time, from here and there, they returned to the shop and entered through the broken window, each greeting the other without much enthusiasm, reporting the dismal scenes they had found, and lapsing into awkward silence.

  All returned from their homes empty-handed, except Adrian. He brought an armful of canned food and biscuits that he had removed from his mother’s waterlogged pantry. Everything that had not been stored in tins or jars had been ruined, and the refrigerator, though unmarked, must have been defrosted many, many hours before, because when he had opened the door the smell had been awful.

  ‘Well,’ Paul said at last, ‘what’s to be done? Do we help ourselves to things or what?’

  ‘I’ve got enough for us to eat,’ said Adrian, ‘for tonight, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve been looking the shop over,’ said Paul, ‘and even if we take everything we can lay our hands on we’re still going to be short.’

  ‘I’m taking nothing,’ said Frances.

  ‘You’ll talk differently when you’re hungry.’

  ‘I’m hungry now.’

  Adrian took the hint and passed round the biscuits. ‘These’ll have to do,’ he said. ‘Most of the stuff in the tins needs to be cooked. But what do you reckon we’re short of, Paul?’

  ‘The milk’s bad and the butter’s rancid. Worse than that, there’s no water in the taps. And the meat’s stinking. Honest, I’ve smelt some things before, but nothing like that freezer.’

  ‘You haven’t smelt our fridge,’ growled Adrian.

  ‘I’ll bet the freezer leaves your fridge for dead. We’re hard up for bedding, too. All the mattresses are wet, so we’ll have to do without them for tonight. The blankets are not too bad, but everything smells so musty. I don’t like the smell in here. It’s all the food that’s going bad. I don’t know what we’re going to do with it. Even the bread’s off. Only came on Friday and sprouting mildew already.’

  ‘If there’s no water here,’ said Frances, ‘it won’t be anywhere else, either. I think we’d better put some bowls out to catch the rain, because you can’t drink flood waters. I’ve heard you can catch awful diseases that way.’

  ‘I’m not worried about water,’ said Paul. ‘There’s enough lemonade in the storeroom to last a month. The storeroom’s like a submarine with a hole in it, but the lemonade’s all right.’

  ‘You can’t touch it, Paul. It doesn’t belong to you.’

  ‘Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Frances! That’s stupid. Isn’t she stupid, Adrian?’

  Adrian swallowed. He didn’t like such a vital issue being thrown up to him for a decision, yet he felt he couldn’t let Paul down. If each had refused to be the leader they’d have to pull together instead. He dropped his eyes.

  ‘It’ll be safer to drink lemonade, Frances,’ he said. ‘And I think we’ll have to use the other things, too. It looks as though we’ve got to make do with what we can find, because we can’t use the wireless.’

  Paul had been afraid of that. ‘Broken?’

  ‘Not exactly. Power’s the trouble. We haven’t any electricity.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’ll try the engine house tomorrow and see if I can do anything.’

  ‘You can’t get near it, Adrian. It’s flooded.’

  ‘It might be different in the morning.’

  ‘Paul,’ said Gussie with some anxiety. ‘Harvey’s not back yet.’

  ‘He’ll be back when he’s eaten his pie, the little glutton.’

  ‘The pie was in his fridge, wasn’t it?’ said Adrian. ‘I’ll bet it was high. If he eats it he’ll be awful sorry afterwards.’

  ‘Harvey can eat anything—like a goat. He’ll probably eat the dish, too. Anyone who thrives on penholders and drawing paper can eat anything.’

  ‘Did anyone see our dog?’ said Maisie.

  ‘Probably gone bush. He’ll be back.’

  ‘Our dog’s drowned,’ said Frances. ‘I don’t know about yours, Maisie.’

  ‘Your dog’s probably gone bush, too, Fran. It takes a lot to drown a dog. He’d get off his lead all right.’

  ‘He was on a chain,’ said Frances, ‘under the house in the shade.’ She suddenly turned away, back towards the window.

  Paul changed the subject abruptly. ‘Let’s get one of these kerosene tins open and fill the storm lanterns. They’ll do for light. Much better than using the torches. I tried one tin before, Adrian, and couldn’t turn the cap. Do you know where Mr Matheson keeps his wrenches?’

  ‘Under the counter, I suppose, and we’ll have to do something about blocking that window off. Perhaps we can board it up. Something to keep the weather out.’

  ‘I think I’ll look for Harvey,’ said Gussie. ‘It’s getting so dark. He’ll be frightened.’

  Paul frowned. ‘Harvey frightened? Not him! But he should be back, the little horror. Why don’t you go with her, Maisie, or Gussie will be frightened of the dark herself? By the time you’re back we’ll have some lights on and the window boarded up and perhaps Frances will have worked out some way of cooking our tea.’

  Frances shrugged. ‘First of all,’ she said, ‘I’m putting out bowls for water.’ And then she sighed. ‘If you two girls are going up the hill, you’d better do as Paul says. Take some raincoats—and one for Harvey, too. I suppose we’ve got to be sensible. I don’t suppose it’s really stealing.’ That was what Frances said, but she swore to pay for every single thing she touched, even if it took every penny she had in the bank and all her pocket money for the next twelve months.

  Mr Matheson had three storm lanterns in stock, so Paul filled all three, lit them, and hung them round the shop. Unfortunately they were not pressure lanterns and their light was yellow and ghostly. Adrian was more keenly aware of that than Paul. They busied themselves, but Adrian couldn’t rise above the anxiety of being cut off in an empty town with only three weak lights between them and darkness. Paul had trouble enough trying to be sensible about it; Frances gave no sign that she had any thought for it; but Adrian’s imagination was too vivid. It always had been. He had been in more rows at home over things he had imagined than he could count. He had had more nightmares than he could remember—some of them so real that he still wondered sometimes whether he had actually lived through them.

  Adrian’s mind was never at rest. His fantastic account of prehistoric paintings had dr
awn Miss Godwin into his own dream world, but he was no longer surprised by the discovery that had miraculously saved him from being branded a liar. The paintings were his discovery. They had been there all the time and he had known it. Hadn’t he described them? The few little differences didn’t matter. Already in his mind their exciting discovery was identified to the last detail with the drawings he had imagined.

  Adrian wasn’t being wicked. He couldn’t help it. Perhaps Miss Godwin had glimpsed it, but no one else had realized yet that Adrian would probably develop into a gifted creative artist, but in the meantime he had to live with the terrors of his imagination. He saw in his mind the dense blackness of night now creeping down the mountain-sides, like the groping fingers of a huge hand. What it would do when it engulfed the town no one knew, not even Adrian. Despite his vivid mind-pictures he was not a boy normally afraid of the dark, but tragedy had walked through Hills End and was probably still there, hidden, waiting to emerge again when night came down.

  Adrian worked hard, in a sweat and a flurry, with a hammer in hand and a pocket full of nails. He broke into sections a big crate in the store-room and dragged the pieces up to seal the window and would have boarded the lot up, without means of entry or exit, if Paul had not drawn his attention to it. The up-ended honey barrel still barred their use of the door. It was far too large and sticky a mess to tackle when so much else had to be done.

  Frances, though she was terrified of the thing, managed to start an old primus stove that Paul found in the storeroom. She insisted upon using it rather than taking a new one down from the shelf. Frances was so much the little mother that Paul had taken it for granted that she knew how to cook, but, strange as it seemed, Frances’s mother never dared to let her loose in the kitchen. Frances had one blind spot—to the despair of all the McLeod family—she couldn’t even boil water without precipitating a disaster.

  Paul mopped up the water at the rear of the shop. It was the drapery department, and he had to pile stacks of goods on the counter and push the racks of garments into the corner. Then he placed bowls to catch the drips that still came through the ceiling. That steady rain drumming against the iron roof must have been finding damaged spots, sprung nails perhaps, or loose ridging, because the ceiling was saturated and stained and sweating discoloured beads of water. Next, Paul placed layer after layer of brown wrapping paper over the floorboards and made six sleeping bags, each from a pair of blankets, and a safety pin. That was a trick his father, once a corporal in the army, had shown him. Two blankets folded double and interleaved like tissues in a packet, tucked securely under at the bottom and pinned at one top corner, quickly made a snug bag that was as difficult to enter as it was to get out of. He accomplished all that and realized suddenly that something was wrong. Gussie wasn’t back. Maisie wasn’t back. Harvey still hadn’t appeared.