49

THE STORM CAME.

The forest around Limeburn had stood for five hundred years and seen few like it.

The wind and the rain combined to bring more water off the surrounding hills than ever before. Instead of raindrops falling on to leaves and weighing down the branches of the trees, they were immediately dashed from their resting place to the ground, where they gathered together and rushed downhill towards the sea.

The stream broke its mossy banks and flooded the road and the cobbles three inches deep. It filled the Bear Den.

In the clearing on the top of the cliff, the wind was even more punishing. Small things bent double to get out of its way.

Big things fared less well.

The giant oak that bore the swing was alone on the bluff. Unlike the forest behind it, where each tree sheltered its neighbour, this oak had stood on the cliff above Limeburn in splendid isolation for over two centuries – a lookout and a landmark – facing down nature.

But this night would be its last.

It swayed and it creaked and it strained under the assault that was a north wind coming straight off the ocean, sweeping all before it. The frayed rope whipped about until it swung so hard and so high that it got tangled in the branches. The oak started to moan, and then to squeal. If any human being had been crazy enough to be sitting on the nearby bench at the time, they would have felt the ground move beneath them as the mighty roots strained to hold on to Mother Earth. Rising and falling, rising and falling, as if the land itself were gasping for breath.

Some time just after midnight, a sound like a gunshot fired through the forest and the bench was tilted, then tossed aside by a great upheaval of soil and roots that rose vertically in the sky for ten, twenty feet. They hung there like witches’ fingers, as the tree they’d nourished for so long clung to the only home it had ever known.

With a horrible shriek, the mighty oak tipped slowly forward and peered over the edge at the raging waters below and then – with a final rending sound – it tumbled off the cliff and into the ocean.

The storm was so loud and the sea so wild that when the giant tree hit the waves, it barely made a splash.

Ruby woke at the sound of a gun.

She lay there for a moment, the sweat that was cooling fast on her body the only evidence of a bad, bad dream.

But even though she was awake, something was still very wrong.

The wind and the rain outside were momentous and the branches squealed and banged at her window, but something else was wrong. Something closer.

She frowned in the dark and realized what it was.

She had wet herself.

Ruby sat up in slow disgust and switched on the lamp. Then she pushed her bedsheets down. She hadn’t wet herself in bed for years. Not since she was tiny. She couldn’t believe it had happened now.

It hadn’t.

In the middle of the bed was a small patch of blood.

Ruby slithered out of bed as if she’d found a spider there, then stood and stared at the red spot on the white sheet for a very long time.

She knew what it meant.

Tears rushed up her nose and into her eyes.

She was becoming a woman, and there was nothing she could do about it. It was one of those things you just couldn’t stop.

She finished crying and stood and shivered for a moment in her Mickey Mouse nightshirt. Then she went to the bathroom and took one of the little pads Mummy had shown her and peeled off the strip and stuck it in a fresh pair of knickers. She didn’t know what to do with her old ones so she decided to throw them away. Not here in the little bathroom bin where anyone might see them, but downstairs in the bigger kitchen bin. Maybe even outside in the proper dustbin – although the storm howled so loud around the house that she thought maybe the kitchen bin would be enough, if she pushed them down among the rubbish so nobody knew.

Ruby crept down the stairs and opened the little white door at the bottom. Tried to open it. But something was pressing against it from the other side.

She stopped and frowned. She could hear something on the other side of the door. Something alive.

Something breathing.

‘Daddy?’ she whispered warily. ‘Daddy?’

There was no answer but the trees trying to break in through the roof, and that strange in-out sound of deep, slumbering inhales and exhales.

It made her shiver again – and not because she was cold.

If she hadn’t had the knickers balled up in her hand, Ruby would have gone back upstairs to bed and waited till morning.

Instead she pushed on the door again – hard. This time there was far less resistance. The door to the front room opened suddenly, and Ruby stepped down into the sea.

Загрузка...