Blake was no longer dressed in black tails and a white shirt. He now wore snow-dusted jeans and a hooded sweatshirt beneath a leather jacket. His hair and eyes were hidden beneath a cap and mirrored snow goggles. “It’s easy,” he called up in what James couldn’t help thinking was a nasty lilt. “You accelerate with the right hand, you brake with the left.” He demonstrated with hands encased in thick black gloves, then tilted his head provocatively. “It’ll be a cinch for you, after riding a broom.”
“Oh stop, Blake,” Millie said, jumping to the ice beneath the boathouse.
James didn’t want to climb down to the ice. He didn’t want to attempt to ride one of those daft Muggle machines. And mostly he did not want to share the evening with Blake, whose smile, even while serving in the manor house, struck him as disingenuous and even a little mean.
And still he found himself leaning to clamber down the ladder, hopping to the surprisingly solid ice below, and approaching one of the black snowmobiles. He didn’t fully understand why he went along, except that the thought of Millie riding pillion behind the young man, holding onto him as they raced along the frozen bay into whatever heady nocturnal adventure lay ahead, filled him with bristling, angry heat. It was much too similar to what he felt whenever he imagined Professor Odin-Vann and Petra together—a thought that even now poisoned him with jealous bile.
“I told you he’d try it,” Millie said smugly, nudging Blake with her elbow.
Blake accepted this with a half shrug. “We’ll see. Helmets, everyone.”
He distributed what appeared to be motorcycle helmets to Millie and James before dropping to straddle the leading snow machine with practiced ease.
James wished he had his Thunderstreak with him, or better yet, his skrim. He had a sudden, irresistible urge to show up the Muggle prat, to blow past him and his stupid snowmobile at top speed, trailing a storm of white powder like a force of nature.
Instead, James felt he had no choice but to clamber awkwardly onto the second snowmobile. Millie fitted herself onto the seat behind him and laced her hands around his belly, holding tight and leaning in eagerly. Her helmet bobbled briefly against his and James heard her giggle.
The handlebars of the machine were black, wide, and complicated with red buttons, throttles, and triggers. James had no idea what to do but refused to ask. He watched as, ahead, Blake twisted to look back.
“Stay close,” he called. “We’re only going a mile or so. I’ll take it slow.”
“Don’t do us any favors,” James answered, sounding much more confident than he felt.
Blake smiled beneath his mirrored goggles, and then turned back. James watched the young man grasp the handlebars of his own machine and thumb a throttle on the right grip. The treads spun, spewing a cloud of ice shavings, and the machine lurched forward, driving out from beneath the boathouse.
James found the throttle on his own machine and thumbed it, just as he had seen Blake do.
It was a fortunate thing indeed that they were on ice. The machine jolted forward so hard and fast that James nearly lost his grip on the yoke. Millie squealed and tugged at his midsection, very nearly pulling them both backwards off the snowmobile as it bucked away.
Had they been on soft snow, the grip of the machine would have been much stronger, causing it to leap away beneath them like a bounding cat. On the ice, however, the snowmobile spun its treads, accelerating swiftly but gradually. It slewed toward one of the boathouse’s wooden pilings and James steered frantically away. It was like trying to control a swinging millstone. The rear quarter of the machine struck the piling, juddered against it, and then squirted out into the moonlight of the lake, picking up speed.
Millie laughed again and squeezed James’ midsection. “I knew you could do it!”
“I’m not doing anything yet!” James called back, unsure if she could hear him over the whine of the engine and the scrape of the treads on the ice. “Just hold on!”
She held on. James twisted the yoke experimentally, threaded the throttle with his right hand, and the machine lunged forward again, following nominally in the direction of the other snowmobile. Blake raced ahead without looking back, cutting across the expanse of flat, grey ice while keeping a discreet distance from the shoreline and the dark houses that presided over it.
James had expected disaster. He had expected to spin the machine into the rocky shore, or somehow crash it through the ice, or otherwise completely endanger and embarrass himself in front of Millie and the smugly smiling Blake. For the moment, at least, that hadn’t happened, and he was relieved. He pressed the throttle harder and the machine revved beneath them, leaping forward on the ice even faster. It was heady, even exhilarating, despite being (as he understood on some level, in the voice of his mother) completely daft and reckless.
Ah well, he thought with a mental shrug, what else is being young for?
Blake led them past the row of stately homes on the shore, around a promontory of spindly woods, and across a bay surrounded by hulking industrial buildings, smokestacks, and factories. Beyond these, a cluster of docks stretched like fingers out into the ice, now bereft of boats and drifted with snow. Blake angled toward these and slowed, eventually slotting his vehicle between the skeletal shapes of the docks.
He ducked as he killed the engine, letting momentum push the snowmobile forward into the shadow of a cement pier, where he seemed to park it.
James followed suit, threading much more slowly around the dock pilings and humping over smooth dunes of snow. As he edged the machine close to its twin, Blake met them, reached across with a snow-crusted glove, and did something that caused the snowmobile’s engine to cut off with a cough and a jerk.
“We could take these all the way into London proper right now if we wanted to,” he said, showing his teeth in what James thought was the first genuine smile the man had offered. “What with the Thames being frozen over for the first time in a decade. But this should do the trick for tonight, I think. Now, let’s have some Muggle style fun,”
He led them to a rusty ladder bolted to the side of the concrete pier, then up the pier and into a warren of ramshackle buildings, all clustered and leaning together as if for warmth. Some of the buildings were houses made of weathered grey planks, most with porches sagging under mounds of snow. Others were brick warehouses or wharves, garages with indecipherable graffiti spray-painted onto their doors and walls. Blake led them to a corner beneath a stuttering, buzzing streetlamp, where a tiny pub thumped with a dull bass beat and a rabble of loud voices. Neon signs glowed from its tiny windows, advertising brands and logos James had never heard of.
He gulped but forced himself to follow with no hesitation as Blake led them to the plain wooden door, which was covered in peeling paint the color of dried blood. He heaved it open, and a roar of heat and noise and laughter barreled out over the slushy footpath. The smell of cigarettes and beer was so strong he could nearly taste it.
“Millie here calls this ‘slumming’,” Blake said, leaning toward James as they edged inside. “But for you and me, it’s not slumming if it’s the world we come home to every night, eh?”
“I guess not,” James nodded, trying to take in every corner of the tiny pub at once. Along the rear was a crowded bar backed by rows of bottles and a cloudy wall-length mirror. A television flashed blue over the bar, presiding over the scene with its bright, blaring eye. Elsewhere, a billiard table clacked and knocked, glowing red beneath its own dedicated stained-glass lamp. A jukebox thumped and pulsed. People danced on a postage-stamp sized dance floor. The crowd was dense but strangely faceless, mere gyrating silhouettes in the pooling, smoky darkness. “I don’t live like Millie,” James said, raising his voice carefully so that only Blake would hear him, “but this isn’t the sort of neighborhood I go home to every night.”
“Thank your lucky stars,” Blake said, nudging James jovially.
The next hour and a half went by in a blur of thumping music, clattering bottles and glasses
on a cracked wooden booth table (James tried a beer called Old Speckled Hen, which he nursed throughout the night but never developed much of a taste for) and trying awkwardly to dance amongst the constant bump of elbows and knees on the diminutive dance floor.
Millie seemed to love every minute of it. She smiled showing all of her teeth—something she hadn’t done since arriving at her parents’ home—and sipped a ridiculous pink cocktail that the bartender had happily provided when she’d requested “the girliest drink in the house”.
James had an idea that if they had not been accompanied by Blake, who seemed to be a very familiar face in the neighborhood, he and Millie might not have been served quite so readily, and surely not without any identification to prove their age, at the very least. In Blake’s presence, they were dismissed as simply two more affectionate hooligans out for a night of harmless debauchery.
By the time they stepped back out into the blowing cold and dark of the street, James’ ears felt like they were packed with cotton batting from the noise inside. Millie was giggling and reeling slightly from her drink, holding onto James as they followed Blake back down the street toward the docks.
“It’s a good thing James here is driving,” she said rather too loudly, her voice strained with laughter as she patted him on the shoulder with one hand, gripped his elbow with the other.
James’ mood alternated between relief that the night was nearly over, annoyance at Millie for her cavalier attitude about getting into trouble, and cautious satisfaction that he seemed to have held his own against the seemingly far more dashing and mysterious Blake.
Without any more conversation, they shuffled down the pier, climbed to the waiting snowmobiles on the ice below, and started them up again. Within minutes, they were traversing the cold blue numb of the bay again, Millie once more gripping James tight around the waist, James following the speeding dark shape of Blake ahead.
The moon had come out, sheathing the world in preternatural blue light. It shone off the snow and ice so brightly that it made its own ghostly daylight, surreal beneath the sharp glitter of the stars above. The ice blurred beneath the snowmobile’s skids, laced with ribbons of white against deep, cloudy grey.
The peninsula of Blackbrier Quoit hove into view, scratching at the low sky with its impenetrable dome of trees. James marveled at it.
From the outside, the peninsula appeared as nothing more than a strip of wilderness, dense with birches and snow-laden pines, allowing no hint of the manor or grounds within. Even the stone boathouse at its tip was so overshadowed by trees that it was virtually invisible unless one knew exactly where to look.
Blake slowed and swung toward the structure, sliding into the shadows beneath. James followed, squeezing the brake lever with a modicum of confidence now, and cut the engine before Blake could come back and do it for him.
Millie clambered off the seat behind him and slipped on the ice, grabbing a nearby wooden piling for support and giggling again. Blake reached to steady her as James dismounted. He pried the helmet from his head, dropped it to the snowmobile seat, and stepped out from beneath the boathouse with a sigh, glad to be shut of the noisy Muggle machine. The expanse of the bay shone like polished stone in the moon glow, like blue-grey marble threaded with white. He breathed in the icy air, listening to Millie’s and Blake’s whispered words and laughter behind him.
“So, are we still a go for tomorrow night?” Blake asked in a hushed voice. Millie shushed him before he could finish his question.
“What…?” James began to ask, a flicker of jealousy flaring once again in his chest, but something caught his eye far out on the ice, distracting him even as he began to turn around.
It was a figure, but so distant, so fogged by blowing phantoms of snow that James couldn’t tell if it was real or a statue. It didn’t appear to be moving, only standing straight, alert, as if watching from the dead centre of the frozen sea.
Behind James, he could still hear Millie and Blake whispering.
He glanced back over his shoulder as they made their way deeper into the shadow of the boathouse.
“Do you either of you see—?” he began, turning back to the mysterious shape, but a gasp of shock cut off his words. The figure was standing directly in front of him now, having traversed the vast, icy distance as if it were a mere footstep. James recognized the tall, lithe figure immediately. The strength fell out of his legs and he only remained standing because his knees had locked.
“She’s a very pretty girl, James,” Judith said in a low, confiding voice, a voice that was somehow both warm and brittle with cold. Her words made puffs of vapour from beneath a black cowl. Her face would have been hidden completely if not for the moonlight that reflected up from the ice. “I’m glad you’ve finally gotten over Petra. She was no good for you. For either of us.”
James took a single, halting step backward. He tried to call out to Millie and Blake, but the breath seemed locked in his chest. All he could produce was a sort of huffing exhalation, stifled with sudden shivers.
Judith stepped forward and raised her hands, open and empty, in a sort of conciliatory gesture. The effect was ruined, however, by the blackened, shriveled skin of her arms and fingers. The flesh beneath her skin seemed to have shrunken away so that only bones remained, mere skeletal hands wrapped in dead, mummified leather.
“I’ve gotten over Petra as well, you see,” she said, looking sadly down at her own hands. “She’s turned on me, poisoned me. She leeches the life right out of me. But perhaps it’s for the best. Sometimes we have to sever the relationships that formed us. Sometimes that’s the only path to forging new and better relationships.”
She stepped forward again, bringing her face closer to James. He backed up another unsteady, clumsy step, and felt his back thud against one of the boathouse’s support pilings.
The blackness of Judith’s hands and arms began to creep up her neck beneath the cowl. It cast veins of deathly purple around her mouth and eyes, sapped the color from her vibrant cheeks. Her eyes dulled, faded, darkened to inky black orbs.
“You’re a wise young man to stay away from Petra,” she said, and her voice was changing as well. It buzzed in her throat, as if she was full of wasps. “Despite what you may think, I loved her as well. But love can turn on us. It can be the sharpest dagger of all. Love can be either the blade that destroys us…” she raised her hands again, showing the decay in her spindly, ghastly fingers, “or the weapon that empowers us to do… what we must!” She was bare inches from him as she spat this last, rasping the words as the blackness claimed her entire face, sinking her cheeks and eyes, pulling her lips back from her teeth and gums in a grimace of deathly hate.
“Stay away from her, James,” she rasped, writhing as if the words were like broken glass in her throat. “You cannot stop Petra. You cannot win her. If you try, all that you love will die. And still she will prevail! She must prevail!”
And then, horribly, a hoarse scream of pain and rage ripped from Judith’s throat, forcing her head back, her chin up, so that her cowl fell away, releasing her hair. It was white, as dry as cobweb, flowing like seaweed into the suddenly rushing air.
“James?”
A hand gripped his shoulder and he jerked away from it, batted at the fingers as if from the clutch of death itself. Wind whipped through his hair, icy and flecked with mist, howling beneath the boathouse and shrieking in its drainpipes. He boggled and flailed and nearly collapsed to the hard ice in shock.
But suddenly there was no Judith. The Lady of the Lake was gone—if she had ever really been there at all. Millie stood with her hand still raised, frowning at James in surprised consternation.
He gasped deeply, drawing the cold air into his lungs as if he hadn’t breathed in minutes. The noise of the gusting wind rattled the windows above. Millie had to raise her voice to be heard over it.
“Are you all right?” Her eyes were wide and startled in the dimness.
James tried to nod, to collect
himself. “I… I just thought I saw… something. Out on the ice.”
Millie considered this, glancing out over the flat expanse of the frozen bay. There was nothing but blowing ghosts of snow and moon-glow to be seen.
“We should go in,” she said, bringing her gaze back to James with some concern. “Feels like a storm is coming in. Blake will take one of the snowmobiles back tonight. He and a friend will collect the other one tomorrow.”
James nodded, as if the parking status of the snowmobiles had been of some nagging concern to him. In truth, he barely heard Millie’s words. In his mind, all he heard was Judith’s hoarse shriek in the howl of the wind. All he saw was the creeping purple-black emaciation of her hands and face.
All that you love will die…!
And suddenly he knew: it was not death or flame that was shriveling Judith’s heretofore perfect skin. It was the scorch of a kind of existential frostbite. Without Petra’s connection to root Judith in reality, she was slowly succumbing to the absolute zero of the waiting, hungry void from which she had come. But if so, why would she wish James to stay away from Petra, to assure that she, Petra, succeeded in her mission to leave this reality forever?
A shiver that had nothing to do with cold shook James from head to toe.
Millie took his hand.
Five minutes later, she kissed him outside of his bedroom on the second floor. He barely felt it. His lips were numb. The air around both of them was still a wreath of cold.
Twenty minutes later, James lay in the enormous bed staring up at the dark ceiling.
Outside, the wind wailed and moaned, hiding the voice of chaos and madness that seemed to surge constantly beneath it. James tried to tune it out, even pulled a pillow up over his head, but could not seem to drown out that keening, pained howl.
James Potter and the Crimson Thread Page 28