Marion Lennox - The Doctor’s Rescue Mission

She liked being alone.

No, she thought. She didn’t. Here she was seldom by herself, but alone was a concept that had little to do with people around her.

She liked being by herself for a while. But she didn’t like alone .

Always at the back of her heart was Grady. The life she’d walked away from.

There was no turning back, but her loss of Grady was still an aching grief, shoved away and never allowed to surface. But it was always there.

He’d written her the loveliest letter when Beth had died, saying how much he missed her, offering to take her away for a holiday, offering to organise things in Sydney so she could return, offering everything but himself.

She’d taken the letter up to the top of the lighthouse. There she’d torn it into a thousand pieces and let it blow out to sea.

Enough. Enough of Grady. She hadn’t heard from him for four years.

Concentrate on need.

Surely an earthquake was worth concentrating on.

Two hundred yards down the path she paused. The closer she came to the village the more it looked as if there was no damage at all.

Hubert really did treasure his isolation. The path up to his cottage was little more than a goat track on the side of a steep incline. She could stand here for a moment with the sun on her face, look out at the breathtaking beauty of the ocean beyond the island and wonder how she could ever dream of leaving such a place. It was just beautiful.

The sea wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

She blinked for a moment, thinking her eyes were playing tricks. The tide’s a long way out, she thought inconsequentially, and then she thought, No, it’s a crazy way out. The beach was normally twenty or thirty yards wide but now…the water seemed to have been sucked…

Sucked.

A jangling, dreadful alarm sounded in her head as her eyes swept the horizon. She was suddenly frantic. Her feet were starting to move even as she searched, hoping desperately not to see…

But she saw.

There was a long line of silver, far out. She thought she was imagining it at first-thought it must be the product of dread. Maybe it was the horizon.

Only it wasn’t. It was a faint line beneath the horizon, moving inexorably closer. If it hadn’t been such a calm, still day she might not have seen it at all, for in deep water it was only marginally above the height of a biggish swell, but she was sure… There was a boat far out and she saw it bucket high-unbelievably high-and then disappear behind a wall of water.

No.

The villagers were out of their cottages. She could see them. They were gathering in the street beyond the harbour. They’d be comparing notes about damage from the tremor, fearing more. They wouldn’t be turned toward the sea.

She was running now, racing up the goat path. She’d never moved so fast in her life.

At least she knew what needed to be done. This place had been the graveyard for scores of ships in the years since the first group of Scottish fishermen had built their homes here, and the islanders were geared for urgent warning. The track she was on overlooked the entire island. There were bells up here, set up to make the villagers aware that there was an urgent, life-threatening need. At every curve in the track-every couple of hundred yards-there was a bell, and every island child knew the way to be sent to Coventry for ever was to ring one needlessly.

Morag knew exactly where the closest one was, and her feet had never moved so fast as they did now. Seconds after she’d first heard her own mental alarm bell, she reached the closest warning place and the sound of the huge bell rang out across the island.

This wasn’t a shipwreck. It was the islanders themselves who were in deadly peril.

They’d have to guess what she was warning of. ‘Guess,’ she pleaded. ‘Guess.’

They heard. The islanders gathered in the street stilled. She saw them turn to face her as they registered the sound of the bell.

She was too far away to signal danger. She was too far away for her scream to be heard.

But there were fishermen among the villagers, old heads whose first thoughts went to the sea. They’d see a lone figure far up on the ridge ringing the bell. Surely they’d guess.

Maybe they’d guess?

She stood on the edge of the rocky outcrop and waved her arms, pointing out to sea, screaming soundlessly into the stillness. Guess. Guess.

And someone responded. She saw rather than heard the yell erupting-a scream of warning and of terror as someone figured out what she might be warning them about. Someone had put together the tremor and her warning and they knew what might happen.

Even from so far away, she heard the collective response.

People were yelling for their children. People were grabbing people. People were running. A mass of bodies was hurling off the main street, scrabbling for the side streets that led steeply out of town.

She could see them but she could do nothing except go back to uselessly ringing her damned bell.

People were stumbling, stopping to help, to carry…

‘ No ,’ she was screaming, helpless in the face of the sheer distance between here and the town. ‘Don’t stop. Don’t stop.’

She could see their terror. She felt it with them.

And she could see the smaller and smaller distance between the islanders and the great wash of water bearing down.

‘Run. Run.’

The wall of water was building now as it approached land. It was sucking yet more water up before it. The shore was a barren wasteland of waterless emptiness.

And Morag could do nothing. She could only stand high on the hill and watch the tsunami smash toward the destruction of her people.

There was a soft, growing rumble. Louder…

Then it hit.

She watched in appalled, stupefied fascination as the water reached the shore. There were dull grating sounds as buildings ground together. Sharp reports as power poles snapped. It was a vast front of inrushing water, smashing all before it in a ghastly, slamming tide, the like of which Morag had never begun to imagine.

And there was nothing to do where she stood but watch.

Maybe she could have closed her eyes. She surely didn’t want to see, but for the first awful seconds her eyes stayed open.

She saw the tiny harbour surge, boats pushed up onto the jetty, houses hit, the water almost to their eaves. Dear God, if people were inside…

She saw old Elias Cartwright open his front door just as the water hit-stubborn old Elias who’d consider it beneath his dignity to gather outside with the villagers just because of a mere earth tremor…

The water smashed and that was the last Morag saw of Elias.

It was then that she closed her eyes and she felt herself start to retch.

She kept her eyes closed.

Closed.

This was safe. Here in the dark she could tell herself she was retching for nothing. It was a dream-a nightmare-and soon she’d wake up.

But there was no line separating dream from reality.

The sun was still warm on her face. One of the island goats was nudging her arm in gentle enquiry. The world was just the same.

Only, of course, it wasn’t. When she finally found the courage to open her eyes, the tiny Petrel Island settlement was changed for ever.

The houses nearest the harbour were gone. The harbour itself was a tangle of timber and mud and uprooted trees.

Devastation…

Her first thought flew to Robbie.

She looked upward to Hubert’s place and the old man was staring down at her, her horror reflected in the stock-still stance of the old man. She was two hundred yards away but his yell echoed down the scree with the clarity of a man with twenty-year-old lungs.

‘I’ll take care of the lad. We’ll watch the sea for more. Robbie and I’ll stick with the bell and not leave it.’