Chapter 26 #3
“Father! Father! I’m getting your father!” Mother’s voice faded.
Eldest climbed blind. Even though the light was growing in intensity with every yard she rose, it rapidly changed from too dark to see to too bright to see.
As she gained height she felt the air change, growing colder, and with a hint of motion to it.
She could see the circle of daylight through her eyelids now, growing closer.
Every limb trembled with fatigue, her filthy fingers bled from torn and split nails, her hip ached, she hung by the thread of her own desire, just a heartbeat from a ruinous fall… but she was so very close.
She was going to make it. She could almost touch the day. They couldn’t stop her now. Not far, just a little—
The fist punched through plaster and paint and sent another brick tumbling. The hand, glimpsed through eyes screwed tight, groped empty air just inches from her stomach. She pressed her back to the chimney wall to put more space between Father’s clutching fingers and her belly.
While Father hissed at the sudden influx of light, Eldest scrambled upwards, loaned strength by this fresh terror. His hand scraped her foot but failed to find purchase. Howling at his miss, Father began to pound the wall, enlarging the hole he’d made.
The burst of panic brought Eldest up to the blinding circle of light.
It had grown as she approached it, but now in the final few yards it had shrunk alarmingly.
The square cross-section of the chimney, barely wide enough for a child, now became a circle defined by a cylinder of blackened clay.
The chimney pot was longer than her arm and hardly wider than her head.
Falling bricks punctuated Father’s unintelligible roaring, her name the only thing she could pick out amid the froth of his rage.
Eldest’s strength, braced only by her feet against the flue’s walls, found no give in the chimney pot. Even at her prime she doubted she could have shifted it without tools and a secure perch.
“Eldest…” Mother’s voice insinuated through a gap in Father’s howls, reaching the length of the flue.
Desperation drove Eldest. With her hands together as if in prayer, she snaked up into the narrow tube, supported only by toenails clutching the gaps where mortar had fallen from between bricks.
Serpentlike, she advanced up the earthenware cylinder, a feat that would have been impossible without her recent starvation.
With her shoulders practically driven into her eyes Eldest wedged herself so tight that she could release her footholds. She drove herself farther up. The end of her escape, trapped in the chimney pot, seemed inevitable.
She breathed soot into a constricted chest, saw nothing save her own tight-pressed limbs, and despaired, but somehow, she wormed her way up by fractions.
When her fingertips found the chimney pot’s edge she advanced a swift hand’s length before running out of room to bend her elbows.
She caught the breeze in her palms now, comically and tragically trapped but close enough to freedom to touch it.
Father’s demolition work below was muffled but constant. Eldest saw his twisted features in her mind’s eye and redoubled her efforts. Probably he’d send up one of her sisters to rope her ankles so he could pull her back down.
Her eyes passed the confining upper edge, having reached it so slowly that the light no longer burned away her vision.
Even with her shoulders out it proved all but impossible to use her arms to help her, bent double as they needed to be to reach the rim beneath her armpits.
The chimney pot chose this moment to start to wobble, beginning to work itself loose from the main shaft below.
Birds farther along the rooftop, perched on the chimneys rising from other rooms, took flight on black wings with raucous cries.
Eldest wriggled furiously. Her imagination painted the very real scenario in which the chimney pot toppled with her inside it and rolled down the roof to dash itself on the ground three storeys below.
Her struggles slowly ejected her as the wobbling grew more substantial, the cracking sounds louder.
“Traitor! Come back!” The voice of one of her sisters not far beneath her, too tight with effort for recognition. “Stop!”
Eldest intensified her efforts, imagination closing fingers around her heel at every moment.
“No! Don’t!” Somehow, she found the breath to shriek her fear.
Her final escape was swift, passing some tipping point where she could wriggle free, albeit at the cost of more skin.
She dropped and would have fallen but for the neighbouring chimney pot, which she grabbed hold of.
With her other hand she steadied the chimney pot she’d emerged from and heaved herself up to stand beside the smokestacks, five of them in a row.
Glancing down the flue she’d escaped, she saw light reflecting in the upturned eyes of whichever sibling had been sent to retrieve her.
Brighter in one than the other. Milk-Eye!
Would the girl choose to escape too or, bound by fear, do their parents’ bidding?
Save for the wind’s cold moan and Milk-Eye’s grunting ascent it was suddenly quiet. The absence of Father’s roaring was worrying. She knew in that instant that he was heading for the street door to gain the roof from the outside.
Eldest tried to ignore the wide-open panorama of rooftops so that it wouldn’t overwhelm her with its half-remembered strangeness.
Other buildings stood all around, closer than she had ever imagined.
People on every side living normal lives almost within touching distance of the private hell she shared with her brothers and sisters.
Close, but none close enough for there to be even a remote chance of jumping the gap.
The grounds surrounding the mansion were thick with overgrown bushes, pierced by a handful of trees. Decisions had to be made swiftly. Escape or die. Capture was not an option.
Eldest peered once more down the chimney pot.
Milk-Eye’s face looked up at her from the flue, almost within reach now.
The girl looked desperate, though whether from fear of falling, fear of failing, or desire to escape, Eldest couldn’t say.
Despite sharing extremes with her sister—her false sister—for years, Eldest didn’t know which way she’d break under such stress and faced with such choices.
Eldest did know that she was too weak to fight off her younger sibling, though.
“Help me…” Milk-Eye’s filthy arm reached up, hand grasping.
Eldest stared with frozen horror. If she took that hand the girl could drag her back down, hold her there at the very least.
She found herself reaching for Milk-Eye, the gap between those stretching fingers and her own already reduced to less than a foot.
In that moment the memory of Strong, broken and crawling for the street door, speared through her again, a physical pain that contracted her muscles, pulling back her hand.
“…sorry…” A gasp. A soft cry of agony. “Sorry,” she muttered again as she withdrew, telling herself again that the girl was not her sister.
Not her blood. A wipe of her hand sent a cloud of soot down to blind the one good eye staring up at her.
A shove sent the loose chimney pot falling, aimed in the opposite direction to the one she planned to take, and in the faint hope it would roll and crash on Father as he emerged.
When the pot broke away it revealed Milk-Eye’s blackened, spluttering face in the flue, now just inches from the open air.
If she’d had the strength, Eldest could have pulled the girl free, out into the world and new possibilities, but fear and weakness stayed her hand.
Eldest ran. Along the ridge towards the East Wing, then veering down across the slates in an unstoppable curving run towards the guttering.
She aimed herself at the tree that grew nearest to the mansion on the far side from the street door.
Fear of the fall didn’t factor at all. Terror of Father’s revenge drove her on.
The roof’s slope gave her speed that her tired legs could not have manufactured. At the last moment she leapt for the branches and shot through the air, arms pinwheeling as the thick foliage devoured her.
The drop didn’t end until the ground hammered the air from her lungs.
Eldest remembered only the sense of falling, the sound of splintering, and the branches’ repeated blows to her body.
She rolled onto her front, drawing air into her wheezing chest, and began to crawl, moving slowly through a thick green jungle that was cold, wet, and sharp.
She hoped that Father would be climbing the mansion’s outer wall to gain the roof, too distracted by the falling chimney to hear her distant encounter with the tree.
As Eldest crawled she tried to erase herself.
She didn’t stop moving, though. Trusting only in what Father had taught her felt…
too trusting. What had been the point of all those nights of pain and fear?
To teach the children to hide themselves.
To terrify them into feats of concentration that might be beyond any less motivated mind.
But would Father truly teach them to hide from him, or could he see through such tricks?
Eldest trusted the cover of the bushes, thorned or not.
On hands and knees, she advanced through brambles, tearing her clothes and her skin.
And when she came to the garden wall, she peered through the leaves to see the black figure of Father prowling the roof ridge, hunting around the chimney stacks.
A thick tree provided the cover she needed to climb the wall unseen.
An oak, she thought, though how she knew that she had no idea.
She dropped down into the street beyond, barefoot, filthy, bloody, and more tired than she had ever been.
But she stood in daylight, and though the sky was leaden, promising only rain, she had never felt more free.