Hills End Page 6

  But how could she go to him? She could not descend the bluff. She’d be blinded by water and ice, even blown from the rock-face. She’d be dead before she got to the bottom, dead before her announcement of the wonder of these caves went out to the world. It was too much to ask of any woman, to throw her life away in the frail chance that she might help a slow-witted, usually unwashed, and greedy boy.

  But beside her was Gussie, that emotional little creature, still tugging on her sleeve, ‘Butch! Butch! Butch!’

  ‘Yes, dear. Yes, dear.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have left him behind, Miss Godwin. You should have made him come.’

  ‘Shut up, Gussie,’ roared Paul, shaking her. ‘That’s not fair. It’s not Miss Godwin’s fault. No one could do anything out there. Not even a man.’

  ‘I bet Butch’s father would. He’d go. And I’d go, too, if I was strong enough. And stop shaking me. And stop shouting at me. You’re a scaredy-cat. That’s what you are. You’re big enough, even if Miss Godwin isn’t.’

  ‘Augusta,’ cried the schoolmistress angrily, ‘you are not to address your brother like that. And not one of you is to leave this cave until the storm is over. I absolutely forbid any move towards the entrance. You’re to get back out of the wind and the wet. I’ve enough worry without the rest of you catching chills.’ Exhausted by the effort of making herself heard and by her distress, she waved them back inside.

  Adrian yelled at her, ‘You’re coming, too, Miss Godwin?’

  She shook her head. ‘On your honours,’ she screamed. ‘No one to leave. Now go!’

  She sat where she was, worn out, hoarse, her throat raw, her head ringing, but she summoned enough strength to gesture angrily at them, once again, and she saw them retreat into the caves and she saw the torch come on again in Paul’s hand, and then they were gone from her sight.

  She surrendered then to a private little weep. When she looked up the hail had stopped but the rain fell in an unbroken torrent.

  At the conclusion of the National News at 12.40, Eastern Time, an additional item was handed to the news reader in the air-conditioned comfort of a studio more than a thousand miles from Hills End.

  The news reader was a pleasant young man, but he could not be expected to be disturbed by a report of a storm. After all, with equal calm, he had broadcast stories of disasters and wars. As far as he was concerned, items of news were words on paper that he was required to read aloud, in exchange for his pay envelope at the end of the week. Another storm was just another storm.

  So he read it and this is what he said:

  ‘A severe cyclonic storm, accompanied by hurricane-force winds and torrential hail and rain, is cutting an arc of destruction and chaos sixty miles wide through the north country, causing widespread power failures and disruption of radio and telephone communications. Numerous country centres are isolated, roads are impassable and rivers are rising rapidly. In the heavily timbered region of the Stanley Ranges, where the storm appears to have struck with its greatest violence, fears are held for the safety of approximately ninety men, women and children, the entire population of the mill town of Hills End. These people are travelling over a dangerous mountain road to the annual Picnic Race Meeting at Stanley. The party was one hour overdue when telephone communication with Stanley was cut off. It is believed that a breakdown of one of the cars or trucks concerned must have caused the delay which has left these people at the mercy of the storm.

  ‘Detailed gale warnings and flood warnings for the region will be issued in the weather report that follows this bulletin.’

  Miss Godwin moved cautiously from the deep shelter of the entrance cave to the fury of the ledge. In a few moments her tough bush clothes were soaked and she was shivering uncontrollably.

  She was so terribly afraid, so awed by the violence, so perturbed that clear sunshine and this awful tempest could come from one sky, could exist in one world side by side, only a few hours or a few miles apart.

  She didn’t walk into the storm, she crawled into it, because she feared she would be swept from her feet to the horrible rocks far beneath. She felt like a poor, bewildered heathen, crawling into the presence of the god of thunder; yet deep inside her, so deep that for the moment she couldn’t summon from it the strength she needed, was the spark of her faith in the good God who was with His people when they needed Him. She didn’t believe in running to God for every little thing, because He had given her a mind and a body equal to most of her problems. She thanked Him for what he had given her, but rarely asked for more.

  She had prayed several times this day in her fear, but now she couldn’t. There was a barrier in her mind and it was a barrier of self-pity. She was sorry for herself; she was angry; she was resentful.

  She stayed on the ledge blasted by the wind and rain, not fighting the storm but fighting herself. She tried to tell herself that the silly boy Christopher wasn’t worth worrying about. Again and again she willed herself to crawl back into the cave, but she couldn’t move her body because fighting against the desire to preserve herself was her love for the simple boy who was always so happy, so obedient, so loyal.

  Little Harvey squatted on the floor of the cave beside Miss Godwin’s tripod and camera. He was itching to get his fingers on the camera, but he was conscious of a steady gaze from Frances and that gaze meant one thing, ‘Behave yourself, little boy, or look out!’

  Paul had placed the electric lantern on a boulder and they sat in the spill of light, with the faint outline of bones not far away. They were subdued and Adrian was nervously flicking back his sleeve and peering at the face of his watch. The roar of the storm was still there but not close enough to prevent them from conversing in comfort if they had wished it. But no one spoke, not for a very long time. Even Gussie nursed her chin in her hands, pouting with her lower lip, trembling from the awful haste of her heartbeat. She didn’t know now whether she was more concerned for Butch or for Miss Godwin, and was sorry for the silly things she had said. How could she have suggested that Paul should go out into the storm?

  Maisie was shaking from cold and fright, and her freckled face had gone very pale. Adrian wondered what she was thinking, because she looked bloodless in the eerie light of the lantern. He was even startled himself when Paul suddenly said, ‘She’s been gone long enough.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adrian, ‘but you know Miss Godwin. She wouldn’t do anything silly.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I think one of us should go and see.’

  ‘Go together if you like.’

  ‘Righto.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Go together. Then you’ll each be on your honour.’

  ‘And leave us here?’ wailed Maisie. ‘By ourselves? In the dark?’

  ‘We’re not taking the torch, stupid. Come on, Paul. We’ve got to get her back in here. She’s awfully thin, you know. We’re not the ones that’ll catch cold. Silly her sitting out there waiting for Butch. Butch hasn’t got many brains, but he’s not that dumb. He won’t try to climb the bluff.’

  ‘Can I come, too?’ squeaked Harvey.

  ‘You stay where you are,’ growled Paul. ‘Someone’s got to look after the girls.’

  Harvey thought about it for a moment, and it was a compliment that pleased him. He folded his arms and looked as important as an Indian chieftain.

  Paul and Adrian groped towards the gloomy light. It was always easier to fumble towards the light than away from it and Paul ran the string lightly through his fingers to ensure that they came out to the right entrance. He noticed that the string was damp and that the floor of the cave was wet and occasionally they stepped into puddles that had not been there a few minutes ago. He didn’t like it. He had been in here before, in dry weather, when water had started flowing. If it could flow in dry weather it could gush in a storm.

  Suddenly the storm was in front of them, just as it had been before, like an endless block of frosted glass that was breaking all the time and spraying fragments from its edge.
They were not fragments of ice now, but gusts of stinging rain, that blew far back into the entrance cave.

  ‘Where is she?’

  It was Adrian’s shout and Adrian’s fingers that dug into Paul’s arm.

  They battled further into the wet and the wind, but she wasn’t there, and Paul pointed. Through the melting hail that was still six inches deep was one almost clear patch. Miss Godwin had gone over the side.

  The two boys clung to each other in an emotion that was nothing less than horror. She couldn’t have fallen; she couldn’t have been blown, because the wind had been driving into her face. Miss Godwin had gone over the side deliberately.

  6

  The Hours of Terror

  Adrian and Paul stumbled away from the storm, back along the string, round the twists and turns, until they floundered into the big cave, breathless and speechless, but they didn’t need to speak a word.

  If they had stopped to think they might have contrived to break the news gently. If they had paused only for a few moments before rushing into that inner cave they might have prevented the scene that followed. Gussie instantly burst into tears. Before she heard anything she was shaking with sobs. She knew. No one had to tell her. Gussie’s intuition was frightening, because it was invariably right. She never bothered to think in a crisis. She didn’t need to.

  It was Frances who calmed her, even calmed them all, even Adrian and Paul, by putting a motherly arm round Gussie’s shoulder and declaring, ‘Things are often not as bad as they seem. That’s something my mother always says. What possible use can we be to anyone if we behave like a lot of silly people?’

  She compelled them to think about it because she had sounded so motherly and so wise. She didn’t seem in the least frightened. She was, terribly so, but no one knew.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Paul. ‘Getting panicky isn’t going to help. Whatever we do we’ve got to keep our heads. We’re on our own. Miss Godwin’s gone. She’s the one that’s in danger. Not us.’

  ‘She’s gone down the cliff,’ said Adrian, ‘to get Butch, I suppose. It was an awfully brave thing to do.’

  ‘But an awfully silly thing,’ said Frances, ‘and you boys are not to get the idea that you’re to go after her.’

  Adrian buried his face in his hands. ‘But we’ve got to, don’t you see?’

  ‘I don’t see,’ said Frances. ‘That’s what she meant when she forbade you to go into the storm.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘It wasn’t different at all. She put you on your honour and we all gave her our honour.’

  ‘It’s Gussie’s fault,’ squeaked Harvey. ‘She’s the one who made the fuss.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. I—I couldn’t help it. I—I didn’t want anything to happen to Butch.’

  ‘Girls,’ snorted Harvey. ‘That’s what my dad says—women!’

  ‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Maisie.

  Paul and Adrian both shrugged. They didn’t know. Neither did Frances.

  They sat down again and when Paul put his hand out behind him he was sure he touched water. He felt nervously with his fingers and he was right. A little stream of water was trickling into the cave.

  He heard Gussie sniffling quietly, trying to hold back her tears.

  On the face of the bluff, Miss Godwin clung to an outcrop of rock, fighting for breath and for the courage to go on. Her fingers were numb, her feet were numb, and she was so very, very weak.

  She was afraid to look up and afraid to look down. She didn’t know where she was, but she realized that this outcrop was the difference between life and death, that if she had not found it her body would already be broken on the rocks beneath. And she knew something more. Never, never, could she climb back up again. She didn’t know where to climb. She didn’t know how she had come to be here. She had to continue going down or slowly lose consciousness and die when she fell. These thoughts were not crystal clear. They were like dreams in her exhausted mind and she had to battle to hold on to them. Her only real desire was to give up, to fall and have done with it all.

  She clung to her rock, groaning, panting, enduring the blows of wind and rain, feeling rather than thinking that it might have been a tragic way to die, an awful way to die, but still noble. It was a hero’s death. Only a hero or a fool would have tried. Perhaps, then, it was a fool’s death.

  What a terrible thing! Not a fool! Not the wise Miss Elaine Godwin, not the brave Miss Godwin. She couldn’t be a simple fool.

  They’d say she’d thrown her life away. They’d say she’d tried to be a heroine but should have known she wasn’t strong enough. They’d say you’d think God would have looked after such a frail little woman. Makes you wonder, some of them would say, whether there is a God?

  She clung to her rock and at last began to pray, fighting against her exhaustion to frame the thoughts.

  Slowly she became aware of the details of the bluff. The storm, instead of a nameless force pounding against her, became what it was—only water and wind, enemies that she could defeat. Finally, she looked down, through eyelids slitted against the blast. At the foot of the bluff, thirty or forty feet beneath her, a vast drift of wind-driven hail had piled up like a carpet of snow. Then she fell.

  Her scream was never heard by a living soul. She felt nothing except the awful convulsion of her heart and a momentary impression of space and a deep sadness that God hadn’t answered her.

  Suddenly, she seemed to be suffocating and she believed it was the moment of death. She didn’t fight. She surrendered limply.

  Gradually, she realized that something strange had happened. The storm was still with her, with all its violence and coldness. The bluff was still there, too, and so were the hailstones and so was she.

  She was alive, buried to the hips in crumbling hailstones. She wept a little and said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’, and struggled out of the hailstones, down a slope of melting ice to the desolate rock pan.

  She was unhurt, not even her clothes were torn. ‘Thank you,’ she said aloud, her head bowed into the storm. ‘I shall manage on my own now, thank you.’

  Then she staggered through the boulders and the gaps, through deepening pools and runnels, bent almost double, searching for Christopher, calling for him, apparently not aware that the water was becoming deeper and everywhere was flowing across the rock pan towards the tormented river. It still crashed from the skies and showered in cascades from the bluff. The skies were not clouds. They were an ocean falling.

  Hills End groaned and swayed beneath the assault of the storm. Littered across the flats were rooftops and walls and fowlhouses and crushed water-tanks, fabrics and sodden paper, and creeping towards them was the swirling, muddied River Magnus, every second rising higher, reaching farther, every second destroying more and more.

  The deserted little town had no one to hold it together, to help it to face its most dangerous hours. Piece by piece it broke away and no one was there to pull it together again, to nail it down, to strengthen it with bolts, to secure it to its mother Earth with ropes and cables. No one was there to barricade the broken doors and windows. No one was there to save the things that people valued more than money, books and pictures and rocking chairs and instruments to make music. No one was there to comfort the terrified animals or the little birds in aviaries.

  No one was there. Not even Frank Tobias.

  Paul was restless and succeeded for several minutes in hiding the water that was entering the cave. He had a suspicion that Adrian had noticed it, because Adrian was very jumpy, and Adrian indeed had known as soon as Paul had known. He had feared this from the moment the rain had started. Every boy knew that the caves sometimes ran high with water, not high enough to drown anyone, but certainly high enough to give one a bad fright. No boy would venture near the caves in the wet and this storm was as bad as the wet at its worst. Maybe it went even farther than that. Maybe this was the sort of rain they had never seen before.

  Suddenly
Frances said, ‘I think we’d better move, don’t you, Paul?’

  ‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Paul!’ Frances put a lot of expression into that pronouncement of his name.

  He shifted uncomfortably because he was sitting in the puddle, still trying to hide it. He sighed.

  ‘Oh, all right. I suppose it might get damp down here. What say we sit up on the ledge with the bones? I suppose rain might get blown in and float round a bit. Then we can have our lunch, eh? Who’s hungry?’

  Adrian was very nervous, but he rather admired Paul at that moment. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Yeah, let’s have lunch. What say we sit up on the ledge and have lunch?’

  ‘With all those horrible bones?’ Maisie shuddered. ‘Not me. I’m going to stay right here.’

  Frances said firmly, ‘They’ve got to know sooner or later, Paul.’

  ‘Know what?’ squeaked Harvey. ‘What’s goin’ on round here?’

  Paul swallowed. ‘We might get wet. If we don’t sit up on the edge I think we’ll get very wet.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Adrian. ‘Much too wet. Right up to our ears, maybe—and that’d kill you, Harvey. Gee, you’d die if you got water in the ears.’

  Gussie jumped to her feet. ‘Do you mean we’re going to get flooded?’

  Adrian nodded and Paul nodded and Frances nodded.

  ‘Right up to the ears?’ howled Harvey.

  ‘Perhaps. But not if we sit on the ledge.’

  ‘That’ll be right,’ said Maisie, ‘or the bones wouldn’t be there, would they? They would have been washed away some other time.’

  There must have been a lot of truth in that. Trust Maisie to go straight to the truth.

  They moved their things on to the ledge and ate their lunches and watched the water flow in. They must have watched for half an hour, then Paul realized that the lantern was becoming dim. The battery must have been an old one.