Filed to story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
So I give him a few minutes to get ahead of me, I wait until the kids are occupied, and then I slip back into the tunnel to follow him. I don’t turn on any lights but walk in darkness. I try to be silent but there is a lot of water in this tunnel now.
Inside, I can’t see him.
I slip into a far aisle and make my way slowly toward the back of the vault. My heart is beating very quickly. In the corner where I keep finding Orly, there is nothing but an air vent. I’d assumed it was a cooling vent but it doesn’t look like the others, and if it’s not, where does it go?
On the back wall is a door. Dom said this was the door to the air shaft. As I get closer I can see it’s not properly closed. Which is odd, because he specifically said they don’t open it in order to keep the temperature from plummeting.
Everything in me is a frozen kind of calm as I reach for the handle and pull it open.
It is indeed an air shaft, long and narrow, with a ladder that stretches right up to the sky; there is a tiny dot of light, way up there-a glass panel in the hatch covering. I turn my neck and follow the shaft down. The ladder reaches to a floor deeper in the earth; I can barely see it in the dark but I can hear a voice floating up to me. Dominic’s voice. I don’t know what he’s saying, but he is returning to the ladder.
I recoil, darting to hide in an aisle. Between boxes on shelves, I can see Dom emerge. He closes and locks the door behind him, and I hear him splash his way out of the vault.
After a few breaths I return to the door. It locks from this side, so I am able to open it and climb into the secret shaft, and down the secret ladder, rung by rung to the bottom. The air is much warmer here; it has never been refrigerated like the vault has.
It would have been a simple storage room, once. A concrete square. Now it has rows of water bottles, boxes of the same food supplies I’ve seen in our pantry, a heater, and one of the camp beds from the research base.
Sitting on which, staring at me in complete disbelief, is Hank Jones.
Fen
Fen is sixteen when she first sees Hank. He’s shouting at someone driving the Frog onto land, signaling that they need to wait for a pair of gentoos who are waddling across their path. He is the new team leader of the base, here to spend a few weeks in handover with Carol. Fen is sad to see Carol go-Carol taught her how to cut open the giant kelp and cook fish inside. None of them know what to expect from the new guy, but Fen likes that he is concerned for the penguins.
She doesn’t have anything to do with Hank until a few months later. He has offered to give the three kids a lesson on the island’s botanicals, which Dom thinks is a great idea-they can use it as part of their coursework. Fen and her brothers head down the hill to meet Hank the next time he’s going south to the vault, and as they speed along in the Zodiac he tells them in his New York accent (so he says, she wouldn’t have a clue) about the seeds he has been tasked to look after. He explains about the importance of the vault, he talks about the dangers in the world that may give these seeds value, he says that some have already been used. He speaks of seed banks back on land and how so many have been lost over the years, he tells them how some plants don’t have seeds or seeds that don’t survive the freezing process, so scientists have taken to culturing their tissues and cloning them as a method of reproduction. He talks of biodiversity and the interconnectedness of all living things. He says his favorite seeds are from a type of orchid, and then he shows them these seeds, which are so small they are practically invisible, and says that the only way to collect them is to let them fall onto a type of fungus and collect this instead.
Fen is aware, after a few lessons like this, that she is developing a crush on him. She has been raised by a man so reticent his silences can last days. So all of Hank’s talking, all of these conversations-they are a revelation to her. It is actually possible to know what someone is thinking, it is actually possible for them to tell you! It makes her feel grown-up, to
know someone like this. He’s smart and passionate, and he’s funny too. Plus there aren’t many choices on this island for people to fantasize about, and the fantasies come without her permission, anyway. One day he is just an adult she doesn’t know, like any other, the next he is filling her thoughts.
Time passes and Fen enjoys these fantasies. They give her something to do. She would be bored without them. Never, in any of her wildest imaginings, does she think anything will happen between them. And, if she is honest with herself, never has she
wanted anything to happen. The fun of the crush is that it exists in her mind. That it is her secret. And that she is safe from it.
Fen is seventeen by the time Hank’s new orders are given. They will both be staying on for another three months and then heading off island for good. Something in him shifts at this point. She can feel the nature of his interest in her changing. Everything about him takes on an urgent quality, a sort of frenzied abandon.
When he says he’s noticed her watching him, she flushes, she feels caught. When he says he knows she likes him, that he can feel her attraction, she realizes she has done this to herself, that it’s her fault. She tells herself it’s what she wants. She’s old enough, it’s legal, he says, and anyway they’re leaving soon. Actually, his exact words are “It will all be over soon.”
It’s not at all like how she imagined it. Still, she is flattered he wants her. She can’t believe her luck, to have been chosen.
She’s not aware of a wife.
It is crucial that her dad never know.
Each month Fen dreads her period; she marks its impending arrival on the calendar so she can be prepared for the pain of it. Which means she is aware of this day passing her by. At only one day late, she becomes convinced. She spirals. Panicking, thinking through every implication. The worst part of this is that her dad will have to be told, because he will need to take her off island so she can get an abortion.
Fen spends a couple of hours wallowing in the misery of it, in the fear of what will happen to her body if she doesn’t get this dealt with immediately. There is an immense urgency in her. (And deeper, a sadness that could swallow her whole, if she allows it to.)
What if?… Could she keep it? Children shouldn’t have children and she has no mum to show her how to do it, but she has the best dad in the world, and she has pretty much raised a baby already herself?… Her family would help her, she knows they would. But Fen doesn’t think the question is whether she’d be capable, but whether it’s what she wants, if it’s what she’s ready for, and it’s not, not yet. One day, but not this day, and not with this man.
As the hours pass, she pulls herself together. She is very good at calm. She comes up with a plan. Hank will help her, he has to, he loves her.
When Fen arrives at the vault to tell him, he seems weird. He’s been pretty weird for weeks now, but today he is opening containers and pulling out seed packets and dumping them in a pile on the floor. All his meticulous categorizing out the window.
Where are the others? Tom and Naija and Alex? Why aren’t they stopping him from doing whatever this is?
“What are you doing?” she asks.
He doesn’t look at her, just carries on with his work. “It’s the end of it all.”
“What is?”
“They don’t get to tell me to drown half. That is not something any bureaucracy gets to decide on.”
“So then don’t,” Fen says. “Just tell them you won’t do it.”
“If I refuse, they’ll send someone else down here.”
“Okay, so what…?”
“Don’t worry about it, kid.”
He is enraged, she realizes. This is not a good time to tell him what she suspects. But he turns to her and levels that look on her, and it seems to say
why have you bothered me, and she gets flustered, wanting something important to justify her presence here. So she blurts it out.
I think I’m pregnant.
At first he doesn’t react. Hank is calm as he leads her out of the vault. They walk in silence to the blue field hut.
“Where are the others?” she asks.
“Up at the base.”
Her stomach sinks. Something feels so off. He’s not looking at her. He is watching the ocean. “You know what’s hilarious?” he asks. “My wife was right.”
It takes a moment for that word to sink in. Wife. And now she can hardly concentrate on what he’s saying.
“I’ve always wanted children but she kept saying it was wrong. Bad for the world, bad for the kids. I thought it was just an excuse but she was so fucking right. This world is a dumpster fire.”