Hedy skirted the main intersection and headed east. Avoiding the crowds now moving like shoals of fish across the town.
Bizarre things all around her. A couple ran past pushing an old-fashioned manual lawnmower, its blades clacking along the asphalt. The howling sex noises still from the northern trails. A man stumbling naked and corpulent. Five people dancing like seahorses.
Frenzy rising. Madness its kingdom.
A group mixing teenagers and older. Spotted her. Hissed: that’s the outsider. That’s the one.
Well I could’ve told you that, Hedy thought for some reason, before they began running at her like wolves, like a nightmare version of the bullying she’d seen at Tomorrow Shines with Lucia, and then she was running back towards the main intersection with them following.
• • •
They smelled of dirt and sweat and sea-brine. They chased her herding her. She ducked into doorways and found a staircase. Ran up it, puffing, into an old oak-wood office corridor.
A room full of newspaper clippings and a desk with a manual typewriter. Nicotine stains on the walls. A broken table lamp. The feel of years, decades, spent with newspapermen sitting and arguing over the right verb.
A neat brass sign on the wall. The Tempest Bay Observer. This place a mausoleum for the corpse of a local newspaper. The Tempest Bay Observer hadn’t been published in forty years.
A man here. Shirtsleeves and a cigarette in his mouth and what she knew somehow was the rottenest hooch made from a still. Typing away feverishly on the typewriter. Ignoring her. Telling some story she’d never know. Like all stories.
Her pursuers still coming. She could hear them in the building.
Help me, she said. But the man just kept rocking and typing, rocking and typing. She was alone, still.
She barricaded the door with a filing cabinet. Considered the window. Came up yes. Climbed out, sad to leave the obvious secrets of this place. The micro-climate of memory.
Searching for options. There was something trying to cloud her mind, she could feel the sparks of frenzy and strangeness. And still, she could surrender. Either in the hills or even with the mob chasing her. Surrender to this madness.
She bit deep into the back of her hand, right into the scar layers. The thing her mother used to do as well, even though Hedy would beg her to stop. Hedy bit so hard she could feel the tendons between her teeth, the bones scraping. Gave herself the energy and pain to run a little more, keep moving, don’t let the black mud below suck you down. She made it down a fire escape and back onto asphalt.
Still free, for now. But the wolves were still coming.
She turned a circle trying to find something she knew but was lost. She could barely remember the geography of the town and even if she could, this wasn’t it. She had a sense that there was a way through, that you could somehow navigate this territory, but didn’t know how. She had tried so hard, hard worked her whole life to build the courage and resources to come back here, had grown the memory garden with such care up on the clifftops, she had tried and tried and tried, had starved herself at times of food and company because of some inner voice that sounded exactly like her Mum saying that’s how brave girls do it—
She decided to fight. Moved to an abandoned police box and laid in wait. This ambush might be insane but she was goddamn going to do something different this time.
They were coming—
A hand on hers in the dark. She nearly died from shock.
Lucia. Small and quiet and preternaturally calm amid this raging storm. Like a little lighthouse.
That won’t work, Lucia said simply, and her voice sounded different too, more at ease, like someone who’s finally figured something out.
What, Hedy managed—
Come this way.
• • •
The Idle Hour bookstore. Local theatre bills and faded political posters. March for the Night. Take back our foreshore. Tiny handwritten ads seeking flatmates or selling cars or promising spiritual massage at only $25 per session.
Untouched, unrioted, its doors open.
There’s a secret room, Lucia said. Right in the middle, underneath the staircase. You get to it through the picture of the sailing ship. You should go there now. It’s got something for you.
What are you doing, Hedy said—
Angela emerged. Standing there by the stacks, a slice of marmite toast in her bandaged hand.
I loved your mother, Angela said. I’ve no bargains to make, nor apologies. But I can show you an answer or two.
Hedy stared. Lucia was gone, flitting away in the darkness.