Page 39 of Ringer
“Good-bye, Gemma.” Calliope was invisible, hidden somewhere behind the curtain of black that began to inch slowly across the opening of the well.
A door, or some kind of table: Calliope must have found it in one of the old cabins.
She was using it to cover the well.
She was using it to seal Gemma inside.
Terror turned Gemma inside out. “No!” She pounded the walls with her fists, as inch by inch the daylight narrowed to a finger, to a line, to a single point above her. “No! Please!No!”
The covering slid into place. Now she could seenothing but a faint gray web of sky, where gaps in the planks revealed razor-thin slices of daylight. Calliope’s voice, when she spoke, was so faint Gemma couldn’t be sure, afterward, that she hadn’t imagined it.
“Good-bye.”
Gemma screamed for hours. She screamed, again and again, calling for Calliope, calling for someone to help. But no one answered—only the rain, scissoring through the rot of old plywood, a quiet shushing.
She slept again. She woke up crying, from a dream of rescuers, of friendly voices drawing closer. Wishful thinking, like people who saw mirages of floating water in the desert.
But then, once again, she heard them.
She sat up as quietly as she could, as if by making too much noise she would frighten off the distant voices. And for a second, she thought she had: she couldn’t hear them anymore, and she strained so hard to listen that she felt the effort traveling all the way through her jaw.
Then they came again, nearer this time. She could make out only a few phrases, which carried through the woods and, like water going off a cliff, tumbled down into the well: “clear,” “no sign,” “radio.” Cops. So someone had been sent to find her. In all likelihood, that meant Pete had escaped and found help.
She was saved.
“Down here,” she yelled, and was horrified when instead what came out was a fragmented whisper, like the rough sound of dry leaves skittering in the wind. She could barely hear it over the drumming of her heart. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Help me. Please. I’m down here!”
A whisper. A croak. A fish opening and closing its mouth soundlessly beneath the water.
She’d screamed for hours.
She’d screamed herself hoarse.
Already, the cops were drifting away—their words lost shape and edge, and their voices became tones, low notes of regret and disappointment. She grabbed a piece of wood from the splintered pile next to her and tried to beat it against the stone, but it crumbled moistly in her hand.
Help me.
Please.
Please.
She crawled, digging a hand into the loam of rot at the bottom of the well, until she found a rock. Loosing it from the mud, she drove it hard against the side of the well, again and again, rhythmically, and the sound traveled as a shock from her wrist to her elbow and up to her teeth.
But it was too late.
She was alone again.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 24 of Lyra’s story.
TWENTY-FIVE
SHE WATCHED THE RAIN BEAD along the fine prism of a spider’s web. The spider, black-bodied with furred white-and-black legs, had been at it for hours, leaping and soaring beneath the splintered remains of two shattered boards, trying to restore what had been lost when Gemma had fallen. It was amazing how pretty the web looked in the rain, in the trickle of light that reached her down here.
She lay there, cheek pressed to the mud, breathing in the smell of rotted wood and leaf rot, surprised that she wasn’t afraid, wasn’t in pain, wasn’t feeling much of anything. She was content simply to watch the spider. She wondered how many times over the spider had seen its own web destroyed, and how many times it had simply begun to reweave. Ten? Twenty? One hundred?
She wondered if Pete was okay, and if he’d made it backto civilization, whatever that meant. She wondered if he’d managed to convince anyone of the truth, or whether he’d been shunted off into some psychiatric hospital.
She had no idea what time it was, only that it had been hours since the voices had gone, and so far they hadn’t come back.
