by Ellen Datlow
“Until you get rid of me.”
Normally, Ellie used silence as an invitation; when people were uncomfortable, they said too much too quickly. Now she was falling victim to her own techniques. This whole island felt like one big watchful silence, and she had to be careful not to give herself over to it. “This little one—she’ll be going back on the ferry tomorrow, but I’ll stay on.”
The old woman made a sound that could have been the clearing of phlegm or the uttering of disapproval.
“Maybe we’ll get a few good walks in.”
“Don’t turn your back on the water,” the old woman said. “You’ll want to take care at this time of year. The ocean is… unforgiving.”
* * *
After they collected their key and dropped off a bag in the room, they headed out again. Ellie had asked about the library—noting it was closed—and the innkeeper said if they were curious, they’d find the back door unlocked.
“It’s an honor system, of course,” the innkeeper said, and Ellie said, “Of course.”
The building was small, square, and rowed neatly into sections. The lights buzzed on, one of them flickering. The air had the musty tang of a cellar. They found the children’s section in a corner. Somehow it seemed hard to believe they had one at all. She set up Lyra in a beanbag chair with some Frog and Toad books before searching the stacks.
She found what she was looking for near the rear of the building. A few dust-coated shelves of local history. Some of the books—published by presses she had never heard of—featured photos and illustrations of shipwrecks, fishing boats, trees, gems, birds, and lobsters. They concerned the Maine coastline or the surrounding islands more generally. But some of the older volumes—bound in cracked cloth, a few leather-backed, even a finer vellum—gave her the particulars of Gull Island.
She sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled books down and scribbled what she found in her notebook. Here was a book of recipes on everything from blueberry lattice to fish stew to lamb bake. Here was a ledger that simply listed years of population counts, taxes, goods traded going all the way back to the 1700s, the same family names listed over so many years that today they might as well be one blood. She traced her way back a few decades, looking for births that might match up with her own. Here was one. A Haddie Ragnar. She jotted down the name. And then tried to plug it into Google, but her phone wasn’t picking up a signal inside the brick building.
Here was a book of photographs without any captions or dates. She thumbed through it once, and then again. Boats in the harbor. A pile of lobsters as tall as the frowning man who stood beside it. The construction of the inn. A dead tree on a rise with children standing in a ring around it, holding hands and wearing gull masks. Stone ruins in the woods. A dead seagull with flies crawling all over it. The Witch’s Cauldron. There it was, as if ripped right out of her memory. The ring of stone splashed full of surf resembling nothing so much as a boiling pot. She would find it. Tomorrow.
Her daughter appeared at the end of the aisle, silent and watchful. She was normally so full of questions, but since they arrived on the island, she had gone mostly silent. Her face was slack and her eyes distant. “Are you okay?”
Lyra pulled a curl of hair into her mouth and chewed on it. “I’m okay.”
“Don’t you want to read?”
“I’m bored of reading.”
“Here.” Ellie ripped some pieces of paper out of her notebook and popped the cap off a pen. “Then draw.”
A cold draft bothered her ankles and spiked its way like hoarfrost up her legs and through her body. She gave a shiver and returned to her reading. There was a book—a black book—but she couldn’t read whatever writing was within it. The rough ink characters might be Old English, but she didn’t know for sure. At its center was an illustration that spilled across two pages. At first she thought it was an ocean current—or perhaps the wind—for the way the black tendrils swirled across the paper.
But then she spotted eyes and teeth within it and determined that it might be hair.
Her daughter was scraping the pen back and forth with such speed, soaking the page with so much ink that the paper tore. “What are you doing?” Ellie said. She snatched up the messy scribbles and made out the words Feed the Hag.
“Lyra? Why did you write that?”
The girl’s shoulders rose and fell.
“Did you see Mommy writing that?” Ellie waited only a half-second before raising her voice to a yell. “Answer me!”
* * *
At their room at the inn, wind hissed through the cracks around the window and trembled the curtains. Above the bed hung a painting— framed in drift wood—of a fisherman dragging up his fish-fattened net in a storm. “It’s cold in here,” Lyra said when they closed the door behind them.
Ellie dropped her backpack—heavy with a few books she had borrowed from the library—and cranked up the thermostat, and the baseboard heaters began to tick and glow orange.
“No TV?” Lyra said and opened the drawers of the bureau one by one. “Then what are we supposed to do?”
“Here,” Ellie said and offered her cell phone. “Watch some YouTube videos. You might need to stand by the window for them to load.”
The girl snatched the phone and climbed up onto the bed and pulled the quilt over her. “What are you gonna do?”
“Mommy needs to think,” she said as she entered the bathroom and cranked the hot water to a steaming roar.
There were two mugs on the bureau next to a coffee maker, and she dipped them each under the faucet and stirred in the packets of cocoa. “One for you,” she said, passing it along to Lyra. “And one for me. Don’t spill, okay?”
“Okay,” her daughter said, the glow of the screen on her face.
In the bathroom, Ellie stripped off her clothes and lowered herself slowly into the tub. Wisps of steam danced on the surface of the water. Her skin prickled with the heat. She leaned back and closed her eyes—and remembered.
* * *
The gulls seemed to eddy and surge in the same patterns as the ocean below. Their voices came together into one voice that sounded like crying.
The girl in the yellow dress—Ellie—threw down her blindfold and the wind caught it and swept it out into the Witch’s Cauldron, where it vanished into the frothing crowns of water.
She marched out onto the ring of rock—the width of the walkway only six feet or so, with a perilous drop to either side—toward the girl who had drawn her there. But who was the Hunter and who was the Hunted seemed suddenly confused.
Both of them were crying, their hair knocked about by the wind. “What are you doing?” Ellie yelled. “You could have killed me. What’s wrong with you?”
The nameless girl hunched in on herself, as if expecting a blow. The fog clung to the air like wet cotton. The waves boomed below. The wind whistled all around. Ellie almost didn’t hear her say, “She made me do it.”
“Who?”
The girl spoke in a low voice, as if afraid someone might be listening. “She’s hungry. The island is hungry.”
“Who?” Ellie said. “What are you talking about?”
“The hag,” the girl said. “We have to feed the hag. Or she feeds on us.”
“You just hate the fact that I’m rich and you’re poor,” Ellie said. “You hate the fact that I can leave this place and you’re trapped here.”
Right then the girl slapped Ellie—and Ellie wheeled around and slapped her right back.
And the girl lost her balance and fell.
* * *
The bathwater was growing cold. Ellie lifted her foot and used her toes to grip the knob. The faucet churned out more hot water. But then there came a moan and a sputter as the stream lessened to a dribble and choked off entirely.
Ellie sat up, the water streaming off her chest, and used her hands to fiddle with the knobs. Squeaking them back and forth and back and forth. The faucet visibly shuddered—and then began to expel a yellow and the
n brown and then black trickle of water.
“Old pipes,” she said, but then something else appeared, oozing out, draining slowly into the tub. A thick clotted mess of hair. Barnacled with what looked to be fingernails.
She didn’t realize she was screaming until Lyra hurried into the bathroom, the phone clutched in her hand and blaring cartoons. When she saw the hair spreading its black tendrils through the water, and her mother scrambling back in the slick tub to avoid it, the girl dropped the phone and the screen shattered on the tile floor.
* * *
There was no landline in the room, and the innkeeper didn’t respond when Ellie called down the stairs. She looked over the railing, still wrapped in her towel, and found the reception desk empty, as revealed by the golden glow of a lamp.
Night came early, and the thick darkness beyond the windows could have passed for midnight.
She dressed and threw the gelatinous mess of hair—what felt like seaweed—out the window of the bedroom. She then scrubbed her hands with soap three times over. Her whole body felt unclean.
“You’re mad,” Lyra said. “You’re mad about me sneaking into the car and now you’re mad about the phone too.”
“I’m frustrated. That’s all.”
Lyra buried her head beneath a pillow and Ellie rubbed her back and said, “Hey. How about we get some dinner. I bet that would make us both feel better.”
“Okay.”
Ellie dressed and they went downstairs and walked outside, leaving the front door yawning open, because they could see from here that all the storefronts were dark. So they returned inside and ate a dinner of mushy bananas and stale granola bars while sitting cross-legged on the bed. The phone wouldn’t turn on—and Lyra didn’t pack anything of her own—so Ellie read her a copy of the Atlantic Monthly she had brought along, until eventually they fell asleep in their clothes.
She wasn’t sure what time it was when she awoke, nor was she sure why her pulse was thudding in her ears. She sat upright, her face tipped toward the window. Her dreams still clung to her like cobwebs, but she felt certain a door had closed somewhere, the sound shivering through the inn.
She climbed carefully from the bed, trying not to disturb her daughter’s sleep, and crept to the window, the floorboards cold and creaking beneath her feet. The waves could be heard even through the glass, a shush and boom, shush and boom, as if the island were breathing.
There was nothing at first, just the side yard of the inn, a patch of meager grass. Then a figure appeared below, moving across it. The innkeeper, Ellie was almost certain. But the darkness was so severe—a clinging black that washed away all color and acuity.
Whoever it was, she was heading toward the road. The road that led away from the town and along the shore studded with vacation homes. But before she stepped onto the blacktop, she turned, as if she could sense someone watching. Ellie pulled back from the window with a sharp intake of breath. When she looked again, there was nothing, but it appeared the woman was wearing a mask. With big hollow eyes. And a hooked beak.
* * *
Ellie tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. This was what she had come here for, wasn’t it?
She slipped on her shoes and zipped into her jacket and hesitated over her daughter, wondering if she should wake her and tell her she was going out for a bit. Back at home, she and Ron could be streaming a movie in the next room and no matter how many gunshots or explosions shouted from the screen, Lyra never woke. Ellie was counting on her being such a sound sleeper now.
She locked the door behind her and stepped gingerly down the staircase, cringing at every squeak and moan. Outside, she wished for her phone’s flashlight, but the moon soon cracked through the clouds and offered a silver glow. The waves lulled.
The farther she walked, the farther out the houses were spread. Cottages and cabins mostly, but a few gothic revivals set up on basalt ridges or tucked back in the woods. She had gone nearly a quarter-mile when she saw lights up ahead. The yellow rectangles of windows burning through the dark.
She remembered what the innkeeper had said—about the bigger houses belonging to those who didn’t live here—and this was one of them. A Victorian revival with gables and a turret and many chimneys knifing toward the sky. Inside there were bodies moving. Dozens of them. A holiday party, perhaps.
But when she crept off the road and up the broken-shell driveway, she noticed that several inside wore masks. Gull masks. They were dancing to a music Ellie couldn’t hear, their bodies throbbing and writhing.
One person—she thought it was a man at first, but no, no, it was a woman—wore no shirt. Her chest was scarred over from a double mastectomy. Her skin was yellow where it wasn’t a raised, angry pink. The housekeeper—it must be her—though her face was hidden, masked like the others.
Before Ellie could get any closer, headlights flared down the road and a truck pulled up the driveway. She scrambled off into the brush before she could be spotted.
* * *
Back at the hotel, Ellie keyed open the door, but forgot to try the knob first, so maybe it was already unlocked? Because the bed was empty. The room was empty. The bathroom was empty. The closet was empty.
Lyra was gone. Her daughter was gone.
She called out her name as she wandered the halls and pounded up and down the stairs twice in the bewildering dark. Her shoe caught on the edge of a rug. She banged a hip into a table. She felt like she was breathing too much and not enough.
“Lyra?” she said one last time, and heard a noise then. In the bathroom. Slowly she entered and stepped toward the tub. Nestled in its bottom was her daughter, whispering into the drain.
Ellie scooped her up and said, “Thank God, thank God,” and hugged her hard. The girl complained—“Stop it”—in a sleep-slurred voice.
“What were you doing? Didn’t you hear me when I was calling for you?”
But the girl was not really here, still lost to some dream, and Ellie tucked back into bed. Then she chewed down two pills and climbed under the sheets herself. She wrapped herself around the girl as much for warmth as to hold her in place.
That night Ellie dreamed of gulls pecking her skin down to the bone and a long-haired hag who squatted on her chest and crushed the breath from her lungs as she leaned in for a hungry kiss.
* * *
In the morning, while waiting for the ferry, they walked up and down the wharf, breaking up pieces of bread to throw to the gulls that followed them in a shrieking cloud.
“They like me,” Lyra said, hurling a handful of crumbs into the water, laughing when they gulls dove and fought.
“That’s only because you’re feeding them.” This was said by a hunchbacked man in a buffalo-plaid flannel jacket. “You’ve got to feed them or they’ll turn on you.” He walked to the end of the dock and untied a rope. Hand over hand, he dragged up a netted pot he had left out overnight. He had hair like gray straw. He clamped a pipe between his teeth and puffed smoke that smelled like fried oysters.
The pot oozed and dribbled when pulled from the dark water— hand over hand, six feet, three feet, onto the dock with a clunk. Lyra crouched down to study what was trapped inside and said, “Gross.”
Ellie at first believed them to be crabs or lobsters. But they were something else. Black- and white-shelled. Insectile. One like a crab crossed with a spider, another like a lobster crossed with a centipede. Barbed and terrible. With long mandibles and pulsing stingers.
Lyra said, “Can you eat them?”
“No,” the man said and hoisted one out to show her. With no more effort than it would take to tear apart a sodden piece of paper, he ripped the crustacean open and black and green guts squiggled in his hands. “No, you can’t eat them.” He tossed the mess into the water. “There’s not much to eat during the thin time. But the seasons turn. And the island gives back.”
“Do you know where I could find Haddie Ragnar?” Ellie asked.
“Haddie, you say? Well, you might hav
e already met her. At the inn.”
“How’d you know we were staying at the inn.”
“Fair guess.”
“Haddie is the housekeeper, then?”
“Ah yuh.” The man cleaned out the pot. Then he pulled a plastic bag from his pocket. In it was a chopped-up fish. He used the chunks to bait the pot and kicked it off the dock again.
A boat motored by and Ellie made eye contact with its captain. The man from yesterday. The one the grocery clerk called Thatcher. He stared at her in his passing, and her eyes were the first to drop.
* * *
The wind was picking up. It ripped the spume off the waves and whipped Ellie’s hair across her face when she spoke to the ferry captain directly. She paid him an extra twenty dollars, if he wouldn’t mind watching after the girl, keeping her in the cabin. She would be no trouble. It was only a half-hour passage and Lyra’s father would be waiting to pick her up on the mainland.
She kissed Lyra on the forehead and told her they would finish decorating the tree when she got home, probably tomorrow. Did that sound like fun? The girl nodded, but then dropped her eyes to the floor and asked if she could stay. Please. Please, could she?
“I wish you could,” Ellie said, but the words came clumsily. “I wish that too. But remember? Mommy has to work. So we can have nice presents under the tree.”
“But I’m supposed to stay,” the girl said under her breath.
“You mean you want to stay?”
The girl did not respond, and so, with another kiss to the forehead, Ellie wished her goodbye and headed off.
* * *
The front desk of the inn was empty, but Ellie followed the smell of cigarettes to the door behind it and gave a gentle knock.
“Yeah?” a voice said.
Ellie pushed open the door. She stepped halfway into the room and paused at the sight of the woman with the headscarf. The housekeeper from yesterday. She was sitting at a round table in the kitchen. She smoked a cigarette and ashed its red tip into a coffee mug.