The Sound
Also by Sarah Alderson:
HUNTING LILA
LOSING LILA
FATED
And, available as eBook originals:
TORMENTING LILA
LILA SHORTCUTS
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © 2013 Sarah Alderson
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Sarah Alderson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi
A CIP catalogue copy for this book is available from the British Library.
Pb ISBN: 978-1-47111-573-8
Ebk ISBN: 978-1-47111-574-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For all you fabulous book bloggers out there, who read and review and generally inspire people to pick up books.
I’m running, running blind. Into the dark. Into the woods. Ricocheting off branches, tripping over tangled tree roots, gripping my arm as I stumble on, sobbing. Are those
his footsteps coming after me or is it the wind? A bird? An animal?
I come to a flying halt and crouch down in the dirt, trying to listen. Is he following me? But my breathing is so loud and laboured it’s all I can hear. That and the wild drumming of blood
in my ears. My heart is no longer a caged bird but a dozen bats trying to burst free. I close my eyes and try to sink down into the dark.
My fingers burrow through sandy soil, damp leaves. I want to claw my way deep into the earth, roll beneath the leaves and bury myself. I want to sob and scream and melt and turn to smoke and
vanish. When I open my eyes the world spins, recedes then rushes back in.
‘Ren!’
His voice yells my name. Over and over. Filling my head with the sound of it and tearing apart the night.
I need to stand up. I need to run. But I’m frozen. My back is slammed against a tree. My lungs are beginning to close down. I try to suck in a breath but it gets stuck and all of a sudden
the sky looms darker and larger overhead, the stars fuzzing out of focus and dissolving into the blanket sky.
A crunch.
I shrink back as far as I can, feeling the bark of the tree scratch a bloody trail across my shoulder. I bite my lip, choking off the scream that is fighting to burst out.
He is out there, holding his breath as I hold mine. Ears pricked, eyes scouring the darkness. I can sense him there waiting, just a few feet away, his head tilted as he listens, and I can no
longer balance my weight on the balls of my feet. My knees are going to give, my arms are shaking.
Tears are slipping noiselessly down my cheeks as my eyes dart left and right strafing the darkness. I can’t see anything. It’s pitch black out here. In the distance the roar of the
ocean seems to be calling to me, whispering my name, urging me to make a run towards it.
A twig snaps to my right.
I haul myself to standing in that same second and then I am running, ignoring the shooting pain in my arm and the sting of branches slashing at my face. All I can hear now is a roaring in my
ears.
And behind me, coming closer,
his
breath,
his
footsteps and the heat of him rising like a mist. My feet hit something soft. I’m on the beach. The trees have given way to
sand dunes. The ocean sounds wild and close. If I can only make it there . . . because where else is there to run to? And then suddenly my foot hits something sharp, a rock buried in the sand, and
I’m flying, falling fast, and I land hard, my ankle twisting, and I let out a yell that I try to smother with my other hand. I roll onto my back, kicking at invisible hands. I try to draw my
legs up to my body, to curl into a ball, but my ankle explodes in pain and I can’t move it. And I whimper, not because of the pain but because fear floods my tongue and it’s as foul as
earth and it’s fear which is closing up my throat as surely as his hands sliding around my neck and squeezing.
I want my mum. And I sob her name out loud into the darkness, and over the sound of the ocean roaring I hear his breathing, loud and heavy and excited, coming close.
But the thought of my mum is enough to push back the fear and let the rage in. And I’ve never felt such rage before. It almost cancels out the fear, roaring inside me now as deep as the
ocean.
I start scrabbling desperately for something – anything – to use as a weapon.
My hand sinks into the dune, trying to find the object I tripped on, and my fingers close around a rock, heavy with jagged, sharp edges. I draw it into my lap and sit there clutching it as the
tears stream down my cheeks.
My breathing is coming in little gasps now. I’m struggling to force air down into my lungs – they’re on fire from the inside, smoke-filled and layered with ash. My fingers are
starting to tingle. My lips are going numb.
And then he appears, a dark shape against the sky, and the rock slides out of my hand and falls with a muted thud to the sand. I open my mouth to scream but I can’t because my throat has
squeezed shut and there’s no air left in my lungs.
And the last thing I see, before the darkness drowns me completely, is him.
I’ve never held a baby so when he hands me this squalling red thing I just stare at it.
‘Can you take Braiden?’ he says.
The baby has a name. This doesn’t make holding it any less terrifying. But I reach out and say ‘sure’ and next thing I know I’m holding a baby. And mother of all
surprises, the baby – Braiden – stops crying. He not only stops crying, he reaches for my hair with fat little fists, tugs on a loose strand and gurgles happily at me.
I am holding a baby. I grin. The whole way here on the plane I have been preparing for this moment. The moment where my summer plan of nannying falls apart like a stage set collapsing as the
people I’m nannying for discover that my only experience of children is having been one once (and technically, legally, I suppose, still being one).
But now I’m holding the baby and it’s not screaming and I haven’t dropped it on its head yet and I’m thinking as I bounce him up and down that maybe, just maybe, I can
get away with it so they don’t throw me out and send me back to England on the next flight.
‘See, he loves you,’ the dad says. ‘I’ll be back in just one second.’ And he disappears.
I stare after him in a state of mild panic. It’s one thing to hold a baby and another thing entirely to be left holding the baby.
‘OK, OK, Braiden,’ I start to say in a sing-song voice that I’ve never in my life used before. ‘I can do this, I can do this.’ I drop my voice back to its normal
range. The baby’s face is now scrunching up and going bright red and he’s looking kind of startled. Probably, I think, because his dad has just handed him to a complete stranger and
walked off.
‘He’s doing a number two.’
I turn around. ‘Hey,’ I say to the little girl with red hair who’s just appeared in the doorway. ‘You must be . . .’
‘Brodie,’ she finishes, then points at her brother. ‘He’s doing a number two.’
I glance back at Braiden who is now fist-pumping wildly and thrashing his legs against my stomach. ‘Oh,’ I say, as the stench hits my nostrils.
Nice. I think of how I am going to describe this moment later to Megan. Pooed on by a baby within minutes of arriving. She’d tell me with a wryly arched eyebrow that one way or another I
always get shat on.
‘You need a diaper,’ Brodie informs me, crossing her hands over her chest and squinting up at me.
‘You want to show me where they are?’ I ask, thinking that maybe I can also get her to show me how to change it. Because I don’t have a clue. I should have YouTubed all these
things before I left but for one reason or another I didn’t.
Brodie leads me into a bedroom – belonging to her parents, I assume, because there’s a double bed on top of which are a couple of half-unpacked suitcases, a laptop case, a newspaper
and a stack of folders.
Brodie reaches a freckled arm into a changing bag on the floor and pulls out a stash of diapers, a tub of something that looks alarmingly medical and some baby wipes. She puts them on the bed
and stares at me expectantly.
I clear space, pushing the laptop far, far out of the way and wondering silently if the bed is the right place to do this. The duvet cover is white. It feels like I’m testing fate.
I lay the baby down carefully on top of a plastic mat thing which Brodie has helpfully laid out for me. Braiden blows a bubble out of the side of his mouth. It’s kind of cute. And then I
catch another waft and my eyes water. I do a quick study of his outfit, locate the handily placed poppers and peel it back. There is poo. There is a lot of poo, oozing like mud out of the sides of
his nappy (let’s not call it a diaper) and who knew poo could ever be that consistency? Or that colour? I’m stunned. Too stunned to move.
‘Do you even know what you’re doing?’ Brodie asks, her eyes narrowing at me in a disturbing display of suspicion coming from a four-year-old.
I weigh my answer. ‘No,’ I finally say, glancing quickly at the open door. ‘But if you help me out on this one I will do my very best to make it up to you.’
She studies me like a lawyer and then bounces over to me, grinning. ‘Deal.’
She unsticks the nappy and opens it and we both stagger backwards.
‘You’re cleaning the poop though,’ she says, handing me the wipes.
I wipe and smear and then I wipe some more. Babies’ thighs have all sorts of crevices, I discover. And the instinct I had over not doing this on a white duvet turns out to have been
correct, so I end up trying to wipe up the smears on that too.