Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
Fen is dissolving. He has a wife. This is bad. This is way worse than she realized. She is a party to something cruel.
“I’ve figured out how to solve the problem,” Hank rambles on (he is always rambling on, how has she abided this?). “You know Orly’s wind voices?” he asks her. “I thought he was really screwed up.” Hank laughs bitterly. “I was the one who didn’t have a clue. This place is full of them.”
“Of who?”
“Of the dead.”
She is staring at him and her skin is crawling. He’s always joked about how stupid her superstition is.
“I think this is where things come to die,” Hank says.
“I’m gonna walk home. I’ll see you later.”
“Fen.”
She pauses, though she very much doesn’t want to.
“I figured out what has to happen. It’s impossible to choose. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“So I won’t. Nobody will. They will all drown. Every one of them, and every one of us, and then everything will start again.”
She doesn’t know what he’s talking about and she doesn’t care, she just wants to get back to her family. But he pulls her in for a hug. As he holds her he says, “I’m so sorry this happened. It’s my fault and I’ll pay for it in the end, I’ll pay for it all.” Then he pulls her down into the seawater and shoves her head under the surface.
First there is shock. There is disbelief. But she is strong, and she has very good lungs. Her brothers and father like to say she was born for the water and maybe that’s true, she is certainly at home beneath its surface. So if he thinks this is how to kill her? He is mistaken.
The secret is simple: you have to know how to stay calm. Panic-even a slightly raised pulse-is your enemy. Even when the pressure comes, even with the pain. Fen lets her mind go blank and her body go limp. She plays dead. The seconds tick past but she doesn’t move, doesn’t panic. Finally his grip on her head loosens a fraction and she uses the moment to twist out of his hold. Instead of surging up beside him she kicks out underwater, swimming as far into the sea as she can. She is not frightened of the burn in her lungs, she knows it well because she is always pushing to its edge, always wanting just that little longer beneath. Even so, she is all too human.
Her head bobs out of the water like one of the seals. She sees him in the shallows, waves crashing against his knees.
“Fen!” he shouts.
He won’t come after her, not while she’s in the ocean-he’s got no chance of outswimming her, and anyway there are people running down the hill toward them. It’s Raff and Alex. She wonders how much they saw.
Fen watches her brother, who is a lot bigger than Hank, tackle the older man to the ground. Together, he and Alex drag Hank into the field hut. She watches that door; she isn’t coming out of the sea until she knows it’s safe. Alex returns and waves her in, but she doesn’t move,
she treads water, watching him. He comes down to the shoreline and shouts to her. “Are you okay?”
She says nothing.
“Your dad’s on his way, okay?” he calls. “And Raff’s watching Hank. You can come out.”
But she can’t. She won’t. She starts to shiver, her teeth chattering. She will have to move soon, she doesn’t have her wetsuit, she might be in shock.
“Fen, baby,” Alex calls. “Please come out. It’s too cold.”
In the end it’s Raff who wades into the water and pulls her bodily to shore. “Why did he do that to you?” he is asking. “Why was he doing that, Fen?” But she can’t talk.
That was a man who said he loved her. She does not understand.
Alex has blankets and they wrap them around her, and Raff keeps holding her, but she is staring fixedly at the door to the hut in case he comes back out, someone has to watch that door, she can’t even blink, don’t they understand he could come back out.
Eventually her dad speeds down the coast to the rocks. There is no beach here, but he doesn’t care, he turns off the Zodiac and jumps into the water, climbing to where they sit.
“What’s going on?” he asks, and he is looking at her and it feels like he is seeing everything. She is so ashamed.
“Hank was trying to drown her,” Raff says, and he sounds bewildered. He sounds like he too is in shock.
Dominic looks at her but still she can’t talk, her jaw is locked, and she can’t take her eyes from the door.
“We were coming down the hill and they were talking by the water,” Alex is explaining, “and we saw them hug, and then he was just, I don’t know, holding her head under water.”
It is so bizarre, so unbelievable, that they all stare at each other.
When Fen nods, confirming it, something falls over Dominic, a cold, mechanical kind of certainty that is utterly unlike the ranting anger Hank displayed, no, this is something other, and Fen should be terrified, but instead she is glad. She watches her father go into that field hut, and she knows something bad is about to happen, but what
she discovers is that she hates Hank with purity and completeness, and she is grateful for her dad’s size and his fists, which she has never understood until now. She knows what the fists are for now, she knows why someone might need to punch a bag over and over.
She is able to look away from the door at last.
Fen won’t ever ask what happened inside, but it is obvious that Dominic has nearly killed Hank in that little kitchen. It is only Raff, with strength that almost rivals his father’s, who manages to wrestle Dom away before it’s too late.
Tom, Alex, and Raff get Hank to the hospital on the base. Naija will treat him. Dom takes Fen home to the lighthouse, where they sit at the kitchen table and talk.
When she explains that she and Hank have been in a relationship of sorts for about a month, she sees the horror that falls over him and she will never be able to unsee it. She knows exactly what he perceives her as now. Damaged. Broken.
He asks, “Has he ever forced you?”
“No.”
“Has he ever hurt you, before this?”
“No. He’s not himself,” she tells him. “He wants to drown all the seeds. So that no one can ever make the choice. I saw it in his eyes-he won’t stop until he’s drowned them all.”
She gets her period two days later.
Dominic