by D. L. Scott
“That’s not what I mean. Of course they didn’t want things to change this much,” Raina said. “Mr.Topoulis said that people didn’t know they were making the changes, until it was too late.”
Alice’s gut rumbled. His muscles ached. “How could they not know?” he said. “Look at how much things have gone under the sea. Look at the storms!”
“I know,” Raina said. “We see that, but they didn’t. That’s the theory. The libraries were largely wiped out because of some kind of power and computer failures along with the rising sea levels.”
Alice’s lips were dry. “If they didn’t—,” he started.
Raina looked hard at him. Her eyes were as dark-rimmed as his. She had started to say aloud that she wanted to go live with Aunt Linz and not live here anymore, at the opening of the gate to the sea. He could feel the urgency in her muscles, even from across a room.
“If they didn’t know,” Alice tried again, “how do we know we’re not still changing things ourselves? How do we know what we’re changing? Is that how those people let such terrible things happen to the world? Because they didn’t know? What if we make the same changes worse?”
He watched the rain intensify. The outer bands of the storm were well over them now, and the sky was darkening. The worst part was still far off, over the heaving waves, out where the statue stared, mute and unforgiving. He was tired of living at sea as well, because that was what this really was—the first mile of the Atlantic itself, scattered with ancient buildings that collapsed a few at a time every major storm.
Raina shook her head. Alice looked up at her when she didn’t answer.
She was crying.
Alice took his sister’s head in his hands and kissed her on the forehead. She sniffed.
“I don’t know, Alice,” she said. “The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know, and that is what is the most frightening. What if we are all caught in a loop, dooming ourselves again and again? I simply don’t know. What if Dad makes us stay here?”
Her shoulders collapsed. She sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t scare you for no reason. Maybe it doesn’t matter. We’ll do our best, and we will make our mistakes, and the world will slide on. We’ll make it somehow.”
Alice nodded, but he didn’t know. He didn’t know anything but this quiet city with its echoing catwalks and storms, the constant threat of being pulled under the thrashing waves. The strange ocean creatures he had begun to see out of the corner of his eye when he walked by the pier. In the summer the year before, he had almost wished the Atlantic to take him. He was tired of being frightened. Tired of running inland and back again, like a taunting dance with the sea. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe the mermaids demanded him as a human sacrifice for the chaos exacted upon the sea by the people from which he was descended.
In this weather, he didn’t dare even look at the ocean most days. It was always reaching for him, up over the pier deck, splashing his cheek with a cold kiss. It would get him one day. He knew it. Just like he deserved. Maybe if he tipped himself into the waves, the sea people would accept the sacrifice, and the world would calm and his family could go on, in peace, without him.
“Kids.”
He turned.
“It’s time to go,” their mother said.
They raced down the catwalks to higher ground, the storm heavy at their backs. Alice felt the pull of the sea on his attention the whole way, nearly collapsing onto the sidewalk when his legs finally met pavement. Raina helped him, and they held their mother’s hands and ran. Then they were climbing up to the bus station, waiting endlessly in the rain. The darkness marched toward them.
As the bus came down the street, its headlights were two of the only lights still visible in the gloom. Impenetrable bands of rain enveloped the edge of the shore now. The water was pulling up toward them, like an octopus heaving itself up out of the sea.
Alice pulled his hat down lower over his eyes and prayed for the ocean to fall back. It lashed at his mind, demanded his fear. He tried to breathe carefully and slowly.
They scrambled aboard the bus. Raina pushed Alice up the steps. The bus driver took off before they had even paid their fare.
“Evening,” he said. “This will be my last run. I hope you don’t have any friends coming later. That’s about the last anyone will be able to get out of the city, they said. This one’s a big one.”
Alice’s mother shook her head.
“Mom,” Raina said.
Her mother directed her by the shoulder back to one of the empty seats in the back of the bus.
“Ouch,” Raina said. “Mom, you’re hurting me. How will Dad get out?”
Alice saw his mother press her lips together. She clasped her hands together, then threw them wide to envelop Alice and his sister in a hug. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “The line couldn’t catch him this time. The network must be overloaded.”
Alice shivered. His sister looked out the window. Debris from a torn awning and a shredded tree traveled along with them down the nearly abandoned street. The tailwind was helping them drive away.
“If we can all just find our way out of the city before we hit a traffic jam,” his mother said quietly. She tapped her foot on the floor and squeezed them tight.
“But,” Alice said, “what about Dad?”
His mother shook her head. “He’ll have to find his way out on his own,” she said. “We can’t help him now. We simply have to help ourselves and pray that he will find good shelter.”
Alice’s eyes stung, but he couldn’t think. He looked away, out the other side of the bus.
The buildings of downtown were dark in their upper floors. Several trucks of people pulled onto the road they were on, heading for an evacuation center.
“I should have thrown myself in when we were by the pier,” Alice said quietly.
“What?” Raina looked around their mother at him. His mother had not heard him, but his sister was staring.
“Someone needs to pay for the changes,” Alice whispered. “Maybe if it was one of us, related to those who caused them, the sea would calm.”
“You are not going to pay for this!” Raina insisted. “If anyone should pay, it’s Dad!”
Alice was suddenly struck numb. He gasped for a breath.
“What is it?” his sister asked.
He tried several times before he could get his lips to form the words. “What if,” he whispered, “what if Dad is paying for it?”
“Stop it!” Raina said. She punched him behind her mother’s back. Alice recoiled.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His sister was near tears. “What can we do?”
“We go to Aunt Linz’s,” Raina said. “Where we’re going to meet Dad.”
Alice sat back. The numbness was still coursing through him, down to his toes and back up to the top of his head.
“Can we?” he whispered. “Just keep going? Knowing we are the kind of people who would destroy the world and ourselves without doing anything to stop it? Knowing we are the kind of people who destroy themselves without seeing it? I don’t know.”
He closed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. He swallowed hard. The tingling was racing through his veins. What if his father never arrived? What if this storm swept the old city into the sea? Then could they start fresh? Did it make any difference if they broke with the past or not? Should he wish for his father’s return, or not?
Alice wiped his eyes and looked around again. A sign peeled off a building front and fell into the road. The back window of the bus was a sheet of freezing rain.
He looked at Raina. She was trembling, holding onto the edge of the window.
“Raina,” he said.
“Yeah.” She turned around. Her cheeks were streaked with tears.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?” she cried. Their mother turned to look at him, too.
“I’ll keep going,” he said.
Raina shivered. His mother turned
away again.
But Raina was smiling. It took her a moment to say anything. She whispered something.
“What did you say?” Alice asked.
“I said okay,” Raina said. “I will too.”
They drove to the edge of the city and got onto the highways, which were strangely empty. No one else was leaving the city. As night fell, the storm behind them intensified, dissolved into and merged with the dark. Alice felt it like a hot breath on his neck, ready to consume the city whole.
They drove. It only took them twenty minutes to reach Aunt Linz’s house, at the edge of the suburbs.
“We may have to leave here, too, all right?” Alice’s mother said when they approached the station near her neighborhood. “This storm will cover several states. But she has a better place than our perch right on the coast.”
Alice and Raina nodded. They pulled their knapsacks closer to their chests.
The bus squealed and came to a stop. Rain battered the roof like the clattering of sheet metal being dropped at a construction site.
Alice was the first to stand up.
He thought of the statue in the bay, facing the storm all alone. They were all alone, really. No one knew how to rescue them from the changes. No one seemed interested in trying. In the morning, the city could be swept away, along with his father, and still not a lot would change. That was what stayed the same, the lack of changes amidst the changes.
But he could try to change.
He yawned, to expel the last of the bad thoughts. The dreams of mermaids he cast back into the ocean, thrashing their tails and grinding their sharp teeth.
“Come on,” he said, taking his mother’s hand. “Let’s see if Dad called Aunt Linz.”
She smiled at him. “So brave, my little Alice,” she said. “You’re a strength to us all in hard times.”
They climbed down the slippery bus steps to stand under the rain shelter by the bus stop. The wind pressed against the corners of the houses and moaned through the streets. Alice could picture the sea rising up with its tentacles to grasp after them. Huge icicles were already forming on the buildings of downtown, preparing to break the skyscrapers in half.
But now, no matter what happened, they would be safe. Alice could hardly say from what. But the threat of the sea had sunk back past the piers.
It was already long gone, deep beneath the surface of the swirling waves. The numbness had passed. Alice took a step out from the rain shelter and pulled his sister with him. They would keep going, handling the changes as well as they could.
About the Author
Laura K. Cowan, The Dreaming Novelist, writes imaginative novels that explore the possibilities of the human condition through the connections between the spiritual and natural worlds. Her debut novel The Little Seer spent its launch week at #2 and #5 on the Kindle Bestseller List for free titles in Christian Suspense and Occult/Supernatural, and was hailed by reviewers and readers as “riveting,” “moving and lyrical.”
Laura’s second novel, a redemptive ghost story titled Music of Sacred Lakes, and her first short story collection, The Thin Places: Supernatural Tales of the Unseen, will be available soon. Connect with Laura on her website LauraKCowan.com, on Twitter or on Facebook.
The Morrígan
By Jack Darkness
“She hissed, right there behind my ear, and I had the horrible idea she was spitting maggots into my hair. Why maggots were a problem when I was about to be dead, I didn’t know, but the idea completely grossed me out. “In the womb I heard you die, for no one lives when a banshee cries.”
– C.E. Murphy, “Winter Moon”
Christopher O'Riley had never been to his homeland of Ireland before, but he had heard all the Irish tales in his family's history. One tale in particular scared him throughout his childhood, The Bean-Sidhe, or the Wailing Ghost.
He had traveled to Ireland because of the passing of his grandmother, who had instilled the fear of the Irish Fairy Folk in him at a young age, to claim the homestead willed to him. This also provided him the opportunity to face his long-standing fears of the fairy folk, according to her last words in her will. She was the only family that he had left, as his parents had been in an accident a year before; the disturbing part was, that he could have sworn he had heard a scream at the time that his parents were reported to have died.
As he stepped onto the boat departing for Ireland, he immediately began to feel uneasy, like he was going to fall over from being drunk.
The journey was awful; he had gotten sick multiple times and had shut himself in his cabin, his weakened constitution being due to being too upset to eat properly.
A chill ran up his spine as he stepped off the boat on the docks in Dublin. Turning south, he saw a woman with fire red hair and piercing green eyes, returning his stare and smiled gravely as she walked up to him like she recognized him.
“Christopher? Are you Christopher O'Riley?” Her voice seemed to purr in a thick Irish accent. He looked at her, admiring her beauty as she tapped her foot and turned on her heel, showing her obvious annoyance with his lack of response while he was staring at her body.
“Wait, I am Christopher,” he exclaimed, as he grabbed her hand softly to stop her from leaving. After feeling an electrical shock run through their fingers as their hands met she glared at him, and turned again to walk away.
Stowing his baggage in the trunk, Christopher and the beguiling red head climbed into the back seat of a black Suburban. She then signaled the driver to begin the five-hour drive to the family homestead, in the remote parts of the country.
They were so remote the dirt roads showed almost no sign of use as though they had been there for many more years than the closest city. Upon arrival, he climbed out of the vehicle as an older woman ran to him and hugged him tightly, with strength strange for her size. Her name was Moira, his grandmother's closest childhood friend and the caretaker to the home.
The strange woman who'd accompanied him made a sound of indignation as she stepped past him on her way into the house, obviously unhappy, possibly even to the point of hate, all directed at him. Christopher stared on in utter bewilderment as Moira slowly loosened the bear hug she had been holding him in.
Moira just burst out laughing with a guffaw, “Brighid is insulted that you don't remember her at all. You didn't even ask who she was, child.”
The old woman stopped laughing and patted him hard on the back. “She told me about how much she missed you and it's painfully obvious that you have forgotten her. You two used to be inseparable and we all thought you would get married someday, but when her mother died she had to move back here to live with me. I'm sorry to hear about your grandmother.”
He was dumbfounded. He never would have believed that the fire haired woman was his childhood sweetheart. She was so strong and independent looking, like nothing could get under her skin. It was a polar switch to the girl he used to torture daily when they were kids.
He looked at Moira and sighed, “Grandmother died last week, and I'm honestly still in shock; let me guess you expect me to still marry her?” She just snickered and went into the house with the luggage, dropping them in front of the staircase.
He followed Moira inside and realized that Brighid was waiting for him expectantly in front of a huge stairway, though she still was not saying anything to him. He walked up to her, carrying his bags, and followed her into a huge bedroom with a grand canopy bed. He stared at the room and dropped his bags hard on the floor. She looked at him with obvious disdain and turned to walk out. Christopher stopped her and sighed.
"Brighid, I am sorry for not recognizing you, but it has been nearly twenty years. You must admit you have changed, we both have in that time..." She looked him square in the eyes, all fire and energy, before kissing him squarely on the mouth. The kiss ended as quickly as it started, all Christopher had time to process was the sight of her leaving the room, leaving him baffled.
Throughout his first month he tried hard to avoid Br
ighid's anger and went out of his way to bring her gifts. She always snuffed him to his face, but when he left with his feelings hurt she would always gather up the gifts and take them to her room. Moira had seen a lot of this and just laughed to herself, knowing that soon they would come together as her predictions were never false. But every time that Christopher tried to get Brighid to pay attention to him or even just talk things out she would lose her temper and storm off.
Later that month, he had strange dreams of a woman washing rags in the river. As he walked slowly up to the river bank, he realized that the strange woman was washing Brighid's bloody clothing. It was the same clothing that she had worn when he arrived at the homestead.
He screamed and jerked himself awake, a cold chill running through his body. In a matter of seconds, Brighid had appeared in his doorway in her nightgown, panting hard from the intense run that brought her there. Upon seeing that he had fallen to the floor, she rushed into the room towards him. As she reached out to touch him, he scuttled away still thinking she was part of the nightmare.
“Christopher? What's wrong?” she calmly asked as she tried to grab hold of him, grabbing his shirt instead. Christopher scrambled backwards into the bedpost, her grip on him causing her to lose her balance.
She slipped and fell into him, her chest smashing into his face. Brighid blushed and backed away. Christopher looked like he suddenly realized she was real and clutched at her, shaking a bit. She sat down next to him, watching him carefully, “Tell me what happened, please.”
Struggling to regain his composure, he told her the details of the dream. After he finished, she went silent and covered her face with her hands, beginning to cry. ”So I'm next? The Bean-Sidhe Queen has said I'm next.” He looked at her, his mouth agape.
“The Morrígan? She's real? I thought she was just a myth.” He ran his fingers over her hair and pulled her into his embrace trying to soothe her. He realized that in the few months of being there he had fallen in love with her all over again, and now he might lose her. With a heavy heart and dark thoughts, he swore to himself that she would not be torn away from him again.