I can see the slight dent in Nate’s neck where the knife pushes in, a peach about to be sliced, the skin only just protecting the soft tissue beneath. I think I may be sick. ‘Please don’t hurt him, I’ll tell you anything.’
Nate keeps his eyes on me, and I get a strange wrench of sadness. Thorn was your hero, and now you’re going to die at his hand. But Nate doesn’t look sad, he looks determined, clear-headed, his light-brown eyes desperately trying to tell me something. I need to think like Nate. I need to be smart.
‘What do you mean?’ Thorn shouts. ‘Tell me or I’ll slice him like a pig.’
Something slots into place and I don’t feel scared any more. Because I am a diehard Gallows Dance fan, I don’t just know things about Thorn, I know what makes him tick. If anyone can talk their way out of this, it’s me. ‘Ruth . . . you want revenge because of what they did to Ruth. The Imp-girl that you fell in love with when you were young. The Gems hanged her at the Gallows Dance because she had a relationship with a Gem – you.’ I watch Thorn’s grip loosen a little, the blade easing against Nate’s skin. But I don’t stop. ‘You see I know things I shouldn’t, don’t I? Because I’ve read them and I’ve watched them – you’re a Gem. And underneath that eyepatch is another working eye. You just wear the patch to break up the evenness of your features, because you’re ashamed that you’re one of them. And every time you punch a Gem, or scalp a Gem, or kill a Gem, you’re actually trying to kill that part of yourself that you loathe – the Gem part. Because deep down you blame yourself for her death, because if you hadn’t loved her, she would still be alive.’
My words echo around the vast stone chamber, simply refusing to fade.
‘Shit,’ Darren says, the pressure from his rifle easing against my back.
Thorn releases this guttural noise like I’ve punched him in the stomach. He stares at me, his face caught between disbelief and sorrow, tears spilling from his uncovered eye and seeping beneath his eyepatch. He raises his hand, blade glinting in the candlelight. For a heart-stopping moment, I think he’s going to stab Nate in the head.
But instead, he pulls the gag free.
‘Baba!’ Nate screams, like the word was corked up inside him. ‘We need to see Baba.’
Thorn nods. ‘I think perhaps you do.’
I recognize the corridor from the film, stone and tight and sloping downwards, taking us deep into the bowels of the church. Thorn leads the way, stooping slightly to avoid knocking his head on the domed ceiling. Rose walked this very corridor, but unlike me, she had no idea what waited for her behind that wooden door. A faceless precog. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.
‘This is so cool.’ Nate pulses his hands in a quick rhythmic motion, his wrists still red and sore from the recently removed binds. ‘We’re going to meet Baba.’
I silence him with a glare. The way he’s talking, all excited, anyone would think we’re about to meet a celebrity. We follow Thorn into the chamber. It’s just like the film set, but there’s this sense of oppression, the air almost sticky with something sweet and fresh – lily pollen perhaps. And it strikes me as odd that I can smell flowers in a place so lacking in vegetation. I imagine I can see the ghost of Rose walking beside me, about to meet Baba for the first time. I suddenly feel this sense of loss. Rose is dead.
‘Rose is dead?’ a voice says, as though echoing my thoughts.
I know exactly where to find Baba, hunched in the corner like a pile of rags. She lifts her head and I see her. The book described her as having an extra piece of skin stretched across her face, sealing in her eyes and nostrils, and a mouth which is no more than a thin opening, as though long ago a surgeon’s knife wished to hear her words. In the film, she was even worse, like some kind of gruesome, featureless monster. But the woman before me just looks asleep, her heavy lids resting shut. She doesn’t even look that old, maybe the age of my grandma, and her skin looks soft and doughy, like it would retain the indentation of a fingertip if touched. The only real peculiarity is her lack of nostrils, but I only notice that when she tilts her head back.
I hear Nate exhale slowly, clearly disappointed by her more approachable appearance.
‘Such a shame. I liked Rose,’ Baba says.
‘You never met her,’ Thorn says.
She shrugs. ‘OK, well I was going to like her.’
Thorn plumps a cushion and slips it behind her back. ‘Would you like me to see to the fire?’ It’s strange seeing Thorn so attentive only minutes after he held Nate at knifepoint, and it’s this unpredictability which makes him so scary. He’s all smiles and cushion-plumpings one minute, only to swing into psycho-mode the next. He’s the same in canon, only now, of course, the knife is real.
And I think Baba must feel the same; unable to trust his kindness. She waves him away. ‘No, thank you. I can manage myself.’ She turns to me, as though she can somehow make out my shape through her eyelids. Perhaps she can – they’re so paper-thin. ‘Who have you brought me instead, Thorn?’
‘God knows,’ he replies.
She laughs and her eyeballs shift beneath their lids like baby birds wriggling inside their eggs. She reaches a trembling hand towards me, and without thought, I take it. I brace myself for the bolt of pain, the shot of fire transferring through her palm into mine . . . but it never comes.
She smiles, revealing a pair of toothless gums. ‘This flower is little, but she has other qualities. Her name is Violet. Always shrinking, am I right?’
‘You’re right.’ My exact thought as I stood at the front of the class.
Thorn steps forward, and for a moment, I think he may pull my hand from hers, but he settles for clenching his fists. ‘She knows things she couldn’t possibly know. It’s like she’s in my head or something. Is she like you, Baba?’
‘Do you have precognitive abilities? Can you mind blend?’ she asks me.
I shake my head, then realize she can’t see, so I say, ‘No,’ then realize she can probably read my thoughts, so I blush and feel a little silly.
‘And what about you, Nate, any precog talents?’ she asks.
He claps his hands together and uses this fast, excited voice, as though she just gave him a permission slip to speak. ‘Oh my God, you know my name, that’s so cool. And you’re nowhere near as scary as you are in the film, they really got you all wrong.’
Thorn clips him round the back of the head. ‘That’s what the girl kept saying, that she’s from an alternate universe and that we’re living in a book or a film or some bullshit.’
Baba remains composed. ‘Well that is quite simply preposterous, wouldn’t you say?’
Nate snorts. ‘Says the five-hundred-year-old woman with no face.’
Thorn raises his hand to deliver another blow, but Baba intervenes. ‘That’s quite enough, Thorn. Show our guests a little respect. I like them.’
‘They’re responsible for Rose’s death.’ He continues to stare meaningfully at an invisible target on Nate’s head.
‘Yes,’ Baba says, like she’s addressing a child, ‘and when one flower dies, another blooms in its place.’