The Knife of Never Letting Go

And slide down and over to the edge of the cliff–

The falls straight ahead–

And I get to the edge and I suddenly have to lean back into Viola cuz the drop goes straight down–

She grabs onto my shirt and holds me up–

And the water is smashing down right in front of us to the rocks below–

And the ledge leading under it all is just there–

Needing a jump over emptiness to get to it–

“I didn’t see this part,” I say, Viola grabbing at my waist to keep us from tumbling over.

“TODD HEWITT!”

He’s close, he’s so close–

“Now or never, Todd,” she says in my ear–

And she lets go of me–

And I jump across–

And I’m in the air–

And the edge of the falls is shooting over my head–

And I land–

And I turn–

And she’s jumping after me–

And I grab her and we fall backwards onto the ledge together–

And we lay there breathing–

And listening–

And all we hear for a second is the roar of the water over us now–

And then, faint, against it all–

“TODD HEWITT!”

And he suddenly sounds miles away.

And Viola’s on top of me and I’m breathing heavy into her face and she’s breathing heavy into mine.

And we’re looking in each other’s eyes.

And it’s too loud to hear my Noise.

After a second, she puts her hands on either side of me and pushes herself away. She looks up as she does and her eyes go wide.

I can just hear her say, “Wow.”

I roll away and look up.

Wow.

The ledge is more than just a little ledge. It carries on till it’s back, way back under the waterfall. We’re standing at the beginning of a tunnel with one wall made of rock and another made of pure falling water, roaring past white and clean and so fast it looks almost solid.

“Come on,” I say and head on down the ledge, my shoes slipping and sliding under me. It’s rocky and wet and slimy and we lean as close as we can to the rock side, away from the thundering water.

The noise is just tremendous. All-consuming, like a real thing you could taste and touch.

So loud, Noise is obliterated.

So loud, it’s the quietest I’ve ever felt.

We scramble on down the ledge, under the falls, making our way over rocky bumps and little pools with green goop growing in them. There are roots, too, hanging down from the rocks above, belonging to who knows what kinda plant.

“Do these look like steps to you?” Viola shouts, her voice small in the roar.

“TODD HEWITT!!” we hear from what sounds like a million miles away.

“Is he finding us?” Viola asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think so.”

The cliff face isn’t even and the ledge curves round it as it stretches forward. We’re both soaking wet and the water is cold and it’s not easy grabbing onto the roots to keep our balance.

Then the ledge suddenly drops down and widens out, carved steps becoming more obvious. It’s almost a stairway down.

Someone’s been here before.

We descend, the water thundering inches away from us.

We get to the bottom.

“Whoa,” Viola says behind me and I just know she’s looking up.

The tunnel opens up abruptly and the ledge widens at the same time to become a cavern made of water, the rocks stretching up way over our heads, the falls slamming down past them in a wall curving way out like a moving, living sail, enclosing the wall and the shelf under our feet.

But that’s not the whoa.

“It’s a church,” I say.

It’s a church. Someone has moved or carved rocks into four rows of simple pews with an aisle down the middle, all facing a taller rock, a pulpit, a pulpit with a flat surface which a preacher could stand on and preach with a blazing white wall of water crashing down behind him, the morning sun lighting it up like a sheet of stars, filling the room with shimmering sparkles on every shiny wet surface, all the way back to a carved circle in the stone with two smaller carved circles orbiting it to one side, New World and its moons, the settler’s new home of hope and God’s promise somehow painted a waterproof white and practically glowing on the rock wall, looking down and lighting up the church.

The church underneath a waterfall.

“It’s beautiful,” Viola says.

“It’s abandoned,” I say, cuz after the first shock of finding a church I see where a few of the pews have been knocked from their places and not replaced and there’s writing all over the walls, some of it carved in with tools, some of it written in the same waterproof paint as the New World carving, most of it nonsense. P.M.+M.A. and Willz & Chillz 4Ever and Abandon All Hope Ye Who something something.

“It’s kids,” Viola says. “Sneaking in here, making it their own place.”

“Yeah? Do kids do that?”

“Back on the ship we had an unused venting duct that we snuck into,” she says, looking around. “Marked it up worse than this.”

We wander in, looking round us, mouths open. The point of the roof where the water leaves the cliff must be a good ten metres above us and the ledge five metres wide easy.

“It musta been a natural cavern,” I say. “They musta found it and thought it was some kinda miracle.”

Viola crosses her arms against herself. “And then they found it wasn’t very practical as a church.”

“Too wet,” I say. “Too cold.”

“I’ll bet it was when they first landed,” she says, looking up at the white New World. “I’ll bet it was in the first year. Everything hopeful and new.” She turns round, taking it all in. “Before reality set in.”

I turn slowly, too. I can see exactly what they were thinking. The way the sun hits the falls, turning everything bright white, and it’s so loud and so silent at the same time that even without the pulpit and the pews it would have felt like we’d somehow walked into a church anyway, like it’d be holy even if no man had ever seen it.

And then I notice that at the end of the pews, there’s nothing beyond. It stops and it’s a fifty-metre drop to the rocks below.

So this is where we’re gonna have to wait.

This is where we’re gonna have to hope.

In the church under water.

“Todd Hewitt!” barely drifts in down the tunnel to us.

Viola visibly shivers. “What do we do now?”