“Don’t worry,” she says, “Mare-bear is kind of cute.”
“Anyway. I’ll be back in a bit.” It takes an attempt to shove my shoes on for me to realize I’m still in my fuzzy house socks. Hurriedly, I strip them off and cram the sneakers on without them. I don’t want Ron to see my monster feet.
But Ron’s occupied with the laces on her own boots, and when she straightens, it’s to wave to my aunt. “Nice to meet you.”
Outside the clouds fly low, ragged gray swaths edged in orange from the lights of the city. The trees bend and sigh, the pine branches lift and wave. Beyond them, the bay is crested with little white waves, churned by the wind. Even with the new sandbags, sloshes of water crash over the seawall every now and again, splashing into a wide puddle that almost covers the whole width of the road.
Ron cups her hands in front of her face, struggling to light a cigarette; the shivering flame makes her face a Halloween mask of light and shadow. The wind whips the smoke away as she exhales.
“So which way did you go the other night?”
I point, not trusting my voice. The streetlights are working again, fortunately, and the street leading to the park is a corridor of little orange-lit islands leading into the night.
“Here.” Ron digs the sage out of her bag and pushes it into my hands. She tries to hold the lighter to it, but the flame gutters out in the wind. We have to stand close, making a shield with our bodies, before she finally succeeds in lighting the tip of the bundle. She lets the flame billow up for a moment before waving it so that the wind puffs it out again, releasing a thick column of smoke that shreds apart in the wind. It smells acrid and sick-sweet at the same time, in the same way I associate with the stoners who smoke behind the tech wing at school. Ron wafts it all around me, ignoring my coughing and grimacing, and finally holds it out to me again.
“You carry it,” she says.
“Ugh. It smells like pot.”
“So? Maybe it’ll make the ghost mellow or something.”
Reluctantly, I accept the smoking bundle, and at Ron’s gesture I step slowly out onto the street.
Fear coils around me, pinching my ribs, making my breath shallow and my head swimmy. I clutch the twiggy bunch of sage before me. The wind steals all but the occasional whiff of the smoke. But I keep moving, pushing myself forward step by step, and Ron walks beside me, and nothing strange happens. Someone hurries past us down the street, sparing us a curious glance.
“Does it feel different at all?” Ron asks. “From last time?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure.” There’s still that same tide of sound in the background, augmented now by the lift and gust of the wind, but it stays where it belongs. If something’s out there, it hasn’t noticed me.
Not yet.
We follow the streetlights to the corner, to the stand of shifting, sighing pines that borders the path into the park. The street’s orange glow lights their trunks, but their tops are shadows against the clouds. Ron stamps out the end of her cigarette and looks up at them and then into the darkness beyond, the little islands of lampposts scattered over the grassy slope of the park. I take an inadvertent step back.
“What?” Ron says, instantly alert. I shake my head.
“Nothing. Nothing. I just don’t want to go this way.” Which is stupid, it’s Britannia Beach, for God’s sake.
“Then this is definitely the way we should go,” she says. I stare up at the shadows of the trees so I won’t have to look at the water. The sage crackles in my hands as my grip tightens. Ron’s touch startles me; she pulls one of my hands away, her fingers twining through mine. I could map each point on my palm that touches hers. Warmth steals into my blood from every one of them. Her voice is gentler when she continues. “Reconnaissance, remember?”
Niobe’s words flicker through my mind as I let her lead me onto the path. Maybe this is more than a friend.
Which is ridiculous. Thank God Ron’s missing the psychic gene. It’s holding hands. Just like with Ingrid. It means nothing. Relax already.
Gravel crunches under our feet. We skirt around a long arm of water that reaches way past where it should, stretching across the path and into the grass. Wide puddles reflect the streetlights. On my right, out of the shadow of the houses and the trees, the river roars, the faintest shadow of white waves visible at the edge of the beach. The faint orange shadows of a few lonely trees stick out of the water. Orange-gray light stains the clouds, but out over the water, where the distant twinkling lights trail off, it bleeds into a dark so deep I can’t make out the shape of the river or where it meets the sky.
I pull my hand from Ron’s so I can walk faster, lengthening my steps, until I’m almost running to the next lamppost. It stands before a row of towering poplars that line the edge of the sand and gives off a faint electric whine.
“Marianne, wait up! What is it?”
“The water,” I manage. “It’s the water. In my dream—can we please get away from the water?”
“It was dragging you into the water, wasn’t it? In your dream, I mean.”
I nod, folding my arms against shivers my sweater can’t ward off. Ron slings her backpack to the ground, pulls out the box of salt.
“What are you doing?”
“If there’s any place it’ll talk to us, it’s here.”
“Ron, I don’t—”
“We need some evidence, right? So here, I’m hitting record.” She pokes at her phone, pockets it again. “And check out what my mom still had.” She brandishes something I can’t see clearly in the dim glow of the streetlight. A little oblong box, silver maybe. “Tape recorder. For backup, in case it catches something the phone doesn’t.”
She hands it to me. It’s smooth plastic; I can feel buttons along one side.
“Very vintage,” I manage.
“An artifact from the dawn of time,” Ron intones, reclaiming it and grinning as she presses a button.
“Seriously, Ron, can we go? Please?”
But Ron holds up a hand for silence. She’s shaking the salt onto the soggy ground, pacing around me in a circle. When the orange light catches her expression it’s fierce, frowning. When the circle is complete, she sets down the box, pushes her hair out of her eyes.
“I think I’m supposed to say something.” She folds her arms, glances furtively up and down the path, and makes a face at me. “Brace yourself. This is going to sound stupid.”
“Ron, I really don’t think—”
“Just hang on, okay? Due diligence. This’ll only take a second, and then we can go.”
She rolls her shoulders, heaves a deep breath, stretches her hand up to the sky. Then like a fencer issuing a challenge, she swings her hand down to point at me, and her voice is like a bell:
“By my will I bind you and charge you: speak!”
For a second it seems as if it’s the wind that will answer her, swelling and voiceless. But it goes clotted and muffled, settling into my ears in a horribly familiar way. It’s happening—it’s happening again. I throw my arms over my head and cry out Ron’s name, but I can’t make any sound. I try again, put my hands to my face, feel my lips moving, my breath on my palms. But everything is lost in that same silent roar, that endless, susurrating unsound. Like I’m underwater. But when I gasp for breath, I can feel the air rushing in.
When I can finally bring myself to lift my head, the wind has vanished. Around me the trees are immobile, uncannily so, their leaves sharply outlined in the glow of the lamp, innumerable overlapping orange coins. Nothing moves.
I’m alone.
Ron! I try to shout, but I can’t make a sound. And again. I feel it shred apart into a scream, and only then can I hear a pale echo, distant, leached of all meaning.
But maybe silence would have been smarter. Suddenly I feel exposed, standing in the middle of the path in the orange and bl
ack shadows. If something’s following me…does it know I’m here? Did it hear me?
“Saint Michael the Archangel,” I whisper. “Saint Michael the Archangel—”
But the words are as soundless as my screams. And I can’t remember the rest of them.
I let my breath out in a long, shivering sigh, and in the space between exhaling and inhaling I become aware of the water at my back: its flat, black face stretching out behind me beyond the trees. The chill green smell of it fills my nostrils. I don’t turn around to look at it, though, because an awful certainty is flickering through my chest, a familiar weight dragging at me—subdued, a current around my ankles—and I can barely breathe.
If I turn around, if I step out there, past the trees and onto the sand, I’ll find the water smooth as glass, breathing damp chill into my face, a shelf of ice barely visible at the edge of the light. If I turn around I won’t be able to stop walking. I’ll be stepping back into my dream.
Only I’m awake.
Aren’t I?
I don’t turn around. I take a step away from the river, and another step, another. The not-quite-noise won’t drain from my ears, there’s no sound to mark my footfalls. It’s not as hard, this time, moving away from the water. Soon I’m running, pelting across the grass, the scattered immobile trees of the park whipping past me. I run, run away from the water, against the pressure tugging at my legs. I cross the bike path, the grassy slope surrounding it, the rocks livid with graffiti, and I’m out under the streetlights again.
But the houses are all dark and silent, and I run. I run down the street that should take me up the hill, but it’s not the same, it’s not right. I can’t hear traffic, can’t hear dogs barking, there’s no sound and nothing moves. The orange light outlines each blade of grass, each pebble in the street. I can’t outrun the roaring in my ears. And in the space of a blink the street has changed direction on me, sloping down, back toward the dark sea of the park. A weight has sprung up at my back like a tidal wave, pressing me forward, and I can’t stop, I can’t slow down. The slow, cold smell of the river rises around me. My feet connect not with pavement, but with sand.
And in that moment, a voice I know and don’t know rips through the silent noise that stuffs my ears, livid with terror, making the world shiver and blur around me.
“Marianne! MARIANNE!”
I whip around to find its source, and for a bottomless instant, I stand face to face with someone—with something—all black staring eyes and floating hair, and the whole world shrinks away from it, even the darkness flees from the hate beating out of it in smothering waves.
But then the sound crashes back in: I’m screaming, my own voice filling my ears, the echoes ringing away into the trees, the wind roaring in the branches above me, and when I force my eyes open I know the pale, painted face I see in the lamplight, startlingly close: it’s Ron, it’s only Ron, lowering her arms as if she’d been trying to fend something off. I gulp her name and she flinches a little.
“Where were you?” I sob out. “Where did you go?”
She stares at me, retreats a few steps.
“Where did you go?” I wail. “There was something—oh my God—where did you go?”
“I didn’t,” she begins, but it comes out hoarse and she stops, shakes her head, folds her arms. Her eyes never leave my face.
“Ron—”
“I have to go.” She makes a fumbling snatch for her backpack. “I didn’t think it would… I have to go.”
“Ron, wait!”
She shoves the tape recorder into my hands and turns away.
“Ron! Ron, what happened?”
But she’s already running, leaving me a shadow under the trees, running away into the light.
I turn to go and let out a yelp at the bite of wet sand and sharp bits of gravel against my skin. I stare down at my feet, pale, black-scarred shapes against the asphalt of the path. Where are my shoes? It takes me a long minute, fumbling in the dark, to find them; one is lying on the wet grass, the other in an inch-deep puddle. My hair falls around my face, blowing into my eyes, as I crouch to retrieve them. It’s loose down my back, my braid completely undone.
I stumble back toward Aunt Jen’s, keeping my head down, clutching the recorder. I can’t stop shaking, a rattling tremor that goes bone-deep. But the noises of the world stay with me: the ordinary sound of a bus coming down the next street, the squelch and slap of my wet shoes on the pavement, the clatter of a garbage can rolling down a driveway in the wind. The wind swirls around me, indifferent and ordinary, not the weird current that pressed me toward the water.
It’s over. It has to be over. Whatever it was.
I count the steps up to my room, grateful for the faint sound of the TV coming from Aunt Jen’s room, and wash my pills down with a glass of water that trembles in my hand. Gingerly, I set the tape recorder on the dresser. It’s a strange, clunky alien among the little china animals. I crawl fully dressed into bed and roll over, facing away from it. But I can feel it sitting there anyway, a silent accusation.
11
I wake to the sound of crows cawing outside. The clock says 11:22 a.m. I lie there, cool and empty, like after a fever or a bad dream. It must have been a dream. Again, just a dream, disappearing into the light like any other. Maybe I won’t even remember it later.
But if it was a dream…
I roll over, burying my face in the pillow, trying to escape the thought, but it follows me. If it was a dream, when did I fall asleep? Would I remember falling asleep? Ron was here, wasn’t she?
I stare up at the ceiling, the dread settling back into place, cold and viscous. If I close my eyes, what swims into my mind is the empty street, the blind faces of the houses leaning over it, the street running the wrong way, not up into the city but down, down toward the sand and the water.
I should stop thinking about it. My thoughts are like the street, leading toward something I don’t want to remember.
I start to do my stretches but can’t relax into them properly. The black splotches on my toes keep drawing my eye. I pull my book from my backpack, but I just end up reading the same two pages over and over again without tracking a single sentence, jumping at every sound: wind rattling the windows, Aunt Jen’s footsteps, the bathroom door opening and closing. After a while she knocks on my door to remind me to take my pills.
“You should have some breakfast,” she says as I toss them back. “They’ll make you sick on an empty stomach.”
Obediently, I force down a banana and a cup of milk, but it isn’t enough. I spend the next couple hours huddled on the couch in a miserable knot of nausea. Aunt Jen tsks over me, covers me up with a blanket, brings me a PB and J.
“I had the same problem,” she says, sitting at my feet. “Have some more to eat. It’ll help.”
I’ve pushed myself reluctantly onto my elbows before I realize what she said.
“Wait. You’re on these too?”
“Was. The SSRIs, anyway.” She doesn’t return my stare; is she avoiding my eyes? “It was a long time ago. After I got divorced. Your grandma had passed away a few years earlier, and your mom’s my little sister, and she was so busy with you. It was like she and your dad were off in their own little world. I got to the point where I was having trouble putting one foot in front of the other anymore, but it kind of felt like there wasn’t anybody left I could go to.” She does meet my gaze then, gives me a meaningful look. “It’s hard when you don’t feel like you have anyone to lean on. The medicine couldn’t change what was going on, obviously. But it took some of the load off so I could get through it.”
I sit up, sorting through this.
“You were married?”
Aunt Jen’s lips quirk. “Not for very long. Not for the right reasons.”
“I used to wonder whether you would ever get married. You never said anything.” All she’d e
ver said was “Well, maybe someday.” When I’d asked Mom, she just told me Jen didn’t seem too interested.
“Oh, I’ve seen a few people over the years,” Aunt Jen says in an offhand way. “I guess I’m still a little gun-shy. I like having my own place, without having to depend on someone else or fight about chores.” She settles back into her corner of the couch and smiles at me. “And anyway, it’s more fun when it’s not too serious.” I blink at her, and she laughs. “Oh, Mare-bear, you look so shocked. What did you think I was, a nun?”
“It’s just weird,” I protest, and she shakes her head, still laughing. Aunt Jen is six years older than Mom, and between that and her gray-streaked hair, her prim reserve, she always seemed ancient to me. Grandmotherly. Among the pictures on the wall above the staircase are some snapshots from the surprise party Mom threw for her on her thirtieth birthday, where I was a baby in a pink sundress. It occurs to me now she’s not even fifty.
“Was it like this?” I ask. “When you got divorced?”
“No,” she says gently. “We didn’t own much of anything. And we didn’t have kids. It was…well, it’s never easy. But it’s simpler, you know, when all you have to manage is your own broken heart.”
How is it possible to love people so much and never know these things about them? What else haven’t they told me?
I’ve seen a few people over the years. People. I look up at her again as she takes a long sip of tea.
She never used a pronoun. Not even about her ex. Not “he.” Not once.
The questions come bubbling up, and I swallow. I will not ask. I take a determined bite of toast and force them down, rocks vanishing into the water. I will not ask. I don’t need to know.
What I need to know is what happened last night.
I steel myself to call Ron, to ask her, but I only get as far as picking up my phone. In my mind I see her running through the orange-lit darkness, and I throw the phone back in my bag. She doesn’t want to hear from me. And I’m afraid of what she would say.
So much for Niobe’s reading. Nobody’s going to hell and back for me.
The Dark Beneath the Ice Page 11