Bedtime Story (17 page)

As I turned to follow her, David looked up at me. His cheeks were wet with tears, his eyes filled with a look of incomprehensible betrayal.

In the hallway, I handed Jacqui the book. I didn’t want to touch it, didn’t want to have anything more to do with it.

She took it.

“I hope you’re happy,” she said.

I
T WAS ALL
D
AVID
could do to wait.

He forced himself to keep his hands in his lap as his father’s footsteps faded down the stairs. He desperately wanted to reach under the blanket, but he forced himself to stay still, just a little longer. Like holding his breath, it gradually became almost unbearable.

Far away, the back door closed with the faintest of sounds. Dad was outside now. Probably smoking. It was safe.

Reaching under the covers, he pulled out the book and opened it to his page. He tried to keep one ear open, ready to hide it again. But what was the worst thing that could happen if his dad discovered that he had been taking the book down from the top of the fridge, reading it when he was supposed to be sleeping or banished to his room? It didn’t matter. What was important was the book, and what happened next—especially now, with Dafyd so close.

The stone door slid silently into the canyon wall. Dafyd took small steps into the corridor that had opened before him. He could breathe again, relax, turn and face the canyon without fear of falling.

He shivered at the sight of the simple rope bridge swaying in the wind, fading into the mist and distance.

He could barely see the far edge of the canyon. He held his hands high above his head and waved to the tiny figures of Loren, Bream and the guardsmen, indistinct and blending into the canyon wall behind them.

No response. Had he disappeared into whatever shadows hid the doorway from view? No matter the reason, he was truly on his own.

Dafyd turned back into the passageway. The stone door had come to a stop. He was stuck, again, it seemed, this time inside a rectangular stone box.

He had just begun to wonder what else he would need to do when the stone wall began to tilt slowly away. Dafyd flinched reflexively, expecting a loud crash. But there was no crash—it slowly continued to fall.

In the dim light, he made out a niche cut into the passage wall. A torch rested in a metal bracket. A small leather bag hung below it. He touched the torch-head carefully. It was sticky. His fingers came away smelling of pitch.

Fumbling under the bracket, he opened the leather bag, and smiled as a number of tinders spilled into his hand. Dafyd struck one against the cavern wall and touched it to the head of the torch. The pitch caught almost instantly, bursting with a warm golden light.

Dafyd could see now that the gentle descent of the stone wall was controlled by heavy chains on both sides.

“A drawbridge,” he muttered to himself.

But over what?

The door settled flat, and Dafyd stepped forward cautiously, stopping at the narrow seam between the stone floor and the drawbridge. Water lapped at the length of the drawbridge: a narrow stream ran beneath it through the cavern.

He set one foot carefully forward. The stone didn’t move. He pushed down and it remained firm.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped quickly across.

His torchlight flickered back at him from another smoothly carved edge, another doorway, this one open. Angling the torch forward, he found himself looking down a set of damp stairs that disappeared into the black far below him.

There had been a time when the house, our house, was as comfortable as a familiar jacket, something warm that could be pulled on, nestled into. But it was all different now. I couldn’t relax, couldn’t get comfortable.
Every sound made me start, pulled me out of the book I was reading.

Finally I put on a Philip Glass album, hoping that the repetitive, slow-building melodies might help.

It didn’t work. I ended up sitting there, thinking of David huddled asleep in his bed above me. Nothing I could say could console him now. What had I done? What was I even doing here?

The cordless rang, and I jumped.

“Hello?” My voice was rough, tenuous, after hours of silence.

“It’s me,” Jacqui said quietly. “I wanted to be sure you got my message.”

She had called in the afternoon to say that she wouldn’t be home for dinner.

“I did. Is it busy there? Friday night and all …”

“It’s steady,” she said. “It looks like it’s starting to ramp up now.”

The house shifted and sighed—it almost sounded like someone moving.

“How’s David?”

“Quiet,” I said. “He didn’t want a story again tonight.” In fact, he’d barely spoken to me all day, sequestering himself in his room, lying on his bed staring at the ceiling.

“He’ll get over it,” she said. “It’s important—”

“I know,” I said. “Consistency. Boundaries.”

She didn’t speak for the longest time.

“Listen, why don’t you head to bed?” she said, sounding genuinely concerned. “You sound exhausted.”

“But David—”

“He knows to use the intercom if you’re not in the house. And he doesn’t usually wake up anyway.”

Just thinking about it, I had to restrain a yawn.

“I’m going to be here for a while yet,” she said. “I’ve got to finish up my charting.”

“I won’t wait up,” I said.

“I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

I waited for her to say something else, anything else.

—

Jacqui cradled the cell phone in her hand.

She was staring out the windshield at the front windows of the house. The blinds seemed to glow with an inner warmth, an illusory comfort. She was parked just far enough down the block that Chris wouldn’t see the van if he happened to look outside.

She waited and watched, hoping to see his shadow on the blinds, an image of his body as he stood up and disappeared from view. As he turned off the light and left the house. As he went away.

There was no movement. Nothing.

She sighed and turned the key in the ignition. She couldn’t do it. Not again. She’d find a coffee shop, someplace she could wait for an hour or so.

D
AVID WAITED EXTRA LONG
. It was one thing to sneak down to the kitchen while his father was outside smoking, the house empty except for him. But his dad had left before bedtime, headed out with Uncle Dale, leaving him with his mother. And
she
wasn’t going outside.

She wasn’t doing much of anything. She had tucked him in a while ago, not even offering to read him a story. Not that he would have let her read to him anyway.

He waited until he could hear the faint, tinny sounds of the television through his open door. Then he waited a little longer, until it had been almost fifteen minutes since he had last heard any sound from the kitchen below.

Then and only then did he creep out of bed, rolling softly on the balls of his feet, slowly stepping across his room and out the door, edging down the stairs. He waited on each stair, his ears tuned to the slightest sound from below, the barest disturbance of the air that might hint that his mother was in motion.

It was quiet on the stairs within the canyon walls. Dafyd could faintly hear the roaring of the river behind him, but the only other sounds came from him: his ragged breathing, and the slapping of his feet on the stone.

As Dafyd descended, he marvelled at the construction of the passage. It must have taken dozens of stonecutters years to carve all of this out.

But Gafilair had written of the person who would find the Sunstone a thousand years before Dafyd’s birth. He thought of the way his hands
had fit so perfectly into the stone to open the door, and he knew, then, that no workers had slaved over building this cave. Gafilair had done it all himself.

Dafyd was descending into a world built by magic.

David stopped at the bottom of the stairs before turning toward the kitchen. There was no sound of his mother moving, no faint footsteps, nothing, just the noise of the TV from the front room.

He moved quickly, silently, keenly aware that this was the most dangerous time, when he faced the highest chance of getting caught. He was in and out of the kitchen, the book liberated from the top of the fridge, before she could notice.

Dafyd lost all track of time as the stairway drew him deeper into the earth. He felt like he had been walking for days. And then, one more turn of the stairway, one more blind corner, and suddenly the stairs ended.

Dafyd stopped. His torch was still burning, sending up plumes of black smoke, and he held it high to see where the stairway had brought him.

The chamber was small. The smooth, wet floor, and the pointed rocks that hung from the ceiling and dripped all around him glimmered in the torchlight. The rough walls beside him curved up into the rounded ceiling, and in some places mist obscured their features.

The wall at the far end of the cavern, however, was as flat and smooth as the doorway in the canyon had been. Dafyd’s torchlight flickered off a bright glint of red in the middle of the wall, a shimmering object the size of coin in what looked to be a silver setting the size of the mouth of a flagon.