Fantasy Life

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Fantasy Life Page 13

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch


  “Yet they run to us every time something goes wrong.”

  Athena shook her head. “The old-timers do. The younger folks are too sophisticated to believe that the Buckinghams can protect them.”

  “They just don’t remember.” Cassie set the remains of the cookie on the table. Her stomach was suddenly queasy. “We’ve been lucky. There hasn’t been a big emergency in thirty years.”

  “There’ve been a few.”

  “South of here,” Cassie said. “Whale Rock and Seavy Village. But not Anchor Bay.”

  “No.” Athena spoke quietly. “There’ve been a few here too.”

  Cassie put her hands under the table. They wanted to become fists again. The anger was back—if indeed it had ever gone away.

  “You didn’t tell me,” Cassie said.

  “I figured you would know if you needed to.”

  Cassie made the fists. “We’re blocked from each other, at your request.”

  “I never requested it, Cass,” her mother said. “You intuited it.”

  “Correctly,” Cassie said.

  Her mother inclined her regal head forward.

  “And because we’re blocked,” Cassie said, “I don’t always get the same information you do. There’s no way I could know if something was going on.”

  “You should be able to predict these things.” Said so calmly as if nothing were wrong.

  It took all of Cassie’s strength to keep herself from slamming her fists on the ugly black table and leaving the room. This was worse that feeling sixteen. This was five decades of struggle, revived in a single conversation.

  And it didn’t help that they avoided this conversation as often as they could.

  “You should know,” Cassie said, putting a space between each word, “that while my telepathy is constant, my ability to predict the future is not. You may have named me after that horrible, unfortunate bitch in Greek mythology, but I am not her, and no amount of wishing makes it so.”

  “You’re mixing your legends.” Athena got up and poured the peppermint tea from her mug into the sink.

  “I am not,” Cassie said, even though she knew she shouldn’t get sidetracked. “I know exactly what I’m talking about. Cassandra was cursed. She was given the ability to see the future, but no one would believe her when she told them what was going to happen. Well, I’m cursed too, but not with that particular ‘gift.’ People like that I can see the future. They just don’t want me around. I make them nervous. I’m odd and too intuitive and I give them the sense, even when I’m trying not to, that I can read their minds.”

  Athena reached into the cupboard and took down the second Mr. Coffee. “You know, some day you’ll have to get past high school, Cassandra.”

  “I am past high school.” Even though she still wanted to slam her fists onto the table like a teenager. “This is my life, Mother, and you refuse to recognize it.”

  “And you refuse to believe that I can’t do anything about it.” Athena rested her hands on the countertop and bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Cassandra. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  Cassie wasn’t sure what caused her mother’s change of mood, but whatever it was, it hadn’t affected Cassie. She snapped, “You’re not going to wait to greet your granddaughter and great-granddaughter?”

  Athena’s shoulders hunched forward. For a moment, she actually looked her age.

  “They don’t need to see me in this condition,” she said. “They’ll understand. They didn’t call ahead. For all they know, we went to sleep hours ago.”

  “Except that Gabriel talked to you and told you they were coming,” Cassie said. And even if he hadn’t, Lyssa would have expected them to be up. She knew what Cassie’s abilities were, and she knew what their habits were. At least, when Lyssa had been a child, neither Cassie nor Athena went to bed before 2 A.M.

  “Ah, yes.” Athena raised her head and sighed. “I forgot.”

  That alarmed Cassie more than the change of mood had. It sounded true. Athena had forgotten. She never forgot anything.

  “Are you ill, Mother?”

  Athena turned. Her face was pale, her cheekbones sunken. The exhaustion had eaten away at her, and Cassie, in her anger, hadn’t noticed how deeply.

  “It’s nearly over, Cass.”

  “What is, Mother?”

  Athena looked at the kitchen, at the darkness outside the stone-framed window over the sink, at the second Mr. Coffee lying in a heap on the counter.

  “This,” she said. “What you and I take for normal.”

  Cassie sat upright in her chair. It felt odd to have someone else reciting a prediction to her. Athena crossed the room and placed her palm gently on Cassie’s cheek. Her hand was cold, and through the skin her bones seemed brittle.

  “You and I shouldn’t fight anymore, baby girl.” Athena slid her hand down Cassie’s cheek and started to move away.

  Cassie caught Athena’s wrist. “You know something. What?”

  “Nothing concrete.”

  “But?”

  “But I know the minute Lyssa and her child cross that threshold, the end has started, and, selfishly, I’m not ready for it.” Athena slipped her hand out of Cassie’s grasp and walked toward the door.

  Cassie let her go. It wasn’t so much Athena’s words that had shaken her.

  It was the tears, swimming in Athena’s eyes.

  Twelve

  Highway 101 South

  The Village of Anchor Bay

  The halogen lights arcing over the highway were one of the few new things in Anchor Bay. The extra lanes on either side, cut into a hill the town fathers had once vowed not to touch, were new, and of course, the names of the businesses were all different.

  But the names of the businesses changed every summer—only the hardiest survived the winter season—so that wasn’t different at all. Nothing else seemed different, not even the buildings. Except for the new construction outside of town, it looked as if no one had invested a dime in Anchor Bay in more than twenty years.

  The hill crested and turned toward the ocean. The businesses disappeared as the cliff appeared on the horizon. Even in the dark and the rain, Lyssa could see its outline black against the night sky.

  The cliffs on either side of Anchor Bay were what made the village memorable. They rose like pillars out of the sea. Made of black lava rock, they had no trees growing on them, no greenery except for the occasional lichen.

  They were also tall and imposing, and they seemed isolated, even though they were not. The entire Oregon coastline had areas like it, places where the ground rose to terrifying heights, and the ocean boomed below.

  The unique thing about Anchor Bay was that the cliffs formed a natural harbor, and inside that harbor was a beautiful, six-mile-long stretch of beach that seemed as if it had been transplanted from Hawaii. Because all Oregon beaches were public highways, protected by the state, no houses could be built on them.

  Anchor Bay’s beach, one of the best in a state with tremendous beaches, brought tourists in from all over. But many of them didn’t stay. The cliffs concerned people—and then they saw Cliffside House, growing out of the south cliff like a castle born of the sea.

  Lyssa leaned forward slightly. The car seemed cold, even though the heat was blasting. She wondered if Gabriel had noticed how nervous she was, and then she wondered why she cared.

  She had had a crush on Gabriel Schelling when she was in high school, and he seemed nice enough now, but he was probably going home to a wife and 2.5 children who were nearly grown. She certainly couldn’t imagine him ever leaving Anchor Bay and discovering what the real world was like.

  Fat lot of good discovering the real world had done her.

  Emily was awake in the backseat, sitting up and clutching Yeller to her. She was looking out the oceanside window, staring into the darkness as if she could see something.

  Lyssa could smell the ocean. Its briny smell was familiar and devastating, one more thing she had run away from. She
could also hear the ocean, as it pounded and slammed against the sand. But she couldn’t see it. It blended with the night and the rain to form an inky darkness to her right.

  “We’re almost there,” Lyssa said.

  “Good,” Emily said, and leaned back against her seat.

  Lyssa didn’t say any more and neither did Emily. Emily thought everything was fine—that casual trust that children had for parents. She didn’t know that Lyssa had been horribly irresponsible on this trip, that Lyssa hadn’t even called ahead to see if Athena and Cassie would welcome them into Cliffside House.

  After the way Lyssa had treated her mother all these years, Lyssa wouldn’t blame her for turning them out.

  Fortunately, this was the off-season, and Lyssa had seen several vacancy signs on the beachside hotels they had passed. The trick was to discover whether she was welcome before the hotels shut their front desks down for the night.

  She supposed she would know soon enough. Even if Cassie had kept her promise and hadn’t tapped into Lyssa’s every thought, she probably knew that Lyssa and Emily were coming. If she didn’t—if she had missed it somehow—well, then, Athena was bringing home the news because Gabriel had told her back there on the highway.

  “Mommy?” Emily said.

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  “Daddy said this place was evil.”

  Damn Reginald and his illness. “Did he? When?”

  Emily didn’t answer. She just looked out the window.

  “Does what he said worry you?” Lyssa asked.

  But Emily was done. She had imparted the wisdom—if that was what it had been; it seemed more like poison to Lyssa—that Reginald had given her and felt that the problem was now her mother’s.

  The problem was that Lyssa would have agreed with Emily years ago. She felt that Anchor Bay was evil, not because of the magic that clearly coexisted with people here, but because of its narrow, small-town single-mindedness.

  She had had a brain, and she had been determined to use it. Her mother had applauded that much, and her grandmother, usually her biggest supporter, had admonished her to bring her knowledge back to Anchor Bay.

  Lyssa hadn’t. In fact, she had fought with Athena the night she’d made that comment. And then Athena had never come to see her, not once, speaking to her by phone only rarely and barely acknowledging the high points of Lyssa’s life, such as her wedding and Emily’s birth.

  Did they even know about the divorce? Lyssa couldn’t remember what she had told them. They knew about Reginald’s death—the whole country knew about that—but they probably had no idea of all the things that had preceded it.

  That thought almost made her turn into the last row of beachside motels. She didn’t want to rehash her history, and she certainly didn’t want to justify it, not for the women who’d raised her, the women who hadn’t wanted her to leave Anchor Bay in the first place.

  And then the road dipped and she saw it, towers rising off its corners like the art on a fantasy novel. Cliffside House’s lights were visible in the rain, making it seem like a beacon against the hideous night.

  It seemed to be missing a tower—she remembered three—but she knew that Cliffside House was never the same.

  She hadn’t explained that to Emily either. Maybe the problem wasn’t her daughter. Maybe the problem was her.

  But how to tell a child of ten that the world she’d grown up in wasn’t the world she was facing now? Some differences had to be experienced to be understood.

  The cliff the house was on, the Devil’s Goblet, was actually part of a longer group of mountains that came all the way toward the beach at this section. The highway went over the lava rock here and continued south. On the left side of the highway, the lava rock rose, black and foreboding. On the right, the ocean side, the cliff seemed far away.

  That was because of the headland that led to it, a flat portion of rock too high for most (but not all) tides. On that rock, Lyssa’s grandfather had carved a road to Cliffside House—or so the story went—even though she had no idea how he had done it. Once she had examined it and thought the road too smooth to have been made by human hands and human machines.

  But the water could have done that, running across the surface over all of the years.

  The driveway, as everyone called the road, rose steadily, until it wound around the center of the cliff and led to a carved parking lot on the harbor side. That parking lot provided the only access to Cliffside House.

  “Is that a castle?” Emily asked, but she didn’t use the tone that Lyssa would have expected. Most children would have been excited and awed to go into a castle. Emily made it sound like the first day of school, a doctor’s visit, and an hour in the principal’s office combined.

  “No, Em. That’s where we’re going.” Lyssa made sure her voice sounded calm. She didn’t want her daughter to pick up on her own nervousness.

  “Is it a lighthouse?” Emily had seen more than her share of lighthouses in the Midwest. The Great Lakes were dotted with them, and Reginald, in healthier days, loved to visit them.

  “It’s not a lighthouse either,” Lyssa said. “It’s Cliffside House. That’s where I grew up.”

  “Is it a mansion?” Emily sounded interested in something for the first time in weeks.

  “I don’t know what you’d call it.” Lyssa couldn’t remember ever having had those questions.

  “But you lived there?”

  Lyssa almost answered with And you will too, but stopped herself in time. She didn’t know if Emily would live there, and Lyssa couldn’t bear to disappoint her daughter. Not when Emily was so fragile.

  “I did,” Lyssa said. “And your grandmother Cassie and great-grandmother Athena live there now.”

  “Gramma Cassie lives there? She never said.” Emily leaned even closer to the window.

  “How many people did you tell when you lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house?” As soon as the question came out of Lyssa’s mouth, she knew she had said the wrong thing.

  Emily leaned back in the car seat, and her arms tightened around Yeller. “Nobody.”

  “See?” Lyssa said. “It’s the same thing.”

  But they both knew it wasn’t. Cliffside House had an aura. The Frank Lloyd Wright house had a reputation. And for all its oddities, Cliffside House had been comfortable. The Frank Lloyd Wright house never was. Both Lyssa and Emily had been happy to leave it.

  Then the turn for the driveway appeared—not as suddenly as it used to, though. Someone had installed two lights that looked like gateposts. They were faint, but visible in the rain. A sign next to them read Private Drive; another read Enter at Own Risk; and a third read Do Not Enter in a Plus Tide.

  As if the people who would enter a private drive that had an Enter at Own Risk sign would know what a plus tide was. Lyssa shook her head. At least someone had tried.

  She turned the car sharply and waited for the bump that she remembered, the moment she would know she had left the paved road and was on lava rock, but the bump never came. Her hands tightened on the wheel, and she sent a little prayer to whatever god would take it to protect her and Emily.

  The lava rock was slippery in the best of times. Now it was wet and covered with a layer of water from the heavy rains. Her car had good traction, but it wasn’t designed for something like this. It would take all of her driving skills to get to the house.

  She had entered the driveway too fast, but she pulled her foot away from the brake anyway. The antilock brakes helped, but they wouldn’t be a solution. The best thing to do was drive as if she knew what she was doing.

  Confidence, a driving instructor had once told her, saved a driver’s ass more than fear ever could.

  “This a weird road, Mommy,” Emily said.

  “It’s a driveway.” Lyssa sounded more dismissive than she would have liked, but she couldn’t pay attention to Emily at the moment. The blackness of the rock devoured the beams from her headlights, and no one had thought to put lights—or guard
rails—on either side of the drive.

  The ocean boomed and rose twenty feet below, threatening to send waves toward her. One wave would knock the car off the driveway and into the sea. If the Bug fell to the north side, the harbor might provide an escape. But if she fell to the south, there would be no surviving.

  Lyssa felt a surge of anger rise. She had forgotten about this part of the drive, and it was stupid really, with all the modern conveniences. What were Athena and Cassie thinking? The house might be secure from large waves and tsunamis, but the driveway definitely was not.

  She finally reached the curvy section and realized it was just barely wide enough for her chubby little car. Still, she managed to get all the way up to the parking area without scratching either side of the Bug.

  Lyssa parked near the main sidewalk, also lit now with two formal-looking light posts, and shut off the ignition. Then she rested her arms on top of the steering wheel and buried her face. Her heart was pounding heavily, and her breathing was short. She had sweated through her shirt.

  She couldn’t remember a more challenging night of driving, not even from her teenage years.

  “Are you okay, Mommy?” The fear in Emily’s voice gave Lyssa the energy to sit up.

  “Tired, baby doll,” Lyssa said. More than tired. Exhausted and shaky and scared. But the rest of it was a burden that Emily didn’t need. “Want to see your grandma?”

  Emily didn’t answer, and Lyssa forced herself to turn around in her seat. Emily had brought her knees up to her chest, like they had been on that damn dock in July. Only then, she hadn’t had Yeller clutched in her arms.

  “What if she don’t wanna see me?” Emily asked, her voice small.

  “She will,” Lyssa said, hoping she was right. Predicting Cassie’s moods was always difficult.

  “I’ll wait,” Emily said.

  The car shook slightly with the wind.

  “It’s going to get cold in here,” Lyssa said, “and I can’t leave the ignition on. It’s too dangerous. Come with me. I want to see my mother.”

  That almost sounded true. It sounded true enough, anyway, to get a solemn nod out of Emily. Apparently she understood the place where fear and desire crossed.

 

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