The Dark Light (6 page)

I shrugged as if I didn’t care. But I did, very much; I just didn’t want her to see. I followed her through the mud, my heart in my mouth. The trees gave us some protection from the weather, but it was dark and boggy under the canopy and the spikes of the blackthorn clawed and snagged on my clothes. As we climbed, the trees got sparser, until eventually we were on a heathland where there were sheep wandering, and above the horizon I could see the rotor of a windmill and the roof of a house, and next to it a church, but strangely there were no lights on anywhere. I didn’t like this place. Not one little bit.

SIX

REBEKAH

Once the seasickness has subsided, I’m glad to be home. The familiar smell of the bracken and the heather, the rocks and moss, and the good earth. And I’m looking forward to seeing Mr Bevins, showing him how I survived the mission, how we brought him a new recruit, although I’m a bit hazy on the circumstances. Usually people come with us who want to be part of New Canaan, rather than because they have been brought to us. Father says we are looking after Alex for a while because Ron and Bridget cannot, and that it’s all a part of God’s plan.

We walk up the hill through the woods to the houses, Alex dawdling behind me, still looking queasy. She’s frightened, although I’ve done my best to reassure her.

‘Is it safe?’ she asks.

What a question! She should know she is safer here than anywhere, away from all the temptation of the world of sin.

‘Course!’

The farmhouse and the church and all the cabins that surround it squat in a hollow that protects them from the worst of the north winds. The farmhouse and the harbour dwellings were the only stone buildings on the island still standing when we moved here. The rest were built from scratch. Wood for the cabins and the kitchen and the church was brought over on boats, and Micah and Father and Mr Bevins and a group of men from the mainland helped to build them. I was only little then. I don’t really remember it, except in strange snapshots: Father hitting his thumb with a hammer so that his nail went black; the clean, pine smell of the church when it was new; the meeting we had to bless the community; and Mother saying to me that we were lucky to live like this, joyful and free at the edge of the world.

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.’