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‘Promise you won’t let me die in here.’
‘I’ll come back,’ he says. ‘I promise. Follow the rules and I’ll see you again.’
With that, the cell door swings shut.
III
Elissa’s first instinct is to light another candle to replace the one that was guttering. But of the original ten, only eight remain. Already, her available hours of light have shrunk from eighty to sixty-four. If she burns another stick, that’ll reduce to fifty-six. Burn one more and she’ll be down to forty-eight. The prospect of confinement beyond that is unbearable, but it’s one she must consider.
Burn a candle? Save it? Banish the darkness? Endure it?
Elissa’s jaw muscles stiffen. She feels her face darkening as blood rushes to the surface. Her jaw clenches tighter.
There’s no reason to make light in here. There’s nothing new to discover. Then again, a candle offers not just light but heat. And yet … and yet those eight remaining sticks are a precious resource. She cannot afford to waste them.
So ration them instead.
Just like you rationed the brownie. Then lost it.
Paralysis strikes. Crouching in the dark, Elissa hears her breath rush in and out of her lungs. When a tremor passes through her, the candle she’s holding snaps in two. Unable to move, unable to think, darkness is her only option.
At last, by degrees, the congestion begins to ease. The muscles in her jaw relax; the pressure inside her skull abates. When her fingers uncurl, the severed candle falls to the floor.
I’ll come back.I promise.
But Elijah hadn’t promised to keep her alive, which was what she had asked.
Follow the rules and I’ll see you again.
There’s no reason to trust him. There are a million reasons todistrust him. He’s clearly damaged goods. But she suspects he’s far smarter than he seems.
You might be a year older than me. But Magic Annie says I have a pretty high IQ. I promise I won’t forget you. Not ever.
She shudders at that, cringes as she recalls the lilt in his voice as he said it. She recalls the other information Elijah revealed: that she’s underground, in a place he calls the Memory Wood; that he lives close; that he was playing outside and only came down here to explore.
That last part is certainly a lie, because he also revealed that she reminds him of Bryony, his friend for six whole months, a previous resident of this hole who was pretty except when she was crying, which was quite a lot towards the end.
Still, she got her tree. I made sure of that, even if I couldn’t make sure of anything else. Picked out a tall one, just like she asked.
Even though it’s empty, Elissa’s stomach begins to clutch. Bracing the manacle, she edges across the floor to the waste bucket. She gags, bringing up a thin stream of bile.
An image blooms in her mind. Suddenly, she’s back at Wide Boys, smelling the bacon grease and listening to Adele through the restaurant’s speakers. She recalls the waitress, Andrea, in all her bleached-blonde, green-eyed glory:Don’t you go believin’ everything you see or hear. Chuckie, you can change just about anything you want if you tries hard enough.
Those words feel spookily far-sighted, a coded message for what’s happened since. Elissa wonders if the woman could be involved. She remembers Andrea’s sly smile, and the pair of fake eyes kept for Hallowe’en:bright orange, slitted just like a cat’s. Scares the bejesus out of people.Even though the waitress seemed full of fun and harmless mischief, she’s part of the same bad and scary world that spawned the jailer, so her involvement cannot be discounted.
In fact, Elissa can’t dismiss the involvement of anyone she met that day. It means her recollections of the tournament, and events immediately prior, have a currency, too, one just as vital to hoard as the physical items in her cell. A careful reconstruction could shake something loose. A half-glimpsed face, a scrap of conversation: any such gem, dredged from her subconscious, might explain why she’s here, might even offer her a lifeline.
Trouble is, just as the candles and matches are vulnerable to the whims of her jailer, her recollections of Saturday are vulnerable to the fallibilities of memory.
Thankfully, she has a plan for preserving them.
IV
Slowing her breathing, Elissa calls up the chessboard she designed to map this chamber. Thanks to its earlier expansion, it’s now an eleven-by-twelve grid. So far, she’s viewed the board from above. Now, she tilts it to form a wall.
To each square, Elissa adds a brass handle. As a test, she focuses on B3, the location of the two buckets. When she blinks, the front of the square rolls forwards like a drawer. The movement is oiled and smooth but not altogether silent – there’s a tiny sound of friction, either from ball-bearings or wheels running in grooves. She blinks again and the drawer rolls shut, accompanied by a satisfying click. Now she has a device not just for finding her way in the dark but for preserving – and interrogating – her recent memories.
The top-left square of her grid is Y8. Into its drawer, Elissa loads everything she remembers about Andrea from Wide Boys. The more she deposits, the more of the encounter sherecalls: the waitress’s T-shirt and name badge; the way she raised her hand like a paw and meowed; her sing-song way of speaking:Through these puppies I can’t see shitums, but at least I got my green peepers, even if I might bring you the wrong-flavoured milkshake because of ’em.