Haunting the Deep

by Adriana Mather

  “Stop, Denis!” Mollie screams.

  For a split second I freeze and so does he. Denis? Not Mollie’s Denis? How can that be?

  Mollie steps between us, yanking on his arm with all her might to get him away from me.

  “Move!” he yells at her, pushing her away.

  I try to pry his fingers off my arm, but he’s too strong.

  “Look at me, Denis! Look at me and tell me you don’t know me!” Mollie yells.

  His eyes flicker with uncertainty.

  “You’re my Denis,” she says with so much emotion that he does look at her. “I ran away from me family and everyone I loved ta be with ya! They said we couldn’t be married. Me brother chased us all the way ta the harbor. Do ya remember? I need you to remember me. Please!”

  His eyebrows push together like he’s struggling to concentrate. His grip loosens ever so slightly, and I pull my arm away, taking a few steps backward.

  His eyes move from Mollie to me.

  She grabs his face, forcing his focus back to her. “Ya couldn’t even stop ta shave,” Mollie says. “We got on this ship by sheer Irish luck. I chose you. I chose ya over all me family and everythin’ I’ve ever known.”

  The hardness in his expression melts away. “Mollie?”

  And she starts crying, big heaving sobs.

  He wraps his arms around her. “Don’t cry, me love. Don’t cry,” he says. But he’s crying, too. And hugging her so tightly it’s a wonder she can breathe.

  The floor beneath us tilts more and we all stumble.

  “We need to get to higher—” An arm wraps around my waist and cold metal presses against my neck. Knife!

  “Time to go,” Matt says in my ear.

  No!

  Mollie turns to me, fear seizing her expression. Matt pulls me backward and away from them.

  “What’ve I done?” Denis says, and walks toward us. “Miss!”

  “Stay where you are, Denis,” Matt warns. “You already did what you needed to do. You brought her up here.”

  “No…I…Ya took Mollie from me!” Denis’s eyes are wild. “Ya made me scare this girl.” He points at me. “I didn’t know what I was doin’, who I was!”

  Mollie inches her way over to the oar.

  Matt steadily backs us away from them and toward the railing. I open my mouth to respond, but the knife pushes into my skin and I shut it again.

  Mollie wraps her hands around the oar. Alexander I runs up the deck toward us.

  “Mollie, take one more step and I will slit her throat,” Matt warns.

  Alexander I grabs Mollie, throwing her to the ground. Denis hits him. The floor tilts again and we slide. Matt grabs the railing, pressing my stomach into it and securing his hands on either side of me. The knife is still in his hand and precariously close to my side. The black water lies quiet and unaffected fifty feet below.

  “Kill her!” Alexander I yells.

  Mollie screams and Denis loses his balance. She, Denis, and Alexander I slide, grabbing at the slippery deck to no avail.

  “Mollie!” No no no! I push against Matt, fighting him to release me. I grab on to the railing, turning my body around so that I can see him. “Stop this! The ship is going down! You need to let them go! Let them pass on!”

  “And who made it sink?” he says accusingly.

  People below us scream as they slide off the ship into the water. The deck slants even more now, and I clutch the railing. “Stop hurting them!”

  “Is that what you want, Samantha?”

  “Yes! That’s what I want.” My voice is heavy and angry.

  “You want me to die?”

  His words catch me off guard. “No. I want you to break the spell.”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t let all these spirits go. My grandfathers spent decades collecting them, my father did, I did.” His hand tightens around the knife and his voice is resolute.

  I scan the deck near my feet for anything I can use to get away from him. There’s nothing except slanted ship floor. My heart beats fast in my freezing body.

  “So you’re going to let these souls fall into this icy pitch-black water all over again? Can’t you see how terrified they all are? They don’t know they’re dead—they think this is all really happening. And how long will you keep them there while you repair your spell? Months? Years? You and your family are so concerned with your own selfish needs that you took away their right to remember, to choose, to pass on. This ship isn’t for these spirits, it’s for a handful of egomaniacal warlocks!”

  The deck tilts more drastically below our feet. Any minute now this ship is going to lift in the air.

  Matt’s eyes harden.

  I try to move away from him, but there is nowhere to go.

  The deck shifts again. Matt slides against me, shoving my back into the railing. The water is moving steadily up the deck, reaching for us. I look down at the panicked people, clinging to anything they can. There’s nothing on the floor but some rope where the lifeboats were tied. My frozen hands strain to hold on to the railing.

  He stares at me intently. My eyes flit to the rope and the water below. He lifts the knife.

  I grab his wrist, but he twists his hand and the knife slices through my skin. I scream. Blood drips down my arm.

  The lights flicker.

  I hook my leg behind his and fling all my weight into his chest, throwing him off balance.

  The force knocks the both of us loose from the railing, and we crash onto the slanted floor. And we’re sliding quickly down the deck. I manage to roll off his chest and pull away, but he clings to my bloody wrist.

  The sound of metal tearing comes from the bow of the ship. The lights go out. Screaming, there’s so much screaming. A funnel breaks off and falls into the water with a huge splash, crushing the people below it.

  I reach out as we slide past the rope, and I grab it with my uncut hand. We come to an abrupt halt, him hanging from my bloody wrist.

  “Sam,” he says, his eyes pleading with me.

  I hold on to his wrist. “Break the spell, Matt! Stop all this!”

  “No.” His voice sounds smaller.

  He’s losing his grip on my slippery blood-soaked arm. His fingers slide down inch by inch. Even in the dark, I can make out the fear in his eyes. He falls.

  “Saman—” he yells as the ship becomes vertical. But before he completes my name, he ricochets off a wall and slams into a pointed corner of railing. The sound of his bones cracking on metal fills my awareness.

  I press my forehead into the rope and clench my body tightly around it. The loss of blood and the chase have robbed me of my strength. I slip down, bit by bit. Pain radiates through my icy skin. As the ship sinks faster and faster, the water rises steadily to meet me. Matt has disappeared beneath its bubbling surface.

  The black water grabs at my legs like a million frozen teeth. I suck in air and down I go, still holding my rope. The water swirls around me in a whirlpool of suction. There is pressure on my ears. Down and down into a cold muffled world.

  I let go and kick with everything I have. My blood mixes with the water, pulling heat from me faster than before. And everything is quiet—the screaming on the deck gone, the sounds of the dying blotted out. My lungs ache with desperation. Dad. I kick harder. Elijah. The darkness continues.

  I want to take a breath. I have to. Please. Above me the darkness fades to gray. My lungs burn. From dark gray to medium gray. Is that light?

  Each second rings out in pain.

  I catapult into the lighter water, my body screaming at me to give in and stop struggling. A face appears, murky and getting closer. Matt! His arms reach out for me. His eyes are huge, and his mouth is open as he sucks in water. His fingers grab at me and he inhales. I push his hands away. His fingers go limp and his wide eyes stare—

  My dad leans over me. “She’s awake! Sam? Can you hear me?”

  It smells like freshly baked cookies, and the ground is hard beneath my back. I stare up at th
e stone counters of Mrs. Meriwether’s kitchen. Someone is crying in the background. Mary?

  “Sam? Sam? Can you talk?” my dad pleads.

  “Dad?” My voice is desperate. And there’s pain. My limbs feel like blocks of ice.

  Alice holds a cloth over my arm and is pressing down on it with both hands. There is blood all over her fingers.

  Mrs. Meriwether kneels down next to me. “It’s sterilized,” she says, holding a needle. Alice lifts up the cloth, and as the needle heads for my skin, my vision blurs.

  I squint in the dim light, trying to make sense of the furniture shapes. My bedroom? My temples pound like I have the worst hangover in the universe. And everything aches.

  “Sam?” my dad says. He sits on my vanity chair right next to my bed.

  “Dad?” My voice is scratchy and low.

  Tension releases his shoulders. I rub my eyes and wince. My left arm hurts like hell. There’s a big bandage wrapped around it. I sit straight up.

  He catches my shoulders. “Whoa, take it easy.”

  “Dad, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “Me? You barely make it out of some spell ship alive and you want to know how I am?” He shakes his head. “Sam—”

  “Dad, I didn’t use magic. I—”

  “Wait.” He holds up his hand. “Let me finish.”

  I close my mouth.

  “I don’t know if you realized, but I was conscious while I was in that trance. I couldn’t speak or react, but I could hear everything.”

  So he heard us discussing the spell, heard me speaking to Elijah, heard the girls doing who knows what type of magic?

  “At first I was furious and kicking myself. I thought that if I had just taken you back to New York sooner, none of this would have happened.”

  I don’t say anything. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

  “But, Sam, you should have seen the girls. Alice was barking orders. Mary was mixing some kind of memory spell.”

  My eyes widen. “They used a memory potion on me?”

  “Practically doused you in it.”

  “It helped. I remembered who I was. I don’t know if I would have otherwise,” I say.

  My dad nods. “Susannah was talking—or rather, writing messages—to someone named Elijah, trying to figure out how signature spells worked and how to break them. They dripped potion on that green dress and on the broken record.”

  “It must have been so weird for you,” I say.

  “No. It was heartbreaking. I realized that they were using a potion you asked Mae for days ago. That you and the girls wanted to mix the memory potion, and that you didn’t because of me. I actually robbed you of the tools you needed to stay safe.”

  I pull at my fluffy comforter.

  “You were right when you said that I didn’t know what you knew,” he says, an unusual heaviness in his voice.

  “You were trying to protect me.”

  “But not in the right way.”

  I look up at him. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying…I’m still not comfortable with magic. But Mae was right; you need to learn how to control it more than you need to run away from it. If you want to live in Salem, we can stay. I don’t ever want to realize again that it was my own stubbornness that put my child in danger. I’ve learned this lesson twice. There won’t be a third time.”

  Tears form in my eyes. “We can stay?”

  “We can stay.”

  My door creaks open, and Mrs. Meriwether comes in, bringing the scent of warm sugar with her.

  “I heard voices and I thought…My girl!” Mrs. Meriwether puts her hand over her mouth. “What can I get you? Are you hurting? Are you hungry?” She crosses my room in no time and cups my face in her hands. “Let me look at you.”

  I soak up her smile. “Jaxon…is he okay? Acting like himself, I mean?”

  She nods. “And he’s here. Jaxon and the girls. If you thought we wouldn’t be keeping vigil until you woke up, then you thought wrong.”

  My dad squeezes my hand.

  “How long was I out?”

  “More than twenty-four hours,” my dad says.

  I guess all those nights of broken sleep finally caught up to me.

  Mrs. Meriwether walks to my bedroom door. “She’s awake!” she yells. “Come on up!”

  Their feet are fast on the stairs and down the hall.

  Mary is the first one in, with Alice and Susannah right behind her. Mary has traces of Meriwether crumbs on her face and starts crying immediately. “Sam, I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do. A cut appeared. And your body temperature started to drop. You wouldn’t stop bleeding. I just…You don’t know…I was so scared. I’m just so happy you’re okay.”

  I look at Alice. “Matt?”

  “Dead,” she says quietly.

  “They found him in Salem Harbor with a broken back and crushed bones. The cause of death was drowning,” Susannah says. “They can’t figure out how it happened. It’s all over town.”

  I shiver, remembering his knife and the look on his face when he dropped from my hand. I nod, pushing the image away.

  “Redd?”

  Susannah shakes her head, and everyone falls silent.

  Jaxon appears in my doorway, and his face lights up when he sees me. “Sam.” He smiles, and it’s a real Jaxon smile.

  “Okay, okay. Let’s not overwhelm Samantha,” Mrs. Meriwether says. “Do you want me to bring you food, honey?”

  “Not yet.”

  They all exit my room, all but Jaxon, who looks anything but comfortable. He sits down in the chair my dad was using.

  “That spell,” I say.

  “Yeah…Sam, I didn’t know who I was, what I was doing. I just—”

  “Believe me, I know. It’s an awful, gross feeling.”

  Jaxon nods. “A nightmare.”

  We’re both quiet.

  Jaxon breaks eye contact with me. “I just don’t even know how to begin to—”

  “Jaxon, don’t. You don’t need to say anything.”

  Jaxon studies his hands. “Yeah, well…How do you feel about opening your get-well gift?” He looks behind him.

  I follow his line of sight to a box on my vanity. “I feel great about that.”

  Jaxon reaches behind him and picks up a present wrapped in blue tissue paper. He places it on the bed next to me.

  I pull back the paper, revealing a wooden box with a boat carved on the lid. The boat is a perfect replica of the one down by the wharf where we had our first real conversation. “The Friendship?”

  “I made it.”

  I look up at Jaxon. “Stop. You did not.”

  “I did. Take it as a peace offering. I should never have gotten mad at you that night after the restaurant. That was totally unfair. And, well, everything after that sucked, too. There are a lot of things I wish I could take back.”

  I lift the lid, and inside the wood grain is smooth and beautiful. “Can we still have our trust arrangement?”

  He smiles and it almost looks like his eyes glisten. “I’d really like that.”

  “Jaxon!” Mrs. Meriwether calls from downstairs. “Sam needs rest.”

  Jaxon stands up. “I guess that’s my cue.”

  I lie back on my pillows and look at my present. Broome stretches his paws out from the blankets near my feet. He blinks at me and curls up.

  I put the wooden box on my bedside table. There is a single lilac in the vase.

  I sit bolt upright. “Elijah?” No response.

  I pull my sore body out of bed, our last conversation, the one when I pushed him away, playing in my mind.

  “Elijah?” I breathe.

  “Samantha.”

  I whip around.

  His expression is unreadable. “Ada gave me your message.”

  “She did?”

  “Shortly after the spell was broken. And she gave me one for you in return. She insisted I memorize it and repeat it to her…three times.” His eyes smile.
“She said that her mother always told her that if you come across someone sad and you do not try to make them smile, then you have disgraced your own humanity. And that even though they did not know it, the passengers on that ship were sad. But you made everyone smile again. She said you would know what she meant.”

  I soak up his words.

  He hands me a small stack of letters. “Some of the other spirits came as well before they passed on. They left these for you.”

  I peek inside the first envelope and see Mollie’s name. I hug it to my chest.

  “Also…Ada asked me if I was your boy.”

  “My what?”

  “Your boy…like the one in Stella’s diary, she said. And then she laughed at me.”

  My cheeks warm. “She found me sulking after you and I talked again for the first time and you apologized for kissing me.”

  He looks conflicted. “I was trying to—”

  “I know. But I don’t need you to protect me.”

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “Besides, I’m not going to believe you if you say you’re leaving this time.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So what now?”

  He moves toward me, stopping so close that I’m sure he can hear my heart beat. He smiles, dimples and all. “Now…here we are.”

  “Indeed,” I say, imitating his old-world accent.

  “And I am not apologizing.” He leans toward me, hovering over my mouth like a question. He gently presses his lips into mine.

  I reach out and grab on to his shirt, ignoring my arm. His lips part mine, and our kiss graduates from gentle to insistent. He puts one hand on my lower back. My legs vibrate. He runs his other hand down my ear and over my neck. I press into him, melding my body with his.

  I sip sparkling pear cider and stand next to Alice, watching Susannah, Mary, and Susannah’s girlfriend dance. The venue my school rented for the Spring Fling is decked out in luxurious Titanic decor. Green velvet chairs surround antique tables strewn with nautical napkins and flower displays in the shape of anchors. The walls are dark wood with bookshelves, and there is an enormous, blazing fireplace. The ceiling is covered with tiny lights that look like twinkling stars. A string band plays everything from modern to classical. Almost everyone is on the dance floor, with a few groups hanging around the food tables.