The Valley and the Flood by Rebecca Mahoney (10 best books of all time TXT) 📗

“Right where Sutton meets Chamblys Road, there’s this huge oak tree. Older than anything alive. I guess they didn’t want to tear it down.” There’s nothing to see, ahead or behind us. Nothing to remind me that I’m standing here in the present—nowhere else. “They built the road around it. And everyone knows it’s there. Everyone knows about the tree. And still.”

Cassie makes a small, understanding sound. It echoes.

“If you’re coming from the city, it’s better. If you swerve, you swerve onto the grass. But if you’re coming from the cabin, Chamblys runs across the edge of this retention pond. Pretty shallow. Just not shallow enough.” I take a breath. I count off, so I remember to breathe deep. “I heard they were talking about filling it. I don’t know why it’s easier to fill a pond than to cut down one tree.”

Up ahead, I can see the stairs smooth out into solid floor. Two steps above the landing, I falter. At some point in the past few minutes, the humming had stopped.

“We should stop talking,” I say.

“Agreed,” Cassie breathes. If anything’s there, we want to hear it coming.

The hall ahead is quiet. Cold. I slide my hand along the wall until I feel the light switch, but it doesn’t help much. The shadowed gaps between the overhead lights feel impossibly long.

The posters are more frequent now, reminding us every couple of feet:

don’t look at her.

don’t speak to her.

pretend she’s not there.

in fact, pretend you never saw this.

if you stopped to read this, well then, you’re not paying attention, are you?

Just up ahead, there’s an open door, and beyond it, the hallway opens into a wider space. As we move closer, there’s one more sign, facing us: quiet please. broadcast in progress.

“I don’t suppose you already know what’s in there?” I ask.

“If I did,” she says, “I would have saved us the trip.”

I try to sigh, though I can’t quite get enough air. “Convenient.”

I go first. Cassie looks perfectly happy with that—she hovers by the doorway as I hit the lights. Half of them flicker on, fluttering on and off with a rapid click-click-click, but it’s enough to give me a better look at the broadcasting studio.

The equipment is pale with dust. The microphone, placed triumphantly in the center of the small desk, looks just as abandoned as the rest of it. There’s certainly no sign that someone might have been speaking into it just two nights ago.

There’s just one device that looks clean: a small, boxy tape deck, hooked into the console by a tangled mass of wiring.

“Look at this.” Cassie hits the eject button. The top gently pops open, revealing a tiny gray cassette tape.

I take a step closer. It looks noticeably darker than the rest of the machinery. Newer, though not by much. And I’m not an AV expert, but just going by the sheer number of wires, someone had to try really hard to get whatever’s on that tape to broadcast.

“I don’t think that belongs there,” I say.

“Maybe they recorded one of their shows,” Cassie says, inspecting the cassette before she slides it back in. “Here, listen.”

She hits play, and the recording starts mid-sentence. I only need that half a sentence to know what it is. I only need one syllable.

. . . ere?

I’ve heard her voice so many times in the past few days, you’d think it would’ve lost its edge by now. But hearing it here, wound around that little gray cassette tape, it’s different. And the world runs as cold as it did almost a year ago, when I heard those words for the first time.

Rose, are you there? Rose, are you there? Rose, are you there?

I step closer. Maybe not step. I lunge, I grab for that little dustless box. Cassie catches my hands in midair.

“Wait,” she says.

I mean to say, Let go. What comes out is “Shut it off.”

“Rose, wait a second—”

“Shut it off!” The last word comes out high enough, frantic enough, that for a second I stop. I haven’t heard myself sound like that before. Not out loud.

“Listen to me.” Cassie spins me around by the shoulders and holds me there, looks me in the eyes until I look back at her. “It’s that message, isn’t it? The one you said no one else should have?”

Suddenly, I’m out of words. I nod.

“Then give me a moment,” she says. “I haven’t heard your message, but I can tell you for sure that it’s not what I’m hearing right now.”

She moves away from me then, leans over the tape deck with both palms on the surface of the desk. Her hair is hiding her face, but as she listens to the loop, she’s gone very still.

Rose, are you there? Rose—

The words start mangling, like the tape’s caught on something, and Gaby’s voice distorts until the words are meaningless pops and gasps. I jerk back and away, my body moving quicker than my brain. And then I see it painted on the opposite wall.

I think it’s another poster, at first. But this isn’t a message from our friends at Lotus Valley Community Radio. This is painted right into the concrete: thick, fresh capital letters from floor to ceiling. And those towering words pop in and out of view with the flickering overhead light.

HERE COMES THE FLOOD.

MAY 30, SEVEN MONTHS AGO

NOTE TO SELF: Sammy doesn’t know what insomnia means. He repeats it because he heard you say it once. But for Sammy, insomnia means that his big sister is binge-watching Korean dramas again.

It’s a thick, humid night, hotter still with your brother’s weight against your side. You move the laptop off your legs to catch every bit of breeze from the ceiling fan, and you spot little scrapes across your kneecaps. You’ve got a few on your palms, too, right where they caught the pavement.

It hasn’t happened again since the party. Maybe if you don’t think about it, it won’t