by Julia Bell
Hurrying now, we get to the vegetable fields, and even in the dark I can see the crops have not been harvested. Rows of runner beans spill into the path, tangled and overgrown, the pods split and spoiled. Father stops to look at a row of peas that are white with mildew, pods rotting on the plants.
‘What’s happened?’ My heart quickens. Something’s not right.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Urgh, slugs,’ Alex says, holding her lantern up to show dark blobs of slime munching through a row of lettuces that are almost nothing but stalks now. I planted those as seedlings, back in the spring. This time of year it would be someone’s task for the day to set slug traps and harvest what’s ready. Losing crops means losing meals. It’s as if nothing at all has been done in the two weeks we’ve been gone. My heart sinks. All the little seedlings I nurtured, all spoiled.
‘Very odd,’ Father mutters to himself.
The only thing that seems to have been harvested is the patch of poppies we grew for Mr Bevins by the polytunnels. There are one or two plants with flowers still to unfurl, but most of them have been taken. All the seed heads look as if they’ve been snipped off.
As we get closer I can make out the white planks of the church. The roof is made of tarpaper and lined with plastic sheeting that flaps loudly in the wind. But there is no light, nor sound of any singing. Next to the church is a row of simple cabins, where live the Braggs, the Webbers, the Morgans, Hannah and Margaret, Ruth and Esther, Gideon and David. The last cabin is empty since the Collins family left: they went to the mainland with Terry to get supplies and never came back. Altogether, there are nearly forty of us living here at any one time.
Ahead of us is the farmhouse. Usually there would be at least a few people here. This is the hub of the community and where I sleep, in the attic with the twins. The ground floor is fashioned into two big rooms, one a kitchen in which we prepare all our food, and another a dining room, where everyone eats at a big table. Leading off the kitchen is a wooden extension called the tack room, where we hold morning meetings and store equipment and where on a big whiteboard the daily tasks are written, and beyond that are the compost toilets and a pump where we can fill buckets with water for the house and for the cabins.
We enter through the tack room. The door is swollen and it takes a hard tug to pull it open. The room is cold and the whiteboard has no tasks on it, only: Live for the Victory! And underneath it a scribbled verse from the Book of Revelation:
Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Alex asks. Her voice is bit higher now; she sounds more like a girl.
‘Hello?’ Father shouts, but no one answers in welcome. ‘Hello?’
He switches on the light, but the electricity is off. This means no one has switched over the battery, either that or they’ve forgotten to recharge it.
We still take our shoes off and thud our way across the wooden floor to the kitchen. Father shines his torch around the room. The hearth is swept and the plates and cups are all neatly stacked, but there’s no sign of an evening meal or that anyone has even been here recently, except that the huge pan that is usually hung above the fire is on the table. There is a nasty-smelling ring of muddy residue around the rim.
A chill passes through me.
‘Where is everybody?’ Alex asks, coming closer to me.
‘I don’t know.’
‘This is really freaky.’ She shivers. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Do you think—’ Hannah starts, but Father shushes her.
‘Not now, Hannah,’ he says. ‘Wait here.’
He goes into the dining room, and then upstairs. I can hear the floorboards creaking as he moves about above us.
Hannah puts her lantern on the table so it casts a dark shadow across the walls. ‘They must be in church,’ she says.
‘But we passed it and there weren’t any lights on,’ I say.
‘They may have been in silent prayer.’
‘With the twins?’
Three years ago Mary Protheroe gave birth to twins, a surprise and a happiness, especially because, as Mary said, no one was getting any younger, although there was much discussion among the men about whether it was right to raise babies on New Canaan. But if Mary was to leave it would mean losing Micah too, as no one could imagine them separated. So the farmhouse became suddenly noisy again with babies and crying, and Father and Mr Bevins found it very irritating when the crying interrupted the prayers or the sermons. Once Mr Bevins even went so far as to tell Mary that their crying was a sign of her own faithlessness, and she should be ashamed and take a tighter control over their discipline.
‘Perhaps . . .’ She pauses, then she looks away as if she does not want to say what is on her mind. ‘Do you think they’ve . . . been Raptured?’ she whispers.
This sends a cold chill through me, but she is only saying what has already crossed my mind.
‘What are you talking about?’ Alex asks. ‘Where is everyone? This place is creeping me out.’
‘Well, where else would they be?’ Hannah says definitively. ‘The Rapture is the only answer.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Taken to heaven,’ Hannah says, her voice breaking. ‘Which means we’ve been left behind.’
Alex wrinkles her nose. ‘O-kay.’
They can’t have been Raptured. It would be so unfair for God to leave us when we were doing his work. If only I hadn’t gone on the stupid Mission Week in the first place. Maybe it was because I was so desperate to go, and I forgot to pray because I was so excited. Maybe I should have been quieter, less demanding. I shouldn’t have been thinking so much about Alex. There’s a scratchy lump developing in my throat. I bite my lip to stop the tears from rising.
Father comes back downstairs. ‘There’s no one here.’ He looks puzzled.
‘Hannah thinks they’ve been Raptured,’ I say.
He tuts. ‘I expect Bevins has taken them somewhere for prayer. That’s all. They’ll be in the church. We spoke yesterday! Live for the Victory, Hannah, live for the Victory.’
Outside the wind has got up. A heavy gust rattles the doors and I jump nervously. None of us speaks. In the silence and the dark it seems that anything is possible.
Mr Bevins has told us many times what will happen when the saved are Raptured. How planes will fall out of the sky because the pilots have just vanished and gone to heaven, how banks will stop working, money will stop flowing, food will stop being distributed. For those left behind the world will be a nightmare. There will be wars, and armed gangs who will eat people, and the world will be ruled by the Antichrist who will turn everything upside down, making the good bad and the bad good. Mr Bevins has visions of this all the time. He says God has blessed him with foreknowledge so that he can warn others. In church his prophesying is very convincing. He says that any who doubt, who don’t truly put their whole heart and soul, their whole life, into believing, will be left behind to deal with this chaos for seven years before the final judgement comes.
‘I’m going to look for them,’ Father says. ‘You stay here.’
‘No!’ Hannah says. ‘Don’t leave us.’
‘I thought you spoke to Mr Bevins yesterday?’ I say.
Father pauses, bites his lip. ‘I did.’
‘I knew it, we’ve been left behind!’ Hannah wails.
‘Hannah, don’t be silly,’ Father says, but I know he isn’t convinced.
Alex is staring at us, her eyes wide. She looks terrified. ‘What are you on about? Shouldn’t we be looking for them? They can’t have just vanished.’
If the others have been Raptured, then we alone are left to bring in the crops and run the whole farm and all the livestock and there won’t be enough of us to manage. And I don’t know what it is that I might have done to have been left behind. I look at Alex, her hair turned wild by the sea and the weather, and wonder if it’s possible to catch her sinfulness like a cold.
‘I think we should look for them first. We would have had warning,’ Hannah says. ‘He wouldn’t abandon us, not like this.’ But her face is drained of colour.
‘OK,’ Father says. ‘You two stay here.’ He means Alex and me. ‘We’ll go and check the church.’
We sit in front of the empty fireplace. The wind rattles the tiles, and currents of cold air snake about the kitchen like spirits. My mind races through the implications. If we have been left behind, then everything is going to get really difficult. There will be seven years of Tribulations to put up with before I can finally see my mother.
Alex curls herself up on the bench like a woodlouse when you touch it. ‘I’m freezing,’ she says.
There’s a dirty yellow sweater thrown over one of the chairs. It belongs to Jonathan; I’ve seen him wearing it in the fields. I give it to her. The sweater comes down nearly to her knees like a dress.
She looks at me fearfully. ‘Rub my arms,’ she says. I hesitate. ‘Please.’
I sit next to her and put my arms around her shoulders. Her wet hair smells of seaweed. I rub her arms until a warmth rises in my hands and in her body.
‘I want to go back,’ she mutters. ‘I don’t like it.’ She’s rocking backwards and forwards. ‘I should never have let them persuade me.’ She gets her phone out of her pocket and switches it on.
On the home screen I can see there’s a picture of her and a girl with blonde hair. They are hugging and leaning into the camera and laughing.
‘Thought so.’ She points at the top of the screen. It says: No Service.
‘So?’
‘So that means I can’t get any signal. You have a satellite phone, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, where is it?’
‘I don’t know. Mr Bevins keeps it. In his cabin maybe?’
‘We need to get a message out there. For once in my life it would be a relief to speak to the police.’
‘You can’t do that!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because . . .’ Because I don’t want you to leave yet. ‘Because maybe we should pray.’
‘What good’s that going to do? Send a message to your imaginary friend to go and get help? That’s really going to work.’
I get up and pull out my witness kit from my bag. I took this with me on Mission Week but I never had a chance to use it. I sit next to her and open the old biscuit tin. There’s a wooden cross, and a bottle of holy water from the font in the church that Mr Bevins blessed, and a small bottle of olive oil for anointing the saved.
I clutch the cross in my hand and hold it over Alex’s head. I close my eyes and try to think of God, although I have always found it hard to picture what He might look like. Most of the time I see someone who looks sometimes like Father and sometimes like Mr Bevins. Some of our number can hear Him speaking. I have often wondered what He might sound like. Sometimes if I listen very, very hard I believe I can hear something, a faraway murmuring over the loud sound of my heartbeat.
‘What are you doing?!’ Alex squirms away, but I ignore her.
‘Dear God, thank You for bringing us here safely.’
‘Why are you saying thank you? That journey was horrible! And there’s no one here! We’re not safe! I mean, I’m sorry, but I’m going back and you can’t stop me.’
‘Please, God, will You help her to see the light while she is here with us. And if You have taken the others, please take us too.’
I dip my finger in the holy water and flick it on her face.
‘Urgh! Get off!’ She pushes my arm so I spill some of the water on the floor. ‘What did you do that for?!’
‘It’s holy water, for purifying your soul.’
She takes the bottle and looks at it. It’s an old plastic one that is scratched and the label is torn, a part of it missing. ‘Bottled at source in North Wales. That’s not holy water.’ She sniffs it. ‘It smells off.’
‘It’s not off! It’s been blessed!’
She passes it back to me. ‘Well, it hasn’t made me holy. I mean, I’m not glowing or anything, am I? Look at it! You’re pathetic – that crap’s not holy!’ She turns away from me. ‘Who are you people anyway? I want to go back. I don’t even have my stuff.’ And her voice cracks a little and she sounds as if she’s going to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. I pack my witness things away in the biscuit tin. She’s right, it is a bit pathetic and I am suddenly ashamed and confused.
She stands up. ‘C’mon. We should go and find that phone. We need to tell people that something’s happened.’
‘Can’t. We’ve got to wait here.’
‘Why? Because you were told? Don’t you have a mind of your own?’
I’m about to tell her that obedience is one of our holy responsibilities when there is a noise, at first like an animal – I think it could be Job, Micah Protheroe’s dog, whimpering – but then I realize it’s actually a child crying.
Alex jumps. ‘Did you hear that?’
I nod. I hold my breath and listen again. This time it’s louder, a kind of mewling, and there’s a rattle on the bolted door by the pantry that leads to the cellar.
My blood turns to cold ice in my veins.
‘What the hell?’
Both of us stare at the door.
‘Help,’ the small voice says.
I recognize it, but I don’t want to acknowledge that it is true.
SEVEN
REBEKAH
I draw the bolt across and open the door. Standing there, blinking into the dim light, is Paul Protheroe. His three-year-old face sooty with coal dust and streaked with tears. He looks sleepy and disorientated.
‘What happened?’ I scoop him up in my arms. ‘Where’s Peter?’
‘Down.’ He nods into the darkness behind him. ‘Oh,’ I say, trying not to sound horrified. Sometimes if the boys are naughty Mary might shut them down there, but only when there are other people around and only for a few minutes to stop them crying. Mostly she or Micah uses the rod, as it is set out in the Bible and as Mr Bevins insists, like Father did to me.
‘Shit,’ Alex says. ‘Literally.’ She points to his trousers where he has soiled himself.
‘Get him a glass of water.’ I push him towards Alex. He really does stink; I wonder how long he’s been down there.
I take the lantern and climb down the rickety stairs.
‘Peter?’ My voice is deadened by the low ceiling. I don’t understand. If everyone else has been Raptured, why did God not take the twins? Why would He leave them?
The cellar is really just a small space half the size of the kitchen, where we store the coal for the house. As it’s summer it’s nearly empty, just full of dust, except in one corner where I find Peter lying on what’s left of the coal. Like his brother he’s filthy, but he’s fast asleep. Even when I pick him up he doesn’t wake. His head lolls back over my arm and he’s freezing cold. Since I’ve been away he’s got heavier and it’s a struggle to carry him back upstairs. He is so fast asleep he doesn’t even wake when I accidentally bang his head against the door frame.
‘He fell asleep!’ I say, trying to sound bright, as if it was a regular thing. I don’t know what else to do. But Alex is sitting at the kitchen table holding Paul in her lap, looking frightened.
‘He’s completely out of it,’ Alex says. ‘Someone’s given them drugs.’
I sit down next to her and look at Paul. Now she mentions it, his eyes are dozy and unfocused, and he looks like he too might fall asleep at any minute. ‘No. They’re just tired.’
Alex shrugs, ‘I’m telling you, they’ve been drugged. One foster home I went to, the woman used to give the kids nips of Jim Beam to make them sleep.’
‘Who’s Jim Beam?’
She sucks her teeth. ‘Whiskey, bourbon, alcohol. Don’t you know anything?’
In the past I would have been proud not to know about the world; all I needed to know was about this island and of the earth. The way that seeds grow i
nto plants, the turning of the seasons, the path to heaven clearly laid out before us, no distractions. But since I met Alex my mind is full of questions. I want to know what she knows, to see what she sees with my own eyes. She thinks I’m stupid, and more than anyone I’ve ever met I don’t want her to think that about me.
‘Whatever’s in that pan,’ Alex says, pointing at the pot on the kitchen table, ‘it doesn’t smell right to me.’
I hold Peter tight to my chest. He’s slightly smaller than his brother. They both have the same dark hair as their father and Mary’s strong features, but they are quiet, watchful boys. I shake him gently, ‘Peter? Peter? What happened?’
But he can’t answer me.
‘I told you,’ Alex says. ‘They’re totally out of it.’
Then a gust of wind blows through the kitchen, followed by heavy footsteps in the tack room. I think Father and Hannah must have come back, but they haven’t. The kitchen door swings open and it’s Jonathan, and he’s soaking wet, shivering like a dog, and his eyes are huge and black as marbles, like he’s just seen something he shouldn’t.
‘Light the fire, light the fire,’ he mutters, over and over. ‘I couldn’t take it any more. I couldn’t do it.’
He picks up a handful of kindling sticks, but he’s trembling so much he drops them on the floor. He hardly seems aware that we’re in the room. I lay Peter’s sleeping body on the table and pick the kindling up and lay it on the grate and set a match to it until there is a small fire. He hops from foot to foot, rubbing his arms, and trembles like a wet dog.
‘Jonathan, what’s happened?’ I say slowly. ‘Where is everyone? Why were the twins locked in the cellar?’
‘Mr Bevins has seen it! The gates of heaven! We’ve been praying for two days. He told me to watch for signs, but I was just so cold I couldn’t stay out there any more!’
I put a few lumps of coal on top of the kindling. We have to be careful not to use too much fuel. We will need all we can get our hands on in the winter. Jonathan radiates cold and wet and he smells of outdoors. Of soil and air. But more than that, he smells sharp like a spooked animal.
