I'm not very happy with this one ... it seems to change track halfway through and I'm not really sure how that happened. Anyway ... all will be revealed if you jsut stick with me. promise. Don't slate me too bad. Or i may never update. ever. ever again.
ever.
the story: (EVER)
The locket.
It has always been the locket.
I tear it form my neck, horrified. The chain spills into my pain, ripped apart by my fumbling fingers. I can feel the smarting of the chain grooves in the back of my neck.
Do not lay your trust in pretty things, Gemma.
Not Pippa. Not Kartik. Not even a person. The locket.
"Felicity! Ann! Pippa!"
They emerge, glum and grey, their eyes only slightly questioning. They do not care that I am screaming, my voice shrill and panicky. None of us care about anything anymore.
"The locket. That's what she meant. The locket."
"What about it? Who?" Their voices come as a flurry, drowned out by each other, by the incessant burbling of the river and the piercing voices in my own head.
She meant it to trick you they all did they all did Evelyn was evil and so was your mother and now they've trapped you and you will live here and die here and become lifeless and grey and broken here and you will never see the real world again, never see Spence or your father or London at dawn, or taste the spices of India spinning through the hot air and you will never ever see him again.
No.
"We need to leave."
"What?"
"No!"
"Gemma, I was in the middle of something." Of course, this is Fee, frustratingly calm and unruffled as usual.
But not quite unruffled. There are leaves and twigs clinging to her hair, and there is a slight rip in her bodice. I hear the throaty voice of a man through the trees calling for his beloved Fee. I narrow my eyes at her and she stares back. She does not care.
None of them do.
"Gemma, are you alright?"
"Maybe you need to sleep a little, I can magic you a bed and some blankets-"
"Gemma, stop acting like a child, you're just looking for attent-"
"No!"
My voice silences all of them, even the hoarse caller through the trees. I am standing, shaking and glaring, and wondering how they can refuse to take me seriously. Don't I know as much as them? Don't I know more?
"The locket ... it's bad, Evelyn warned me, but I just didn't realise what she meant. And we might be trapped here, we need to return to Spence and destroy the locket and never think of it again, I swear that's what we have to do."
"Never come here again?" Pippa is pouting, petulant and spoilt as always. She deserves what's coming to her, I think for just a fleeting second, and it's like she has read my mind. She recoils, as if I have slapped her, and I realise that the words have spilled from my lips. They are all gazing at me, abhorrent.
Not Felicity. Of course not Felicity. She is smiling at me in her curious way, like she is proud of me, proud of the monster that I have become.
"Pippa, I didn't mean it, I'm sorry-" but she has run from me already, the tears pouring down her cheeks like the sweetest and saddest of rain, and she is slipping and stumbling over wet moss and slimy stones. The man that was lying with Felicity steps into her path, bewildered, and she reaches out and pushed him away, but it is like with her touch her melts away, breaking into a thousand pieces and dissolving back into the magical earth from which he sprung.
"Pippa!" It is not just I this time. We all see where she is headed. The waterfall, the constant stream of magical water that draws you near and holds you captive. This is not what Pippa wants.
I grasp the locket tight in my fist, fly on feet of silver across stepping-stones in the water, and grab at her billowing dress as she leaps for the curtain of water.
"Pippa, no!"
Ann.
She is standing there, plump and plain and dowdy Ann, Ann with her pasty skin and watery eyes and pointed nose, Ann with her stutter and blinking and uncertainty. Ann.
Ann has never been powerful, and she never will be. But there is something about Ann that captures Pippa. Maybe it is her appearance – maybe Pippa secretly yearns to be ugly, so that she will not be leered at and slimed over by balding men twice her age, who all have one thing on their minds and only want our beautiful Pippa to be naked and perfect, writhing in between silk sheets beneath their own portly bulks. They only want her to parade on their arms. They only want her to pretend to love them. To want to show them how she loves them.
We all know how it happens. Rumours swapped between the boldest of girls, snatches of paper with carnal drawings, gossip from the city and listening at the door to your parents dinner party, hearing them discuss such atrocities.
We all know what happens.
Even Pippa.
And it terrifies her.
But she is in my arms, sobbing and sobbing and it doesn't seem like she will ever stop, because she is only sixteen years old and she has to be married in one week's time.
Ann is crying, and I am crying, and Felicity is still standing smiling at me.
And I used to think she was human.