The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook

by Lydia Millet

  “In the world. Beyond us. Some kind of a fight. And he’s on one side and our mother is on the other. And we’re supposed to be there, too. At least, I think that’s what she was telling me.… We’re supposed to be joining in the fight, but to do that we have to get to her. Or to the others, her friends, maybe? And she’s trying to help us, but he doesn’t want us to succeed, because he’s one of the bad guys. She called him dead. One of the dead soldiers, is what she called him, though I don’t know what she meant. She also said his name is fear. She said he works for the someone called the Cold Man. Or wait, the Cold One…”

  Jax was gazing up at her from the floor, his cereal box forgotten, while Hayley stared from her armchair, Cara’s mother’s terrycloth bathrobe swamping her small frame.

  “Huh. Well, you said a mouthful,” said Hayley.

  There was a pause. Cara was overwhelmed herself—where had all that come from? She hadn’t thought about the whole thing before at all, at least not consciously.

  “That’s more than I knew,” said Jax after a moment.

  “She also said …,” started Cara, and turned to Jax. She hesitated, and then decided to take the plunge. “She said the visionary is me,” she went on.

  She felt a little proud of it—the pride kind of escaped her control, surged up despite herself—but there was no good reason for that except being conceited, she reminded herself. It was only a dream, after all. Her dream.

  Basically, she was the one who suddenly had the idea that she was the visionary. It wasn’t like her mother had come up and said it to all of them, in the flesh.

  Usually, in their family, it was Jax who knew things. It was Max who did things—sports, popularity, whatever—and it was Jax who knew things. She only half-believed she’d been singled out at all, frankly.

  But then Jax surprised her.

  “I suspected as much,” he said. “You see things. I hear them and I think about them. I’m more of an interpreter type.”

  “You guys lost me again,” said Hayley, shaking her head in resignation.

  “So Max is the arbiter? I wouldn’t want Max judging me,” said Cara. “Geez.”

  “No kidding,” said Jax.

  “Max is some kind of a judge?” asked Hayley. “In your game here?”

  “It’s not a game,” said Jax. “Did the guy in the mirror seem like a game to you?”

  “I wish it was a game,” said Cara.

  “Max would make a good judge, actually,” said Hayley, and picked a mint-green marshmallow out of her cocoa, scrutinizing it.

  “She has a major crush on him,” Cara told Jax, her eyes rolling.

  “No, but for real,” said Hayley. “You’re kind of harsh on him. This summer, anyway. But he’s just trying to stay cool. It makes him lonely, but he has to, to keep it together. And he’s really a fair person, you know that? He’s always jumping in to make sure big guys don’t pick on little ones. You guys are way harsh.”

  She shook her head and popped the marshmallow into her mouth.

  Jax and Cara exchanged glances. Hayley might have a point, Cara thought with a pang of guilt—although Max could make himself pretty hard to be nice to when he was always locked up in his room wearing headphones. Or at the park jumping his skateboard. Again and again and again…

  Still. He had his own way of dealing, and the past months hadn’t been easy for him either. Hayley was right about that part.

  “Be that as it may,” said Jax.

  “She said she couldn’t make it simpler for us,” said Cara. “Because just like you thought, Jax, he can read us, or at least read you, so as soon as we know where she is, he’ll know, too. So it’s got to be, like, this last-minute thing, somehow. The way we find her, I mean. It can’t be a slow hunt. She has to be revealed to us when we’re not expecting it, basically. Or something like that.”

  “That does make it hard,” said Jax.

  “I don’t know about you guys,” said Hayley, yawning, “but I kind of need to crash.”

  “Keep the phone nearby, Jax,” said Cara, rising from her armchair. “And wake us up if it rings.”

  Jax nodded quickly, anxious to be responsible despite being the one who’d been left at home like a baby.

  “Will do,” he said.

  They slept in so late that it was almost noon by the time Cara sat up in her double bed to blink at the fringe of bright sunlight around the window blinds.

  She’d been woken by the jangling sound of Max and his friends banging in through the front door; now she could hear them downstairs. She sat listening as they went through the kitchen, opening and slamming cabinets and drawers. No doubt they were prowling through every available storage space looking for junk food.

  She heard them laughing at the bottom of the stairs and had to assume that their night, at least, had been relaxed and uneventful.

  “What time is it?” asked Hayley sleepily, opening one eye and stretching beneath the coverlet.

  “Late,” said Cara. “And Max is home, so I guess that means you’re going to get right up and put your makeup on.”

  “Shut up,” said Hayley, but she got out of bed, tossed on her pink robe, and padded into the bathroom in her cat-paw slippers. Cara heard the tap running and the sound of an electric toothbrush. Slippers, robe, electric toothbrush—Hayley didn’t travel light.

  “Is everyone decent?” said Jax from the door.

  Hayley closed herself in the bathroom, a bit of a prude considering the intruder was only ten. Then again, Hayley didn’t have brothers. She wasn’t used to the lack of privacy.

  “It’s fine,” called Cara. “It’s just me.”

  Jax opened the door and entered, fully dressed in what looked like yesterday’s clothes, with Rufus beside him.

  “So they didn’t see anything during the night, right?” asked Cara.

  Jax shook his head as the dog licked Cara’s outstretched hand, then bounded over to his favorite spot on the rug and curled up. Cara got out of bed and opened the blinds, flooding her bedroom with light.

  The day, for once, was blue and clear. The water of the bay sparkled, stretched out beneath her.

  She opened the window and cool, clean air swept in. She breathed deeply. Now that it wasn’t raining, she could leave it open….

  “Listen, Car,” said Jax in a low voice, glancing quickly at the bathroom door. “The thing is, he’s getter stronger. Because it’s almost a new moon. You know, when the sky is darkest? In a sense, when it’s the deepest night.”

  “What, like vampires or werewolves or something? He’s hooked up to the phases of the moon?”

  “Yeah, like all the soldiers,” he nodded. “Like all the soldiers in the army of the dark,” he added ominously.

  “You made that up,” said Cara.

  “Nah, actually it’s a line from a game. I thought it sounded good. But the deal with him is, he hates the full moon, because it sheds light. It sort of turns night into day.”

  “So then when’s this new moon coming?” asked Cara, going over to her closet, opening it, and staring in at the rack of empty hangers. Clean clothes were often hard to find since her mother had left.

  “Problem is, it’s tonight.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Just be careful, I guess,” said Jax, but his small face was tight with concern.

  “Like for instance don’t say ‘Come in’ to the bad guy, you mean?”

  Jax sat down by Rufus, rubbing between the floppy ears.

  “I’m not even happy about you and Max being out at night, with him there. But I guess you have to be. Right?”

  “Well, there’s no other way to see the ocean,” said Cara.

  “Actually,” said Jax thoughtfully, “there just might be. You can pull down satellite images—there’s a famous one of a red tide in California, so I know those phytoplankton can show up in the dark. In the picture I’m thinking of, you can see this bright turquoise color and the red, too, from way up in the stratosphere. Or thermosp
here, technically. Or exosphere…”

  “Talk normally.”

  “In low-earth orbit the satellites are still above the stratosphere, 200 kilometers up at a minimum … or else you get this rapid orbital decay—”

  “Jax. Stop already.”

  “Anyway, I’ll check it out.”

  “You’re telling me we can look at Marconi from, like, outer space?”

  “Maybe not us, not in real time,” said Jax. “We don’t exactly have top-level access. Google, for example, uses old satellite photos. But I might be able to get in using Mom’s account. Let me check, anyway.”

  “I’m not going out there tonight unless I have to,” said Cara and turned from Jax to pull on a tank top. “Max should go again. Nothing ever happens to him. He’s lucky.”

  “I’m amazed Max is even going along with all this,” said Jax. “For that reason if nothing else: things don’t seem to happen to him. It’s like he’s outside it….”

  “He saw you with the leatherback,” said Cara. “That’s the only thing he’s ever witnessed that makes him think we’re not just playing.”

  “And then the pirate ship,” said Jax. “He’s probably doing it just because of that, at this point.”

  “Would you two stop ragging on him?” said Hayley, stepping out of the bathroom fully dressed and with her trademark shiny lip gloss and eyeliner already applied.

  “We’re not ragging at all,” objected Cara.

  “You are, too,” argued Hayley, flipping her hair. “You act like it’s you two against him.”

  Cara and Jax looked at each other—Cara, at least, registering that maybe what she said was true.

  “He’s a skeptic,” said Jax.

  “And we know that what we’ve seen is real,” said Cara. “That’s all.”

  “Huh,” said Hayley. “Well, I’m going down to hang with the guys.”

  “Go for it,” said Cara. “Just give me a minute.”

  Hayley went out, taking the staircase two steps at a time.

  “She is way too young for him,” said Jax severely.

  Jax was still trying to get satellite feed from Marconi Beach up on his laptop in the late afternoon when Max left to get Zee’s father’s scuba stuff ready. He had all the gear—masks and fins, tanks and wet suits—so Max just had to get it prepped and ready for them to use.

  And Hayley had long since gone home. As far as Cara could tell, she was more focused on Max and whether or not he might like her than the fact that they’d looked at a mirror and seen something supernatural that Jax said “practically defied the laws of physics and turned all of reality on its head.”

  Cara went into Jax’s room and looked over his shoulder as he pulled up aerial photos of the Cape. Brown and green splotches that were treetops flashed across his screen, the black of rooftops and blue and brighter green of the water.

  “You know what?” he exclaimed suddenly. “I got it! We should use the webcam! There’s a webcam at Marconi. Surfers use it to check on the waves. The problem is, it hasn’t been good surf conditions lately, so right now it’s pointing in the wrong direction.”

  Onto his screen flashed a scene of the beach—not a satellite photo, from above, but a regular beach webcam. It was a view of the cliffs that rose over Marconi, to be exact. She saw the long flight of wooden stairs that went up from the water to the parking lot that overlooked it, on the clifftop.

  “But it’s pointing inland,” said Cara.

  “Right.”

  “But how can we—do we even know where it is? The actual camera?”

  “I do. It’s on the lifeguard station,” said Jax. “I’ve seen it there. Halfway down the beach between the cliffs and the waterline, on that high platform where they sit. All we need to do is turn it around so it faces out to sea. Chances are no one would even notice till morning. Surfers don’t care how the waves are doing in the middle of the night.” He glanced fleetingly at the time readout on the upper corner of his display. “Shoot. It’s getting late. I don’t know if there’s still time before dark.”

  Cara thought for a second. Max had taken the car, so he couldn’t drive them. The bike ride took at least twenty minutes. She looked at her watch.

  “We’d get there before sunset, definitely,” she said.

  “But on the way back…,” said Jax, and trailed off.

  “We have to risk it,” she said. “Better than spending all night out there.”

  “Even if it was Max?”

  If she and Jax went out now, and took the chance of riding home in the dark, Max wouldn’t have to be out later, vulnerable.

  “We need to do it,” she said firmly. “You and me. Listen, Jax. Just because nothing has happened to him yet doesn’t mean it couldn’t.”

  Jax nodded, but she could tell he was nervous.

  “Come on,” she said. “We can do this.”

  They practically jumped their bikes off the front porch, pedaling swiftly up the road toward Route 6; but as they got closer and closer it became clear that they had a rare, off-season traffic jam to contend with.

  Cars were lined up along the highway at a complete standstill. The fumes from their idling engines filled the air, and a few horns honked way down the line.

  “Oh, no,” groaned Jax.

  The cars wouldn’t stop them, since they were on their bicycles, but the traffic jam would make the trip a lot less pleasant.

  Suddenly she heard the whine of a siren behind them, and then an ambulance careened by at high speed.

  “An accident,” said Cara, feeling a chill.

  And just like that, she knew there was something wrong. She had to find out what.

  “Follow me,” she said to Jax over her shoulder, and took off on her bike in the direction the ambulance had gone, toward the Wellfleet town center. She wove between the stopped cars to get across, then raced up the shoulder.

  “Wait up!” Jax was calling behind her.

  It was the opposite direction from Marconi.

  She yelled back to him to explain, but what she said was probably lost to their velocity. He followed anyway, pedaling behind her as fast as his short, thin legs could go, a puzzled look on his face.

  And then she saw it: beside the road, up ahead, a car was wrapped around a tree. A car that looked familiar.

  Because it was theirs.

  Cara had never felt so afraid, not even when the Pouring Man reached out. Never. The fear lodged in the pit of her stomach, making her almost sick.

  When they got to the scene, there was the family car, the front of it forked so far into a tree trunk it looked as though the tree was part of it now. Then there was a police car, lights flashing, parked near the tree, and the ambulance pulled up with the back doors open. Then they saw the stretcher. And the prone form of a boy lying on it.

  Max.

  She practically threw herself off her bike, let it fall to the gravel and left the wheels spinning as she ran to the stretcher, which they were about to lift into the open back of the ambulance. She had eyes for no one but her brother … she couldn’t see any blood, at least—a good sign, she told herself—and then she was looking down at him, ignoring the paramedics or whoever they were, who were saying things in her ear she didn’t listen to.

  “It’s me, it’s me,” she heard her voice repeat, and she was bending over to look into the familiar face.

  It was white, but his eyes were open.

  “Cara?”

  “Oh my God,” she said, and her voice caught in her throat. Tears filled her eyes but didn’t spill out. Her legs felt shaky with relief, or shock, or something. He was OK.

  She almost had to sit down, she was shaking so hard.

  “Your brother’s one hell of a lucky kid,” a paramedic was telling her, and put an around her trembly shoulders. It was a lady paramedic, bulky and kind-sounding. “He’s got a broken arm, maybe a very mild concussion. And that’s all.”

  “Never seen anything like it,” someone was saying behind her to someo
ne else. “It shoulda been way worse. Miracle the kid’s still kicking.”

  “Max. What happened?”

  Max tried to smile, which looked kind of pathetic but made the tears slide down her cheeks for some reason.

  “Guess Dad won’t leave me in charge again,” he managed weakly.

  “Don’t joke! You never have accidents!”

  His smile faded, and his eyes seemed to lose focus. The paramedic lady squeezed Cara’s arm.

  “Honey, it’s just a broken arm,” she said. “Really. You don’t need to worry about him.”

  “… finally met your friend,” Max was whispering.

  “They’ll keep him overnight after they set the arm, no doubt,” said the paramedic. “You kids got a ride over there?”

  Cara heard Jax answer her but couldn’t listen to either of them. She leaned close over Max, whose lips were moving but whose faint words she couldn’t hear in all the hubbub around her.

  “What did you say?” she hissed, her lips a couple of inches from his ear.

  “I think I met your friend,” he whispered back. “What did you call him? The man who walks in water….”

  Cara felt strange; all over her body her skin was tingling.

  “He was here? He did this?”

  “He came up out of nowhere,” whispered Max, and then winced. Maybe they hadn’t given him anything for the arm, because he seemed to be in pain.

  “He came up?”

  “First he was in the rearview mirror,” murmured Max. “Smiling. Smiling this … awful smile.”

  “He was in the car with you?”

  “No. He was just in the mirror—when I turned around there was no one in the back. And then…”

  “Then?”

  “Then when I turned to the front again, he was crouched on the hood. His face was a few inches away.”

  “Oh, no,” said Cara.

  “I swerved. I hit a tree.”

  “Of course you did. That was what he wanted,” put in Jax, at her elbow.