by Alma Katsu
The presence—of life, of faith—emanating from beyond the door is strong and thrums with heat and life—while he is dead and cold and has been these four years since Lillian’s death.
Stop thinking about Lillian. We are sailing into danger. I must tell the captain. Mark wills himself to push everything else out of his head. Annie, Lillian, his daughter. He clutches the rolled-up map tighter to his chest and reaches for the door.
But it doesn’t budge. He can’t open it.
It wouldn’t be locked, not for a church service. That’s absurd. All are welcome.
He tries again, but the handle merely turns in his hand. Spins loosely at his touch. He bangs on the wood. They must be able to hear that inside—why doesn’t someone get up and open the door for him? But nothing happens; it’s as though they can’t hear him, as though he’s in another dimension. As though he’s a ghost.
Or as though the church won’t allow him in.
He remembers from a childhood story that witches and demons can’t cross the threshold of a sacred place.
It’s all in your head, old boy.
But it’s not, and he knows it.
He bangs on the doors some more, rattles the handles again, but still no one comes to his aid. Finally, he stumps back out into the alleyway until he can no longer hear the singing. What sounded sweetly human moments ago, now sounds eerie, threatening, and deafeningly loud. A cacophony of innocence.
In his frustration and confusion, a crazy idea flits through his head.
Maybe Annie is telling the truth. After all he’s experienced the past few days, he must admit that Annie’s story is the only thing that makes sense.
And what’s more—maybe she’s not the only ghost.
He starts to come alive, reverberating with a new thought. Maybe there is one last redemption. It’s his fault Lillian is dead, he’s known that all along. Living with the guilt, trying to hide it by marrying Caroline. He killed her with neglect. This dubheasa, this sea witch or whatever Annie called her, may have claimed Lillian, but fate has given him the chance to save his daughter. What was it Annie said—the sea witch wants her innocents? Ondine is innocent, but he’ll be damned if the sea is going to claim her.
If everyone is in the service this morning, that means the wheelhouse and bridge will be minimally staffed. There will be few men to get in his way. Mark knows what he needs to do. To end this curse at last. To end it all.
That’s why the map ended up in his possession. It was important that he knows where the sea mines are.
Rising again to his feet, Mark Fletcher starts off for the bridge. And his destiny.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Am I dreaming?
Annie flexes her biceps, making her arm rigid—and it jerks at the end of its tether, like a dog chained to a tree. A leather strap is wrapped around her wrists, the other end tied to the metal bed frame. She pulls with increasing ferocity, but the frame is attached to the wall and will not budge.
She has no recollection of how she got here. She cannot remember which ship she is on. Time has bled together, her lives flowing one into the other.
She remembers the feeling of floating, the feeling of movement without her feet touching the ground. Drifting through the corridors of the ship—the Titanic, not the Britannic, evidenced by the beautiful appointments, surrounded by the ship in all its glory—she sees the people she knew then, now dead and gone. They turn their faces to her as she drifts by, William Stead, Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor. She pities them in retrospect: such self-important men, playacting right up to the end. If they had known they’d only had days to live, what would they have done differently?
And then there is Caroline, her sweet face turning to her, shining with genuine love. Her beloved friend. A pain shoots through Annie’s chest. Heartache, wrenching and true.
And now she sees herself, able to look down at herself in this moment, tied to this bed, her hair wild like a bird’s nest, her face dirty and tear streaked. How can she be seeing this? Because she isn’t Annie—not right now. She is Lillian.
As if in reaction to this sudden truth, she feels a lightness. She feels . . . free. The tension at her wrists lessens. Almost imperceptibly at first, then it slackens, until she is able to pull her hands free.
She is both in this body and not.
She sits up, rubbing her wrists, and looks about the room. She sees her clothes laid out to dry, sees that the map is gone. And knows, instantly, knowing without knowing, where it is. Who took it.
And what she must do.
* * *
—
Her feet, it seems, don’t touch the floor as she makes her way to the bridge. Funny, for a large ship, it is surprisingly quiet and empty, as though a sorceress has put this kingdom under an enchantment, a sleeping spell.
She knows what she will find on the bridge and there it is: Mark, standing near the wheel, staring at the battered map stretched between his hands. On the floor at his feet, the two men who were left in charge while the others were away, the two men fallen under the enchantment and now asleep. Or has he harmed them?
Mark looks up when she enters, but his surprise and confusion quickly melt away. She knows that he is seeing not Annie but Lillian, and not the angry, vengeful Lillian he had betrayed but the Lillian of before. Beautiful and radiant, unscarred, with her glossy dark hair piled high on her head, lovely as the dawn.
He reaches for her hand, his eyes wide and filled with tears. “It’s you.”
She can see the red in his eyes—knows he has been drinking. Knows he is barely holding on. She has seen him this way many times before, though. He has always needed her. Needed her forgiveness.
Their fingers entwine. His are warm and strong, whereas hers feel as weak as water. She wishes she could hold on to him harder. They are together. At last. At last, he sees. “I’ve never left you,” she says, realizing it’s true. “It’s always been you, Mark. You are all that matters to me. You know that, don’t you?” She can’t tell if she’s speaking the words or if they are just moving somehow between them, from her heart to his. Through the inexplicable connection they’ve always had. And though she can hardly feel the body she is inside, still, something pinches in her throat. Something painful and hard and full of feeling. “I gave everything, Mark. I gave—I gave my child.”
“But we agreed to it.”
“Not to Caroline, Mark. Not to her. I gave Ondine to the dubheasa, don’t you see? It was my . . . my promise. The Bargain.”
“I don’t understand.” His voice is a low murmur, and he is staring into her eyes as though pinned in place by her gaze.
“So I could return to you, don’t you see? So we could be together again. Finally. Forever.”
A worried look flits across Mark’s face but only for a second. Ondine. His child, but a child he has not seen in four years. The mother, however, is standing before him. Holding his hand.
He pulls her into his arms, crushing her body—no, this body—to his. His hands find her jaw, the back of her neck, her hair, like they always had when she was alive, and she feels as though she is made of pure flame. She has waited so long, so long for this. The idea of him—the need for him, for a second chance, for this—pulsing and aching inside of her.
“I love you,” he whispers again, as if still in disbelief. “You came back for me, and I love you. I love you so much.” When his lips touch hers—salty with tears—she feels the kiss making her light again, light as wind, feels the way it pulls something out of her, feels her soul finding his and swirling into it. All the pain, all the anger and fear, all the compromises and betrayals, all the waiting. The horrible dark promise she made. All of it has led to this.
And then—then she steps back. And in the place of that momentary bliss, there is only loneliness.
“That’s right,” Mark says, not noticing the change i
n her. His eyes search her face, taking it in, a long satisfying drink of water for a man dying of thirst. “You are the one, Lillian. You’ve always been the one.” He almost laughs. “It was always us. You were right. You were right.”
With one arm still around Lillian’s waist, Mark reaches for the ship’s wheel, his eyes sparkling and wild—unhinged, almost. “Let’s finish this, then.”
“Mark, wait. What do you mean, what are you—”
“It’s better this way for Ondine, too,” he murmurs, studying the map again now. “She is safe, with the only family she has ever known. It’s better if she never learns of us.” And in that instant, she knows what Mark intends to do.
With a harsh gasp, Annie returns to her own skin, fighting down the mournful ache of Lillian within her.
Once, when Annie was a child, she’d gone swimming off the coast of Ballintoy. Gotten caught in a riptide and sucked under, felt the air thrown out of her chest, felt the sunlight disappear as she was flung upside down and pulled far out—so far out. She’d been too young, then, to think of death. She hadn’t even dreamed up the Vanishing Game yet. There had been panic, and confusion, as she thrashed beneath the waves . . . but beneath all that had been something automatic and constant—the belief in the surface; the certainty that light, and breath, would return. As a child, you do not imagine anything other than life, other than light, other than another chance, and another, and another.
In this moment, as Mark grabs, wild-eyed, for the wheel, Annie comes to that certainty again. Even now, after everything that has happened. The awful narrowness of her life under her father’s watchful eye. The intensity of Desmond’s attention, of his touch, of his ultimate betrayal. Of God’s betrayal. The pregnancy. The humiliation. The desire to die. The dream of escape. After all of it—even becoming the unwitting vessel of another lost soul—there is still some bit of the real Annie, and some bit of that truth, that belief: that light. There is still some kind of certainty at her core.
And she clings to it, as her consciousness bursts through the surface of the enchantment and she takes in her surroundings, takes in the truth:
They are in the channel. She can see the angry whitecaps as the water crashes and swirls in the narrow strait. If the ship doesn’t run into the rocks hidden beneath the waves, it will strike one of the German mines.
He means to take the ship down. To damn the thousand souls aboard, asleep and unaware of what waits for them. Like the people aboard the Titanic.
Yes, a voice inside her says. We’ll be together forever. But these are not Annie’s thoughts. This is what Lillian wants, but Annie cannot kill everyone on board this ship. She cannot be responsible for so many deaths a second time.
“Mark, you can’t do this,” she says as she wrenches out of his arms. “You can’t mean to kill them all. They’re innocent.”
His look is pure confusion. “What do you mean? I’m doing this for us. To free you from this Bargain. It’s the only way we can be together, don’t you see? This life—it’s over for me. But for us, for us—it’s just beginning.”
He is intent. But she cannot be that selfish. She is a good girl.
She tries but cannot wrestle the wheel out of his grasp. This body is still not—never quite was—her own. Maybe it never belonged to her, even when she was born. Maybe women’s bodies never are. He pushes her away—manic, now, and desperate to hold the wheel against the bucking force of the waves smashing against the ship. Britannic is rising and falling and juddering like a toy boat trying to navigate a raging river. There are flashes of the Titanic’s last night, the feeling of being batted about, of falling. The electric charge of impending disaster crackles in the air.
Annie swears she can smell the whiff of explosives a split second before they hit the mine.
In the last moment, she does the only thing she can do: she frees the enchanted from the spell, waking them so they can try to save themselves. She may have done everything wrong, but she can still do one last right thing.
The pulls for the alarm bells beckon from the far side of the control board, the switches and levers, gears and slides that the captain and crew use to control the ship. She lunges for them, praying that Mark does not come after her, that he doesn’t try to stop her, doesn’t have time.
She grasps on and yanks the pulls, even as the alarm bells peal throughout the ship, their sharp cries cutting through the fog of enchantment.
Even as they cut through her own.
Even as the first of the blasts shudders through the wall of the ship.
She rings the warning until the water takes her, until the bells—and she—can scream no more. Until she can no longer hold on. Until she is no longer Annie or Lillian. Until it is over.
Epilogue
The Daily Mirror
23 November 1916
Hospital ship sunk by torpedoes;
53 dead, count rising
London, Thursday, Nov. 23, 1916—In a terrible tragedy and affront to Her Majesty’s government, HMHS Britannic has been sunk on November 21 by German mines off the island of Kea in the Aegean Sea, according to the Daily Mirror’s Athens correspondent. The ship was hit and began to take on water at 8:12 a.m. and reportedly sank within the hour. It is believed that two German submarines were positioned in the Kea Channel in waiting for the famous hospital ship, sister ship to the tragic RMS Titanic and the largest hospital ship in the British fleet. This latest German outrage against humanity is all the worse for knowing that the ship, heading north, had not yet taken on its full complement of wounded soldiers, so mainly noncombatants—doctors, nurses, and crew—were on board.
Survivors reported that the ship sank very quickly, with an hour elapsing in total from when the ship began evacuation proceedings to when it slipped beneath the water. Because of the quickness, not all lifeboats were able to deploy in time and this is partly blamed for the loss of life. Survivors credit the relatively limited loss of life—only 53 unaccounted for at this time—to the sounding of the alarms by someone on the bridge just as the mines were struck. Without the alarm bells, survivors agree, the loss of life would’ve certainly been higher, perhaps even approaching the catastrophic levels of the sister ship. The ship is believed to have been carrying approximately 100 doctors, 200 nurses, and 200 crew, in addition to about 500 wounded picked up in Naples, Italy. The ship, which is fitted to carry up to 3,000, was en route to pick up another 1,000 wounded in Mudros when it was struck.
Our correspondent spoke to one of the survivors, nurse Violet Jessop, who had also been on the Titanic when it sank. She reported that in comparison, the sinking of the Britannic was more violent. “There was a great explosion, then a second one. The ship rocked like a toy boat in a child’s bath. We were all in the mess hall for daily service, and ran up to the boat deck. That’s when we were told we were sinking and to man the lifeboats.” Miss Jessop found she was not clear of the horror, however, when her lifeboat was drawn in by one of the ship’s massive propeller blades, stuck up out of the water. She had to jump to keep from being killed, hit her head, and nearly drowned.
“Someone hoisted me out of the water. I don’t recall a thing,” she said of the harrowing experience, “except that I heard a woman screaming from inside the Britannic as it was going down. At the time, I thought that was impossible, as they’d surely evacuated the women first, but later I found out that one of the nurses was unaccounted for, and it was all the worse for being one of my dearest friends, Annie Hebbley.”
Due to the angle of the explosions, all those in and near the captain’s bridge died on impact.
The captain has made claims it was a miracle that he was conducting Mass at just that moment, and thus survived.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One thing I learned while touring to promote my previous book, The Hunger, is that readers are very interested in the research that goes into a historical novel. At every stop
, the majority of the questions had to do with my research process and how an author decides how much fact goes into the making of fiction.
While a lot of work went into The Hunger, it was dwarfed by The Deep, and that’s because of the special place the Titanic holds in the imaginations of many. There’s an avalanche of material available on the Titanic—a boon but also a challenge to the novelist. Then there’s a second ship, the unfortunate HMHS Britannic, to factor in next to its more famous, flashier sister. A huge number of resources were consulted in the writing of The Deep, but I’d like call out a few in particular: the online reference Encyclopedia Titanica was an invaluable first stop when I needed to look up crew and passengers. Olympic, Titanic, Britannic: An Illustrated History of the ‘Olympic’ Class Ships by Mark Chirnside (The History Press) provided a treasure trove not only of history of the ships but of photos, blueprints, data, and statistical information. And lastly, Titanic Survivor: The Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessop Who Survived Both the Titanic and Britannic Disasters by Violet Jessop, edited by John Maxtone-Graham (Sheridan House) gave me greater insight into the life of Violet Jessop, whose curious claim to fame as survivor of both Titanic and Britannic provided the spark of inspiration for The Deep.
Once again, I’d like to thank my partners at Glasstown Entertainment—particularly Lexa Hillyer for whom this was, I believe, a labor of love—for their help in bringing the story to life. Thanks are also due to Glasstown editor Deeba Zargarpur, to Emily Berge-Thielmann for her help with all things marketing and publicity, and to Alexa Wejko for her work in the early stages.
Thanks to the team at Inkwell Management—my agent, Richard Pine, Eliza Rothstein, and Glasstown’s agent Stephen Barbara—for their able stewardship on this project.