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  RAVES FOR FROM DARKNESS

  “From Darkness is deeply romantic, in both senses of the word. It’s moody and atmospheric yet passionate and endearing. This story broke my heart with its fraught relationships and stitched me back together again with its gorgeous words.”

  —Alex Brown, Tor.com

  “A story that takes the reader on an edge-of-your-seat ride through love, loss and redemption.”

  —Mark Smith, bestselling author of The Road To Winter

  “Set in two richly imagined, juxtaposed worlds and cleverly infused with Greek mythology, From Darkness is an atmospheric tale of grief, courage and first love.”

  —Julia Ember, author of The Seafarer’s Kiss and Ruinsong

  “This delicate story combines suspenseful twists with emboldening love, threading miracles out of the bleakest moments.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  “An atmospheric read… The book’s greatest strength is its sense of place; the pine plantation and terrifying sinkholes come vividly to life.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Copyright © 2020 Kate Hazel Hall

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-98-6 (trade)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-945053-73-3 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020939800

  Published by Duet, an imprint of Interlude Press

  www.duetbooks.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and places are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

  Cover and Book Design by CB Messer

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Interlude Press, New York

  For Maya and Kendra

  Contents

  1. Anniversary

  2. The Lost Girl

  3. Old Friends

  4. Strange Tales

  5. A Painted Circle

  6. In the Pines

  7. Missing

  8. A Hole in the Earth

  9. Into the Dark

  10. The Hunter

  11. Walking with the Dead

  12. Mara’s Tale

  13. The Secret Prison

  14. The Trial

  15. Seal Cove

  16. Home

  17. The Waning Moon

  18. Tracks in the Snow

  19. Dark Moon Rising

  20. Spindle

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This novel was written on lands belonging to the Wadawurrung and Gadubanud peoples of the South-West coast of Australia. These lands were never ceded. I acknowledge the continuing connection of the rightful owners to their lands, waterways and cultures, and offer my deepest respect to their elders, past, present and emerging.

  Some readers may find some of the scenes in this book difficult to read. We have compiled a list of content warnings, which can be found at www.interludepress.com/content-warnings

  1. Anniversary

  Ari watched a wave slip through the deep blue channel between the reef and the rock. She dug her thumbnails into the soft pads at the tips of her fingers, one by one. Pointer, Tallman, Ringman, Pinkie. Pointer, Tallman, Ringman, Pinkie. Pointer, Tallman, Ringman. To stop herself, she crossed her arms and tucked her hands away. What if she didn’t have the guts to do it? “Of course I’m going to do it,” Ari told herself. Her voice sounded squeaky against the deep hum of the sea.

  As she stepped cautiously over the sharp bits of the reef, Ari glanced over her shoulder at the empty beach, then checked the two headlands and finally the horizon. The beach was called Seal Cove and it was deserted. It was too early in the morning for tourists, and fishing boats never came close to shore in the rising swell: perfect conditions for an anniversary swim. Ari’s feet sank into the slick sponginess of sea lettuce and slid on the tight green beads of Neptune’s necklace. Despite the summer heat, the seawater was freezing, and Ari tried not to think about how icy it would be when she plunged in.

  “It’s too cold!”

  “Baby.”

  “All right then, I’ll show you.”

  Laughing, Ari watched Alex pull her dress over her head and throw it down, furiously, on the reef. When Alex got cross, she sometimes did silly things, but Ari knew her friend would swim the channel now. Dare or no dare, she would do it just to prove that she wasn’t a baby.

  “Well, come on then, Ari. This was your idea.”

  Alex was poised on the edge of the reef: a tall, skinny, black-haired girl in a faded olive-green swimsuit. The ocean glittered under the midday sun. Waves ambushed the rocks and turned Alex’s ankles white with spray. Ari slipped off her singlet and jeans and stuffed them into her backpack, where she also had a towel, a plastic drink bottle full of lemon soda, and some sandwiches for after their swim.

  “Hurry up, Ari, the tide’s coming in!”

  Looking past Alex at the waves crashing on the edges of the reef, Ari saw that she was right. A nagging little voice inside her whispered: it’s already way too high, but she ignored it and picked her way carefully over the rocks to join Alex, who was making funny faces at Ari and windmills with her arms.

  “Are you ready, Your Highness?” Alex gestured dramatically at the grim, gray rock surrounded by swirling water about twenty yards off the reef. “Danger Island and the Cave of Sorcery await us.”

  Ari gave her warrior salute, and they dived together, into the cold, inky channel.

  Alone on the edge of the reef, Ari closed her eyes, remembering. At nine and eleven, she and Alex had been too old, really, to still be playing princesses and warriors. Alex’s parents were worried that their almost-teenage girl was still hunting imaginary dragons in the pine plantation. Cass, Ari’s mother, didn’t mind the make-believe, but she agreed that Alex and Ari should be encouraged to do other, more normal, things. Beth and Nate decided that Alex should join the netball club with the local girls, and Ari was offered a pony and a future of Saturdays filled with pony club meetings and gymkhanas. But Alex hated netball, and Ari only wanted to ride her mother’s rescue Clydesdales. She loved their gentleness and their shaggy feet and she thought that their great, patient strength made them closer to the heroic steeds of legend than any well-bred, pampered pony. Ari and Alex were happiest when they were together, playing warrior queens, dressing up, dressing the horses up, fighting dragons, and shutting out everything but the world that belonged only to them. Eventually, their parents gave up and left them alone, and so the mermaids and sea monsters of Seal Cove flourished where they might have become extinct.

  Ari had vague memories, assisted by photos and her mother’s recollections, of Alex towing her around in a homemade wagon when she was tiny, of trips to the wildlife park and the movies in Port August, and of a playground with a rusty metal roundabout that always made her feel sick. She remembered climbing trees and falling out of them, and Alex holding her hand while one of their mothers tortured her with Dettol. But she had much clearer memories from when they were older: ordinary, school holiday memories, like swinging on the old tire under the ghost gum near the beach, riding their bikes along the hot, dusty orange road to the camping area to buy ice creams from the kiosk, or running squealing with a bunch of other kids through the sprinklers on the Stonehaven football field. She remembered playing cards with Alex in the cargo bed of Beth’s rusty old pickup while their mothers did the kind of grocery shopping that meant they wouldn’t have to drive back into town for weeks. If the girls behaved themselves in town, they got to travel all the way home in the back of the pickup. And there were the long summer days spent swimming, and exploring rock pools, and trying to build rafts out of driftwood. Ari had a hoard of perfect moments with Alex and she kept them carefully in her memory so that they would always be there.

  But it was their private world, the place only they shared, that she remembered most of all. On the long, winding bus trips to school on foggy winter mornings, Alex and Ari would sit together, heads bent over Alex’s sketchbook as she drew mountain ranges and rivers, immense deserts and dark, dangerous forests, while Ari made up the people, animals, and magical beings that populated these wondrous landscapes. The other girls stopped trying to include them in their groups after a while, and Ari and Alex didn’t care. They were inseparable, and the rest of the world was irrelevant.

  The water was cold, and the current much stronger than Ari had thought it would be. Alex surfaced beside her, and they began to swim, cresting small waves like seals and paddling strongly down them. The undertow tugged at their legs, but they were both good swimmers. Alex wasn’t quite as good as Ari, and Ari knew that this bothered her friend more than she would have admitted. Being two years older meant that Alex was superior in many respects. She could run faster and lift heavier things. But swimming was something Ari did better than most people. Every year, she won all the races at the school swimming carnival and infuriated the sports teacher by refusing to compete in inter-school swimming competitions.

  For Ari, the public pool, that over-chlorinated aqua lozenge next to the Stonehaven tennis court, was something she swam in because she had to. But the ocean, that was home. She had trained herself to hold her breath for well over two minutes, just so that she coul
d stay underwater longer in the cool, buoyant stillness of the sea. Down there, in the silence, Ari would swim like a dolphin or a mermaid: arms folded back against her sides, moving her legs together so that her body rippled through the water. Her favorite time to be underwater was on sunny days when the sea was still and quiet. On those days, the water was so clear that swimming was a kind of flying, and the sun-dappled sand of the ocean floor became a continent, with its own mountain ranges, deep valleys, and tall dark forests of kelp. Ari would gaze down at this strange and beautiful land from a great height, then plummet gannet-like to the bottom, just for the thrill and the unbounded joy of swimming in deep water.

  Ari knew that Alex was secretly afraid of swimming out of her depth. But because she was two years older, because she hated to be beaten at anything, and, mostly, because she couldn’t deny Ari anything, on the day of their Danger Island swim Alex paddled strongly through the waves beside her, and Ari could see her friend making an effort to keep her gaze fixed on the surface of the water. The channel was much wider and the rock much farther away than it had seemed from the reef. Ari claimed it was less than twenty yards, “not even as long as the swimming pool,” but it was clear that Alex had her doubts about this estimate. In any case, the waves and the sweeping current made swimming much harder and much more tiring. Finally, though, Danger Island rose, tall and imposing, and they paddled the last few yards and clambered triumphantly onto the slippery rocks at its base.

  “We made it!”

  “Let’s find the cave, quickly.” Ari stood up and gripped the sheer sides of the rock with her fingertips. She suddenly felt anxious about her mother and Beth, who had, of course, told the girls never to dive off the reef, but who had not imagined that their children would ever attempt to swim the treacherous channel between the reef and the rock. And the tide was coming in much quicker than Ari had bargained for. Looking back across the channel, she could already see little waves washing over the long, jagged reef that was their only way back to the shore.

  “I think it’s this way. Come on, Ari, what are you waiting for?” Now that the swim was over, Alex was wildly excited, itching to explore the rock. She scrambled nimbly over the shale stones that lay piled up, like a little gravelly beach, along one side of the rock. Huge Pacific gulls circled silently or perched on top of the rock, and the girls saw bits of bleached driftwood like skeleton fingers poking over the edge. The stones crunched underfoot with twiggy nest scatterings—brittle shells and tiny bones—and the waves slapped against the boulders, clawing the gray shoal with white fingers of foam. Like magic, the cave appeared, a dark hole in the wave-worn face of the rock. Ari and Alex had seen the cave only once, and that was from the deck of Dawso’s fishing boat. Now they were actually standing at its entrance and they high-fived each other, laughing triumphantly, while all around them the sea heaved and fell in surges, like a restless giant breathing.

  Ari put her towel on a dry rock and pulled absently at the straps on her swimsuit. She still wore the faded black one-piece that her mother had bought her for school swimming sports two years earlier, but the swimsuit was getting very threadbare and the straps were uncomfortably tight. The last time she’d dived into this channel, Ari had worn a little girl’s suit, with pale blue and white stripes and a ruffle like a ballet skirt. Seven years ago.

  Seven years ago, she had curled her toes over the edge of this same reef, ready to swim to the island with Alex.

  Seven years ago, two children dived into the ocean from a reef and swam across a notorious undertow to a large rocky island.

  Seven years ago, two children watched from that rock as high tide swept in and buried the reef under six feet of water.

  Seven years ago, two children tried to swim nearly a mile through rough seas to reach the shore.

  Only one child made it.

  2. The Lost Girl

  Ari put both hands flat on the reef’s edge and hauled herself out of the water. The sun warmed her back and shoulders as she sat to catch her breath. The island looked small and insignificant now that she had been there and back once more. Plunging into the sea had been the worst part. Ari had been dreading the dive from the reef into the channel; she’d been afraid that the cold depths would suck her down as they did in her dreams. Some of the drowning dreams, as she secretly called them, were not terrifying at all, but gentle. Lulled by the ocean’s quiet rocking, Ari would find herself able to breathe underwater. In these dreams, Ari wandered calmly along the seabed until a familiar figure appeared, wavy and indistinct, but with its arms stretched out wide to welcome her. Ari would wake up from this kind of dream feeling comforted, or at least untroubled. But then there were the other drowning dreams, and these were horrible ordeals, full of panic and fear and pain.

  The worst nightmare was the one where Alex floated, pale and still, just under the surface of the water. “I’ll get her! I’ll save her,” Ari promised Beth, who ran back and forth along the beach calling for her child. But no matter how far Ari swam or how desperately she reached for her, Alex floated just out of reach. Each time, just as Ari touched the tips of her lifeless fingers, the current snatched her away. In the dream, Ari found herself alone, treading water in an empty ocean, until Beth’s sobs and her own grief became one and she woke, usually to a soaking wet pillow and her mother’s voice calling her name. After Alex’s funeral, the dreams had been particularly bad but, as the years passed, they had become less frequent, until they seemed almost like the memories of nightmares that belonged to somebody else. Living with the guilt was harder. “It wasn’t your fault,” they all said, even Beth and Nate, who had every right to hate her for causing the death of their only child.

  Then, one day, about three years after Alex went missing, Cass came into Ari’s room and held her tightly and told her that Nate had left Beth and gone back to Crete. She had to hold Ari very tightly for a long while after that. Those weeks and months following Nate’s departure were, in a sense, even worse than after Alex’s death, because then Beth began to fade away. She took all the pills the doctor prescribed and she let Cass and Ari look after her; she opened her mouth when they wanted to feed her and lay down obediently when they asked her to sleep. But loss had eaten her from the inside. Beth was taken to the psychiatric ward of a large public nursing home in Port August.

  Ari sometimes thought that it might have been a little easier on Beth and on everyone if they had found Alex’s body. It was the not knowing: that tiny, desperate uncertainty that lingered in the heart, that was hardest to bear. They hid the newspapers from her, but Ari read the headlines on the newsstands outside the general store. Alex wasn’t Alex anymore. She was “Eleven-Year-Old Girl Drowned,” or Stonehaven’s “Local Tragedy.” She was “Alex Cohen Still Missing, Hope Fades.” Helicopters and boats had searched the ocean around Seal Cove for weeks, and Beth and Nate had hired fishermen and charter boats to keep searching for months after that. But they never found any trace of their daughter.

  For years Ari sometimes let herself imagine that Alex had been swept out to sea and picked up by a foreign fishing boat or that she’d been washed ashore on a desert island, just like a story in a book. She learned, as time wore on, to forget these childish fantasies. In the end, loss was loss, with or without a body to prove it.

  Cass tried desperately to convince Ari that Nate’s desertion and Beth’s breakdown were not her fault, just as Alex’s death wasn’t her fault. For Ari, though, guilt multiplied inside her like some ugly and unstoppable weed. She learned, as she grew up, to conceal it so that others, especially the psychologists and grief counselors whose business it was to ferret out such guilt, would think that she had forgiven her nine-year-old self for drowning her best friend and destroying her best friend’s parents. But Ari had come to terms with the truth. The guilt would never go away. Like grief, it might continue to wilt and bury itself deeper inside her, but no amount of self-loathing would erase it. So she lived with it, getting on with the business of being a teenager, which often took so much concentration that it blocked out, sometimes for long stretches of time, the horror and the misery of Alex’s death.