Page 38 of Ringer
GEMMA BLINKED INTO CONSCIOUSNESS AGAIN, tossed up by a hand of pain. Something screamed. Or rather, she screamed and it screamed, and it was impossible to tell who started first. Leathery wings swept her face and the tangle of her hair, and her voice reached registers she didn’t even know she could hit: a high-C, horror-movie scream that echoed back to her as the bat winged up toward the moon, probably just as scared as she was, knocking against the sides of the well in its effort to get out.
It was silhouetted briefly, a black blur against the sky knotty with clouds and a moon just easing out of the darkness, and then it was gone, and with her terror ebbing, the pain came grinding back instead, and the memory of what had happened: the long, limping escape through the woods, the sudden realization that she was lost. Thehouse in the glen—now, in memory, so obviously abandoned, maybe for a century—and the soft splinter of wood breaking apart beneath her.
The well.
She was at the bottom of a well, alone, in the middle of the woods.
She was shivering. The well smelled, strangely, like the inside of a dirty produce drawer, like the chill of old vegetal rot. The mud was puddled with old water and debris, with a tangle of tree branches and miscellaneous trash. She was lying in the rot of the old well, and when she shifted, she heard the crunch of small animal bones beneath her. High above her, a portion of the well cover was still intact. It blotted out a sweep of sky and reminded her of a half-closed eyelid.
“Hello?” she whispered. Of course no one answered. She cleared her throat and said, louder, “Hello?” Her voice rolled off the stones and then dropped.
Panic came up from her stomach, sharp-clawed and frantic, like some kind of rodent. She could barely sit up. Her back hurt; everything hurt. Nothing seemed broken, at least.
“Hello!” she tried again. “Help me!” There must be someone out there, someone who would hear. The well tunneled her voice into echoes, so even when her voice began to crack she was momentarily surrounded by thecascading responses of her own words,help me.“Help me! Hello! Help!”
She shouted, over and over, into the thin night air, but her voice, still raw from overuse, gave out quickly. It dropped into hoarse croaks and then into whispers. Finally, she couldn’t even do that, and when she opened her mouth, nothing came out but a soft whistling, like a leak from a faulty kettle.
Still no help arrived. No one came. No one answered.
There was no one around to answer, no one for miles and miles. Only the bats, blind and hungry, clicking their way through the dark.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 23 of Lyra’s story.
TWENTY-FOUR
IN THE CURDLED LIGHT OF a new dawn, while a hundred police officers from all over the state began to gather in the parking lot outside the Bruinsville police station to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and blink the sleep out of their eyes, while four bloodhounds lashed to the wrist of their handler sniffed experimentally at shoes and car tires and the crusted remnants of someone’s dropped bacon, egg, and cheese, Gemma woke up to the pressure of a light rain that had started hours earlier and to a voice calling softly to her.
She blinked. Rain blurred her vision, and she swiped it from her eyes, disappointed when she realized that the voice, and her name, must have been part of a dream. There was no one above her, no one looking down on her at all: just the sky, a small and narrow mouth, graying above her. Staring up at the knit of clouds, she thought ofthe surface of a distant mirror.
A shadow moved: she saw her own reflection peering down at her as she peered up at it.
She blinked again through the long tunnel of rain.
Calliope.
“Hello, Gemma,” Calliope said. Then Gemma knew that hers was the voice she had heard calling softly to her in her sleep.
It took Gemma a long time to sit up. An eternity to claw, inch by inch, to her feet. “Calliope.” Her mouth was dry. She opened it to the rain. “Please. Help me.”
Calliope’s face was a small, shifting pattern of shadows. “Don’t be afraid,” she said in a sweet voice, like the subtle pressure of a razor on Gemma’s skin. “Be a brave girl, now.”
Calliope disappeared again. When Gemma opened her mouth, when she screamed, she felt as if more fear flooded in, instead of being expelled.
“Please.”
Calliope reappeared almost immediately, and Gemma felt a small flicker of hope. Calliope had murdered all those people. Calliope was sick. She was evil. But she was stillsomeone. She was a chance. Gemma couldn’t stand to be alone. She couldn’t bear it.
“Please, Calliope.” She licked her lips. “I—I want to help you. If you get me out of here, you can come and livewith me. We can be like—like sisters.”
“Sisters?” Calliope repeated the word in a puzzled tone of voice.
“Like friends,” Gemma said desperately, realizing Calliope likely didn’t know what sisters were. “Like best friends, who share everything.”
For a long time, Calliope looked at her. She seemed to be considering it. Gemma allowed herself to hope.
Then Calliope said, “I’m tired of sharing.”
This time, when she vanished from the lip of the well, Gemma heard almost immediately the scrape of something heavy on the ground. And then a portion of the sky above turned black. Gemma thought, confusedly, of an eclipse.
