Vall walked down the narrow, spiralling steps. The Governor of Tremallan followed behind her. Shafts of light were let in through long, thin holes bored into the thick outer walls of the fortress. After some time, the stairs gave way to a passage lit by torches whose elongated, unflickering flames were sucked into soot-stained cracks in the stone above them. They had hardly gone thirty paces before Laostic indicated with a grunt that she was to take the passage to her left, which went straight ahead at a gentle slant.
Before long, the torches were replaced by boreholes and daylight again, and the floor flattened back out into a short, straight corridor. A vertical window was cut into the wall in front of them, through which the sea could dimly be made out through the sun’s glare, and the wall to their left was replaced by iron bars. Laostic stopped there and, beckoning Vall over, murmured into her ear.
“Go in and talk to the boy inside. There’s nothing in particular you have to do or find out – just get a sense of his situation. Enough to be able to describe it, and answer questions. If he asks what you’re doing there… To be honest, just tell him the truth: you were sent in to get to know him. Or just say whatever you think will keep him calm. Whatever he’ll accept. Don’t think too much about it. Just go in when you’re ready. It’s unlocked.”
Without showing her bemusement on her face, Vall advanced to the iron gate and swung it open with a mild creak. It was a strange arrangement – fine rugs and wooden furniture on the bare, mortared stones of a prison cell. Long, wide windows had been cut out of the wall all along the longest side, facing the sea. The panes of old-fashioned crown-glass would have looked more at home as the front door window of a small country manor. The whorls left in their centre by the glassblower’s pipe caught the sunlight and twisted it into curling streaks along the walls and ceiling. Under the burnt lavender incense, the smell of faded bleach still lingered.
There was a desk with a few leather-bound books piled on it and crumpled, ink-stained scraps of paper strewn all around. The bed was heaped with covers. To her right as she entered, a young man in dark green and light brown suede leaned manacled to the wall, his chin collapsed into his chest, face turned somberly to his right and knees leaning together to his left.
Vall stood facing him for a few moments, like a fox who has spotted a walker looking at it down a country lane. When he did not stir, she sidled over to the desk and picked up some of the crumpled sheets of paper on the floor. Some of it was illegible, deranged scrawl. But some of it flowed elegantly in neat, cursive script.
Part of me watches from a tower ten miles high, while below, the township of my mind erupts into civil war.
On a different sheet:
Have I been blind? Have I been lost inside myself and my own mind? Hypnotized, mesmerised, by what my eyes have seen and my soul been unable to digest?
On a third:
Help. Help. Help me. Help. Help. Help. Who are you asking for help from, you fool? There’s no one else here. And even if there were, who could save you from your own fractured self?
help help help help help help help – Fuck me, I would kill you if I could
And scratched on the reverse:
There’s no solution. That much at least is clear. Death, perhaps. Maybe someone could be induced to kill me. Death is the only hope. Necessarily. Anything else would be part of the same problem. But there’s a small chance that death might spell an end.
“Who are you?”
Vall smoothed out the papers and, stacking them on the desk, turned back to look at the boy chained to the wall. She noticed now that the manacles were lined with fur on the inside.
“A sailor,” she replied. “First mate on the Verity. Just arrived back in port this morning.”
He finally raised his head to look at her. Vall studied his features calmly and carefully. He was extremely beautiful, with exactly the sort of troubled, serious, noble, and sheltered air that meant he would react angrily if treated any differently for it. He was relatively well-kempt – clean-shaven, though his hair was roughly cut quite short. A shame, considering how glossy a shade of shining auburn he possessed.
“That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
Vall hardly hesitated.
“I’m not too sure what I’m doing here myself. I was just told to keep you company for a while.”
The youth let out a mirthless chuckle.
“So I’m so lost at sea that they’ve resorted to sending mariners my way now. He really must be clutching at straws. What’s next – mermaids? Well then, sailor. Do you have any sea stories to tell?”
“Plenty.”
“Give us one, then.”
She rested her weight on the desk and crossed her arms, looking out through the windows for inspiration.
“Got swallowed by a whale once.”
A full minute passed.
“…well? What happened?”
“Got spat back out.”
“Is that it?”
“Just about.” She thought about it for a while longer, and then added: “Had to have a bath. I stunk.”
“You’re really not very good at telling stories, are you?”
“I get that a lot.”
The youth merely stared at her after that. She stared right back.
To his surprise, the steadiness of her unblinking gaze discomfited him. He had, for some reason, assumed that, after all that he had suffered, others would have difficulty looking him in the eye. But she was just like an animal, with no trace of self-consciousness or shame. He started to blush – and when he looked away, he suddenly remembered.
A sick feeling started to spread out from his stomach. The idea of being seen right now became repulsive to him.
“I’m tired. Go away, please.”
Vall froze. What was she supposed to do now? She hadn’t found anything out yet. In fact, until he had spoken just then, she had entirely forgotten what she had come here for, and was just enjoying looking at his face. Had she made him uncomfortable? That wasn’t even in question – obviously she had.
“I said go away.”
A few minutes passed, and somewhere in and amongst the windswept, tide-towed waves which swept around and through and pulled him under, the thought came to him that he hadn’t heard her leave. With a fevered effort – like someone bedridden with illness attempting to stand up – he opened his eyes.
She wasn’t leaning on the desk anymore. Had he imagined her entirely? Frantically he scanned the room – from the wrought-iron bars on his left to the seascape on his right – and had to look twice at the spot before he noticed her seated under the long window, knees hugged to her chest and eyes covered by her palms.
The sight was so unexpected that it shocked him clear of the confusion for a few moments.
“What on earth are you doing down there?”
“I don’t know, sir. I panicked, sir.”
“Sir?”
“I guess what I meant to say was ‘sorry’.”
“Why are you covering your eyes like that?”
“I thought you didn’t want to be looked at. See – I don’t mean any trouble. So please just let me stay here a while longer.”
“I’m not feeling well. I don’t want a complete stranger skulking about the place while…” he trailed off.
“What’s wrong? Maybe I can help.”
“You can’t. No one can.”
“I might. I got swallowed by a whale once, you know. That was really, really dark and confusing, and scary and disgusting. And, well – sort of topsy-turvy.”
“Please stop.”
“Yes, sir. I mean – sorry.”
“…I meant to say: ‘please go away immediately’.”
“I don’t want to.” There was silence for a minute. Then she continued. “Anyway. The whole point of the whale thing was to say that maybe I can understand, just a little bit, some of what–”
“Oh for Heaven’s sake, will you please stop covering your eyes like that? It’s extremely silly.”
“Oh. Right. Alright then.”
She put her hands by her side once more, and when she looked toward him, he felt something in him tighten, and something else loosen, before she turned away and studiously observed the rays of the sun filtering through the iron bars and glowing against the sandstone wall beyond it.
“There’s no point telling you. I’ll just get worked up again, for nothing. What could you do? You’re stuck in it as well. And besides. Even if it helps – even if we find a stable point in the centre of the cord we tie between us, though we swing untethered to anything else… you’ll get up soon, and leave, and I’ll be adrift again. Only worse, because it will be even more lonely, and I shall be left with that much less time to find a truly stable anchor.”
Vall couldn’t help looking at him again as he said this. Each word was delivered as if wriggling to the surface of the water to breathe – even if he was only mumbling it toward the floor. She was struck by how deeply, how earnestly he wished, despite the hopelessness, to make himself understood. In that moment, all thought of the Governor’s mission fell away. She found she genuinely wanted to help this unfortunate young man.
“That’s fair enough. Maybe talking to me won’t help you. But it probably won’t waste time. If you’re lost, not sure where to go, then there’s not much good you’d be doing by yourself anyway. If you try and explain it to me, though, it might get clearer. And then you’ll have a better idea of what to do when I’m gone.”
That only seemed to make him crumple into himself even further.
“…but I…I’d just be dragging you into it, too…”
“You said I was stuck in it already. If I’m in danger, I’d rather know what I’m up against.”
“But that’s just the thing! Knowing doesn’t make it better! Knowing the problem is the problem itself! The only safety is never having noticed. So, please. Let me just deal with it alone.”
“I don’t want to.”
The nausea seemed to drain from him, leaving only a wan resignation.
“But… I’ve been through this so many times. I… I can’t go through it all over again, from the beginning…”
“You’ve never been through it with me. I still have no idea what’s going on. And I’m here now. And I want to understand what you’re going through.”
He looked over to her, and saw the same thing Laostic had, back in the study. Despite the agony he was in, something about it seemed precious to him. He nodded.
“I… I’ll try. But, where to even–”
“Just start anywhere. Start with the first thing you think of — or see or hear or feel right now. And then you can go back to explain anything you need to explain.”
“But, see, that’s just the thing. You said that you’re here now. But what does that even mean? You walked in a few minutes ago – correct? And you were standing by the desk.”
“I was.”
“Well, where are those moments now? At the time, you fooled yourself into thinking it was normal, safe… only because you weren’t paying attention to the fact that the moment was on the brink of annihilation. But now, those moments are gone, and the only way we can get to them is by bringing them back in our minds. And the moment we try to find them there, we’re lost. Where is a memory? Is it forward, back, to the left? It’s absolutely nowhere – you can’t find where it is or where it comes from. And if you keep looking, you go in loops, or you notice the memories start to morph – become different every time. And you see the gaps in them – how you don’t have anything complete to work with, just chunks floating here and there. And that’s all before you’ll remember that the memories aren’t real. They’re just our own thoughts – they’re not the real world. And that’s the only evidence we have! Because that moment when you really came in and were standing by the desk – that’s gone! And, the problem lies in the fact that this exact moment is in precisely the same position as the one before! Me explaining this to you now is the same as you standing by the desk. It’s immediately gone, and then we can’t make sense of any of it. We face annihilation, not dying in some distant old age, but right now!”
“…I see.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I think so. The past is gone. The present will immediately be gone too. We thought we were on solid ground, but it’s actually thin air.”
“That’s right!”
“But I don’t see how that’s a problem.”
“You don’t? What do you mean?”
“I just don’t. And that’s the point, really. I understand what you’re saying. But it hasn’t really changed anything. That’s how things were before you told me. It didn’t bother me then. And it still doesn’t bother me now.”
“But don’t you see what this means? Our dreams fade away with the first rays of morning sunlight, but we think the world we wake to is different. But it isn’t. And when we find our thoughts are just as nebulous and vanishing as our dreams – that they go nowhere, rest on nothing, just trap us until we wake from them – well, then there’s no safe place to return to. No surer ground. Because this moment too immediately transforms into a thought.
“And it’s not just the world! We ourselves happen in time. We’re constantly moving! We can’t freeze ourselves long enough to understand. The moment you ask ‘Why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why did I think that?’, the you that did and said and thought that is gone. So you can’t look under the surface – see what was happening to lead up to it, what its parts are, how to change anything. And even if you were able to freeze that old moment – that just begs the question about this one. Why did you mind choose to stop and try to understand itself, rather than just keep doing things? Why did you look here rather than there? Why did you react this way to what you found? You can never try to find it out, otherwise you’d drop the first question before finding an answer – and after that, you’d be stuck in the same position. Drop the second question to ask why your mind is trying to understand itself trying to understand itself? Open up a fourth…? …why aren’t you saying anything?”
“I thought I shouldn’t just tell you it doesn’t bother me again. I want to understand you – the last thing I want to do is argue with you or make you uncomfortable.”
“No. Umm – don’t worry about that. But, do you truly mean it? You’re not disturbed by any of this? Why?”
Vall shrugged.
“You do know I’m a sailor, right?”
“Yes?”
“I’m at home when everything around me is moving all the time. I feel slightly queasy, the way everything is so… frozen over here. Lifeless. It’s natural to be always flowing with the force of things. You don’t look for a spot where things aren’t moving. What you look for is their rhythm, so you can move with it, not out of time with it. And when you find that rhythm… well, you know. It’s like rocking a baby in its cradle. That’s the most soothing thing.”
“I suppose that… does make some sense.”
A few minutes passed in a silence which could only really be described as a calm verging on cosiness.
“How are you feeling now?” The young man seemed reluctant to reply. “Go on. Just say it.”
“I’m feeling relatively well.”
“So you see – it’s not just cus I’m a sailor. The moments are still disappearing and things. And if you ask yourself why you work this way, you could still go in circles. But now you’re not bothered. So that proves that you don’t have to be bothered by it. Being bothered by it isn’t necessary. It doesn’t have to happen. Which proves it’s at least possible to be alright.”
“But… but that can’t be. It’s always the case… and it’s… horrible… and uncontrollable, and–”
“Look. If what you said is true, then doesn’t it mean that everything depends? There’s nothing fixed. So that means there’s always going to be different responses to things. Drop an empty barrel off a ship and it will float. Drop a metal chain and it will sink… as will a rope, once it has stopped a while on the surface and sucked in some water. A bird will fly off; a dog will drown; a sea turtle would feel the relief of being back in its proper home.
“The sea that seems churning and stormy above becomes peaceful as a summer’s breeze below.
“I would react differently to the same sea as you would; and you’d react differently in the morning and the evening.
“So it’s precisely because what you say is true – that everything is moving all the time, that nothing is fixed – that you won’t always react to it in the same way. You will be able to find peace with it – maybe soon.”
They stayed staring at each other for some time.
“I’m sorry. That’s probably the most I’ve ever talked before.”
“No. …thank you.”
Many minutes later, the young man spoke again.
“But it also means everyone and everything you will ever love will be carried away from you by the current, and disappear. Without exception. Sometimes you’ll blink and it will be gone forever, without even an echo. And sometimes, you’ll watch it dissolve and slip between your fingers as you hold it in your hands.”
There was another long silence before Vall responded.
“Yes. But that’s just sadness, isn’t it? Not fear. Not horror. And not confusion at all. Sadness, you can deal with. Sadness, you were made to deal with. So long as you take it slowly. Hours. Months. Years. Slowly. I think.”
The sunlight coming in from the seaside window moved up the wall and turned into a honeyed gold.
The young man stirred.
“It’s beginning to get late. You should go.”
Vall was uncertain how to respond.
“Before you do, though, let me please try to remember your words. And the way you lived them.” He squinted and shook his head to clear it while Vall slowly nodded. “You didn’t see it as a problem. It didn’t bother you. You were patient, and interested, and straightforward and forthright and brave. You’re a sailor, and the constant motion of the sea is where you feel at home. You just find its rhythm, like a cradle… That’s all while you were sitting there. But you came in through the iron gate, and you stood there watching me. You were by the desk, and then you walked over to the window, and looked out… no. Wait. You were sitting against the wall, underneath the window. You took your hands off your eyes… you were hugging your knees a minute ago, as the light… hold on.”
“Umm… sir?”
“No, wait, wait just a minute…”
“Young sir? I’m not sure–”
But he was mumbling to himself already, and her words did not seem to register.
“It’s alright, it’s alright, I’ve got it. I didn’t actually see you sit down under the window. That’s why I’m getting confused. But you were sitting down, there, under the window, and I was remembering you coming in through the iron gate, looking at me, studying the desk, looking at……. Wait. No. …no, yes, it’s alright. Those were two separate moments. You coming in, looking at me, going to the desk… and then me remembering it, explaining it to you when you were sitting down. Yes, yes, that’s what — wait. Why are you standing now? That isn’t… stop confusing me. Wait… are we still explaining it? Did we move on from that? Are… are you actually still sitting down, and we’re just supposing that, in some future moment, you were to stand up… which is really… really happening… the sitting… looking, in the sitting… the… the standing…”
“Young sir. Please. You’re beginning to get upset. Just deal with the emotion first. And then you’ll be able to think about it clearly. You can do it just fine, I know.”
But he was looking at her from a great distance now, his gaze suspicious and uneven.
“Have you actually already left? When? When did you leave? How long have I been by myself here? Did you even say goodbye? I trusted you! How could you just lea– …no. No, she must have said goodbye… but… but I can’t remember………it’s alright, it’s alright, just go back to the beginning. She came in, she went to the desk, she sat, we talked….. Oh no…. Oh no no no…”
“Kid! Snap out of it! I’m still here now! Just listen to me for a minute! I’m standing right here in front of you!”
His eyes focused again for a moment, but only into a wounded glare.
“I told you this was just going to make it worse! I did! I told you I had been through it so many times! So many times! I couldn’t bear to do it again! I wasn’t ready! But you made me… you made me trust you…”
“Look, kid!! Just…..huh?”
Somehow, the young man had unlocked himself from the manacles, and his face was right up in front of hers, and his hands were gripping at her. But she held back, and didn’t flip him over, because he wasn’t trying to strangle her, just shake her by the shoulders and the lapels of her coat.
“You made me trust you! And now I’ve gotten lost again! And now I’m all alone, and I have to somehow get clear of this, just like I–”
But really — when did he get out from the manacles? Vall blinked, and her brow furrowed in confusion as she saw he was still there, manacled against the wall, writhing and whispering with eyes screwed shut…
No, wait. He was clearly shaking her, his fingers digging into her collarbone, his breath–
But then, there he was – at his desk, scribbling away by candle-light, foot tapping restlessly on the ground, his auburn hair long, so that he had to brush its sweat-soaked strands from his eyes with one hand while the other wrote about the way she looked at him from the ten-mile watch-tower. …ah. It really did look much better long like that. No, wait – why would he be… He was pacing by the window, it was dawn outside, and he was curling forward and grabbing bunches of his hair and pulling at them hard enough to — no! Don’t do that! No…
…no. This couldn’t be. Maybe Vall was seeing double, and imagining him still against the wall while he shook her and shouted in her face. But then, how could she also see behind herself, towards the desk where he was still writing… no, that is, why could she see herself sitting there, under the window, while the sunshine streamed in and he was explaining all of this to her?
Of course, that’s all that’s really happening, she’s just sitting there and he’s explaining… but wait. That wasn’t her at all. It was a serious-looking older man with a beard and battle scars, and he was sitting in an armchair… no, we were behind the desk, and the man sitting in the armchair was a doctor, dressed in black, and speaking in clear, clipped tones, and he had these funny little thin bands of metal around his eyes and ears and… wait, when did that man get in here?
Vall finally snapped back to her senses.
With a cold, dark feeling she had never known before, she finally recognised the danger she was in – and how urgently she needed to escape it.
There wasn’t a second to spare for thought. But… where? Where could she run to that she wouldn’t end up walking in through that gate again, standing there watching him, inspecting the desk, sitting by the wall, covering up her eyes and… covering her eyes and…
She shook her head violently. No! It was happening again! She had to escape… But where? Where could she run to that – …no. No! She couldn’t get stuck there again. She had to escape! She had to escape! She had to– the sea!
Of course! The sea! The sea was the answer. Moving, always moving. Just like a cradle. Because things move, you can fix things. It all depends…
No! Don’t go backwards! The sea! Deep under the surface. Where it’s black and cold and silent. …now! She had to go now.
She flung him off her, bolted to the iron gate, wrenched it open, and sprinted to the large square window at the end of the corridor.
She pulled herself up and flung herself out. The fresh air hit her – salty, clean, and free.
She hit the rocks below with a sickening thud, and her head was ringing agonising white as she tumbled down and the waves washed over her and took her, down, down, down, black, cold, silent, black…
…and she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe in. She was suffocating. His hands were around her neck, digging into the skin, and she couldn’t draw in air, he was strangling her, he was strang–
Vall pulled her hands away from her eyes.
Everything was quiet.
Everything was still.
She was dry. The sunshine was streaming in. She was sitting against the wall, under the window. The whorls in the centre of panes of glass meant the streaks of sunlight on the wall were a bit distorted. And the boy was talking.
“There’s no point telling you. I’ll just get worked up again, for nothing. What could you do? You’re stuck in it as well.”
She blinked, and shook her head to try and clear it.
“…you’ll get up soon, and leave, and I’ll be adrift again. Only worse, because it will be even more lonely, and I shall be left with that much less time to find a truly stable anchor.”
Wait. …wait. …what was…?
“…but I…I’d just be dragging you into it, too…” the young man mumbled.
No. No, this wasn’t right. This wasn’t where… this wasn’t when…
“But that’s just the thing! Knowing doesn’t make it better! Knowing the problem is the problem itself! The only safety is never having noticed. So, please. Let me just deal with it alone.”
“…I don’t want to,” Vall whispered. “…I don’t want to get stuck… get stuck in it…”
But he was already slumping, pale.
“But… I’ve been through this so many times,” he said again. “I… I can’t go through it all over again, from the beginning…”
As those words left his lips, the full horror of the situation finally hit her.
She was stuck. She didn’t know what was going on, and every time she tried to figure it out she realised that things had changed – that she was in a different position asking a different question, and not able to clearly remember what she was trying to figure out.
Everything he had said came back to her now in a completely different light. She had assumed he had been experiencing things the way she was. And for a brief moment, she had talked him into it. But what if things really weren’t quite so clear for you? What if you got lost? What if you got really lost? What if you really didn’t know where… really didn’t know when… And what if you were in pain? What if you were in awful pain? Where would you go? How would you find your way back… where?
Vall looked around herself. She had to stop thinking. She had to get out of her own head. She had to steady herself in her senses. The sunlight on the walls, the desk in front of her… But it couldn’t be. This surely wasn’t real. This was probably a memory. She had thrown herself out the window… wait, that’s impossible. Or was she drowning? Was this just? No, but wasn’t she unable to breathe? Wasn’t it because he was strangling her?
…or had she really looped back to the beginning?
Would she really…? Could she already…? Could she bear to…
She shook her head violently. No. There was no way. She couldn’t. She had to escape. The image of the window at the end of the corridor came back to her. The sea! The sea was the answer. She remembered now.
Without giving herself time to think, she bolted out through the gate, while the boy looked on in shock, and shouted after her, but she ignored him, and turned left, to the ten mile window looming up towards the sea…
She stumbled. Did the window really look like that? Had… hadn’t she done this before? She heard a voice shouting her name. What did it matter, what the window looked like? She put her hands on it, and pulled herself up.
“Vall!”
Once her foot was firmly set on the sill, she shot a quick glance back over her shoulder. Governor Laostic — the man she had been so excited to meet just a few hours ago — was running towards her.
“Vall, stop! You’re confused! Please – just step back from there, and we’ll talk it through–”
She shook her head. There had already been too much talking. If she hesitated, she would get stuck there, sitting under the window, where all of this was really happening… no. No. She had to escape.
She pulled her other foot up onto the stone windowsill, crouched… and jumped out.
It was many, many hours later.
It had taken many, many, many goes around the spinning vortex, but Vall had finally extricated herself from the boy’s nightmares, and was walking back down the underground corridor, away from that den of horror and back towards the study. The torches’ thin flames were still being sucked into the boreholes in the walls. The only noise was the dim crashing of the sea above.
“So. What do you make of it?”
Governor Laostic was with her, and they talked as they walked.
“He’s got it pretty bad, it must be said. I really feel for him.”
“Ever seen the likes of it before?”
She shrugged.
“Well, you get sailors who get their wits scrambled like that. Sometimes after a battle, sometimes after a storm. Sometimes just when they’ve been out at sea too long. But the poor kid really has it pretty bad, it must be said.”
They made it to the end of the corridor which sloped gently downwards and came to the spiral stairway. The torches were gone, and the blowholes in the wall let in long, thin beams of sunlight… or, wait. Wasn’t it night by now? There were no torches on the stairs, and no sunlight streamed in through the blowholes, so it was dark, pitch black… no, wait. Light can’t get in through blowholes anyway. So that meant she was still in the whale. How did she get out of it again? She couldn’t remember…
But, at the end of the day, wasn’t that a good thing? Couldn’t she just stay here, in the dark? Just here, right here, nowhere. This way, she couldn’t get lost.
“Sonj…. Sonj!”
Son…what? That wasn’t her name…
“SONJ!”
The hands gripping her vest were being lifted, and Laostic was pulling the boy off her, and taking him into his arms, and Vall was slumped down on the floor, trying to get up, but her arms kept folding under her.
“Come on, son. Here you go. Here you go. Just put these on again, and you’ll sort yourself out in no time, just like you said…”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I’m so sorry… Oh by whatever holiness there is in anything, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
Laostic was carrying the limp, shivering figure of the boy to the wall, and locking his wrists up again, and Vall was shimmying backwards… no, not towards the window. Towards the desk instead, past the scraps of crumpled, discarded paper. Then Loïc was kneeling down in front of her. She blinked her eyes, and she tried to get her wits about her.
“He’s got it real bad, sir. You… feel sorry for him. Sailors sometimes… storm, or out, lost at… ……I’m sorry, sir. Is it still… still going…”
“Vall. Don’t try to speak for a little while. I’m going to walk you back to the study. You can collect yourself there. But yes. You can rest easy. You should be alright now. Give yourself a few minutes. Take it slow. That’s right, up you get. Just let me lead you for a few minutes, then you’ll…”
She noticed, as they walked out of the room, that the sea window at the end of the corridor was nowhere near wide enough to stand on and…
She bit hard on her lip, and let Loïc lead her through the gently sloping corridor with its unflickering torches.
David Leon 