Phoenix Page 14

  Using the broken fences with their missing railings to support myself, I fumbled to take the sapphire from my shoe and hurried to the church, but Dougie’s dad and Mr Brown spotted me, and by their accusatory tones I knew the theft had already been discovered. And Jack was being blamed.

  The sounds of heightened struggling close by jerked my concentration back to the marsh. Dougie was writhing beneath Jack. He kicked his feet in the air then rolled onto Jack.

  “NO!” I screamed.

  I lunged at Dougie but his fist connected, thwack, with Jack’s temple. Jack’s head bounced slightly off the ground before he fell motionless beneath him. Dougie’s sneering face turned towards me.

  “Thanks for coming, Kathy,” he said. “Now give me your jewel.”

  “Maybe I should put them back.” I held my hand towards him. “Give me yours.”

  “I left mine safe at my auntie’s hotel,” Dougie said. “You never really thought I was gonna share with you?”

  “You’ll never get away with it, Dougie.” My voice came out fast and hard, surprising me. Inside, I felt like a jelly. “You can never sell the jewels; the whole world will know what they look like when they’re reported missing.”

  “I got it worked out, up here.” He tapped his temple. “I’m gonna stash ’em away til after the war, after the scandal dies down. Then I’ll be living the good life.”

  “Over my dead body, Dougie Smith!” I said.

  “If that’s what you want,” he said.

  His fist punched the air as I ducked under his arm and dropped to Jack’s side.

  I slapped Jack’s cheek. “Wake up, Jack!”

  Jack murmured, his eyes flickered and his head turned slightly towards me.

  “Come on, Jack.”

  “Forget it,” Dougie said. “No point bringing him round.”

  “What! Why not?”

  I whirled around. A fist hurtled towards me. I tried to dodge sideways but it was as if my nose had connected with a cannonball. Warm liquid poured over my top lip, into my mouth. I could taste the iron, the blood.

  My blood.

  Night clouded in on me, the hazy moon little more than a white smudge.

  Maybe I was sleeping, dreaming – it felt like I was being dragged by my wrists. Then I was falling, but I wasn’t afraid, you never hit the ground in a falling dream, you always wake up before. But I smacked into the squishy ground with a splat so I guessed I wasn’t dreaming.

  I carefully rolled over. Blood trickled down the back of my throat.

  “You okay, Kathy?” a voice asked in the dark. Jack!

  “N-not sure,” I admitted, tentatively feeling my limbs. My hand reminded me that if nothing else had broken in the fall, my hand and nose probably had. And then an overwhelming sense of loss flooded over me.

  Both my hands were empty.

  – chapter eleven –

  I scrambled to my hands and knees and groped the saturated ground. But all I connected with was Jack’s leg.

  “Ow!”

  “What’d I do?” I gasped, stiffening.

  “My leg,” he moaned.

  My eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dark. And I saw that his left leg was stretched straight in front, his right twisted awkwardly to the side.

  “Do you think you can stand if I support you?” I asked.

  He tried to move his foot and stifled a scream, trapping it between clenched teeth.

  “N-no.”

  “Where are we, Jack?” I asked quietly.

  “Not really sure,” he said, groaning. “A natural well, an old bomb crater?”

  “Rot in hell!” Dougie’s evil laughter filtered down to us.

  “That’s your destiny, Douglas Smith,” I yelled. “Not ours!”

  “You don’t think?” he shouted. “I’m staying here to make sure of it.”

  “You just wait ’til we get out of here, Dougie!” I said.

  “Ain’t happenin’ on my watch,” Dougie said. “Now that you’re both here, you just made it really easy for me. I can say you were in on it together.”

  A slight rush of air pushed past my back as Jack flopped back against the squelchy mud wall. Panicked, I slapped his cheek and his eyes struggled open.

  “I’m sorry, Kathy,” he moaned.

  “But you didn’t do anything!” I sobbed. “And I knew it was wrong, Jack. If I had my time over, I swear I’d do it all differently.”

  I flopped back against the well wall, exhausted. I would never, ever steal anything ever again.

  “Goodbye, Kathy,” Jack whispered, caving in to his concussion.

  “Don’t you say that, Jack Stewart!” I sobbed, shaking his shoulder with my good hand. He moaned again as he fought through his faintness and then vomited on the ground beside him. “I’ll get us out! And I’ll get Mum to hold a fancy dress party for my birthday so you can take part and I won’t. That wasn’t fair what I did to you, Jack.”

  My feet slid as I struggled to stand. My hands, the pain irrelevant now, fumbled around the lumpy wall of our prison. It was narrow and almost circular. I stood on tiptoe. The walls were taller than me. And then the air became saturated.

  “Kathy!” Jack said. “Breathe!”

  I realised then that I was choking on my own blood.

  “By dose,” I said, pinching it with my good fingers. “Beeding.”

  My knees sagged and I remembered at the last minute not to fall on Jack. I propped myself against the wall, sinking lower and lower as my strength gave out. A black haze wrapped around me like a comforting blanket and I sank gratefully into its welcome embrace.

  Light filtered through my eyelids and I lazily opened them, in no hurry to leave my dreamless sleep. A circle of daylight shone like a spotlight on Jack’s horribly twisted leg.

  My feet barely gained traction in the mud, but I managed to kneel beside my cousin. His breath came in short, sharp bursts.

  “Jack, wake up!” I shook his arm. “It’s daytime!”

  “Mmm.” He licked his lips and tried to focus on my face but his eyes didn’t find mine. “Wh–”

  “Shhh,” I said. I glanced at his watch but the hands weren’t moving and it had stopped at ten to three. I wound it up, desperate to make it work. Uncle Bill had given it to Jack on his tenth birthday and it meant so much to him, but it still didn’t work, broken by the fall or the dampness maybe? “Don’t try to talk. They’ll find us soon.”

  I struggled back to my feet. The top of the hole was probably no more than an arm’s length above my head. I tried tiptoeing again it was but no use. The sound of Dougie humming Freddie’s favourite tune was like a knife stabbing at my heart. We’d meet again, Freddie, have no doubt, I raged.

  “Help us out, Dougie!” I screamed. “Or I’ll…”

  But he hummed without interruption.

  I clawed mud from the inside of the pit but my purple and black fingers were swollen and so stiff they wouldn’t bend.

  “Jack?”

  His eyeballs rolled behind his closed lids and I knew I had no choice. I had to get him out even if Dougie was still on guard. I didn’t know how much longer Jack could last.

  “I’m going to have to hoist you up, but it’s gonna hurt.”

  Jack’s head lolled to his shoulder.

  “No, Jack! Wake up!”

  The sun shifted higher in the sky. Mid-morning maybe? The light shone right onto me now, and the puddle of blood I was kneeling in.

  Jack had managed to straighten his leg out in front of him but the unnatural bend in his shin made me gag and blood seeped from a gash in his thigh.

  I had to stop the blood. But how? My jacket? I tore it off and wrapped the sleeves around his leg, but the fabric was too thick to secure tightly. I let it fall into the bloody puddle as I searched for something else. Jack’s trousers? But I couldn’t risk tearing them and hurting him more.

  Jack’s limp body slid further to one side and his braces slid off one shoulder.

  I gently reached behind him
, unclipped the braces from the back and pulled them towards me. Then I did the same at the front.

  The blood trickled from his wound, not pulsed, but I slipped one end of the braces under his knee, grasped the other in my teeth and see-sawed it back to the top of his thigh. Knotting them with only one hand and my teeth was difficult but I managed.

  Jack flinched slightly in his unconscious state but didn’t murmur.

  “Jack? I know you can hear me!” I howled. “We have to get out. You need a doctor!”

  If I could just lift him high enough, he could haul himself out and then help me.

  I nudged my shoulder under his armpit but Jack didn’t respond and his thin, ration-starved body felt like an elephant against me. The pit swirled with the effort and I sank back to the ground, realising, with despair, that most of the blood around me was mine.

  – chapter twelve –

  ally

  I bloody hated my sister. I bet she just wanted me to free her from the statue so she could live her frigging stupid life in the past. So what if our future was all a big mystery? Could it really be worse than going through a war, being shit scared of being blasted to death, and pretty much starving from lack of food? Yeah, I paid attention in history too, but not like her – she was so in love with it she wanted to live it.

  “Are you sure Katie didn’t say anything?” Mum asked for the zillionth time. “Ally, you must know where she is. You’re twins!”

  “So?” I glanced up from my magazine. I’d been staring at the same page for so long that it was just a faint blur. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Don’t you care?” I could hear the tears in Mum’s voice. “Twins are supposed to have a connection, aren’t they?”

  I stared in Mum’s direction but I didn’t see her, not really. Katie and I may have come from a divided cell, but that was the only connection we had. Katie had made it clear where her priorities were.

  Mum and Dad’s voices drifted from the kitchen and I realised Mum was no longer in our bedroom. Our bedroom? It was all mine now.

  I struggled stiffly off the bed and hauled Katie’s messy suitcase onto its wheels. Her dirty jeans she wore on the plane collapsed to the floor and I kicked them in anger. Why the hell had Dad made us move here? It was his stupid fault. If we were still in Australia, I’d still have my sister.

  “We’ll find her, Ally.”

  Dad’s hands on my arms made me jump and I shook him off, glaring at him.

  “You said that a million times already.”

  I snatched my focus away from his drawn face, unable to bear the guilt of what I’d done, and crouched to finger the soft wool of Katie’s shawl spilling from her backpack. Despite its stale odour, I pulled it to my cheek, wishing I could go back to the last time she wore it, before this whole nightmare began.

  “We have to keep positive,” Mum said, coming back into the bedroom with a mug of tea. She held it towards me but rested it on the bedside table when I didn’t take it.

  “But it’s a fact,” I said, slowly standing up. “The longer someone is missing, the less chance there is of them coming back.”

  Both my parents physically buckled at my words and I wished I could take them back.

  “I-I’m sorry, I mean…”

  What did I mean? It had been almost thirty-six hours. A whole day and a half. Mum and Dad had filed a missing persons report with the police. Dad had driven around Trentham a bazillion times, searching, each time returning with drooping shoulders. Mum had scrubbed the putrid entrance and stairwells to the apartment in a useless attempt to pass time and be the first to see if Katie came back, and I’d been interrogated, consoled, interrogated again by the cops and my parents. Was this what happened to all the other people who disappeared without trace? Had they somehow found a way back to their past lives as well?

  I let Dad lift the shawl from me, anxious to give him some comfort, and he stared at it for a long time before sinking onto Katie’s bed with his eyes closed. His face seemed to switch through a million emotions as he sat with the shawl spread across his outstretched palms, his face tilted to the ceiling. It looked like some bizarre meditation pose and my heart jerked. Since when had he believed in Mum’s hippy hoodoo?

  Mum was back on the brink of tears when I glanced at her, but we both jumped when Dad suddenly drew a razor-sharp breath and thrust the shawl at Mum. There was a look of thunder in his eyes that scared me.

  “I told you we shouldn’t have come,” Dad snapped. I was puzzled by the accusatory tone in his voice. It was his dad we came to look after.

  “She seemed so okay with everything,” Mum said defensively. She cradled the knitwear to her chest as sobs wracked through her.

  I grabbed her arm in a pathetic attempt to give her some moral support, then stood in the bedroom doorway as she began pacing the floor from the bedroom to the front door with the shawl hugged around her shoulders. She opened the door for the zillionth time and peered into the corridor. I glared at Dad furiously and his shoulders drooped even further. He hauled himself to his feet and joined Mum at the front door, putting his arm across her shoulder by way of apology.

  “Did she say anything, anything at all, Ally?” Dad begged. “That will give us any clue where she was going?”

  Mum’s back suddenly stiffened and I wondered what she’d seen. I hurried to the front door, my heart daring to quicken at the possibility Katie was back. But other than a mop and a ragged doormat, there was nothing to see.

  “It was that creepy man from the bus, I just know it,” Mum whispered. Her face had paled even more when she faced me. “Oh my golly, why didn’t I take more notice of his appearance! I have to tell the police.”

  “They’ll have CC footage I’m sure!” Dad said.

  He dived into the kitchen to use the phone and a wave of heat engulfed me. As much as the bus passenger had given me the creeps, it was wrong to get him involved.

  “It wasn’t him, Dad!” I shouted.

  Grandad’s cane fell from the hook as I slumped against the wall between the front door and loo, my dwindling energy betraying how I really felt – defeated, guilty, angry, hurt and confused all at once. I hated my sister, hated that she hated me enough to do this, that she was open enough to admit she was a freak. But I hated even more that I didn’t really hate her at all – she was my sister.

  Was.

  The word got stuck on replay in my mind and I screwed my eyes shut to try and squeeze it away.

  Hands grasped my shoulders and I flicked my eyes open, surprised to feel wetness around them. My parents’ eyes, rimmed red and circled black, were filled with the same fear and remorse that I knew was in mine.

  “If you know something, Ally, you have to tell us!” Mum cried, but it was in desperation rather than anger.

  “We promise you won’t be in trouble,” Dad said.

  I glanced from one face to the other then focused on the worn carpet.

  “Ally! Talk to us!”

  I bit my lip. Their pain matched mine but at least I had an explanation for where my sister was. They had nothing.

  “I, oh…” My shoulders slumped and I dragged myself to our bedroom. Apart from a slight crinkle in the sleeping bag that Katie was using over her sheet as a duvet, the bed showed no sign of being slept in. Her pillow was as plumped up as it was before she disappeared.

  I kicked her stupid, daggy clothes again. I hated that she wasn’t a slave to fashion, that she was okay in her body, that she didn’t care what her hair looked like, that she never pissed Mum and Dad off. I laughed stupidly. Dad’d be totally pissed off with her now if he knew the truth, pissed off with me as well – it was my stupid idea for her to go back and swap the gems.

  “There’s nothing funny about this,” Dad said, grunting.

  “Like I don’t know that!” I dropped onto my bed.

  My bed sank first on my right then my left as Mum and Dad sat beside me. They each grasped one of my hands. Mum’s was icy cold and I jum
ped slightly at its touch.

  She slowly wiped away the tear that slid down my cheek and pulled my head onto her shoulder.

  “I think I stuffed up, Mum.” My voice was a croak, surprising me. I’d meant to deliver my confession with more guts.

  “Shhh.” Her gulp was audible. “It’s not your fault. I must have missed something; there must have been some clue…”

  The skin by Dad’s right eye twitched with nerves. He was impatient to know but too afraid to ask in case I clammed up. But how could I tell them Katie wanted to run away, run back to the past?

  I removed myself from their clutches to sit on my sister’s bed and hugged her pillow on my lap.

  “It’s because I never got her the phone, isn’t it?” Dad physically sagged as he remembered.

  “Andy!” Mum yelled. “I can’t believe you still haven’t! She even said if she had one she could call us if she got in trouble!”