Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She didn’t feel scared of this water, because she couldn’t feel it, even though she knew it was wet and cold and dark. She could only see through it, which she probably shouldn’t have been able to do either, considering how black it all was.

  It also helped that Grandma Cassie was right beside her, looking as intense as she did in the restaurant, heading someplace with a real purpose.

  It took a few minutes to get there, going through water littered with junk. Emily didn’t have words for most of it: stuff growing on rocks, the rocks themselves that didn’t look like rocks, the weird animals climbing in and out of shell-like stuff.

  Grandma Cassie kept going out and down until they were so far away from shore that Emily doubted people had ever been this deep in the water. She got no real sense of humans at all, although there were other things here, things Grandma Cassie and Roseluna and Great-Grandma Athena were familiar with.

  Then Emily saw the bottom, all sandy and covered with more creatures, some of which she recognized, like big crabs that walked along the bottom as if there wasn’t water there at all, and snakelike things, and even a shark.

  Emily winced as the shark went by, but it didn’t scare her, because most of her—almost all of her—was sitting on Grandma Cassie’s lap in the restaurant. More people had come in, and they were going to their table near the window, laughing and talking as if nothing was wrong. They didn’t even see Emily or Grandma.

  Grandma Cassie finally stopped at this big lump of something on the bottom. It was covered with more of that green, floaty stuff, and lots of sand had drifted onto the sides.

  Emily actually had to lean on Grandma Cassie just a bit more to know what she was looking at. It was the Walter Aggie, the part they’d sunk, the part with all the oil in it that Roseluna was talking about.

  The part that was leaking.

  Emily held her breath, then remembered she didn’t have to. The leaking oil wouldn’t kill her. She was still outside, breathing air (thank God. She didn’t want to think about how it felt to have no air. That had scared her too badly last July, and if she remembered it too much, that burning feeling started in her chest and made her even more scared—this time of herself).

  Maybe the water was black because it had so much oil in it. But the crab and the shark and the snakelike thing didn’t seem to notice the oil. A couple of fish wove their way around one of the green-covered things, which, guessing from its shape, had to be a railing or something.

  Emily wondered where the leak was, and the big emergency Roseluna was talking about, the big excuse for all the problems she was going to cause and the stuff she was going to do to Anchor Bay.

  Grandma Cassie must have been wondering the same thing, because she leaned even farther forward in the restaurant and nearly banged heads with Emily. In fact, they would’ve banged if Emily hadn’t moved away a little.

  Grandma Cassie didn’t seem to notice. Her mind was swimming faster, going onto the deck of the Walter Aggie, then down into the hold—Emily knew all this stuff because Grandma Cassie was sharing now, whether she meant to or not. Maybe because she was so close.

  Or maybe because she was so upset. Grandma Cassie was broadcasting upset without even opening her mouth. Emily wondered how the other people in the restaurant could keep laughing. The upset was so bad, it made Emily want to crawl off Grandma Cassie’s lap.

  But Emily didn’t. She went with Grandma Cassie into the hold, and deep deep deep into the tanks where they stored the oil. The tank doors were closed, and they were made of reinforced steel. Grandma Cassie explored the edges of the steel, and all around the doors, and didn’t find any leaking oil at all. Finally she slipped under the door and slowed down even more because a lot of oil was there, and it was cold (Emily could almost feel it) and it was thick, thick as ice.

  Only Grandma Cassie didn’t use the word thick. She was thinking viscous. She was thinking lies.

  She pulled out of the tanks, then went all the way around the hull, at least the parts she could see. There were no tar balls, no pieces of black stuff slowly floating their way to the surface.

  There were no dead fish, but lots of algae, and nothing to show leaks. Nothing at all.

  Grandma Cassie let out a sound like the cross between a moan and a growl. She touched the side of the ship with her mind, then everything vanished—the ship, the restaurant, the people, everything.

  Emily panicked—she wanted to see! she needed to see!—and then something rose in front of her:

  Three women swimming quickly toward the Walter Aggie, giggling as they did, the sound registering more like gurgles than laughter. They had ugly feet and suckers on their hands, and scales instead of skin, but in the water, their strawlike hair looked kinda pretty, and they had something Mommy would call real grace, which made them look like dancers.

  Emily thought they looked like synchronized swim ladies from the Olympics with underwater cameras and everything, only they didn’t move the same, and they weren’t wearing stupid swimming caps. They swam right into the ship, and then they looked at each other.

  One of them went into the tanks, and it took a minute before the others followed.

  And then everything changed as the camera—Grandma Cassie?—pointed up. All around the ship were seals. Only seals didn’t swim that deep. They were surface creatures.

  “Selkies,” Grandma Cassie said, and the whole picture disappeared.

  The restaurant came back, and Emily let out a breath. She was breathing as hard as if she’d swum the whole thing herself.

  “Selkies were down there,” Grandma Cassie said.

  “What does that mean?” Emily asked.

  “I don’t have the full ramifications of it yet.” Grandma Cassie’s voice was tight, like people’s got when they got really mad. “But I’ll figure it out. What I do know is that you’re right, Em. Roseluna was lying—at least about the oil. I don’t think she’s lying about destroying Anchor Bay.”

  “But if she made up the oil stuff, why wouldn’t she make up the other stuff?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Grandma Cassie said. “But I’m going to find out.”

  And then Emily got another flash, this one of burning. The tears formed in Emily’s eyes—Daddy?—before she realized the smell was wrong.

  It smelled like farts and matches just before they caught on fire. And then she realized she’d smelled something like that yesterday.

  When she had had that shared dream-memory with Grandma Cassie. Grandma Cassie, standing in the stairway at Cliffside House, unable to move because she saw fire everywhere.

  “What does it mean?” Emily asked.

  Grandma Cassie looked at her. “You sensed it too?”

  Emily nodded. “The fire. You saw that a long time ago, right?”

  Grandma Cassie tilted her face, wonder in her eyes. “You’re a miracle, child.”

  “You saw it, right, Grandma?”

  “I saw it. And I thought we averted it when we convinced Spark Walters not to burn the Walter Aggie. I had no idea that it could be this far out in the future, that it could be something else, something not related to that night.”

  “I think it’s got something to do with that night,” Emily said, “or Great-Aunt Roseluna—”

  “Don’t call her that,” Grandma Cassie said. “Don’t give her that kind of respect.”

  Emily took a deep breath, hating all the confusing stuff that grown-ups made her do.

  “I think,” Emily said again, “that she wouldn’t have mentioned the boat. And the oil. And they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to make us think the boat is leaking. They want something.”

  “Yeah,” Grandma Cassie said. “They want an excuse.”

  Thirty-Two

  Anchor Bay Elementary School

  Gabriel tried to step into the parking lot, but the creatures wouldn’t let him. He clutched the bullhorn in one hand, feeling the cold metal and plastic against his skin.

  Why didn’t the bull
horn disturb them? Why did Lyssa’s horn?

  She was still hanging out of her car, like a teenager on a drunken brawl. Her hair was mussed and her skin was blotchy, as if she’d been in there and panicked for hours.

  She probably had. He had known about this for a while, and it had never crossed his mind that any of the cars were occupied.

  “What made them move?” One of the tourists, a man, had come up beside Gabriel. This guy was dressed in Northwest casual—khaki pants and a golf shirt, looking comfortable despite the chill.

  “Just a minute,” Gabriel said, not wanting these people to do anything on their own.

  He leaned forward and said to Lyssa, “I think it’s safe for you to get down, so long as you wash off when you get inside the school.”

  Lyssa glanced at the goo on her car. She was leaning as far from the slime-covered metal as possible.

  “Oh, I’m definitely doing that,” she said. “It’s getting across the trail that I’m worried about.”

  Denne reached Gabriel’s side. Denne was holding a pile of slime in one hand.

  “I don’t think it’s harmful,” he said more to Gabriel than to Lyssa. “It’s not burning me, and it doesn’t smell toxic.”

  Gabriel’s nose wrinkled involuntarily at the thought of sniffing that stuff. He didn’t want to think about touching it.

  “That doesn’t seem very scientific to me,” he said.

  “Trust me,” Denne said. “If she takes your advice and washes off, she’ll be fine.”

  “Did you hear that?” Gabriel asked Lyssa. “You’ll be fine. Just jump it as best you can.”

  Lyssa nodded, then swung herself around the car door like a Hollywood stunt person. She landed at the very edge of the slime trail, splashing the goo up and out.

  A few people who were standing near Gabriel made a unison sound of disgust. But Lyssa seemed buoyed by being free.

  He probably would have been too.

  She waved at him.

  “Thanks!” she shouted, and ran for the school’s front door.

  His heart was pounding. He didn’t like the idea of Lyssa Buckingham trapped in her car, no matter how much she joked about it. She didn’t deserve anything like that, especially on her first day in town.

  “So,” Denne said, shaking the goo off his hands. Gabriel stepped back so that none of the flying ooze would hit him. “We gonna take advantage of the lesson she just gave us or are we going to ignore it?”

  Gabriel grinned and then looked at Denne. Denne didn’t have a twinkle in his eye. Gabriel had thought that Denne was voting for tweaking the tourists, but he wasn’t. He was serious.

  “Why in God’s name would we ignore it?” Gabriel asked.

  “For the sake of science. Maybe we can figure out what some of these things are.”

  Gabriel nodded toward the tourists. None had left their posts, and only a few had taken his advice to turn off their ignitions. The kid with the camcorder was still recording the scene, only now his little lens was fixed on Gabriel.

  Gabriel quickly turned away.

  “That kid is recording things for posterity, and I see a few bodies around Lyssa’s car. You’ll get your chance,” Gabriel said. “Now we just have to figure if all car horns divert these things or if it’s just something in VW Bug’s horn that works.”

  “Or,” said an unfamiliar voice behind him, “perhaps it’s the vibration on metal that they don’t like.”

  Gabriel turned. A woman with streaked, blunt-cut blond hair stood behind him. She wore careful makeup—not too much and not too little—that looked fresh. Her eyes were the brilliant blue granted by contact lenses, and her nose was regulation WASP—straight, narrow, and petite.

  A man behind her, scruffy and ill-tended, his jeans as sloppy as his hair, held a small news camera in his hands. Gabriel couldn’t see the call letters, but he knew from the woman’s precise prettiness that this had to be a Portland station.

  She watched Gabriel’s gaze shift from her to her cameraman and back to her again. Then she stuck out her manicured hand.

  “Nicole Drapier, Oregon’s Best News at Six.” Somehow she managed to say that with a straight face. “And I understand you’re Sheriff Schelling?”

  Almost no one called him that, but he took it in stride. More in stride than he had taken the way she had introduced herself. Oddly enough, though, the introduction had worked. He knew what station she was from because that was what it called its news—not Portland’s Only Local News at Six—which would have been more accurate.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You were here on vacation and somehow got stuck in traffic.”

  Her smile was the prettiest part of her, and he could see how she would be able to wheedle stories out of unsuspecting people.

  “I wouldn’t try to fool someone like you, Sheriff. We drove in this morning, waiting until the road opened just south of here, and came to do a live remote on the road troubles.” She looked down at the creatures heading toward the valley. “It looks like the troubles are a bit different this year.”

  That comment, with its touch of dry wit, endeared her to him instantly, and that worried him. He didn’t want to like a reporter, especially one whose innocent little news story could change the nature of Seavy County forever.

  Gabriel shrugged, trying to seem as calm about this as he could. “I think the storm last night disturbed them.”

  “C’mon, Sheriff. Storms happen here all the time.”

  “But not severe enough to close all the roads at once. Besides, have you looked at the surf? Lots of junk in it this morning. Something got stirred up.”

  Unfortunately, his comment didn’t even get her to look toward the ocean.

  “Mind if we do a brief on-camera?” she asked, already signaling her cameraman.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said. “I do.”

  It was his turn to signal. Zeke moved behind the cameraman, ready to stop the filming if he had to.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” Drapier said.

  “It’s a minute I don’t have.” Gabriel pushed past her. “Now that we know what’s going on, we just have to clear the road.”

  He headed into the highway, and the tourists gathered around him. The Los Angeles guy spoke first.

  “I think we should all honk. Then these things’ll run, and we’ll be able to get across—”

  “Actually,” Gabriel said as he scanned the rows of backedup cars, “we’re going to try something else first.”

  “We are?” Denne’s stage whisper was loud enough for everyone else to hear.

  Gabriel nodded. “We need to get them back to the beach. I have an idea, but it’ll take a bit of work.”

  “Work we can do,” Denne said. “It’s failure that we don’t want. And, as you said, we don’t want to lose any of these creatures.”

  “We won’t,” Gabriel said, but he wasn’t so sure. Lyssa had given him part of the answer, that was true, but not all of it.

  He knew that the creatures could be diverted by a car horn, but whether he could force those coming out of the sea toward the drainage pipes under Leland Hill was a whole other matter.

  Oddly enough, the thing that bothered him the most was having this whole strange event and possible solution caught on camera. Normally he didn’t mind the press, but this time he did.

  Nicole Drapier’s presence didn’t feel like a coincidence, even though he wasn’t sure why. But that niggly little voice in the back of his head—the one that Cassandra Buckingham said everyone had, and which dominated her mind—was telling him that none of this, not the creatures, not the reporter, not even the dead water sprite, was a coincidence.

  And that disturbed him more than he could say.

  Thirty-Three

  Highway 101

  The Village of Anchor Bay

  A long string of cars lined the southbound lane of Highway 101. No cars drove along the northbound lane. Cassie’s stomach turned, and she wondered what she had missed.

&nb
sp; Emily sat in the passenger seat, staring out at the sea. Cassie had gotten the sense that Emily had been with her on the mental journey to see the Walter Aggie.

  Some of Emily’s powers unnerved her.

  Emily seemed to have more abilities than all the other Buckinghams combined—and she was untrained. The abilities could flare up at any moment and take everybody by surprise.

  Cassie had already been surprised twice that day, first by the miniature model of Emily’s memory, and then by Emily’s closeness during Cassie’s mental journey.

  Cassie crossed the highway and parked in the Sundance parking lot. Sundance was one of those nebulous coastal stores that seemed to have a lot of useless tchotchkes, glass sculptures that passed for art, and badly done watercolors of the seashore. Cassie never knew how those stores thrived, but they seemed to, for they were the only ones that never closed. All the others, with practical things like shampoo and toilet paper, couldn’t seem to make it through a summer, let alone the long, dark winters.

  Hers was the only car in the lot, even though half a dozen stores were on this block, and several restaurants. The string of cars were idling, as if they had hope that soon they’d get out of whatever was holding them in place.

  If she hadn’t driven across that part of town earlier, she would have thought that this was one of the areas that had flooded or fallen away. But she knew better. Something had happened while she and Emily were in the Trawler, and if it had cars idling this far up 101 on a late-fall weekday, then it had to be serious enough to close down the highway for some time.

  “What’s going on, Grandma?” Emily asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”