White Crow (17 page)

R
ebecca’s body aches, cramps have come and gone in both legs and arms, but her neck is the worst. It aches so badly, and she thinks again about how long it’s been. She has no idea.

Though she’s wearing a watch, she can’t see the face. She decides to count for a while, doing maths in her head. If she can count to sixty fairly accurately, that’s a minute. So if she can count to three hundred, that’s five minutes.

While she counts, she stares at the candles.

She’s got to six hundred before she starts crying again. None of the candles seem to have burned any way down at all.

Unwelcome notions wander into her head.

Will Ferelith come back before the candles have gone out? Is she coming back at all?

It’s the first time she’s permitted that thought to exist, and though she tries to push it away, like all bad thoughts, it won’t be banished easily. It keeps rising in her mind, and every time it does, it gets stronger.

Supposing Ferelith has left her here?

For good.

She tries not to think it, but fails, so then she decides to let herself think about it, but rationally.

People don’t do that kind of thing, she tells herself, people don’t do bad things like that. Not in the real world, but as soon as she thinks that, she thinks about the girl tied to the table in the hut in the woods. Rebecca knows her father stopped looking for that girl. Supposing he were to stop looking for her too?

She lifts her head and stares at the candles, the four remaining candles, and at last she sees that they have burned lower.

One of them is quite short now, and as Rebecca stares at it, she convinces herself that she can see it actually burning down.

She’s close enough to the candelabra to see the life of the flame.

The candle is creamy yellow-white. The wick is whiter where it’s not burned, and black where the flame has it. The flame is . . . The flame is amazing, and she becomes entranced by it as she realises she’s never looked at a flame properly.

What colour is it?

It’s yellow, she thinks, then realises that there is no name for the yellow-orange-white-gold-blue that a candle flame burns. Its shape is perfect, and it flutters in an unfelt breeze, a draft so gentle that only something as delicate as the candle flame can be moved by it.

And yet the flame is strong. It has burned for hours. It sucks up the molten wax from the bowl formed in the top of the candle stub, and steadily eats it all away, drop by drop.

There’s barely any wax left now in this candle, and Rebecca expects it go out some time soon, but it doesn’t. Despite everything that’s happening to her, she still has the energy to be amazed as the candle enters an extremely long series of death throes, as the last of the solid wax slips onto the stem of the candlestick, and yet the wick remains feeding a flame that now gets bigger if anything, feeding it till it sputters and gutters around the silver lip of the candlestick.

A thousand times it appears as if it will die, and doesn’t, and then from nowhere, it’s gone.

There are three candles left.

She watches them briefly, then she’s distracted as she realises she needs to pee, and knows there’s no chance of that happening in any way she would like.

She’s cold too. As the heat of the day outside seems impossibly far away now. She shivers, and a new fear surges through her, a fear that is totally ridiculous, but which she cannot destroy.

She thinks about the legend of the Candle Room. Despite everything she thinks she knows, despite the fact that this is the twenty-first century, maybe she’s wrong. Most people in the world still believe in God. They don’t believe in the same one, not all of them, though Christians and Catholics and Jews do. And she remembers from World Studies that Allah isn’t so very different from the Christian God. But then there are Buddhists and Taoists, and Hindus and Sikhs. And she supposes, there are Pagans and Wiccans and that kind of thing. And most of the world believes in some kind of god, and if they’re right, and she’s wrong, what then?

If there is heat, there must be cold.

If there is light, there must be dark.

And if there is God, and a phalanx of angels, then there must also be the Devil.

And as she watches the third candle go out, and the room becomes even dimmer and darker, she suddenly thinks that if she’s wrong, and six billion other people in the world are right, then maybe something is going to come and get her when that last candle goes out.

As she sits in the chair and she tries for the twentieth time to pull her wrists out of the shackles, tugging and straining and failing and swearing, she’s overtaken by the horribly real sensation that there is something in the room with her, behind her, unseen.

T
he fourth candle goes quite quickly.

‘Who’s there?’ she calls out. ‘Who’s there? Who is it?’

Nothing.

Except, does she hear a noise somewhere outside the room? It’s gone, whatever it was; mouse or rat. Or Ferelith.

‘Ferelith? Is that you?’

She’s so tired now, she can’t even be angry, she can’t even shout.

She sits still and quiet, and the feeling that someone is there with her slides gently away. But what if there had been someone? What if someone had entered the room? And what about when the last candle goes?

She looks at it, as if it’s her enemy, but maybe it’s her friend.

She has nothing else now. No one else.

Everyone has gone.

Her father, who let her down.

Her friends, who were only there when it suited them.

Adam, who never really cared.

Ferelith, who has actually left her to die in darkness. She remembers the conversation they had a couple of weeks ago. At the time, she took it for another weird conversation with Ferelith, but now it takes on more significance. Ferelith had told her about the man who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories. She knows them, but she doesn’t remember the author’s name. Ferelith told her how this writer made a pact with his brother, the ultimate experiment, so that when one of them died, he would find a way to contact the other, to tell him that the afterlife was real.

‘We could do that, too,’ Ferelith said. ‘Wouldn’t that be cool?’

And Rebecca had smiled and agreed because well, Ferelith wanted to, and, what harm could it do?

‘Do you mean it?’ Ferelith said. And only now does Rebecca realise that she meant it.

 

She’s tired, she’s cold, she’s hungry, with nothing left in her life but the single spluttering candle flame. Her thoughts grow wild.

The Devil deals with darkness. His tools, she thinks, are the things of shadow. He can only live in the dark places, and he uses the play of illusion to create his monsters, which can only be destroyed by the light of God.

Has she been a good girl, she wonders? Has she led a good life?

Who is coming for her when her candle dies?

She knows she’s done some bad things, but nothing terrible. She’s let a few people down, and she’s told a few lies, but mostly to avoid other people’s feelings being hurt. She stole a mobile phone case from the market once. She felt so bad about it the following day she threw it away.

And she’s done some good things.

She’s sure she has. It’s just that she can’t think of any of them right now, that’s all.

And while she’s thinking all that, she starts to see shapes in the candle flame, sooty shadows of devils dancing in the smoke that twists up away from the tip of the flame.

She sees angels and she sees them speared by devils with tridents in their hands, and grins on their lips. She sees them dance and leap and laugh and stab their spears. An angel tries to wave a sword of light at them, but they surround him, sneering and laughing as they pin him down, and set light to his hair, and put a burning flame to his flesh too.

The angel dies.

The flame of the candle performs a last mad dance, and then, in a puff of smoke that goes unseen in the dark, it dies too.

The room is dark.

And a voice calls through the darkness to Rebecca.

I figured she’d had enough by then. So when the last flame went out, I called through the grille in the wall of the Candle Room.

‘And are you a God-fearing girl?’

She screamed, which was kind of funny and kind of scary, and then there was silence. I guess that was her realising it was me, recognising my voice, and then she started yelling and shouting and swearing at me.

I came in through the door and put the lamp I’d brought from home down on the floor.

She blinked and screwed her eyes up but she didn’t stop shouting at me.

‘Jeez,’ I said, ‘calm down. It was just your forfeit. That’s all.’

But she really wouldn’t calm down, and I had to get her to shut up so I told her I would only let her out if she stopped shouting and swearing and everything.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘it was just a laugh, just your forfeit. I said you had to do a forfeit, didn’t I? You didn’t take it seriously, did you? Did you?’

I laughed then, which probably wasn’t a good idea, because she got really cross again. She called me all sorts of things. She called me a freak, which hurt. But then, I already knew that’s what she thought of me.