Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“Don’t get too close to them, okay, they have a special defense mechanism you don’t even want to know about.”
“Roger that.”
“They spew fish vomit on you!” he cries gleefully.
My nose crinkles. “I thought I didn’t want to know.”
I’ve been building to something but I’m not sure how to frame it, Dom’s instruction about using common sense forefront in my mind. “Hey, I’m sorry I scared you with the talk of the fire…”
“You didn’t,” he says brightly, then skips ahead.
Righto.
I hurry to catch Orly and we follow Dom, who now waits by the entrance of a cave. It seems to sit at the base of the snowy mountain I could see on approach, and it has, I see as I draw closer, a man-made floor. It’s not a cave, it’s a tunnel.
The long dark tongue of a tube snakes out. From its end trickles a steady stream of water, making its way down to the sea. He’s got a pump in there somewhere.
“Why’s there water, Dad?” Orly asks, sounding panicked.
“It’s alright, mate,” Dom says, not looking at either of us but turning to lead the way down into the dark. “Just the storm.”
“But that was nearly two weeks ago,” Orly says, and is met with silence.
We follow the piping. It gets a lot colder as we descend the tunnel. The heavy snow parka that was too hot for hiking across the island is now necessary against the icy air. Up ahead, Dom switches on a string
of lights; I imagine this would be a terrifying walk for those who suffer claustrophobia. I have never been bothered by small dark spaces, but there is something unnerving about walking down into the depths of this island, with its whispering winds and its ghosts. Easy to imagine there is something very old waiting down here for us. And with the orbs of light to guide the way, the shadows seem ever deeper.
“How long is the tunnel?” I ask softly, not liking the sound of my voice but needing to get a sense of our depth.
“Hundred and fifty meters,” Dom says.
I was expecting the water to have dried up, but in fact by the time we get down to the chamber door our feet are submerged. The pump is working away, siphoning out as much as it can, but it already seems overloaded.
“Don’t let it get inside!” Orly exclaims.
“I won’t, it’s okay,” Dom says. But there’s not much choice, really. He pulls the heavy door open and the water runs in. We’re in a kind of antechamber, its walls covered in ice. There are special subzero suits hanging in this chamber and we each pull one over our other layers. They have built-in gloves and hoods that cover most of our faces, but as we open a second door into the seed vault I feel the cold striking straight to my extremities. My fingers and toes, my ears and nose all start stinging.
As an afterthought, Dom asks, “You don’t have any heart conditions, do you?”
I stare at him.
“The cold,” he explains.
Jesus. I shake my head.
We are in a cavernous space, with tall rows of shelving. The walls here too have thick layers of ice, as in a giant freezer. And that’s really all it is. For all of Hank’s descriptions, for his passion about this room and what it holds, I never thought it would be so?…
plain. It is just a very large, very cold storage unit. I try to hide my sense of anticlimax from Orly, who is gazing at the place as though it’s a royal Egyptian tomb filled with riches.
Our breath makes clouds in the frigid air.
“It wasn’t purpose-built?” I ask Dom.
“No, this cave has been here a lot longer than the seed vault. It was used by the nineteenth-century sealers. A storage room for their catches.”
Meaning once upon a time it was filled with the dead. I can see them laid out before me, all those creatures we passed outside, hundreds of them now lifeless, and it isn’t the first time I have resented the vividness of my imagination. I don’t like this room. I don’t like being down here. Hank told me he was all but living here at the end, and the thought is a crawling thing.
“There’s an air shaft at the back,” Dom tells me. “I’ve always thought it was pretty amazing that they were able to drill through the mountain with whatever tools they must have had available to them in the eighteen hundreds.”
“Can I’ve a look at it?”
“Nah, we try not to open the door so we don’t lose air temp.”
“What is it now?” Orly asks worriedly.
Dom peers at the gauge. “Minus sixteen. It’s holding pretty well so far.”
This doesn’t seem to ease Orly’s concern. “That’s two degrees warmer than it should be,” he points out.
“It’ll be fine, mate. There’s some tolerance.”
Orly and I make our way down a few rows. To distract him, I ask him questions, and as he talks me through what we’re looking at, I peer at the containers, all sealed so I can’t see what’s inside. With a jolt of familiarity I see that some of the labels are in Hank’s handwriting.
There is not one without another. His mantra, and how he taught me to garden. The trick is in working out which plants go together and which compete. A patchwork, a collage. Try this here, try that there. In the vault I take in the vast volume of seeds waiting to be plants and wonder how they would go together, know that nature’s experiments are far more sophisticated than ours, and far further reaching. These seeds, given a chance, would all be able to work out how to coexist across the globe, how to feed and help and sustain each other, and there is something truly wonderful about that.
“Dad told me you’re married to Hank?” Orly says.
I glance sideways at him. “Yep.”
“He was nice, he talked to me about the seeds. We did lessons with him sometimes.”
“He told me about you,” I admit. “In our calls. He said he’d met a very smart boy with a passion for botany.”
Orly beams. It’s easy to see how much this means to him. “He told me about you, too.”
“What did he say?”
“Just that you guys had a garden.”