The Black Room

AFTER WHAT SEEMED A VERY LONG TIME, MR. ARMSTRONG began to feel the blankets, squeezing them stupidly and fumbling among the layers.

Hope’s empty clothes dropped out of the blankets and landed on the ground in a little heap. Tom looked down at them.

“There she is,” he said. “Your nonexistent daughter.” His voice was as shaky as Emma’s. “Why don’t you take those home and keep them under the floor?”

Mr. Armstrong picked the clothes up and shook them, looking bewildered. “Where has she gone? What have you done to her?”

But Mr. Armstrong hadn’t seen anything. They could tell that by the way he turned around, looking wildly into the woods. He didn’t even glance at the ground in front of their feet or at the patch of raw earth where Helga had dug into the molehill. Instead, he stepped back over the ditch and began going back and forth through the trees, shouting Hope’s name. They heard him calling for a long time, getting farther and farther away. Finally, there was the cough of an engine starting up in the parking lot, and the long gray car slid away, down the road.

When the sound had died away, Tom looked down at the hollow in the hedge bank. There was nothing there now. It was just a dip in the earth, lined with rotting leaves and moss.

All their attention had been focused on the empty blankets, on Mr. Armstrong’s face, and his greedy, grabbing hands. While they were concentrating on those, Hope had slipped away from them. And the little figures at their feet had escaped back into the ground.

“Nor was I,” Robert said, still gazing down at the mole’s empty den. “I thought I’d understand if I found Lorn. But it’s worse. Why wasn’t it the same for her as it was for me? What happened?”

“How can we ever know?” Robert said bitterly. “If we’d been looking—if we’d seen her—we might have been able to tell. But it’s too late now. We’ll never know.”

That’s not right, Tom thought. Somehow, instinctively, he knew that Robert was wrong. But it took him a moment or two to figure out why he felt so sure.

“We do know! Just think what happened. The minute she had a chance to get away, she took it. Zap! Hope wouldn’t have done that. Not the way she was before. She’d still be there, sitting in the bottom of the hole.”

“Yes.” Emma nodded slowly, taking it in. “If she’s escaped, then she’s all right. And that means she’s Lorn.” She looked up at Tom and a huge grin spread across her face. “We did it, didn’t we? We saved her.”

Robert nodded slowly. But he didn’t smile. “We saved Hope,” he said. “But we haven’t rescued Lorn. She’s still down there in the cavern—and winter’s almost here.”

Robert didn’t reply. Tom looked at his stiff, miserable face for a moment. Then he knelt beside the hole, pushing Helga away when she tried to join him. “Here’s one thing we can do right now,” he said.

He started to scoop the earth back into the hole, blocking off the end of the tunnel. After a few seconds, Robert knelt next to him and began to help, patting the loose earth flat as it was shoveled in.

Tom waited until they’d almost finished. Then he leaned sideways and muttered, very softly, “We had to do it, Robbo. You know that as well as I do.”

Robert picked up a handful of dead leaves and scattered them over the patch of earth he’d just flattened. “I suppose so,” he said under his breath. “But why does it have to be so hard?” His mouth twisted and he turned away, hiding his face from Tom.

For once in his life, Tom didn’t try to give an answer. He just waited. It took a while, but at last Robert looked back at him.

Tom made a face at him. “Don’t count on doing it again.” Then he grinned and raised his voice, making sure Emma could hear. “Anyway, there’s a much better first coming up soon.”

“Oh yes?” Emma had stepped across the ditch, away from them. But she took the bait—just as Tom had meant her to. “What’s that, then?”

Tom looked up at her, innocently. “Well, we’ll have to go home and change now, won’t we? We’re all pretty muddy. And that means—” His grin widened. “You’re going to be late for school, Emma Doherty!”

For an instant he thought she was going to shout at him. Then she glanced down at her watch and grinned back. “You want to bet?”

Before either of the others could reply, she had jumped across the ditch and started to run. She was out of the woods and on the grass before they caught up with her.

The words connected with the angry, ugly memories that filled her mind. They were all sliding together now, making a dark pattern, full of pain and grief. She still didn’t understand everything, but she remembered now. She knew. And it was almost too much to bear.

She wanted to crawl away and curl up in a shadowy corner. But that would be going backward. Retreating into another dark corner, on her own. She was Lorn, and her place was in the circle. So she sat still, like the others, listening.

Zak’s face was tired and lined in the firelight. “The man couldn’t stop his daughter from dying,” he said. His hands moved over the drum on his lap, not making any sound. “The doctors and nurses and social workers and experts came and took her away from his house. She was his, but they shut her away inside a hospital and stuck her full of needles and tubes and medicines. And when she died, they said to the man, It’s your fault.”

On the other side of the circle, Bando suddenly lifted his head. He was lying on the stretcher they had used to bring him back along the tunnels—a length of thick white cloth wound tightly around two heavy wooden posts. No one knew what it was, but it had appeared in the cavern like magic, just when they needed it to carry him back along the tunnels.

He still looked pale and dazed, but that didn’t stop him from interrupting the story. “It’s not fair!” he said indignantly. “They were the ones who took her away. How could it be the man’s fault if she died?”

The left side of Zak’s mouth curled up into a half smile. “That’s just what the man said. It’s not my fault. He blamed the doctors for not saving his daughter’s life. He blamed the nurses and the social workers and the experts. She belonged to me, and they took her away and killed her.”

He stroked the drum skin, and it murmured softly under his fingers. They all waited for him to go on, but he didn’t speak. After a moment, Perdew prompted him impatiently.

Zak stroked the drum skin again. “For a long, long time nothing happened at all. Only the voice in his head, shutting out everything else. It wasn’t my fault.... It wasn’t my fault.... For years and years and years. And then—”

Zak’s fingers began to beat out a slow, insistent rhythm. “And then,” he said, “the man had another daughter....”

Lorn wanted to block her ears. She wanted to shut out his voice. But she knew she had to hear the story. She put her hands in her lap, knotting her fingers together to keep them there while she listened.