North of Nowhere

  We were surrounded by utter stillness and calm. The only movement was the arrow inside the compass, which was spinning furiously.

  Sal and I looked at each other. “What on earth happened?” she asked me.

  “I have no idea. Can the weather change that drastically, that quickly?” Surely it couldn’t. It couldn’t. So what had happened?

  Sal shrugged. “I don’t know. But even if it’s calm at Luffsands, too, Peter and Dee are still stuck on the roof of a house that’s half full of water.”

  “And Dee’s mom is still stuck under a beam.”

  Sal cranked the engine up to full speed. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go and get that lifeboat.”

  She wasn’t sure how much longer she could bear it. Something would have to give soon. What would it be? The beam? The roof? Her legs?

  The house creaked all around her, every sound sending a crackle of fear through her body.

  What was that?

  She twisted her head to the right just in time to see another piece of ceiling sag and bend and finally break under the weight of water. It sloshed into the pool that was surrounding her. And then a thought hit her, the most terrifying she had had in all these hours. What if the water level rose above her head before she could tear herself free from the beam?

  She didn’t want to drown. Not here, not in her own home. Not when her husband had left in anger, before she’d had one last chance to see his face.

  I don’t want to die, she thought. But a second thought came upon her as swiftly as the first. But I would give my life if it would spare my daughter’s.

  Diane, up there on the roof, with that boy, trying to get help. She thought she’d heard them shouting a moment ago, but perhaps it was just the screeching of the gulls and the whistling of the wind, and the waves booming through her battered home.

  Where had the boy come from? He had arrived at just the wrong moment, hurled from his boat by the wave that had landed him literally at their door. Wrong for him, but right for them. When the bottom floor of the house had been flooded within moments, he was the one who had reached out for her and dragged her up the stairs. And when the beam had fallen, it was he who had grabbed hold of Diane and pulled her to safety. The beam had been heading for Diane’s head. If he hadn’t been there . . . well, it simply didn’t bear thinking about.

  After that, everything had happened so fast. The three of them inside the house, the deep booming beats of the sea as it lashed and thrashed at their home. All of them enclosed in the dust and fog and plaster when the ceiling came down. They must all have been knocked unconscious — but for how long? And then, the silence that each of them woke up to as, one by one, they came around and saw what had happened. Those silent hours of unconsciousness — had they cost all three of them their lives?

  Had the rescue workers come, and gone, during that time? And how long had it been, anyway? Moments? Hours? If that was when the rescue workers came and they had heard no sound, surely they would believe the house to be empty, all its inhabitants safe.

  And then what? Would they come back?

  How long could they last like this?

  She had already lost all feeling in her legs. What would she lose next?

  We tied the boat up on a mooring ring in the next bay around from the harbor. We could probably have brought it into the harbor, but we didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves — or to the fact that we were in someone else’s boat that we hadn’t asked their permission to use.

  As soon as the engine died, I hid the key under the bench seat and we scrambled off the boat and ran around to the lifeboat station.

  We burst through the door to find a couple of men playing cards at a table. They looked so relaxed that it was as if they didn’t even know what was going on just two miles off the coast. Perhaps it was yesterday’s news to them and they thought everyone was safe now. But they were wrong!

  One of the men turned to us and smiled. “Hello there, girls. Come to have a look around the boat, have you?” He was small and chubby, with sun-bleached blond hair and blue eyes that danced as he spoke.

  Sal and I glanced at each other. A look around the boat? Didn’t they realize? Didn’t they know?

  I recovered first. “It’s about Luffsands,” I said. “There are people still there; they got left behind.”

  The man looked at his friend. The other man was thinner and bald with a ruddy red face. He leaned forward on the table and squinted at me. “Who got left behind?” he asked. “Left behind from what?”

  “From yesterday!” Sal said.

  The men exchanged another glance. “Yesterday?” the smaller one repeated. “What happened yesterday?”

  “How can you not know?” I squealed. “Please — you have to help them. They’re stuck on the top of a house.”

  “The one on the spit at the far end of the village,” Sal added.

  The men stood up from their seats. “They must mean the old ruin, Stan,” the taller one said. “Kids messing around up there.”

  “It’s not just children. There’s a boy and a girl on the roof, but the girl’s mom is trapped inside.”

  “Trapped inside what?” the smaller man — Stan — asked.

  “The house!” What was wrong with them? Was I talking in a foreign language without realizing it?

  “Please,” Sal said. “You have to come quickly.”

  “If you’re making this up . . .” the taller man said gravely.

  “Of course we’re not!” I gasped.

  “Look at their faces, Dave,” Stan said. “The poor things are terrified. They’re not making it up.” Then he looked closer at me. “Wait, I’ve seen you before. Your grandparents run the pub, don’t they?”

  “Yes, I’m here on vacation.” Not exactly the whole truth, but they didn’t need to know about our family troubles on top of everything else.

  “And you wouldn’t want to upset your family by making up stories, would you?” Dave asked.

  “We’re not making anything up,” I insisted. “Please, you have to help.”

  “These blasted kids playing on the walls. How many times have we warned them?” Dave grumbled as he grabbed a huge waterproof coat and a set of keys. “Come on, Stan, let’s take the inshore boat; it’s in the harbor already.”

  The men were halfway to the door. I ran after them. “We need to come with you,” I said. “We have to show you where they are.”

  Dave turned around. “No can do, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’re not allowed to take you out in any of the Porthaven boats without permission. One of the things the town council has gotten super firm on since we started advertising vacations here.”

  “I’ve got permission!” Sal burst out. She scrabbled in her coat pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “Look!”

  Dave studied it. “So you have,” he said.

  I stared at Sal.

  “We all had to have one for the course,” she explained. “It’s been in my coat all week from going out on the boat.”

  Which just left me.

  “Hold on a minute,” Stan said, coming back inside the lifeboat station. “We’ve got all those permission slips for the lifeboat open house tomorrow. Maybe there’s one for you in there.” He grabbed a box from a shelf and started rifling through it.

  I stood and watched him for a while. “There won’t be one in there,” I said miserably. “I haven’t asked anyone if I can go to the open house. I didn’t even realize that there was an open —”

  “Got it!” Stan pulled a piece of paper out of the box. “You have got permission!”

  “What? How come? Who from?”

  Stan waved the paper at me. “Look,” he said. He pointed to the flowing signature: P. Robinson. My grandad! I looked at the date. A week ago. He’d signed it before he disappeared!

  Stan laughed at me gaping at the paper. “I wouldn’t be too shocked,” he said. “We had something in the Times & Echo last week telling people about the open house. He must have
done it on purpose, so you could go. Must have been planning to surprise you.”

  The thing was, that was exactly the kind of thing Grandad would do — organize a special treat without telling me. The thought of him arranging for me to go out on a lifeboat trip as a surprise made me miss him twenty times more than I already was. Except I suddenly realized something — we were only here because he’d gone missing. Had he been planning to invite us to Porthaven at the last minute? To be honest, among all the other unanswered questions, this one wasn’t important enough to dwell on. All that mattered was that the lifeboat men could take us to Luffsands.

  “So. Are you coming?” Stan asked.

  I shook myself and tried to put all thoughts of Grandad out of my head. Peter and Dee were our most pressing concern right now.

  “We’re coming,” Sal and I said in unison — even though my stomach did a slight backward flip as we followed the men out of the lifeboat station. Could I really face going out there again?

  But then I thought of Peter and Dee, up on that roof, scared to death. They needed us. And anyway, the sea had calmed on the way back. Surely it wouldn’t get worse again now.

  I glanced at Sal as we headed to the harbor. Her teeth were set tight and her fists clenched as she walked. She obviously relished the thought of going back out to sea as much as I did.

  Halfway to the island, I wondered why the lifeboat’s engine was banging so loudly. Then I realized it wasn’t; it was my heart. We were in the area where the storm had broken out last time.

  I held my breath and waited. Nothing happened. The sea stayed calm. I began to breathe again.

  But as we came closer to the island and motored over to the other side, I saw something else. Something even worse than getting caught in a storm out at sea, if that was possible.

  Sal looked as stunned as I felt when she turned to me. “The . . . the village . . .” she whispered.

  “I know,” I whispered back.

  The two men were chatting together as they drove. Neither of them seemed to have noticed that anything was wrong. How could they not have seen?

  The village had disappeared.

  “Where . . . where’s it gone?” Sal asked.

  The men continued to chat and laugh together as Sal stared, ashen faced, at me.

  “Sal, correct me if I’m wrong, OK?” I began. Sal nodded. “OK, so we were here an hour ago. There was a storm, and we couldn’t get into the harbor. But we got close enough, and we saw the village. There were a few houses at the front that had almost collapsed, and some of the others had lost windows or roofs. Most of them were flooded up to their second floors. That is what we saw, isn’t it?”

  Sal nodded. “But the houses were there,” she added. She pointed across at a shoreline that was covered in moss, rubble, seagulls, and nests. A shoreline that looked exactly the same as it had earlier — with just one difference.

  All the houses were gone.

  I tried to remember something Mom had once told me, about slowing your breathing down when you can feel yourself start to panic. I tried it now.

  It didn’t work. I gulped in air and tried to arrange my thoughts. What I knew was possible and what I was seeing with my eyes didn’t match. That was the simple truth of it.

  “Are you girls all right?” Stan asked. “This is where you meant, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything sensible if I tried to speak.

  “Where were your friends?” Dave asked.

  Sal pointed to where we had seen Peter and Dee. I looked across. When we’d been here earlier, they were on the top of a roof of a house that was partially flooded. It was one of three houses on the promontory. Now that same piece of land was about a quarter of the size it had been. It just looked like a large rock, jutting out over the sea below it — and two out of the three houses had completely disappeared.

  “Over there,” Sal said. She was pointing at a wall. A gable end of a house. That was all that was left standing. As we came at the village from the side, we could see it head-on. It looked like something from a stage set — not real at all. The two downstairs windows had been completely boarded up. The two upper ones were gaping holes. They looked like massive eyes, wide-open but blank and glazed, seeing nothing.

  The chimney jutted out at the top. On either side of it, the walls sloped up to the point where Peter and Dee had perched, gripping on to what was now merely a jagged wall, covered in moss.

  “OK, we’ll moor up and we’ll have a look for your friends,” Dave said. He drove the boat up to a low rock that jutted out over the sea. It was hardly bigger than a ledge, but just large enough to clamber onto, one at a time. A mooring ring hung from the bottom part of the rock. Stan tied a rope through the ring and leaped off the boat.

  “Get off the boat carefully,” he said, reaching out to help Sal and then me across.

  Once off the boat, I climbed up from the rocky ledge and followed the gravelly path to the flat ground above.

  Sal was behind me. “Is this real?” she asked in a whisper.

  “I don’t know. I don’t see how it can be. Is there any chance that we’re both dreaming?”

  The two men had walked up to join us. “OK, do you want to have a look around for your friends?” Stan said. “Check they’re not still here?”

  I stared at him. What was he talking about? Of course they weren’t still here! Where exactly did he think they would be? Hiding behind a wall, just for the fun of it?

  I didn’t reply. How could we tell the men what had happened without running the risk of them carting us off to the nearest hospital to have our heads examined?

  Sal nudged me. “Great. Thanks,” she said to the men.

  “Dave and I will check out the dangerous rocky parts. You girls stick to the paths,” Stan said. “They’re safe enough. The rest isn’t. And no climbing on the ruins.”

  Sal gave them a thumbs-up and a big false smile, then she grabbed my arm and pulled me away to the side.

  “Come on, Mia, act normal!” she hissed. “They’re going to think we’re completely insane!”

  “Maybe we are completely insane! This isn’t possible.”

  “I know,” Sal said. “But think about it. If it were just one of us who had seen it, maybe we could have imagined it. But it wasn’t. It was both of us, wasn’t it?’

  The way she looked at me made me realize she wasn’t stating a fact; she was asking a question. Asking me to reassure her that I’d experienced the same things as her. That in the space of approximately an hour, what had been a storm-ridden but still-standing village was now little more than a rubble-covered wasteland. And that the house we’d seen Peter and Dee clinging to had become a wall on a tiny promontory jutting out over a perfectly calm sea.

  “Yes,” I said eventually. “It was both of us.”

  Sal let out a heavy breath. “OK. Well, that’s one good thing,” she said. “We can’t both be going crazy. But what does that prove? And how does it get us any nearer to finding Peter and Dee?”

  I kicked at a pile of stones at my feet while I tried to think. “I’ve no idea,” I admitted. “But I don’t think we should tell Dave and Stan the truth. For one thing, they’ll never believe us.”

  “And for another, they’ll think we’re nuisance kids who are making the whole thing up,” Sal added.

  “Exactly.”

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  “Let’s just look around the place, see if we can find any clues, anything that helps us to make sense of any of this.”

  “OK,” she said, and we headed off toward what remained of Dee’s house at the far end of the village.

  I walked around, almost tiptoeing in the silence of this abandoned and ruined place. I felt like someone in a TV drama about lone survivors in a postapocalyptic world. There was no human life here.

  I’d never felt such silence. I don’t just mean an absence of sound. It was as though the silence itself were part of the place, filling i
t up louder than sound could ever do.

  The ground below my feet was springy with moss and grass; I almost bounced as I walked. On either side of the spongy path, there were piles and piles of rubble and stones. Down below, the water lapped gently on the rocks. An occasional soft BOOM! echoed in the silence as a stronger wave hit the hollow under a massive rock that jutted out over the sea. It had a hole on its underside, as though the sea itself had reared up and taken a bite.

  Following the path back toward the cliff that rose up behind us, I came to another wall. This one had collapsed in stages. It looked like a staircase, as if you could start at the top of the wall and climb down it one step at a time. It had a hole in it that must have been a door at some point. I walked around to the back of the wall and looked through the gap. The huge expanse of sea stared silently back at me.

  I moved on.

  In front of the wall, a single snowdrop poked up from among the rubble. Faded, grayish-white, and drooping, its closed-up buds hung limply, dying and forgotten, like everything else here.

  Farther along, I disturbed a group of squawking seagulls. They flew off as I came near, and landed a little farther away.

  The birds were clearly the only residents of this place. What stories would they tell, if they could? What had they seen? And when had they seen it? Had the storm really happened yesterday, or had something completely inexplicable — something I couldn’t even put into words — happened here?

  I wished the seagulls could tell me.

  “Mia!” Sal broke my daydream.

  I turned around. “What?”

  She pointed at the ground a little way ahead of me and I gasped. The path ended abruptly and a rickety fence stopped us from going any farther. Beyond it, there was a chasm in the rock. You couldn’t see it from farther away, but if we had taken another couple of steps, we would have walked right off the edge, plunging down to where the sea was quietly splashing around, a long, long way below.

  I let out a heavy breath. “Jeepers,” I breathed, not really able to think of anything more intelligent to say.