FOURTEEN
The Ruins of Coronation Avenue,
London
Monday, 14th October 1940
GRACE SPEAKS
Ilay there, listening to Matilda die, and couldn’t do anything for her. I should have been able to do something: ease her pain, move some of the rubble, still her breathing into the relief of death if that was what she wanted. I should have been able to do that for myself.
But I couldn’t do a thing. The rubble not only trapped me physically, but crushed and trapped most of the Darkwitch and labyrinthine powers I had as well. I had enough to dredge some light out of the single diamond band that was free, but that was all, and I wondered if that was not my power, but something residual of Jack in the diamonds. Even that died, after an hour or two, and we were left in the dark.
So I lay there and listened to Matilda die. I could hear her anguish in every breath: each harsh inhalation, each ragged exhalation. I could hear it in the way she cried sometimes, or the pitifully tiny movements I heard her head make as she struggled uselessly against the weight of the rubble about her. I kept calling her name. It annoyed her, I know, but oh, gods, I so desperately wanted to hear her voice, to know that she was still alive.
To know she was still with me.
I couldn’t bear to think of what lay even further beneath us in the basement shelter. Ecub and Erith were dead. Truly dead. Gone forever, and both Matilda and I cried for them. But there were others, and in the first hours after the bomb blast, they were still alive. I knew, because at first I could hear pitiful cries for help coming from below us, or desperate scratchings at the rubble.
Oh, the image, those trapped people scratching away with broken fingernails at the bricks atop them.
I could also hear the trickling of water and, after some time (how long? Hours? Days?) the unmistakeable stench of sewage.
All the cries for help below us gradually ceased, and I no longer heard the pathetic scratchings at the rubble.
When Matilda said her feet were wet I wept, because I knew that somewhere a water pipe had been broken—a sewer, too—and that whoever had been left alive after the blast had now drowned. Now that horror threatened Matilda.
“Matilda?” I whispered. “Matilda?”
She didn’t answer, and after a moment I realised I could no longer hear her ragged breathing.
“Matilda!” I stretched out my fingers, trying to feel her face, thinking only to jab at her cheek and remind her to breathe, but my fingers encountered not dry flesh, but cold, watery rubble.
Matilda had slipped away, down further into the rubble, down, down, down into her grave.
I started to sob, not caring about the pain it caused my chest, calling out Matilda’s name over and over until I could barely breathe.
All about me there was silence, save for the gentle lap of water against my fingers and the gentle grinding of rubble as it settled deeper into the water.
After a while, Catling came to me.