North of Nowhere (16 page)

“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 it 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.

Sal came up beside me. “How do we get to the house?” she asked.

The wall, the only remaining piece of Dee’s house, was on the other side of the chasm — and there was absolutely no way of getting across it.

“We don’t.”

“But —”

“Sal, what difference does it make? They’re not there. The
house
is hardly there, and we can see all the way through it from here — through those great big gaping holes in the side. It’s empty! It’s dead and deserted, like this whole place.”

I could feel my voice rising. I took a breath and added more gently, “Sal, there’s no one here. And, more to the point, there’s been no one here for
years.
”

“But it doesn’t make
sense,
” Sal insisted.

“I know it doesn’t. But it’s true. Look around. It’s a completely abandoned, destroyed, deserted place.”

I turned around in a full circle to survey my surroundings and try to convince myself they were real. That was when I noticed something that made me catch my breath, right over at the edge of the spit of land, just in front of where we stood. I walked across to take a closer look.

It was a crumbling low wall, like others all around the place, but with one difference: it was pink. A very faded pink, but you could clearly see the color, which stood out among the gray. The wall came up about as high as my knees and was probably once the back corner of a house.

I remembered Dee telling me about the family who had owned this house. I couldn’t recall their names, but I remembered what she’d said. The couple who lived here had just painted the place pink because their young daughter had insisted on it.

This pink had been painted a long time ago.

Where was the family now? What had happened to them? What had happened to all of it? How was any of this possible?

My heart felt heavy, and I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take.

“Sal, let’s go back,” I said.

She just nodded without saying anything. That was when I realized how much harder this must be for her than for me. An hour ago, we were filled with hope that we were about to bring her brother home; now he seemed more lost than ever.

“We’ll find him,” I said, touching her arm as we walked. “We’ll bring him home.”

Sal just nodded and swallowed. We didn’t say anything else till we got back to the lifeboat.

The men were waiting for us. “So, you want to tell us the truth about your friends?” Dave asked. “They weren’t here at all, really, were they?”

We didn’t reply. How could we? There was nothing we could say that would make sense — or that the men would believe.

“You know we’re an emergency service, don’t you?” Stan said as we clambered aboard and Dave started the engine.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, it’s probably best if you don’t waste our time again.”

I looked at his face to see if he was angry, but he’d turned away to pull a fender over the side of the boat.

“We’re not going to report you this time,” he went on as we started chugging away from the island. “But next time you’re craving a boat trip, it’s best if you ask one of the fishermen to give you a ride. What if we’d had a real emergency come in while we were taking you girls out on a joyride?”

“A joyride?” I gasped. “You think this was a
joyride
?”

Stan shrugged. “OK, to be fair, I can’t say either of you looks exactly filled with joy. Well, what
was
it about, then?”

I opened my mouth to reply and caught Sal’s eye before I began. She quickly shook her head:
don’t tell them.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “It wasn’t a joyride, and we weren’t tricking you. But we were wrong. We thought our friends were over there, but we hadn’t already been there like we said.”

“We thought if we said we’d been there and seen them, you’d be more likely to come,” Sal added.

Stan looked at us, studying each of our faces — probably to see if we were lying. I don’t know what he saw there, but whatever it was, he spoke more gently. “All right,” he said. “Like I said, you’re not in trouble.”

No, but Peter and Dee still are.

“Just be honest next time, OK?”

“OK. Sorry,” I said again.

“Go and check where your friends are staying. You’ll probably find they’re at home safe and sound,” Stan finished.

“Probably,” I said woodenly.

The rest of the journey back was calm and uneventful. Soon, Dave was pulling the boat back into the harbor and Stan stood up to get ready with the ropes.

“Now, go and find your friends and have a nice day,” he said. “No more silly stories, OK?”

“No more silly stories,” I repeated.

“We’re sorry,” Sal added.

“All right. Good girls.” Stan slung the rope over a cleat and reached out to help us off the boat. “Off you go, now. And try to cheer up a bit, eh? Porthaven’s not the worst place in the world to spend your vacation, you know.”

We got off the boat and left Dave and Stan sorting out ropes and engines. We didn’t start talking till we were sure we were out of earshot. Then Sal stopped and turned to me.

“Now what do we do?” she asked.

“I was about to ask you the same thing. Do you think we should go back to the pub?”

She shook her head. “I can’t face it. What would we say?
Hey, we saw Peter. He was hanging off the roof of a flooded house in the middle of a terrible storm. So we got the rescue boat out to get him, and guess what! He wasn’t there anymore! And neither was the house. Or the village.
That’d go over well, don’t you think?”

“Exactly. We can’t tell your parents. We can’t tell
anyone.
They’ll think we’re bonkers.”

“Or that we made it up, like the lifeboat men did.”

“Right. And to be fair, who could blame them?” I added. “If I heard someone say that,
I’d
think they’d either made it up or lost their mind, for sure.”

“So what
do
we do?” Sal asked.

I thought for a moment. “We need to find out what’s going on,” I said. Possibly stating the obvious, but what else
could
we do?

“I agree. But how?”

I shrugged. “Normally I’d say let’s look up a bunch of stuff on the Internet — but we can’t.”

“Why not?”

I opened my arms to take in all of Porthaven. “This place,” I said. “I don’t know anywhere around here that gets a signal.”

Sal stared at me. “I do,” she said. “Come on.” And then she hurried off.