Desiccation by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarah Potter
Published: 2015-12-09T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Janet lay down once more, flat on her back on the carpet. It was early evening. Despite the communal psychosis inflicting the school, she felt sane and safe relaxing on the floor of her housemistress’s sitting room. Once, in another life—or that is how it seemed—she had lain relaxing on the cream pile carpet of Miss Clinton’s sitting room.

Miss Dandridge continued to hum, occasionally breaking into song, her voice quavering, slipping minutely between perfect and imperfect pitch, her aged and lax vocal chords juggling with the sound. Janet liked the songs; they reminded her of the ones her grandmother used to sing.

Her mother’s mother had died when Janet was eight, her ashes scattered in a garden on a hill, a rosebush of fat peach-coloured roses planted there in her memory.

Janet had always found notions of heaven too nebulous for her liking, its nebulosity rendered hazier by her family’s unorthodox views, with Mike into his own version of Hinduism, Andy into Jesus Christ the astronaut, and Tilly into Mother Earth. Of course, in the context of recent events, anything now seemed possible.

Quillin existed, Janet supposed. How else had he managed to touch every one of her five senses? He had laid claim to her as her protector, yet made mischief with her. This abstruse hippie pixie explained nothing, yet instinct told her he knew everything. Physically he rated zero—puny, scruffy, and weirder than weird—and yet he promoted strange sexual feelings in her akin to those she’d sometimes experienced on hot summer days, lying in cool grass, her clothes adrift, the sun playing on her bare skin; or during a lazy swim, with sea-water ebbing and flowing between her legs: rhythmic, seductive, the tide her lover.

The word lover conjured up images of another male, too; the one who’d danced magic on a sundial. Even as an unseen force, he both frightened and aroused her in a way that undermined her sanity. She saw him in her dreams and woke up sweating, a-rush with guilt and anger at the perversity of her subconscious, painfully aware that in her sleeper’s landscape she’d felt no revulsion over his swift interchanges with Samantha.

Throughout the day, lessons had passed in a haze. She’d taken notes without listening. She’d carried out experiments without seeing. She’d answered questions without conscious thought, her mind preoccupied with the fantastic rather than the real. The quest for knowledge had always been her main companion. Now, instead of studying with a future in mind, her main aim was survival, one hour at a time, while her deepening bond with the ancient Miss Dandridge confirmed to her their shared imminent end.

Always the sensible person, Janet had considered escaping the school, but an indefinable force kept her there and made it clear to her that leaving would amount to the most selfish evasion of responsibility, as would her calling for help and bringing in scalpel-wielding, test-tube obsessed Government scientists, or, worse still, the army.

She climbed to her feet and tiptoed out into the corridor, leaving Miss Dandridge nodding off in her rocking chair.

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