Filed to story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I stare at him.
“He is dangerous, Rowan. I couldn’t tell you where he was because I could never be sure you wouldn’t let him out. Or that Fen would be safe from him if he was free.”
The cold is working its way up from my numb feet to my guts, my chest, my mind. I have rage in my heart for what Hank has done, at the thought of the ways he has hurt Fen and broken apart this family. But somehow I also have pity for his sickness, which has transformed him. He needs help. He needs treatment and medicine. He needs to get away from this island.
“We still can’t let him die,” I say.
“You don’t have to,” Dom says. “But I can.”
“Dom,” I say, squeezing his hands.
“I’ve thought a lot about what I’d do if the vault flooded before the
ship came. I was going to hand him over to the authorities, but nature’s decided for me.”
“If you do this,” I say clearly, “if you make me part of it, there will be nothing left for you and me. Do you understand? We won’t come back from it.”
His eyes close as though he is in great pain. “Row,” he says. He looks at me. “I’m sorry. Truly. But I have to protect my daughter.”
Dominic
About halfway home I decide I’d better not let the fucker drown. Rowan’s right. I don’t want her to bear the same loss I have. I don’t want to carry his death or meet his ghost. Most of all, I do not want the violence of it to scare my daughter any more than it already has.
The only way back in, now that the vault is too dangerous, is down the shaft, which has been rusted shut for many years and will require an angle grinder to open. I look through the curtain of rain and can barely make out the black inflatable boat up ahead. They’ll be drenched in that thing; I should have made Orly ride with me but he loves being with Rowan-he senses an ending the way we all do. At some point very soon our lives together on Shearwater will be over.
I have been preparing myself for the day she’d find Hank. I don’t know if it will be the ruthlessness of the captivity or all the lies I told her, but one of them will end us. I saw the horror in her eyes, felt the retreat within her. I knew it was coming and yet I did not realize it would feel so bad, so ruinous, I did not realize there could be no preparation for this kind of pain. It is really fucking sad that it should take loss to know the precise quality of love.
As I reach our beach and drive the Frog up onto the sand, I can make out the reflective red lights on the back of the quad bike, already halfway up the hill. I will let them come back for the seeds in my boat, while I go straight for the tools to get the son of a bitch out.
Rowan
There is a ship on the horizon. I can see it from the kitchen window, even through the storm. It has arrived one day too late to save a great many of the species in that vault. But it may have come in time to save a man’s life. It will be full of naval officers. I can tell them where he is and they can retrieve him, and I won’t have to go back down there. I am shaking with the relief of it.
I need to take the quad back for Dom and Orly, but first I unpack my load of containers. Our freezer is just about full. Both Raff and Fen are there, making space for this last lot. The only way we’ve been able to pack them in tightly enough is to follow Fen’s idea of removing them from their containers and storing the little plastic bags of seeds. They help me open my last containers and take the precious bags out, placing them gently on the piles. I look at these seeds, pausing to note that the bag I have just placed on top contains something rather extraordinary looking, and not what I was expecting. The wrinkly seed seems to sit within a hood, a great draping hood that curves around like a papery moth wing, and then at its base is a long needlelike point. The shape of the whole thing is that of a sickle, and this hood is so fine-parchment thin-that light travels through it, illuminating the delicate filaments and giving the illusion of movement. I stare at it, taken aback by its loveliness, and then I look at the label.
Pterocymbium tinctorium (Malvaceae)-or the melembu, from Indonesia. I don’t know what this name means; it could be any kind of plant.
I look at another packet, also strange. A walnut-shaped seed is covered in long, thick, blond hairs that stand on end, a child’s drawing of a golden sun. The
Aulax pallasia (Proteaceae)-or the needle-leaf featherbush from South Africa. Again, no idea what this is; I have read Hank’s
list a few dozen times, scanning my eyes over the seemingly endless and incomprehensible Latin names in search of containers to collect and move, and neither of these is remotely familiar. Doesn’t mean much really, there were too many names for me to memorize of course, but a thought starts tugging at the back of my mind.
I look at more of the seeds, now exposed.
There are the Wollemi pine seeds, and the common dandelion seeds. I know those two and I’m not surprised by them, but the next looks like a weapon. It is covered in sharp tusks or antlers, and it’s called a
Cullenia ceylanica from Sri Lanka. There is a seed that looks like a jellyfish, with a hood and several long tentacles. There is one with two chambers, both an impossibly vibrant and deep inky-blue color. One that is long and curling and snakelike. One that looks like a pineapple. Another like a wiry bird’s nest. They are strange and otherworldly and I was not expecting their beauty. They don’t look anything like seeds as I know them. When I reach a packet containing the
Banksia grandis, from Australia, I know what this is-it is a giant banksia-and I know what he’s done.
“What’s wrong?” Raff asks me, because I am standing in the freezer, staring at the sea of seeds around me.
“Nothing,” I say.
As I approach the beach, I can see my hope was in vain-that ship is too far out. It will take time for them to prepare and load their Zodiacs, to reach us, to understand. The weather might even be too rough to disembark at all. The air shaft will be starting to fill.
Dom is loading the Frog with tools. I kill the bike’s engine and jump off. Shout through the rain. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going back,” he yells, with a shake of his head like he can’t believe he’s doing it.
“Where’s Orly?”
Dominic straightens. He frowns, and meets my eyes, and in the space of a moment I see a universe pass through him. “He was with you,” he says. “He told me he was going on your boat.”
He sees the answer in my face. Orly told me the same thing.
Orly
If you have anything down in that storage room, it’s time to move it.
That’s what she said, and it has been ringing in his ears since.
The thing is, this is all his fault.
On an unusually sunny afternoon, Orly took a couple of his dad’s tools into the communications building and smashed everything to pieces. He broke things and he opened them up and he even cut wires for good measure. He wanted to be sure.
Because Orly, alone of anyone else on the island, could see that Hank Jones, his mentor, the leader of this place, was going mad. Orly was there as Hank talked through every element of every decision he was having to make. He explained how he went about choosing the seeds, he was doing it by nation and by cultural necessity, he was saving food staples and then widening out to more unusual tastes, but he would argue with himself, he would say that if he didn’t save this seed then he might as well not save that one, because those two plants fed each other and one death would lead to two, and how could he waste a single spot on the ship? Things like that. He was tormenting himself, Orly could see that much. He tried to help, but Hank didn’t want his help, even though he’d said Orly was very clever and that he was Hank’s only true friend in the world.
Orly knew that if anyone else started to notice how unwell Hank was becoming, they would definitely want to call a doctor. And if they did that, then Hank would never finish his task and the seeds would be left to drown, all of them.
So he simply removed the problem. He made it so that Hank-along with Orly and the others-
had to stay and finish. That nobody could be called. That he couldn’t be taken away.
But that was before Hank started throwing the packets into the ocean. It was before Tom and Naija and then Alex all died, before they needed to be buried.
It was before Hank needed to be contained so he didn’t do any more damage than he’d already done, before the vault started flooding for real, before a woman showed up, stranded, wanting to get home. All things you might want to contact someone about, really.