Thyla - Kate Gordon [17]
I wondered if she might tell me what she knew, and if it might be the first clue to finding Cat.
I also wondered about the pair of shiny brown hiking boots sitting neatly side by side beside Rhiannah’s bed. If Rhiannah was on a bushwalk, why hadn’t she taken her boots with her? I pictured her, running through the trees, barefoot and wild. My stomach pulsed with yearning.
It was too hot in the room. It was like the hospital – heated far too well, though nobody else ever seemed to notice. I was sweating.
I looked over at the window on Rhiannah’s side of the room. The crack in the dark-red curtain gifted me a beguiling glimpse of the cool night sky. I felt the hairs on my back stand up; my pulse quicken. I wanted to jump out. I wanted to run through the playground, through the sporting fields, through the high metal gates and away, into the bush that surrounded Cascade Falls, into the trees and moss and bracken and dirt and rocks and wild water.
I padded across the room and perched on the corner of Rhiannah’s armchair. I pressed my hand against the window. It was cool to my touch.
I opened it just a little bit, and then turned the latch backwards to lock it. I didn’t want my instincts to take over my logic; to allow my body to follow my longing to push the window wide open and leap. I knew my instincts to be powerful. In the days since I had been rescued I had, many times, felt compelled to do things my brain told me were illogical or even dangerous. I remembered biting the nurse. I remembered the fire that sometimes smouldered in my belly, crackling and simmering, making me want to run away from the hospital and into the wilderness. I knew I was capable of madness. I didn’t want it to compel me out of the window.
Despite my initial misgivings, I liked my room, my school, my new life.
I didn’t want to leave.
But the night air was intoxicating.
I breathed it in and it seemed to fill not only my nostrils but my entire body, from my scalp right down to my toes. It smelled of wet grass and bark and dirt and something else. Something without words. Something wild.
I wanted to roll in the dirt. I wanted to hurtle through the trees. I wanted to sniff things.
I wondered if the other girls felt these urges, or if they were unique to me. I could not imagine Charlotte Lord wishing to leap out of a window. I wondered if the old me – the one before my accident – would have just leapt without thinking.
My body pulsed and shuddered and I willed it to still. Something told me I needed to control myself if I was to fit in here at Cascade Falls.
And if I was to find Cat.
A voice whispered inside my mind. Howl, it hissed. Bay. Growl.
‘No,’ I whispered out loud. ‘I am in control.’
The words felt familiar, like a mantra or a hymn. I was certain I had said them before. But what had I needed to control? This same burning, fevered desire to break out? What had I been trapped in before? What was I trapped in now?
I stretched out my fingers against the glass and allowed my eyes to blur. It seemed like my hand was part of the sky. Then, as I watched, half-squinting, my fingernails seemed to lengthen, my fingers curled up …
Like paws. I gasped, blinking quickly, and looked closely at my fingers. They were normal. An eerie, unsettled feeling remained.
I looked up at the sky, letting it soothe me. It was beautiful. I couldn’t see much of it above the high stone walls, but it was enough. The stars were like glimmering specks of sand, and the moon was almost full. It looked like an apple that had been peeled on only one side.
‘Hello, moon,’ I whispered, and my words flew out on the night air and up into the sky.
I didn’t sleep very much that first night, but when I did, I dreamed again one of my odd, unsettling dreams.
I was floating in the sky overlooking a large building in the middle of a wide, green valley guarded by craggy hills.
As I slowly drifted down towards it, I saw that nestled in the valley was a thin snake of buildings coiling around flat, muddy courtyards. The courtyards reminded me of the yard out the front