The Deep

by Alma Katsu

  The next thing she knows she is standing, water coursing off her like rain through the downspout, drops hitting the surface of the bathwater so loud that it hurts her ears. Her teeth chatter furiously, her lips numb. How long has she been asleep in the cold water? She could’ve frozen to death.

  And then she sees her reflection in the front of a dispensary cabinet, so mirrorlike that it’s caught soldiers off guard, too, when they rise out of the tub. Only this isn’t her reflection. It’s the reflection of a woman whose face has been all cut up and her hair chopped off like a prisoner or a penitent. An angry young woman with murder in her eyes.

  Annie staggers backward a step, then clambers out of the tub. She is going mad. She must be losing her mind.

  “It’s you,” she whispers. “Lillian.”

  “No,” a voice answers, slightly mocking. “That’s you.”

  The voice is coming from behind her.

  Annie turns to see a specter rising from the bathwater, the figure of a woman that shimmers brightly like morning light on dew. She stands tall, towering over Annie. The sight of her paralyzes Annie, but it resonates with her, too. A dim, old memory skitters through her mind.

  I know you.

  It’s the woman she met on the beach years ago, when she was a child. The dubheasa of her grandmother’s stories. Annie can feel the truth of it rattling her bones.

  “Turn and look at the reflection. You recognize that body, don’t you, Lillian Notting? That is the woman you once were.”

  Staring, Annie reaches to her hair, expecting to find it chopped away, but in her hand is a long, wet twist of strawberry blond.

  It’s not a reflection.

  “I’m here to remind you who you are, and of our Bargain. I’ve been waiting a long time for what you owe me, Lillian Notting, but I’ll wait no more.”

  That horrible pain in her head comes back, a pain to split her skull in two.

  The shimmer gets brighter, so bright that Annie cannot look at it. “That nice body—I gave it to you, don’t you remember? Yours was destroyed. . . . Oh, you did terrible things to it, didn’t you? You wanted to come back, but you needed a new vessel.”

  Annie runs her hands over her naked body. This is her body, the only body she’s ever known. “I’m Annie Hebbley,” she says, more to herself than the spectacle beside her.

  “Sometimes there are problems when you take another body. Sometimes the old spirit doesn’t want to leave. Sometimes the mind is still cluttered with the old life, the old memories. It’s up to you, Lillian Notting. You must take control.”

  The pain gets stronger, more insistent, making it impossible for Annie to think. She shakes her head as though she can shake the pain loose. These aren’t memories; they’re just stories she’s heard from Caroline or Mark, or even quite possibly read once in a book or overheard from a neighbor. It doesn’t matter where they’ve come from: she knows she is not Lillian. That’s impossible. She’s Annie Hebbley. It’s just that she isn’t feeling well.

  Other memories come at her, ones she tries not to acknowledge. From the unhappy times at Ballintoy. She remembers opening an old tin throat lozenge case, filled with tiny white pills that she stole from a sick neighbor. She doesn’t know what the pills are for, only that they are deadly if taken in quantity. In this memory, Annie Hebbley wants to die. There is no future for a ruined woman with a strict father in a small Irish town.

  Not when the father of your baby is a priest.

  But the pills aren’t working the way she thought they would. Annie starts to bleed between her legs and she knows what that means because it happens to the women of her village all too often: she is having a miscarriage. This is the last place she would want this to happen. Not in the house. Her mother and father will see the evidence and they will know their daughter is not a good girl.

  She has no choice but to go down to the beach and wade into the pounding surf, and surrender to the mercy of the sea.

  * * *

  —

  Annie rocks unsteadily on her feet. The shimmering woman in the metal tub has vanished. The scary image reflected in the medicine cabinet is gone, too. Annie is alone, standing in a puddle.

  Is either story she has just seen real? Or are they just stories her mind created to keep her from remembering something worse? She remembers what Dr. Alice Leader had told her on the Titanic: The troubled mind can never know itself. That is the sad truth of madness.

  She is so, so tired of being mad.

  There is only one course of action open to her, as far as she can see. Only one thing she can control.

  The enemy of water is fire. The dubheasa may rule water, but she has no dominion over fire.

  First, Annie puts on a dressing gown, taking one off a stack of military-issued ones for the wounded men. It hangs off her like a horse blanket, but at least it’s dry—so dry that it will, in fact, make good kindling. Then, she searches the cabinets until she finds a box of matches. Her head is pounding so badly she can barely think, but that’s all right. She doesn’t want to think. If she does, she might not go through with what she knows she must.

  Snick, snick. Annie runs the phosphorus match head down the strip of sandpaper on the side of the box. Sparks fly promisingly, but at the last second, the wooden stick breaks in her hand. She tries another. The next one lights but goes out just as quickly. Then more sparks, more broken sticks. Is she gripping too hard? Maybe the matches are damp, gone bad. All gone bad. She doesn’t notice the faint ocean breeze creeping in from under the door that seems to blow out each match right before it ignites.

  Should have died in the fire. The thought moves through her, smoky and dizzying. The fire. The factory fire all those women died in—all but her.

  All but Lillian.

  She looks down at her trembling hands and for a moment, sees not the matchbook but a men’s razor, sharp and gleaming.

  She screams.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  20 November 1916

  Ballintoy, Ireland

  The fine sand from the beach gets everywhere in the house, even in a room that’s not been used in four years, Mrs. Hebbley thinks as she runs a feather duster over a chest of drawers. She’d use a cloth but then the sand would scratch the wood. It’s not fancy furniture, but it is all she’s got, and she knows her husband will not replace it.

  She’s in her daughter’s room. She means to pack away Annie’s things and let two of her sons move in. The youngest, Matthew, has gotten so big that it really is a punishment to make him share one room with his three brothers.

  Finally, the day has come when Theresa Hebbley is ready to let her daughter go.

  The thought makes her heart tighten, like someone is squeezing it. She can still remember the last time she saw her daughter. She’d been in this bed. The girl could’ve been asleep, but a mother knows. It wasn’t sleep. It was the middle of the day. She’d pulled the blanket back to wake her and that was when she saw the terrible things. What kind of pills they were, Theresa Hebbley had no idea. She didn’t believe in modern medicines. They were the devil’s work and here was the proof.

  There had been blood on the sheets, too. Where had the blood come from? There wasn’t a mark on Annie, not a cut, not a bruise. Theresa Hebbley had shaken and slapped her daughter in an attempt to wake her up. But there was no waking her.

  Was she dead? Theresa hadn’t known that day. There was no one home. The boys were out doing odd jobs, and Jonathan was still at work. Theresa had no idea what to do. Run for a neighbor? She had a vague sense of shame—How could she explain how Annie came to be like this? Should she hide the pills?—and hated herself for dithering, for not knowing what to do. Go for the doctor, was her next thought, but the doctor was in Dunseverick, a good hour’s trip on foot.

  She got so flustered, she did what she always did in times of stress and indecision: she went to chu
rch to pray for guidance. Jonathan wasn’t here to tell her what to do, so she would look to God. The church wasn’t so far and so she ran. Down the street, as fast as her feet would carry her. That quiet young priest, still new to their town, Father Desmond, was there, replacing the tapers in all the candelabra, and he asked if there was something troubling her, something he could help with. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him because he was so young—it didn’t seem possible for him to be a priest yet, not a full-fledged one—and she didn’t want to embarrass Annie in front of a stranger.

  Because she knew why her daughter had taken those pills.

  The blood, that much of it—with no cuts or wounds—meant a woman’s weakness and shame.

  She knelt in a pew in front of the altar, closed her eyes, and started reciting the Lord’s Prayer in her head. There was comfort in repeating the familiar words. They helped to steady her heartbeat and slow her breathing. Now her heart didn’t squeeze as badly. And once things slowed, she was pretty sure she heard God speaking to her, and he was telling her to go back home. Her daughter needed her now.

  She ran back down the street, sure her neighbors (if any saw her) thought she had gone mad running back and forth to church so quickly, like she was dropping off a loaf of bread.

  When she got to the gate, she knew the awful truth. She remembers it to this day: the white curtains flapping in the wind, the front door standing ajar. The small footprints in the sand—small like Annie’s—going from the house to the water’s edge.

  Then nothing but sea.

  For four years, this memory has haunted her. She cries every time she remembers, but today she wills herself not to cry. She has always told Jonathan and the boys that Annie isn’t dead, but she has started to allow herself to believe that there is the slimmest possibility that this is not true. She knows she failed her daughter that day and it is time to start admitting as much, and accepting the punishment that goes with it, which is that she’ll never see her daughter again.

  She wishes she knew the father of Annie’s unborn baby, but no one has ever stepped forward. No one has ever come to the door pale faced and hat in hand, asking where Annie has gone off to and whether there might be a way to get in touch with her. No one in the village has asked about Annie at all, except for Father Desmond, and she’s certain that’s only out of consideration for her, seeing her praying for her daughter’s soul every day in the quiet solitude of church.

  Theresa Hebbley figures the father to be a coward, plain and simple.

  She opens the drawer of the nightstand. Inside are girl’s things, things Matthew and his brother Mark will not want to see as they will only remind them of their lost sister. Ribbons and hairpins, illustrations of a pretty dress or hairstyle torn out of a newspaper or magazine. A single white glove, the kind meant for wearing to church, its twin lost. A small pot of carmine for the lips—not that Jonathan approved of his daughter using cosmetics.

  Pushed to the back of the drawer is Annie’s Bible, the one given to her as a First Communion gift years earlier. The plain leather cover is dried and cracked, the onionskin pages yellowed. Theresa Hebbley hefts it, remembering the many times she saw Annie hunched over the book, reading it not because she was so devout but because there was nothing else to read in the house. She was so hungry for stories, particularly after her father banned her from going to see her grandmother, Theresa’s mother, for filling her head with nonsense. Fairies, selkies, the dubheasa.

  The ripped edge of newsprint peeps out from inside the book. Another illustration that Annie fancied, Theresa thinks, and opens the book to see what it is. But it’s not an illustration: it’s an article.

  An article from not so long before her daughter disappeared, about a fire in a factory in London. A tragic story, Theresa sees as she reads. Hundreds of girls died in the fire, unable to get out of the death trap in time. Instinctively, she wonders why her daughter had saved this story; had she been thinking of running away to London, to work in a factory like this one, and been stopped in her tracks when she saw this story? It doesn’t seem likely, but Mrs. Hebbley’s mind has run in a thousand different directions since Annie disappeared. She knows it’s only the mind’s refusal to accept the truth and a mother’s wanting for her daughter to be alive, the evidence be damned.

  As she goes to tuck the clipping back into the Bible, she notices that it’s been annotated. A faded stroke of ink underlines a name: Lillian Notting, lone survivor of the fire. Could her daughter have possibly known this woman, Mrs. Hebbley wonders? Impossible; how would Annie ever have made the acquaintance of a London girl? And there have never been Nottings in Ballintoy, not in all the time Theresa has lived in the village.

  So, this must have simply been a fascination of Annie’s. Another girl who had survived something, perhaps a trial as terrifying as her own. A kind of heroine.

  She tucks the clipping back into the Bible, swallows hard, and continues to make the room ready for her sons.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  21 November 1916

  HMHS Britannic

  Door after locked door. This blasted hospital ship is all locked up at night, and Mark’s fumbling search for more alcohol has led him down a long, empty hallway, dark but for one flickering bulb at the far end. The Glen Albyn has long since abandoned him, and Mark can’t get the urgency of Annie’s whispered voice out of his head. Her accusations, terrible and yet not far from his own suspicions.

  Except it wasn’t Caroline he suspected of wrongdoing.

  His foot slips in something wet. He grips his cane, and for a fleeting moment, he is certain the ship has taken on water. That they are sinking.

  But, no—the spill is seeping out from under a closed door. Could it be a burst pipe or ruptured tank? He shoves open the unlocked door, and there is Annie: unconscious on the floor.

  The shock of it wrestles a gasp from his throat. Surrounding her are an array of broken matchsticks and her discarded nurse’s uniform, sopping wet.

  “Annie?” He sets the cane on the floor, kneeling beside her. The water—overflowed bathwater, he sees now—soaks into his trousers. He turns off the still-running faucet, then tries to lift her into an upright position, gently slapping her cheeks in an attempt to wake her. He catches the faint smell of alcohol on her, something raw and unpleasant.

  She wakes with a violent start—and looks at him curiously. In this moment, she is so fragile and afraid that the dark suspicions he’d entertained only moments ago flee from his mind. His urge is only to protect her.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  She looks about, taking in the disarray: water everywhere, supplies knocked off shelves, a dispensary cabinet thrown on its side. She must’ve had a fit of some kind—there can be no other explanation. She starts shaking. His chest aches for a moment, remembering what he said to her. She confessed to loving him and he threw it back in her face. Then again, one couldn’t just dismiss her mad rantings about Caroline. He must remind himself that she is untethered from reality. She is dangerous.

  Gently he drapes a towel over her. “Let’s get you to your room.”

  She whimpers. Her eyes are red rimmed. Her wet hair is awry. Her lips are raw, and her normally fair Irish skin is fiery and splotchy. It’s hard to believe that she’s the same girl he met on the Titanic.

  “Please try to believe me.” She clutches his forearms as though she fears he will run away—as though she anticipates he will try to run away. “I’m not Annie—I’m Lillian.”

  He freezes. “What?”

  She goes on with a story of ghosts and sea spirits and more Irish superstition, but Mark isn’t following her because he is thunderstruck. He is certain he never actually spoke her name to Annie. How does she know? Chills rattle down his spine and he lets go of her as though she is on fire or crawling with snakes.

  “Annie, listen to me. You need help—”

 
“I need your help.” The girl, perhaps heartened that he is still speaking to her, lunges for him. “Mark, I’ve done a terrible thing. In order to be with you, I’ve traded away Ondine’s future. I made a deal with the dubheasa and I can’t take it back. As long as I’m here, our daughter is in danger.”

  He doesn’t believe a word of it. It’s all nonsense, a childish fantasy. The girl needs a doctor. He will keep her quiet until morning, when the doctors are back on duty. If word were to get out, it would be demoralizing to the patients, to think that a nurse had gone mad. . . . But where to take her? He can’t bring her to the nurses’ quarters. She needs to calm down first, before her colleagues see her. He passed a few empty quarters when he was searching for drink. No one would think to look for her there.

  Once he’s got her situated in one of the empty rooms, he persuades her to try to sleep by promising to stand watch over her. He dusts off a camp stool and sits with his back against the wall to watch her sleep. What happened to this girl? He remembers the letter he’d found in the fireplace of the Titanic’s smoking room. It had been too burned to yield much, but he only had to read, I was wrong to leave you to deal with this particular problem alone, to know what this was about. She’d been pregnant and abandoned.

  Mark looks uneasily at the sleeping girl. She’s mixed the story up in her mind, he thinks, scrambling her past with what happened to Lillian. She wants to forget her own past by stepping into the life of another.

  But he doesn’t believe it, no matter how much he’d like to.

  The living are often anchors for the dead. The old newspaperman Stead’s words come back to him, how the dead want to lay down their troubles and escape to the next world, but it’s the living, unable to let go, who keep them here. Love and desperation like heavy chains lash them to the earth. Has he been Lillian’s anchor? Is he to blame? Has she come back in this poor, weak vessel?

  No, this is nonsense. Ghosts are not real.