Rachel Bennett - The Flood

The warmth didn’t survive for long. By the time she’d slogged along the back street to the other end of town she felt the cold again. A light drizzle flattened her hair and chilled her exposed skin. She pulled up her hood and waded on.

The back lane took her around the main street, because she had no desire to chat to the group who were sandbagging the gardens. She’d wanted to get in and out of town without talking to anyone except Stephanie.

Daniela ground her teeth. Stubborn, awkward Steph. It’d been a pleasant daydream, to imagine her sister would hand over a wad of cash without blinking. She might at least have listened.

Daniela shook the thought away, set her shoulders, and kept walking.

The old family house was a half-mile outside town, along a narrow lane flanked with high hedgerows. As a child, Daniela had walked that road twice a day, every day, since she was old enough to walk. It held a familiarity like nowhere else in the world. Every footstep felt like a journey home. It wasn’t entirely comforting.

The lane rose and fell with the undulations of the land, too slight at normal times to notice, now dotted with tarmac islands that stood proud of the water. In places Daniela was forced to wade. She was careful not to flood her boots again. She also stayed clear of the ditches that edged the road; hidden sinks at least three feet deep.

As she left the village behind, the road wound into the woods. The hedgerows gave way to barbed wire fences. Slender elms and beeches crowded the skyline, their bare branches scratching as they moved with the wind, their roots swamped in mud and water. A rippling breeze scooted fallen leaves across the pools.

At another time, Daniela would’ve abandoned the road, ducking under the fence to follow the hidden pathways of the wood. Part of her yearned to rediscover the secret places where she and her sisters had played as children. The hollows where they’d made dens; the winding streams where they’d fished for minnows. Trees for climbing, root-space burrows, hollow deadwoods …

She paused to light a cigarette. It’s gone . Even if it’s still there, it’s gone. Those places are muddy grot-holes, or piles of branches, or fallen trees. You are definitely too old to grub around in the dirt looking for your misspent youth.

The family home stood in a shallow depression, hidden by trees until the road turned and it was suddenly right there. Daniela had to brace herself before taking those last few steps.

She was prepared for the house to look exactly as she’d left it. She was equally prepared for it to have been modernised and updated beyond recognition. What she hadn’t expected was it to be derelict.

The house was once elegant, with a wide, many-windowed front and arching gables, but neglect had made it slump, like an old lady giving up on life. Its timbers had slouched and its roof was sloughing tiles. The paintwork had peeled and cracked. A broken window was patched with cardboard. The woodpile under the awning had mouldered into a heap of rotting, moss-covered logs.

It didn’t help that rain had flooded the shallow depression, and the house sat in a lake of dirty water.

How did this happen? In Daniela’s memory the old place was alive, awake, with washing lines strung across the garden and toys scattering the front lawn. Now there wasn’t so much as a light in the window or a trail of smoke from the chimney. At some point in the intervening years the old house had died.

She’d thought Stephanie had been evasive about how little the house was worth. Now she saw the truth. No wonder they couldn’t sell the place.

She made her way down to the front gate. It was wedged open by years of rust.

The water was almost a foot deep around the house. Daniela felt her way along the path. Ripples sent reflected light bouncing across the windows. A half-hearted stack of sandbags guarded the front door.

Halfway up the path, Daniela paused to listen. The only sounds came from the wind in the trees and the occasional hoot of a woodpigeon somewhere among the stripped branches.

Daniela reached the front door. A piece of sticky tape across the inoperative doorbell was so old it’d turned opaque and flaky. She leaned over to peer through the sitting-room window. Floodwater had invaded the house as well. The front room was awash, the furniture pushed back against the walls, a few buoyant items floating sluggishly. Obviously the sandbags hadn’t done the trick.

She felt a flush of anger at Auryn. Why hadn’t she made sure the place was watertight before she left? And what about Stephanie? She was right here in town but hadn’t bothered to keep an eye on the house?

The front door was locked. In a village like Stonecrop, people hardly ever locked their houses, except when they went away. But Daniela had kept her key, or rather she had never got rid of it. It was still strung on her keyring like a bad reminder. So long as Auryn hadn’t changed the locks …

She hadn’t. The Yale clicked open. Daniela pushed the door but the water held it closed. She leaned her weight onto the wood and pushed it open a half-inch. It was more than just water behind. More sandbags, possibly. She couldn’t open the door enough to get her foot into the gap.

Giving up, Daniela stepped off the path and made her way around the side of the house. Clouds of muddy water swirled around her wellies. Now she risked not just flooded boots but tripping over the uneven ground into the freezing water. She kicked aside debris with every awkward step.

At the side of the house, the small vegetable garden was now an empty lake. A few tripods of discoloured bamboo canes protruded like totems. Against the far wall, the old beehive was a pile of mushy timbers. Dead leaves sailed like abandoned boats. Eddies of twigs had collected below the window frames. Daniela paused by the window of the utility room next to the kitchen, but the net curtains obscured her view.

There was more neglect at the rear. The back porch lay in a crumpled heap of broken wood and corrugated plastic, as if someone had angrily tossed it aside. The apple tree by the porch was dead. A frayed length of knotted rope still hung from a branch – the makeshift swing that Franklyn and Stephanie had put up.

The back door of the house was also sandbagged. When Daniela tried the handle, she found it locked too. Either that or the door was so tightly wedged it wouldn’t budge. She didn’t have a key. The sash windows on either side were stuck, the wood swollen.

By now she was sick of sploshing around. Despite her best efforts, water had trickled into both boots, and her toes were numb. She was tired and annoyed and already thinking how long it’d take her to get back to the pub.

And, besides all that, a niggle of unease wormed into her stomach. The house felt creepy and abandoned. She felt like an intruder.

She went to the base of the old apple tree that reached up past the roofline. Her eyes automatically traced the route she’d used to climb up and down the trunk a hundred times in her youth. The branches were sturdy and evenly spaced, and it was no more effort to climb than a ladder. Daniela was halfway up before she really stopped to think what she was doing.

The trunk was twisted towards the wall, bringing it close to the window of the old junk room, which Auryn had turned into a separate bedroom for herself when she’d got tired of sharing a space with Daniela. Daniela shimmied along a branch to the window, with only a twinge of vertigo when she glanced down. It’d been a long time since she’d been up a tree. There wasn’t a lot of call for it in adult life.

The window to Auryn’s room was stiff, but, with a certain amount of effort, Daniela slid the wooden sash up.