Then she sees the coat stop on the far edge of the boulder field and she hears the old man’s voice through the rain. ‘What are you waiting for, Molly Hook?’ Longcoat Bob calls. ‘Come!’ And he disappears into the rain.
Molly scrambles over the boulders, her feet repeatedly losing grip in the rain. One rock to the next. Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. She loses her footing and her shins take the brunt of a sharp edge that cuts her and bruises her but does not stop her moving forward, forward, forward behind the sorcerer who placed the curse upon her heart.
The ground beneath her feet slopes up now. A hill of stone that rises for forty, fifty, sixty yards. And at the top of that hill she can see Longcoat Bob through the rain, powering up the slope, Molly’s red rock gripped tightly in his right hand. Violet’s rock.
Molly scrambles up after him. Far, far up the hill she climbs, breathless and rabid and close to something she can’t put her finger on. Close to an answer. Closer to the curse.
And the lightning crashes and the rain buckets down on her brown curls and the wind wants to push her back down the hill. The wind does not want her to know what waits atop this hill. The earth rebels, Sam said. The rain rebels, she thinks. The wind rebels. But Molly keeps pushing forward. Pushing with her legs and feet and with her head and chest down so close to the sandstone beneath her that she’s almost crawling up the hill.
She looks up to find the black of the old man’s coat, but there is nothing to be seen now but rain and grey and rock. Run, Molly, run, she tells herself. Dig, Molly, dig. Dig for your courage. Dig for your strength. Dig for your truth.
And her hands are on her knees when she reaches the crest of the hill, panting for air in the thick rain, and she can see that she is now standing on a flat overhang and this startling formation looks out over the whole of the deep country and the girl and the sorcerer are so high up that Molly wonders if she could see the ocean given a sky that wasn’t so cross with her. And she turns her gaze from the deep country to the old man in the admiral’s frock who kneels before a large, eroded bowl-shaped hollow in the centre of the flat rock.
Wild hair and a wild black coat blowing in the wild wind. He seems possessed by the storm. In Molly’s eyes he is the lightning and all his power comes from the electricity in his right hand, and inside his right hand is a large ball of perfectly rounded granite that he is furiously bashing against Molly’s red rock, which he has placed in the centre of the bowl.
‘What are you doing?’ Molly screams through the rain. Her hair across her face. Her sky-blue dress soaked with rain. The old man strikes and strikes and strikes at the rock and the lightning strikes over him. Molly sees now that he’s trying to crack the red rock. Molly’s rock. Violet’s rock.
‘Stop it!’ she screams. ‘Stop it. You’re going to break it.’
And she rushes towards him at the very moment Longcoat Bob drops the ball of granite and leans back with his right arm held out to stop Molly in her tracks.
‘Watch,’ he says through the rain.
And Molly can see it already. The rock is bleeding. Streams of red leaching from the heart-shaped rock, as if it is dissolving. A work of black magic by Longcoat Bob the sorcerer, a man so powerful he can melt rocks dug out of the dead, the dead who were buried only five feet beneath the earth.
But then Molly sees a glowing in the rock and she knows it for what it is. It is the metal earth. It is the stuff that builds and hardens below the surface. It is the great story the sky and the earth keep hidden underground. An eternal story of time and growth and movement, of secrets buried in the soil.
A loosened outer layer of soft rock, a hard clay at best, is being stripped away by the pelting rain and the truth of the rock’s story is being exposed along with the glowing. More and more red running away, and more and more glowing. Patches of it showing and then whole sides of it showing. A precious metal breaking through hard earth. And Molly’s never seen gold glowing so bright.
The rain builds a pool of water in the hollow and that water has turned red from the colours in the rock’s outer shell. Longcoat Bob runs his hands around the rock and more earth and colour escape from the gold inside. Then Longcoat Bob sets the gold down on the plateau floor and he strikes it hard twice more with the ball of granite, which he wields now with two hands. Then he puts the granite aside and washes the gold again in the bowl and finally he stands up with a nugget of pure gold cupped in his hands. A nugget shaped like a human heart. A heart that’s been bashed and worn down and eroded and aged and forgotten and carried far and proven to be unbreakable.
The rain, the relentless rain, hammering the old man’s face, but it only makes him smile. And he hands the heart of gold to the girl in the sky-blue dress. And he laughs at the driving rain. ‘You carry no curse, Molly Hook,’ he
