Rules for Vanishing

by Kate Alice Marshall

  I move toward it, pulling free of Mel’s hands. Her fingers slide from my arm without resistance, and a moment later I hear the others’ footsteps behind me.

  Anything wooden has rotted through, but stone still stands. The buildings are empty. We don’t check inside to be certain, but they have a loneliness to them, a hollow way of watching us, that makes it clear. And it’s clearer still when we turn a corner and find them.

  The crowd stands before the gates of Ys. The women wear long skirts in colors to match the coral, and jeweled pins adorn the hair piled in lush arrangements on their heads. The men wear tunics belted over leggings. Some people carry lanterns. Most stand empty-handed. They no more belong to one era or country than the buildings; they’re the sum of a hundred imaginations, not quite real, not quite in agreement.

  The gates are massive. Taller than ten men, and not wrought iron but solid stone, carved with a pattern of waves. Every face in the crowd is turned toward them. Every face—including a blonde girl, her features sharp, her form muscular and lean.

  “Trina?” I say, but the moment I step toward her, the crowd seems to shift without moving at all, and she’s gone. I halt, pain lodged in my breastbone.

  A boom sounds through the air, and the gates shudder with the force of a blow. The crowd tenses, a thousand intakes of breath making a seething, wave-dragged sound. The tension bleeds out slowly.

  “That . . . that’s the gate?” Anthony asks. We’re still a ways back from the crowd. They don’t seem to have noticed us—or if they have, they don’t care that we’ve come. “That’s the gate we’re supposed to open?”

  “I do not think we should open that gate,” Becca says.

  “But that’s the way home, isn’t it?” I ask. I drift a step forward. “Through the last gate.” I want to open it. I need to open it. Someone is waiting behind it, I’m sure—waiting for me to set them free.

  “No,” Becca says, catching my wrist in a tight grip. “That isn’t the way home. Can’t you feel it? Whatever’s past there, it’s . . .”

  “Hungry,” Mel finishes, shuddering.

  “Ys drowned for him,” Becca says. Her eyes are unfocused, and her body sways slightly. “Ys the drowned, Ys the drowning, Ys long since lost. We walk among its bones. We speak to its memories. Ys is the end of the road. And the end of the road is Ys.”

  “Becca?” Anthony says, but she seems not to hear him, to see any of us. She sways forward.

  “I can hear it. Now that it’s quiet, I can hear all of them. The drowned,” she says. “They stand guard, to keep it shut. The gate. To keep him out. Dahut’s lover—Dahut’s master. She draws us here, and we feed the road. We feed it by traveling it. We feed it by dying. We keep it alive so that she stays alive, and someday she’ll escape it. Someday she’ll wake him up, and open the gate, and we will have to drown the world to stop him.”

  The others shift uneasily. I reach for Becca’s hand, hush her. “Stop. Don’t listen,” I tell her, surprised by my own urgency. “Everything we know says we need to go through the last gate. That’s how we get home.” She turns half-blind eyes on me. The boom comes again. Something knocking on the door. Something knocking to be let in.

  “The old story about the road,” I say. “It says that if you reach the end, you can ask for something. A wish. What if that’s what’s past the gate? What if whatever’s through there could . . .”

  “Could what?” Kyle asks. “Bring them back? Trina? Jeremy? Vanessa?” He shakes his head. “No way. Becca’s right. That’s not our way home.”

  “Then what is?” I demand.

  Becca turns. She raises her hand, and points. And there it is—the darkness, waiting. “There,” she says. “That’s the way home.”

  “Or it’s just another trap,” I say.

  But the others are listening to her, I can tell. Mel moves close to me. “I think she’s right, Sara. She’s been on the road longer than any of us. She’s the one that could hear Lucy. I think we should listen to her.”

  “We can’t,” I say, looking back at Anthony and Becca. “We can’t go through the dark. Not with only five of us.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Anthony says.

  “We can’t all make it. We won’t have another miracle,” I say. “The candle is gone. No one is coming to save us. If we go through the gate—”

  “That gate isn’t to keep us in,” Anthony says. “Don’t you hear that sound? It’s to keep something out.”

  The sea cannot drown him forever. My lips are dry and taste of salt.

  “We’ll make it,” Becca says. “We’ll find a way.”

  Anthony shakes his head. “Sara’s right. Basic math. Odds and evens. We can’t break the rules, not this late in the game. If only four make it, that’s better than none of us.”

  “I don’t accept that,” Becca says. “We’ll figure it out. I was in this place for a year and you found me, do you know how impossible that is? We—”

  The panic in her voice breaks something inside of me. The last bit of my reckless hope vanishes—or maybe some last scrap of defiance wakes up, for a moment.

  We can’t open the gate. Whatever lies beyond it, I can feel its power—like heat or frost, already almost painful. I don’t need to know what it is to know that it is nothing I care to be responsible for unleashing. If what the road whispered to me is true, this whole city was drowned to stop it from getting in. And every traveler that has passed by—every one of them chose the uncertain dark.

  And we have to choose it, too.

  “All right,” I say. “Mel, take Kyle. Get out of here.”

  “But—” Mel looks between the three of us. But she knows what we need to do—Kyle has to survive, more than any of us. She doesn’t want to leave us behind, but she doesn’t want to die, either. Who would?

  She steps in close to me one last time. Her kiss is light and chaste, and I want it to last forever. “See you on the other side,” she says. Like she’s making a promise that’s my job to keep.

  “Go. And don’t stop until you’re home,” I say. “Don’t wait in the woods, just get Kyle to safety. We’ll find each other later.”

  She nods reluctantly. “Be careful,” she tells me. She looks toward the waiting dark. “This was a lot more fun when we were kids, and it was all a game.”

  “Just thirteen steps,” I remind her.

  “Or in my case, seven, and then Tommy Jessop ran up and sprayed us with Silly String,” Mel says, trying to smile and failing utterly.

  “You’ll make it,” I promise her. She nods—and then she’s gone.

  We watch them walk toward the dark, hand in hand. Mel looks back. Kyle doesn’t.

  They vanish into the dark.

  “Becca,” I say. I look at Anthony. “Can you give us a minute?” I ask him.

  He hesitates, then nods. He walks a little ways away. Out of earshot if we drop our voices. I pull Becca toward me, linking both my hands with hers. Our brows touch. She trembles and the movement passes through me like an echo.

  “One of us has to stay,” I say.

  “You want to stay behind,” Becca says, anger clipping the words.

  An answer lodges in my throat.

  Because I should. Shouldn’t I? I want my friends to live. My sister. My best friend. How could I choose one of them to leave behind? It has to be me. It should be me. Yet something has changed, and it sends a sick shiver through me. I fight against it, not entirely aware that I am fighting, trying to put the order of myself back the way it should be. “You have to go,” I say, halfway to what I mean. “You know you do. Otherwise this—all of this? It’s for nothing.”

  “I don’t accept that.”

  “I know you don’t want to hear it. But you know that it’s true.”

  “Then you’ve got to come with me.”

  I want to protest. They wil
l not die because of me. It should be Anthony and Becca, but I can’t say it.

  “I already made my choice,” Becca continues. “In the boat, when you fell . . . I was reaching for you. It’s you. I choose you.”

  And still I say nothing. Instead, I grip her hands tight and shut my eyes. Something passes between us in that moment, a force I cannot describe, and a tension loosens in my chest.

  Anthony clears his throat. We look up in the same movement. He’s tucking his phone in his pocket.

  “I think it’s obvious what has to happen,” he says. “I’m staying.”

  Guilt knifes through me, but he continues before I can say anything to contradict him.

  “We don’t have to . . . Of course you’re going to pick each other. You should. I agree. It’s the right choice. And I’m saving you from making it. I’m volunteering.” His face falls into a smile. “Besides. Maybe if I stick around awhile, some other fool will—will—” He can’t finish. Can’t scrape up enough belief or hope to voice it.

  “This isn’t fair,” Becca says. She crosses to him in three quick strides and throws herself into his arms. He wraps her up, and I turn away, walking a few paces to give them one last moment together.

  It’s a little while before footsteps approach behind me, and Anthony taps on my shoulder. I turn. Becca is hunched in on herself, staring off into the distance.

  “You shouldn’t have to stay,” I say.

  “Hey. I can’t let Jeremy go out a hero and upstage me,” Anthony says. “Wherever we go after this, he’d never shut up.” He scrubs his hand over the back of his scalp. “Look, Sara. I know things aren’t great between us right now.”

  “You think that matters?” I ask.

  “It matters,” he says. “We might not want it to, but it does. We haven’t been talking. We haven’t been friends like we used to be. I wasn’t there for you, and you were, let’s face it, kind of a jerk.”

  “Definitely a jerk,” I tell him. He smiles.

  “I don’t want you carrying that, when you leave here. Pretend we had the time to work it out. To be friends again, best friends, the way we used to be. Promise?”

  My vision blurs with tears. I don’t stop them from falling. He hugs me, and I can’t remember the last time he did that.

  “Be strong. Get Becca home. And don’t you ever look back,” he whispers. He breaks away, his own cheeks wet with tears, fear he doesn’t want to show deeply etched in his features. As he pulls away, he slips his phone into my bag.

  And then there is nothing but goodbye.

  * * *

  —

  We come through the dark. Count the steps in twinned whispers, hands clutched together tightly against the urge for release. We come through the dark, and we leave Anthony behind, and some rewritten part of my soul is triumphant.

  I think I understand now what happens next. Better than I did then, at least. Then, I didn’t even think about what I was doing. It was instinct, automatic action, unexamined. We step out of the dark. My hand is still wet with Lucy’s blood—the same blood that stains Becca’s palms and her shirt, one lonely streak marring the hollow of her throat where she swiped her hand unthinkingly. We emerge stumbling, and our hands unlink. The road is already vanishing behind us, and as Becca blinks, sunlight-blind, I vanish, too. I slip away.

  I hear voices in the woods—police, searching for Trina. I hope they’ll find Becca. I don’t remember how I get home, but the next thing I can consciously recall, I am in the bathroom Becca and I have shared all our lives, washing dirt from my feet and blood from my hands. Then I’m crawling under my blankets and lying awake in the early morning light.

  The police come to get us not long after. I hear my mother downstairs, her voice rising in shrill disbelief. When she comes up to get me, I pretend to still be half asleep, to not understand what she’s telling me.

  Becca is alive. She’s back. But there’s a problem. And they want to know if I’ve seen Trina Jeffries or her brother.

  They don’t ask about the others yet. As if the road is making them forget, look the other way. They never ask about them together; it never occurs to anyone to notice that all of them vanished on the same night. Last night. We didn’t miss a single sunrise here, however much time passed on the road.

  In the end, they decide that Trina Jeffries ran away after attacking her stepfather. Kyle goes home. He tells them about what Chris did to him. It doesn’t matter for Trina. They’re looking for a girl undone.

  And Becca—eventually, Becca comes home. They can’t find any blame to attach to that blood. If any of them wonder about the other teens who didn’t come home, they don’t wonder long.

  I am sitting in my room when she returns. Dad is home. Pretending he never left, though that won’t last long. Becca promises she can find her way upstairs, and she makes her way up alone. I listen to every step. She knocks on my door, pushes it open.

  We had seen each other at the police station, but it wasn’t like we could talk about what happened. She gives me a hollow look.

  “Where did you go?” she asks.

  I have been waiting for her to ask me this question since I left her behind, and I don’t have an answer for her. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t remember.” I want to tell her that there is something wrong with me, but I don’t. I want to tell her that I have changed, been changed, but I don’t. “Mel made it home okay. Kyle, too.”

  “Good,” she says, her relief palpable. She crosses to me, sits beside me. “I don’t remember what happened after Anthony and I stepped into the dark.”

  “You don’t?” I say, surprised. Or maybe not surprised. “I’m missing things, too.”

  “What happened to Lucy and Anthony?”

  “I—” I know the answer, and then I don’t. We all walked into the dark. Becca and I walked out. It’s all I know.

  My fingertip taps out a strange rhythm on the bedspread. Becca takes my hand.

  “What matters is we’re safe,” she says firmly.

  “We’re safe,” I agree. I am wrong, of course. And so is she.

  We aren’t safe at all.

  INTERVIEW

  SARA DONOGHUE

  May 9, 2017

  Sara’s head hangs low. Her hands rest in her lap, palms up. They look like the wings of a broken bird, bent wrong, limp.

  ASHFORD: That’s it, then. That’s what you remember?

  SARA: You seem disappointed.

  ASHFORD: I had hoped . . .

  SARA: I’ve figured some things out, though.

  ASHFORD: Oh?

  SARA: Can ghosts possess people, Dr. Ashford?

  She cocks her head to the side. Becca is tense beside her.

  ASHFORD: In my experience? Yes.

  SARA: The road called to people. But it wasn’t the road itself. It was Dahut. She needed someone who could be her vessel, to carry her off the road. She thought she’d found that vessel, with Lucy. But Lucy was dying. Her brother had attacked her in the woods, before she reached the road, and so she couldn’t leave it. But an innocent girl like Lucy—people wanted to rescue her. People came when Dahut called with Lucy’s voice. It wasn’t really Lucy calling to Becca. It was Dahut, using Lucy’s voice. Her face. And I—I think I heard her, too.

  ASHFORD: I believe you are correct.

  SARA: Becca and I got out. But it wasn’t just us, was it? Everything that’s wrong with my memory. The things I remember that didn’t happen. The things I don’t remember that did. Could she have done that to me?

  ASHFORD: It’s possible.

  SARA: I see.

  There’s a knock on the door. Abby opens it, nods, and lets Mel in.

  SARA: You’re all here, then. But not Kyle.

  ASHFORD: We weren’t able to bring Kyle in, due to his legal situation. We thought it better not to compl
icate that for him.

  SARA: You mean you couldn’t get past his lawyer.

  ASHFORD: That, too.

  MEL: Sara. We’re all here to help you.

  SARA: Because I’ve been acting crazy.

  She draws a spiral on the tabletop with her fingertip.

  ASHFORD: If Lucy—or Dahut—is using you, we don’t have much time. The better she establishes her hold, the less likely it will be that we can remove her. You’ll lose yourself, piece by piece, and she’ll be all that’s left. She’s using your guilt to hide, Sara. Using your friends’ deaths.

  SARA: Using them.

  ASHFORD: Your guilt. Your pain. She’s hiding herself behind the memories that you would be glad to be rid of. I don’t believe she’s controlling you, not directly. Influencing, maybe. But it is Sara Donoghue that we’ve been speaking to.

  Sara laughs bitterly.

  SARA: Oh, if you’re sure.

  ASHFORD: We can help you, Sara. And it makes it much, much easier to root her out now that you’ve located the hidden memories yourself. It makes it harder for her to hide from us, and easier to remove her without . . .

  SARA: Without what?

  ASHFORD: The process can be damaging. This will minimize it.

  SARA: It’s dangerous?

  ASHFORD: Yes. There are absolutely risks involved. I won’t lie to you about that. But it’s also our only option. Given the length of possession, it’s likely we don’t have long at all before she’s entrenched thoroughly enough that she can’t be removed.

  SARA: I’ve felt like I was going crazy for weeks. I . . . This is why I attacked Becca?

  ASHFORD: Becca was trying to get you help. The spirit would be strongly invested in stopping that.

  BECCA: But I did get you help. They are going to help you, Sara. You’re going to be okay.

  She squeezes Sara’s hand and gives her an encouraging smile. Mel hangs back, frowning, arms crossed. Abby arches a curious eyebrow in her direction. Mel leans in toward her and whispers something, and both young women slip out the door. Ashford looks after them momentarily, a puzzled expression on his face, before turning back to Sara.