by Lydia Millet
“Come home,” said Cara, begging. “Where are you?”
“Nearby, sweetie,” breathed her mother. Her voice was warm and comforting.
“Why aren’t you home with us?” asked Cara plaintively. She wanted to reach out for her mother, but her arms were not moving. She couldn’t get them to rise no matter how much she wanted them to. They weighed nothing, as though they were not attached to her.
“I’m in hiding,” whispered her mother. “Not from you, honey. But I can’t let you know where, exactly. If you knew where I was, then he would, too. He’s like Jax, in that way.”
“The Pouring Man?” Cara asked.
“His name is fear,” came her mother’s voice softly.
“What does he want with you?” asked Cara.
“He’s one of the soldiers of the Cold One,” murmured her mother. “The Cold One’s army of dead soldiers…”
“His dead what—? What do you mean?”
“Long, long story,” said her mother, and she seemed to be fading. Her voice came like a wave now, or the wind, with a kind of whisper. “But you are needed, Cara. All three of you are. In the struggle against them. And he doesn’t want us to be together for the struggle, because we’re weaker if he can keep us apart. He wants to keep you away from me, and keep you away from the others, too.”
“The other who?”
“Others like me,” said her mother and swirled in midair, getting blurry. For a second Cara thought she was floating on her back. Her voice was getting almost too thin and soft to hear. “Others among the guardians.”
“Why can’t you just tell us what to do, then?” Cara cried out, impatient.
“The more you know, the more easily he can know too,” said her mother, but now she was almost gone, getting smaller and farther away. She was receding. But Cara didn’t want her to.
“Don’t go,” said Cara. “It’s too hard! I can’t find you!”
“You will,” said her mother. “You’ll see. Because it’s you, Cara. You are the visionary.”
And Cara sat bolt upright in the dark.
She was breathing hard. She tried to calm herself, counting to ten until her breath came more evenly.
“Hayley?” she asked finally.
No answer. Hayley wasn’t in the tent at all.
She must have needed to go to the bathroom, Cara thought—there were bathrooms at the edge of the parking lot, along with the outdoor showers.
And Cara hadn’t told her about the danger. Cara hadn’t told her anything, and now she might be out there with him.
Rain was still pattering down on the tent; she would wait another minute or two and then go find her friend. The dream had seemed so real, except for the way her mother hung suspended in front of her .… But how could she be the visionary? Jax was the one who seemed to know everything, who had special powers….
She heard a hand on the door flap, scrabbling at it—trying to open the zipper in the dark. Hayley, come back. It was a relief. She groped for the lantern to help unzip the flap, and after a minute had the light switched on, illuminating Hayley’s fingers.
“Here,” she said. “That better?”
But Hayley’s fingers couldn’t get it to work—it was a sticky zipper—so Cara reached out and undid it herself.
“There, I got it finally,” she said. “Come in!”
Hayley kneeled and came through—the top of her head first, with its straggly part and light-blond hair. When she was all the way in, past Cara and settling down to sit on her own sleeping bag, she raised her face.
And Cara saw there was water running off her. Out of her wide-open eyes. Down her cheeks and her neck. Pouring.
And at the same time she thought: I asked her to come in.
Cara screamed. She couldn’t help it.
Before she even registered what she was doing she had thrown herself past not-Hayley, out the unzipped door flap, and was sprinting in a blind terror for the parking lot—toward wherever there might be light, the signs of civilization.
She ran pell-mell toward the parking lot and the cement-block restroom building, her feet slipping and sliding on the muddy trail, bumping into wet branches and slick grass as she went—
A light went on in the dark. It was the light outside the women’s room, on the wall of the building. It must have been triggered by motion, must go on whenever someone came near … and then she was inside the women’s room, which she’d never thought she’d be so glad to get to.
Something had stung her cheek, and she put her fingers up reflexively. They came away with blood on them. A cut from a pine branch, probably.
The bathroom was the same as ever. Fluorescent tubes overhead shone down on sinks and toilet stalls and the grubby gray tile floor.
And in front of the blurry mirrors stood Hayley.
Again.
Cara felt another scream rising but stifled it, stumbling back with her hands out, grasping for the walls and the door; at the same time, Hayley turned and gaped at her. She looked pretty much like she always did—no water pouring, none at all. Her face was dry and familiar. She was chewing her usual strawberry-flavored gum, which Cara could smell, and wore too much blue eyeliner.
It was light in here, after all. Light and dry.
“Is it you?” blurted Cara. “Hayley! Is it you?”
“Um,” said Hayley, “who else would it be? What is up with you? What happened to your face, girl?”
“He made himself look just like you,” said Cara, breathing raggedly, shaking her head.
She leaned over, bracing her hands on her thighs while she caught her breath. She couldn’t believe it. It was impossible. Water was one thing, but this?
Then she remembered something Jax had told her: something like eighty percent of the human body was water.
Was that how he managed it? Being the master of water?
And she had invited him in. She’d said Come in, believing it was Hayley. He had tricked her.
Would he follow them here?
She turned around and looked closely at the door, trying to find a lock. Hayley was saying something, but Cara was too frantic to pay attention to her. The lock wasn’t the right kind, though—the door could only be locked from the outside, for one thing, and to do that you would need a key. So she backed up against it, just in case. Trying to hold it closed with her weight.
“Cara! He who?” repeated Hayley.
Of course. Hayley thought they were doing a science project, and now Cara had blown it. But who cared about the details—he was close. He could get them any minute. It was still raining.
“We can’t go back to the tent,” she said.
Her mind was racing. She didn’t know what he could do to them. What had her mother said? He wanted to come between them; he didn’t want them to find her. His name was fear, and he wanted to keep them apart….
And even if he was gone from the tent by now, he might have left some of his water there. Right? She couldn’t forget how carefully Jax had lifted that towel—how deliberate and grim he had seemed. You couldn’t touch where the Pouring Man had been. You couldn’t take that risk.
His name is fear, her mother had said. He is a dead soldier.
Who knew what that was supposed to mean? A dead soldier? It made her feel kind of sorry for him, if he was a soldier who had died. But then the Pouring Man wasn’t someone she thought she could feel sorry for.
It made no sense.
“Why not?” asked Hayley.
“We just can’t,” said Cara. “Trust me.”
Her back still against the thick metal door, she fumbled in her pocket and pulled out her cell.
“Max,” she said when he answered. “Help. He’s here. Come pick us up in the parking lot, beside the bathroom building. And come now!”
She clicked the phone shut to find Hayley staring at her, so amazed she was even forgetting to chew her gum.
“What’s going on?” asked Hayley. “Come on. Tell me!”
“It�
�s, it’s just this guy,” said Cara. “He’s been hanging around the house lately. We don’t like him. And now he’s followed me here.”
“What, like a molester dude?” asked Hayley.
“Not exactly,” said Cara.
“Because if it’s a Peeping Tom or something, my mom is gonna freak,” said Hayley, turning back to the sinks to wash her hands. “There was this guy across the street last spring? Renting the Klosterman house? And he—”
Cara couldn’t listen. Her stomach was still flipping. He could be close; he could be right outside. The windows of the bathroom were frosted so you couldn’t see out, and threaded through with squares of wire. As windows they were completely useless.
“Here, lean against the door with me,” she told Hayley. “Just in case he tries to get in.”
She didn’t know what the rules were when the place was public—maybe here he didn’t have to be invited. Maybe here he was free to come and go as he pleased.
“But how’ll we know when it’s Max?”
“We’ll hear him,” said Cara. “And the car, we’ll hear it pull up. He doesn’t drive a car. He’s always … walking.”
“He, like the perv?”
“He’s not—whatever. Yeah. Basically, him.”
Both of them were lined up against the door beside each other now, their backs to it, their arms down at their sides. It took eight minutes to get here from their house—she knew that by heart, since she and Max been coming to Marconi since she was tiny—and more if there was traffic.
She looked at her watch; Max should be here in five minutes now. Could they hold him off for that long?
“So, when did this guy start bugging you?” Hayley was asking, sounding kind of urgent. Cara wanted to tell her to be quiet, but she didn’t want to seem mean. She’d brought Hayley here; she was the one putting her friend in danger.…
“You left the faucet on,” Cara noticed.
“Oh. Whoops,” said Hayley, and darted forward to turn it off.
“No, no, stay put!” cried Cara. “I need your weight on the door. He’s stronger than me. He’s stronger than both of us!”
“Aright, aright, chillax,” said Hayley, already back at the door.
Cara felt a small surge of relief.
“Can’t hear the rain,” said Hayley. “Can you?”
“That’d be good, if it stopped raining,” said Cara, and tried to listen. But the walls of the restroom were pretty thick and it was hard to tell.
Her watch said two minutes more.
“Shoot,” said Hayley. “That faucet must be broken.”
The tap was on again.
“The plumbing in this place never did work that well,” said Cara. “Just leave it this time, ’K? I need you here, against the door.”
And then she looked harder at the stream of water coming from the tap.
Water. Of course.
She felt stupid. And then she also felt afraid.
Steam was rising from the water column, as though it was boiling. The steam rose and fogged the blurry mirror, the mirror where you could never actually see your face anyway. They made them that way on purpose, for some reason … the mirror fogged, more and more. And then there was something moving in it, either in the fog or the mirror itself. The blurry silver sheen of it seemed to churn and roll.
“What the—”
Before Hayley could even finish her sentence, there were hands reaching for them out of the mirror, arms that were long and thin, hands made of water with reaching fingers that were longer and longer and terribly, terribly thin, thin as bones, thin as daggers—
And behind the hands was a long face in the mirror, grotesquely long with an open mouth and a chin dropping down so the mouth opened wider and wider—
Hayley was shrieking right in her ear at the top of her lungs. Cara turned and grabbed the door handle.
She wrenched it open, and both of them threw themselves through the crack, running at full tilt across the wet parking lot toward the road that led through the woods out to Route 6, pounding the wet pavement with their feet. Then they were running up the road, leaving the parking lot behind them. The rain was barely a mist now, Cara realized, and kept running, and then felt flooded with relief.
They were saved. There were Max’s headlights.
Six
“OK. So that was not a Peeping Tom,” said Hayley emphatically.
It was about two in the morning and they were home and warm. The three of them—Cara, Hayley, and Jax—sat in their dad’s study by lamplight with blankets pulled around them, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. The library part of the study, behind the big desk with its jar full of Milk-Bones for Rufus, had two overstuffed armchairs, a fireplace with a marble mantelpiece and lion heads at both ends, and dusty old bookshelves on two of the walls. Cara had always thought it was a nice room. Beyond the chairs was a bay window that looked out over the water—or would if they didn’t have the deep-red drapes pulled shut.
Max had insisted on driving back to the park and keeping vigil from the car with his friends, though Jax had made them promise not to go near the tent till dawn. Max had never seen the Pouring Man—the so-called dead soldier—which was why, Cara thought, he didn’t take her story too seriously.
Though he hadn’t said so, maybe he even thought she was imagining things.
“There’s no way you’re gonna convince me that thing coming out of the mirror was just some weirdo who likes spying on girls,” went on Hayley.
“Not so much,” admitted Jax.
He sat cross-legged on a thick rug on the floor and was eating sugary cereal from the box with his fingers. That was his habit when he was trying to think something through.
“I haven’t been a hundred percent honest with you,” said Cara to Hayley sheepishly.
“Yeah. No kidding.”
“I’m sorry,” Cara told her, and meant it.
Before this whole thing, she’d always thought of herself as pretty truthful, aside from the rare white lie to save someone’s feelings. She wanted to have integrity.
“So what the hell was it?” asked Hayley. “I mean there was that—face thing in the mirror—and the hands were stretching out longer than any hands could ever be, like they were groping for us….”
“You said he was in the tapwater?” said Jax, turning to Cara.
Cara kept her own hands cupped around her mug of cocoa, alternating between sipping and blowing on it. She’d toweled off, so she wasn’t still soaking, but both she and Hayley were wearing bathrobes and thick socks—Hayley had brought puffy pink bedroom slippers in her overnight bag—and had their hair wrapped up in soft towels.
“That was how he got in,” she said to Jax, nodding. “Through the pipes. Not the door.”
“Yeah, um, pipes? I’m not getting it,” said Hayley.
“He travels through water,” explained Cara. “He has to have water to travel. And he likes the nighttime, too. Maybe there was enough wetness in the pipes that he could move through them? But then he turned to steam when he came out, because it was too bright or dry in the bathroom for him to, you know, materialize all the way….”
“Before that,” said Jax, “you said he took the shape of Hayley?”
“He did,” said Cara. “He really did! Jax, I swear. I was inside the tent, and she’d gone out across the parking lot to the bathroom, and I thought it was her. I heard these hands scratching and scrabbling, you know, trying to undo the zipper on the flap in the dark? And I turned my flashlight on them and they were her hands. Her fingers! They looked just like them! So I told her to come in.”
“You invited him,” said Jax.
“It was meant for Hayley. But I guess I did.”
“I didn’t know he could do that,” said Jax. “Shapeshifting. He’s more powerful than I thought, that’s for sure.”
“Wait,” said Hayley. “Shapeshifting? But that’s, like, the sci-fi channel! You guys have got to be kidding me.”
“It’s a kind of mind-control, I would guess,” said Jax. “I can’t be certain, of course, but that would be a more efficient strategy, to make the observer think he looks a certain way. He’s not actually transmuting atoms or anything. ’Course, mind control’s a pretty good trick too.”
“Whatever!” said Hayley. “You guys need to tell me what’s going on. I mean, he was after me, too, right?”
“He won’t bother you unless you’re with us,” said Jax. “I’m pretty certain of that.”
“And, of course, I mean, you can go home now, if you want to,” said Cara. “I wouldn’t blame you, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t want to go home,” said Hayley. “At least—not while it’s still dark out. No thanks.”
“You’re pretty safe in here,” said Jax.
“We think,” added Cara.
“But then—what does he want from you?”
Jax turned to Cara, expectant.
“You know more now, don’t you?” he said.
His eyes seemed to be taking her measure.
“I had a dream,” she confessed. “A really realistic one. Mom was in it.”
“Oh, man. The creepy guy has something to do with your mother?” asked Hayley.
“He’s trying to keep us from her,” said Cara.
She leaned forward and set her empty mug down on a table, on a stack of her dad’s books. Then she sat back, feeling spacey … she twisted her favorite ring back and forth on her middle finger. Her mother had given it to her for her twelfth birthday: silver, with a round white and blue design that looked like an eye. She had said it was for good luck. To ward off the evil eye, her mother said.
“Um,” said Hayley. “Like, why?”
Jax shook his head, then looked sideways, checking with Cara.
“We don’t exactly know,” he said.
“There’s something going on,” Cara told Hayley.
“Yeah, I got that much,” said Hayley.
She was winding a strand of her yellow hair around a pencil.