Wither (The Chemical Garden #1) Page 22
Author: Lauren DeStefano

I just manage to grab on to the tree near my window ledge, and that gives me the leverage to fall into a shrub a few feet down. It hurts, but I’m unbroken. I untangle myself and I run, with the house screaming behind me, and the wind a strange shade of gray. Leaves and hair are in my eyes. I don’t care. I run. The clouds are throbbing.

There are sick flashes of white in the sky.

My sense of direction is gone. All I can see is dingy angry air. And there’s so much noise, and it doesn’t get quieter no matter how fast or far I move. Dirt and bits of grass are rising and dancing chaotically as though enchanted.

I don’t know how much time passes, but I hear my name being cried, once and then several times, like gunshots. And this is right about the time I crash into a giant ice cream cone. The golf course. Okay. I can navigate better now that I know where I am.

I don’t know how far the exit is. I have been to every garden, the golf course, the tennis courts, the pool. I’ve even passed the horse stables, which have been abandoned since Rose’s illness. But I’ve never seen an exit.

I press my body against the giant chocolate scoop as branches fly past me. The trees are waving and howling.

The trees! If I could climb one of them, it would be easier to see farther. There has to be a fence or at least a shrub I’ve never seen before. A hidden door. Something.

One step, and I’m shoved back against the scoop. The air is sucked from my lungs. I drop to the ground and try to turn myself away from the wind so I can breathe, but it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere and I’m probably going to die right here.

I turn, gasping, to the storm. I won’t even get to see the world one last time before I die. I will only see Linden’s strange utopia. The spinning windmills. The strange flashing light.

Light. I think my eyes are playing tricks on me, but the light persists. It spins, shooting toward me and then continuing on its circular path. The lighthouse. My very favorite obstacle because it reminds me of the lighthouses off the Manhattan harbor, the light that brings the fishing boats home. It’s still going even in this storm, throwing its light into the trees, and if I can’t escape, I at least want to die beside it, because it’s as close as I can get to home in this awful, awful place.

Walking is impossible now. There are too many things flying, and I actually think I might be blown away. So I crawl, jamming my elbows and toes into the Astroturf of the golf course for traction. I move away from my name being called, away from that ongoing siren, away from a sudden stabbing pain that hits me somewhere. I don’t look to find out what the injury is, but there’s blood. I can taste it. I can feel it pooling and dripping. I only care about not being paralyzed. I can keep moving, and I do, until I’m touching the lighthouse.

Its paint is chipped; the wood is splintered. Even though I’ve reached my goal, there is something about this marvelous little structure that is telling me I’m not ready to die. To keep going. But there’s nowhere to go.

My hands grope for a solution, for a path up to the light.

I am clinging to a ladder. Not the kind that’s meant to be climbed. It’s clearly for decoration, flimsy and nailed to the lighthouse’s side. But it can be climbed, and my body is able to do it, and so I go. Up and up and up.

My hands are bleeding too, now. Something drips into my eye and stings. The air is being sucked out of me again. Up and up and up.

I feel as though I’ve been climbing forever. All night.

All my life. But I make it to the top, and the light greets me by searing into my eyes. I look away from it.

I almost fall.

I’m higher than all the trees.

And I see it, far, far in the distance. Like a whisper.

Like a timid little suggestion. The pointed flower from Gabriel’s handkerchief, constructed into an iron gate.

It is the exit, miles from me.

It is the end of the world.

And I realize what the lighthouse was trying to tell me. That I am not supposed to die today. I am supposed to follow the path it’s lighting for me—like Columbus with his Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria—to the end of the world.

The gate in the distance is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

I’m just starting to climb down when I hear my name again. It’s too loud and too close to ignore this time.

“Rhine!”

Gabriel’s blue eyes and his bright brown hair, and his arms that are so much stronger than Linden’s, are coming toward me. Not all of him, not a whole body, but pieces of him, disappearing and flickering in the wind. I see the fierce, angry red of his open mouth.

“I’m getting out!” I scream. “Come with me! Run away with me!”

But all he says is “Rhine! Rhine!” with increasing desperation, and I don’t think he hears what I’m saying.

He opens his arms, and I don’t understand why. I don’t understand what he’s shouting at me until an incredible pain comes crashing to the back of my head, and I’m falling right into his open arms.

Chapter 12

The air is still. It’s quiet. I can breathe without the wind to steal air from my lungs. It’s sterile and antiseptic. “Don’t,” I say, or try to say. I can’t open my eyes. Vaughn is here. I can feel his presence. I can smell his cold metal scalpel. He’s going to cut me open.

There’s something warm rolling through my blood. I feel my heart beating with loud, intrusive beeps.

He asks if I can open my eyes.

But it’s the smell of tea that truly rouses me. Despite something telling me it’s not right, I think Rowan is here, and he’s waking me for my shift with a cup of Earl Grey. Instead I’m met with Linden’s eager green eyes.

His lips look redder, cut up, bloody. Strange purple welts make spreading circles on his face and throat. My hand is in both of his, and when he squeezes, it hurts.

“Thank goodness,” he says, and hides his face in my shoulder and convulses with a sob. “You’re awake.”

I vomit, and I’m still gagging when the world goes black again.

I open my eyes many, many years later. The wind is still howling like the dead. It pounds against my bedroom window, trying to break in, to steal me away. I look for the lighthouse gleam, but I can’t find it.

Linden is asleep beside me, his head on the same pillow as mine. His breath against my ear, I realize, is the wind that has been howling in my dreams. There’s a slight wheeze to it.

As I lie here, coming back to myself, I realize that no years have passed at all. His face is still smooth and young, though rather bruised, and I’m still wearing his wedding ring, and I’m still in this centuries-old mansion that will never be blown away.

But there are new strange things to observe also.

There’s a needle jabbing into my forearm, and it leads up to a bag of fluid hanging on a metal rack. There’s a monitor steadily relaying the rate of my pulse. Calm, methodical. I try to sit up and there’s pain in each of my ribs, one by one, like a xylophone breaking as it plays.

One of my legs is elevated on some kind of sling.

Linden feels me stir beside him, and he makes muttering sounds as he awakens. I close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. I don’t want to see him. It’s bad enough that I’ll have to see him every day for the rest of my life.

Because no matter where I go or how hard I try, I will always end up right back here.

When I can remain comatose no longer, there’s a constant stream of visitors to my bedroom. Linden is always by my side, fluffing my pillow, working on his designs, and reading library books to me. I find Frankenstein to be unnervingly ironic. Deirdre, Jenna, and Cecily hardly get more than a few seconds with me before Linden tells them I need my rest. Housemaster Vaughn, the doctor, the concerned father-in-law, gives me a repertoire of what I’ve broken or sprained or fractured. “You’ve really done a number on yourself, darling, but you’re in the best possible hands,” he says. In my medicated delirium he has transformed into some kind of talking snake. He tells me I won’t be able to put weight on my left ankle for at least two weeks, and it’s going to hurt to breathe for a while. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I have the rest of my life to lie in this miserable room and recover.

Time has lost all meaning; I don’t know how long I’ve been lying in this bed. I drift in and out of consciousness, and something different awaits me each time I open my eyes. Linden reads to me. My sister wives huddle in the doorway, frowning over my condition; I stare at them until the frowns melt from their faces and their eyes turn black. There’s pain everywhere, and heavy numbness on top of that.

“I must admit, a hurricane is more extreme than an air vent,” Vaughn’s voice is floating over me. I struggle to open my eyes, but all I can make out is a smear of color. His dark slicked-back hair. Something warm rushes through my veins, and I shudder with relief as the pain in my ribs disappears. “Did you know that’s what your dead sister wife tried? The air vents! And she made it all the way down the hall in that air duct before she was discovered. Such a clever little girl she was, and only eleven at the time.”

Rose . . . The word won’t reach my lips.

I feel Vaughn’s papery hands brushing over my forehead, but I can’t open my eyes anymore. His hot breath spirals into my ear with his echoing words. “Of course, who could blame the girl; it was how she was raised. Her parents were colleagues of mine, very well-respected surgeons, in fact. But then they lost their minds. They traveled state to state spreading some crackpot conspir-acy that if we couldn’t find an antidote, there had to be some surviving country out there in that wasteland of water that would help us. They taught her all about the destroyed countries, as though any of that matters.”

Another surge of warmth through my blood. More medicated numbness. What is he injecting me with? I will all of my strength to my eyelids, and I manage to raise them. The room doubles, then materializes just enough for me to see that Linden isn’t beside me, and my sister wives are no longer standing in the doorway.

“Shh, it’s all right,” Vaughn says, and lowers my eyelids with his thumb and index finger. “Listen to my bed-time story. It doesn’t have much of a happy ending, I’m afraid. They toted that girl with them everywhere they went, spouting their nonsense. And do you know what happened to them? A car bomb in a parking garage. And she was orphaned just like that. The world is a dangerous place, isn’t it?”

A bomb. I have heard those in Manhattan, a distant boom! telling me that people have just died. The memory is not something I care to relive, and instinctively I try to move, but whatever courses through my veins has made moving impossible.

“There are people out in that world who don’t want an antidote. People who think the world is ending and it’s best to let the human race die out. And they’ll kill those who try to save us.”