That’s when I heard the crying, coming from somewhere in the great hall.
It was the sound of a small child sobbing and the first thing that I had encountered since Hal told me who he was. This sound seemed to bring me to my senses because, in a weird kind of way, it was familiar.
There was always some crying going in the kids’ homes I lived in growing up, especially from the younger children, the ones who didn’t understand yet what was happening or why—why they had been taken away from the parent they loved and dependedon. That had been me for a while, and then when I was older, I made it my job to take care of those frightened kids the best that I could: find a teddy for them to hug, a cartoon to watch, and a biscuit to eat—anything to make them feel a little less lonely and scared and a bit more at home.
That’s what the plaintive cry reminded me of, a cry so sad and bewildered that you could almost feel the weight of it in the air, dragging the night down to meet it.
It sounds weird, but that was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment. It pulled me out of the state of shock and back into the early hours of that summer night. There were a lot of people staying in the castle, and not just for the competition. There were more visitors in the grounds on holiday or attending courses. Maybe someone’s toddler had woken up in the night and wandered off without their parents knowing. The poor child had to be very frightened.
“Hello?” I called out, following the cry into the vaulted cool of the grand hallway.
“Mama?” I heard a little voice call out. “Mama?”
“Hello, no need to be scared. I can help,” I called into the shadowy hallway. My footsteps echoed off the marble floors. The crying bouncing off every surface made it seem as if it were coming from everywhere.
“You don’t need to hide,” I told the air, gently. “Come out, and I’ll help you find your mummy.”
That’s when I saw a small white face peering at me from between the balustrade of the stairs, a tiny white hand clutching onto the carved wood of a baluster.
“Hello there,” I said, approaching slowly. “Hello there, little one. You wait there and we will find your mummy together, okay?”
I kept the pale, frightened face in view, except for the one second that it took to turn the corner and start climbing the stairs. But when I put my foot on the bottom step, I stopped dead, my mouth falling open in astonishment.
There was no child sitting on the stairs waiting me. And no way that they could have gotten all the way up the stairs or down past me without being seen.
The child had vanished. I remembered the story that LadyB told me, of the little girl, Eliza, who had died just a few weeks before her mother, Cecily, whose portrait hung in my room.
Then I heard the noise of everyone else coming back from the star safari, and I ran up the stairs and into my room, locking the door behind me. I don’t know if it was the whiskey or the shock, or the haunting, but I half expected the Blue Lady to be standing there by the fireplace waiting for me, wanting to know why I hadn’t brought her child to her. The room was empty, though, and silent.
There was a knock on the door, and I froze.
“Ava?” Rani called through the door. “You okay, love?”
I thought for a moment and snored loudly.
“That is the fakest snore I have ever heard,” she said. “But point taken. Look, I know you don’t want to talk about what happened between you and Hal tonight, and you don’t have to. But for what it’s worth, the poor bloke looked miserable for the rest of the night, really worried he’d upset you. Anyway, you know where I am if you want me. Hope you sleep well!”
I snored again.
“Night then,” Rani said. I heard her door open and close.
Sitting on the end of my bed, I looked at the portrait of Cecily and Eliza. Once I was a very small girl who had lost her mum and couldn’t work out why. And once, my mum was just like Cecily, trying to figure out where it all went wrong and how she’d lost me. Suddenly, the thought of mum and daughter spending the last few hundred years looking for one another and never ever succeeding made me wantmymum. It made me want to cry myself to sleep. And that was before I even thought about what I was going to do about Hal and FreeThought and the fate of humanity.
So, I made up my mind to do what I normally do when something so overwhelming is happening that I feel like I might spontaneously combust if I think about it.
And that is to pretend it’s not happening and carrying on as if it isn’t.
So, as we enter the second week of the competition, Rani thinks I’ve reached burnout, my temporary amnesty with Forrest is over, and as for Hal, well, that’s a little more complicated, as you are about to find out.
Chapter Seventeen
My head is full of questions and anxiety when I finally get down to breakfast the morning after the star safari. Of course it is Forrest who is sitting at the otherwise empty table when I enter the dining room.
“Ava, good morning!” he says with a smile. “When did you get in last night?” I don’t answer him as I pour myself my first cup of coffee. I’ll need at least seven more of these before I can manage polite small talk to even an average-looking person, let alone Forrest. “Ah, I see,” he says when I don’t immediately reply. “I thought our truce extended until we got back to the castle, but you didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I left, that’s all.” It is just at that moment that Hal, the man formerly thought of as human, enters the room. I am so not ready to talk to him yet, or look at him, or think about him or anything. There might not be enough coffee on Earth for this situation. Still, I knock back one coffee and then another.
“So, that’s it, then?” Forrest asks. “The truce really is over?”
