Chapter 16 – Into the Darkness
There is a part of me that is desperately trying to convince the rest that what just happened is a nightmare. None of it could have really happened, because that would be stupid. I used to have nightmares about the House falling down, or my family dying. I know others who did the same. Phylida said it was anxiety or something like that. So all this really is a nightmare. My family isn't dead. My home isn’t destroyed. I’m not buried alive.
I’m buried alive. I’d woken up some time ago. It feels like several days have passed. There is something pressing against me from all sides, trying to crush my body. There is a little space to shuffle around but that’s it. I’d realized quickly I was surrounded either by dirt or debris from the House. Either way, I was either on the verge of being crushed or had been sucked through a crack in the ground. I would run out of air soon, or starve to death. There is no way out.
No way out.
“Help me!” I shout. My throat is raw, and then I remember. I’ve been shouting for help for a while now. Shouting won’t bring help, because there is nobody left alive to dig me out of this pit.
“Help!” I shout again.
And again, and again.
I try moving my arms but it’s no use. There’s maybe an inch or so of room for me to move and that’s it. If only I could manage to get my hand in a decent position I could try and dig my way out.
A woodlouse scuttles through my hair and I fight the urge to desperately try and kill it. An insect can’t hurt me, even though it feels like just another woe piled on top of the others.
Something rumbles in the background, and then I hear some sort of heavy snuffling. It has to be a mole. I like moles, they make good stew, and their fur can be turned into gloves for the winter. I’m glad it is only a mole. The ground seems stable enough now. I hear something, and I’m sure this time it isn’t a mole or some other underground creature. Is it the fire taking hold of what remains of the House? Have the gods moved their fight elsewhere?
They’re all dead. Nothing could have survived that; the fires, the explosions, the gods shattering the earth, and the House collapsing. For anyone to survive it would have to be a miracle. Yet, I survived it, even though I have been granted a temporary reprieve. What if there are other survivors? Maybe Milo or Father has escaped and are now making their way to the House of Rowan or somewhere else to start anew. Maybe they are looking for me right now, and all I have to do is shout a little bit more and I’ll be rescued!
I start to hear voices in my head and they scare me. I don’t want to go insane before suffocating to death. I try to focus on what they’re saying but it’s just a fuzz of words. I decide that if I have to go mad I might as well make my final few moments of sanity interesting. All I have to do is strain to comprehend what they’re saying.
“There’s no...could have...that,” says the first voice. All I can tell is that it’s male. Perhaps it’s the adult I could’ve been if I hadn’t died.
“...heard a...keep going...” says the second voice, which is clearly female. I don’t know what she’s supposed to represent.
I’m telling myself that I’m already dead and I’m not. I’m still very much alive. There’s still a spark of life in me yet, even if I am just waiting for the air to run out and death to claim me. Cramped up so tight in such a small space, I should’ve died ages ago. Why haven’t I?
There must be air getting through.
Great. Now I’ll starve to death instead of suffocate. I think that dying from lack of air would’ve been less painful. I’d heard starvation could be quite a grim death. I don’t want that. I don’t want any death at all, come to think of it, painful or otherwise. What’s wrong with me? Why have I convinced myself that death is a more preferable state than life?
“I want to live!” I shout. Everyone I love is dead but I’m not, not yet, and that’s something to be thankful for. Maybe I have time now to sort through the feelings in my head before the time comes. Wasn’t it a massive coincidence that, just as Harold finds out where the God Cannon is located, the gods end up killing him and the House? If I didn’t know any better I’d think the gods had specifically targeted the House for destruction.
I hear a bang above me. I grow frightened once again, thinking the gods are back. Maybe they had destroyed the House on purpose and they knew there was a survivor and had come back to finish me off. It occurs to me that I’m in a coffin and I start to panic again, fearing death one second, embracing it the next. I don’t know what to think or what to feel.
“Is that you, Ben?” a voice calls.
The voice doesn’t sound like it’s in my head anymore. It’s coming from somewhere else, somewhere above me. The voice is muffled and low but much closer now and my mind tells me the voice belongs to someone I love, even though it isn’t possible as they’re dead. Suddenly hope swells within me.
Please let this be real.
“Ben!” the voice shouts again. “I’m coming, try not to move!”
This isn’t a trick, is it? This is real. The gods are gone for now and I’m being rescued. I can’t believe it.
“Father!” I scream. “Father! Father!”
“Ben!” he shouts. “I’m coming! Hold on!” I hear more voices, and clanking and bashing sounds.
“I’m down here!” I yell, ignoring the bits of muck that fall in my mouth. “Father, I’m right here!”
There is a rumble above me. I instinctively try to cover my eyes with my hands, but of course I can’t move them. Suddenly the stone above me starts to creak ominously and I fear I’m about to be crushed. A shaft of light pierces through, hitting my leg. This time I would be completely buried. I panic, and my breathing comes out in ragged gasps, and I pass out.
I open my eyes steadily. The bright light of an early spring sun burns into my eyes, and I close them again. The warmth of the light feels good on my face, and my lips feel moist, like I’ve recently had a drink of water.
I’m lying on my back. My mouth tastes of dirt. My stomach rumbles from hunger. The fresh air smells like roasted pork, melted plastic and smoke. My body aches, bruised, and there is a horrible pain emanating from my arm, which I think is broken, but other than that I’m alive. I have survived being buried alive.
“Mother,” I whisper, suddenly remembering. My memory forces me to experience the pain of seeing her die all over again.
I jump to my feet, startled. There is a bandage wrapped around my right knee, and my broken arm throbs hellishly. I suddenly realize what the smell of roasted pork actually is and I dry heave a couple of times. I have nothing left in my stomach to vomit up. The smell is my family, burned alive in the fires of the House.
“No!”
They must have been in so much pain. They must have been so scared. How could the gods do this? What was the point of them? I just wish Harold had told me more about his finding of the whereabouts of The God Cannon.
I’m near the outer edge of the forest. The landscape around me is so different to what I’m used to. It might as well be a completely new place. The trees of the forest had been uprooted as the ground under them erupted. The ground for at least a mile around is jagged and messed up, like an almighty beast has ploughed it. There is no sign of the sheds or the fields of vegetables. They’ve all been sucked underground.
The worst of the damage is confined to The Glass Palace itself, or what’s left of it anyway. Half of the building has collapsed into the ground, and the rest is a burning wreck, the flames of the fires still burning hot and strong and reaching up so high as to reach the clouds. It doesn’t look like a palace made of glass anymore; a sparkling edifice where over seventy people lived and were happy. Now it’s just another ruined city like the thousands of others in the world.
Yet there are survivors. I’m proof of that. Father had saved me, hadn’t he? Where is Father? Why has he left me here alone to deal with this? Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I’d dug myself out and my mind, sti
ll in mourning, had conjured up the whole rescue thing. It had seemed so real.
I look around me and spy equipment: two spades and a pickaxe. That must’ve been where they’d dug me up. But where were they? I figure that they are probably out looking for other survivors. I hope there are more, a lot more. We have nowhere to live now but that doesn’t matter.
“Ben?” a voice whispers.
I jump, almost tripping over something on the floor right next to me. It is a figure, covered in dirt, moaning and lying on their back. Through the muddied hair and wild eyes I make out Lottie. She has dried blood around her hands as she tries to use her arms to stand up. She’s too weak, and she ends up falling back onto the floor again. I sit beside her so she doesn’t hurt herself further.
“Lottie?” I cry, so glad to see her I could hug her.
“I never expected to see you alive. I saw the ground swallow you up like a huge gaping mouth.” She surprises me with a hug. Now that I can see her up close, I can see the dried tears on her face.
“Are you alright?” I ask.
She sniffs. “I think so. When I heard someone shouting from under the ground, at first I thought it was Brian.”
“It was you who heard me?”
“I thought you were Brian.”
She clutches my arm, pulling it. It hurts abominably where the bone is broken but I don’t even try to pull away. She’s in shock and she needs me.
“That man invited the gods’ wrath on us,” says Lottie. “He, your father and the others wanted to kill them, but they knew and they destroyed us.”
I want to disagree with her, as there is no way we could know that. There was no way any mortal could know the mind of a god, but the coincidence is too great for it to be dismissed easily.
“I want the gods punished,” seethes Lottie darkly. She glares up at the sky, her eyes glazing over with fear. She starts mumbling, lies back down and falls asleep.
I look around me, to make sure I haven’t missed anyone else. That’s when I see Father dragging something towards us across the churned up dirt. It’s Tara. I know she is dead the moment I set eyes on her. Her whole body is covered in black, dried up blood and I can see her brain through a gaping hole in her skull.
“Is that the only body you’ve found?” I ask him. This is no time for hellos and such. We can both see that the other is alive.
“No,” says Father calmly. His eyes briefly seek out Lottie, now sleeping peacefully. “There have been others. I’ve just buried them.”
“Father, about Mother...”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I buried her first. I know she wanted to be buried next to Glory, but her grave vanished underground.”
The thought of my little sister’s tiny body being sucked into the dirt enrages me. I tell myself it was just a body and that the person she'd been is long gone to the darkness but it still makes me shiver. Mother is there now, too, in the darkness where souls swim.
Father tells me about all the bodies he’s pulled out so far. Each and every name is like another wound to my body. I knew them all. We were all a family.
Most of the dead seem to belong to the people who had followed mother and Rooster out before the gods destroyed the place. Father says it’s too dangerous to try going back in the House, while it’s still on fire. While in principal I agree with him, I wonder whether there is still anybody left alive in there.
When I’ve finished burying Tara I hear an almighty scream. Father and I tense, and rush back to where we’d left Lottie sleeping. I couldn’t bear it if a wild animal or a Felum had attacked her.
“Lottie!” I cry. She is hugging someone, but she is crying with joy.
“Brian,” I whisper. Suddenly every death doesn’t seem so bad.
He seems uninjured. He is covered from head to foot with dirt and dried blood, and his hair is a mess but apart from that, he appears fine. Even in this state, he looks handsome.
“Brian!” I call. He directs me a look that could wither a flower and I stop, heartbroken. Even after all this, he is still acting this way with me.
“Are you alright?” I ask carefully.
“I’m fine,” he says curtly. “Just don’t come too close.”
I grow angry. “Is this the time for your stupid feud with me?”
“It’s not that,” he says, though his voice is still mean. “I was buried with your Uncle Rooster and I pulled him out too. He’s in a bad state.”
Near Brian’s feet is my uncle. His eyes are closed and his breathing jumpy, but he appears to be fine. It isn’t until I look closely that I see it. The right side of his torso is a mess of blood and gore. I can even see some sort of internal organ, white colored like a worm, poking out. His right hand is crushed into a bloody pulp, too. I can’t even make out his fingers.
“I don’t think he’ll make it,” says Brian.
“You’re not a doctor,” I spit at him, suddenly hating Brian. He still treats me like garbage while everyone we love is dead.
I run from the scene, trying to ignore the odor of death around me. It’s just too much. I crave to be away from here and away from the gods and Brian and stupid Lottie. I’m sick of them all. All I want to do is be back out there in the world, living free like I’d been on my Journey. Instead, I’m burying my family.
I find myself next to a fallen doorway. Inside I see a few small fires still burning and the odd charred corpse. I can’t tell who they are. Maybe one is Phylida, or Uncle John, or Rosa.
And then I see him. I roar with grief and sink to my knees. He had been crawling towards the door as the fire claimed him. His face is still there, forever set in a grimace of pain. I scream.
Milo.