The Lake of Dead Languages

by Carol Goodman

  “I knew you’d come,” he said, pulling me up the bank. His voice sounded hoarser and deeper than I remembered. He pushed back the hood of my parka and touched my face.

  “Jane!” he said. I couldn’t tell if it were surprise or excitement that I heard in his voice. And then I saw the unmistakable look of disappointment in his face and I knew.

  “Where’s Lucy?” he said. “Why didn’t she come?”

  I stared at him and tried to keep the tears from coming. After all, just because he’d expected his sister didn’t mean he didn’t want to see me as well.

  “She was with Domina Chambers so I came first. I left the corniculum on the door, though, so she’ll be here soon.” I was glad, now, that I had left it. “I thought… well, I thought, you might want to see me, too.”

  Matthew sighed and put his arm around my shoulder. “Of course I want to see you, too. Good old Jane. It’s just that I’m worried about Lucy. I heard about what happened at Christmas and then about what happened to poor Deirdre. And then Lucy sent me a very confusing letter…”

  “She told you about what happened at Christmas?”

  “Well, I heard from my parents that she tried to kill herself. At first I just couldn’t believe it, and then I thought I might understand why…”

  “But didn’t she write and say she didn’t really mean to kill herself?”

  “Yes, but don’t people always say that after they’ve tried and failed? That they didn’t really mean it? She did cut herself, didn’t she? I can’t stand the idea of her hurting herself especially when it’s probably all my fault.”

  I saw the look of pain on his face and I thought to myself, well, at least I have the power to do something for him. “She didn’t try to kill herself at all, Mattie, it was all a sham.”

  “A sham?”

  “Yes, it was a cover-up. For Deirdre. Not that she appreciated it, although I guess I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

  “What are you talking about, Jane?”

  “Look, let’s go inside the icehouse and sit down. I’ll explain everything.”

  THE PATH, I NOTICE, IS BEGINNING TO SLOPE DOWNWARD. At one point it becomes so steep I have to hold on to branches to keep from sliding down the icy chute. I hear a soft moaning sound and I strain to hear if it’s Athena. It’s me you want, I say to myself, over and over. And then I call it out. “Albie, it’s me you want for letting Lucy die, not Athena.”

  My own words come back in an echo as if they’ve bounced off a rock wall. And then I see why. I’ve come to the end of the path and it ends in sheer ice. I’m at the edge of the lake, on the southern tip, not far from the icehouse. Directly across from the rock wall of the Point. I could have gotten here in fifteen minutes from the Toller house if I’d followed the Schwanenkill instead of following the crazy meandering of Albie’s path. She’s worn me out and given herself more time and gotten me just where she wants me.

  I hear again the sound of bells, louder than the tinny chime of the cornicula, and when I look up I see, hanging like Damocles’ sword, twin silver blades. I step out from under them and see that they’re skates hanging from a branch by their knotted laces. An index card has been threaded through the laces and on it, in childish scrawl, is written “Lucy’s Skates,” only the name Lucy has been exxed out and under it there’s my name, crossed out as well, then Deirdre’s name, crossed out, and then, finally, my name again. Jane’s skates, it is then. I take them down and, as I’m meant to, put them on.

  They’re a little tight (it’s a good thing I’m wearing thin stockings), but otherwise they fit well, and, I notice as I stroke out over the slick ice, the blades have recently been sharpened. As tired as I am I seem to be skimming over the surface of the lake effortlessly. I even do a little spin and land looking back at the icehouse, at the doors left open from the recent ice harvest, creaking in the wash from the channel that’s been carved out of the ice. Is that where Albie hid that night, behind the doors? If she had, she would have heard everything I said to Matt.

  HE’D LEFT HIS FLASHLIGHT ON THE LEDGE; THAT WAS THE light I’d seen coming from the icehouse. We sat down in the boat and leaned against the stern, next to each other so we could both look at the lake. I remembered the last time I had looked out these doors onto the lake. It was when Lucy and I were putting back the boat. The blizzard had started and the air was so full of snow it had blotted out the lake. Now the air was white from that same snow evaporating back into the sky. I liked the idea of the snow returning to the sky; it was the past rewritten with all its mistakes rubbed clean.

  While I talked Matt bowed his head so that I couldn’t see his face. I told him everything that had happened the day I came back from Albany, from the moment I walked into the dorm room to the last glimpse I had of the tea tin sinking into the black water. When I finished he asked one question.

  “Whose baby was it?”

  “Lucy thought it was Ward’s because that’s who Deirdre was with on May Day.”

  Matt lifted his head, but he didn’t look at me. His eyes were on the lake, as if drawn there by some kind of magnetism.

  “Why did she think the baby was conceived on May Day?”

  “Because Deirdre hadn’t been with… anyone… for weeks before. Because of the rain, remember? And the time before that, well, that would have been too long. Lucy said the baby was small so it was probably early and the time worked with May Day.” I was beginning to realize what Matt was afraid of.

  “Did you see it?”

  I nodded and then realized he still wasn’t looking at me. I decided then to say no, but he must have seen me out of the corner of his eye.

  “Who did it look like?” he asked.

  “Oh Matt, it hardly looked like a person. It was tiny.” I remembered the way the skin had glowed like opals and the pale red hair like fire.

  Matt turned to me and took me by the shoulders. “Did it look like me, Jane? Tell me the truth.”

  “Matt,” I cried, surprised at how hard he was gripping me. “It couldn’t be yours because you weren’t with Deirdre on May Day.”

  “Shut up, Jane.”

  The words startled me more than the way Matt was hurting me. They came from behind us. Matt got up and stepped out of the boat, which rocked so hard I slid and knocked my head on the stern. When I scrambled to my feet and got out at the front of the boat I saw Matt facing his sister, his hands balled into tight fists. I’d never seen him look so angry. Actually, I couldn’t remember ever seeing him angry at all.

  “Whose baby was it, Lucy?” he asked his sister.

  “It was Deirdre’s baby, Mattie. Isn’t that what Jane told you?” Lucy looked toward me and the coldness of her look shocked me. “She promised not to tell anyone, but that doesn’t matter now. Don’t you believe her, Matt? You know Jane would never lie.”

  “I also know she’d believe anything you told her.” Matt came around the boat toward me. He looked so unlike himself that I took a step away from him, but when he took my hand he was gentle.

  “You saw it, Jane. Tell me, what color hair did it have?”

  “Babies don’t always have hair,” Lucy said. I heard an unfamiliar note of panic in Lucy’s voice. She came around the other side of the boat and stood next to me. We were all three standing in the doorway facing the lake.

  “Did it have hair, Jane?”

  I looked from Matt to Lucy. Lucy shook her head and, seeing her movement, Matt dropped my hand and whirled around on her. “Was it red like mine, Lucy?” He took a step toward her and Lucy backed up to the edge of the doorway.

  “Your cousin has red hair, too, Matt,” I called over his shoulder. “Maybe Deirdre was with Roy on May Day.”

  Matt looked back at me and laughed. “Oh, Janie… ,” he began, but before he could finish what he was going to say he was silenced by a sound that made my whole body go cold. It was a high keening moan, like no sound I’d ever heard a human being make, and yet there was something like human emotion in the sound. We
both turned to the lake and saw that Lucy had run onto the ice. The moan was coming from the ice itself, buckling under her weight.

  I STAND ON THE ICE NOW, PICTURING LUCY COMING OUT OF the icehouse onto the melting ice. She’d run in a straight line from the icehouse out into the middle of the lake, the ice shuddering and moaning at every step, leaving black water in her wake. The path she took is now marked by the channel. When Matt tried to follow her he had to stay on the east side of the lake. That’s how I go now, making toward the east cove and the sister stones. I look down at the ice to see if I can see the mark of skate blades, but the fog is so thick I can’t even see my own feet. It makes me feel queasy, as if I’ve become invisible.

  Then I see a figure up ahead, standing still in the fog. I skate toward it, trying to glide on each skate as long as I can so as not to make too much noise. The figure seems not to hear me and I’m afraid I’ll find that it’s Athena, frozen and dead on the ice, but when I reach it I see it’s only one of the statues left over from the ice harvest. I look around and realize they’re everywhere, standing on the ice like sentinels before a tomb. I skate from one to another, looking for some sign that Albie and Athena have passed this way. I stare into each face as if it might speak and tell me where they have gone, and so animate are they it seems they might at any moment gain voice. The crudely hewn features have softened, the caverns of their chisel gouged eyes deepening, rough-cut lips separating as if about to speak. I wonder for a moment how these hastily crafted sculptures have become so lifelike, and then I realize what it is. They’re melting.

  I think of the rain I’d encountered on the Northway. The temperature’s been rising steadily since the electrical storm last night. That’s why there’s so much fog. How long, I wonder, before the lake ice melts and cracks? I listen to the low moan of the ice as if it could tell me, and then I realize the moan I’m hearing isn’t coming from the ice, it’s coming from the sister stones, which, I now see, are directly in front of me. I skate toward them, stilling inside myself the terrifying impression that the stones themselves are calling out to me. It’s just another trick of the ice, I tell myself, and then, when that doesn’t work I recite a little Latin to calm myself down.

  “Tum rauca adsiduo longe sale saxa sonabat,” I whisper to myself, choosing the Virgil passage Athena translated only last week in class, which describes how Aeneas’s ship navigates around the Sirens’ stones and makes its way to the Italian shore and the sibyl’s cave safely.

  I’ve reached the second sister stone where the sound seems to be the loudest and, I can no longer deny, human. But this cry of human anguish is not coming from the sister stone, but from the rock face of the Point. Someone is in the cave. I shuffle forward on my skates as I approach the entrance to the cave, sure that at any moment Dr. Lockhart will pop out and impale me with one of those horrible ice pikes. I take out my can of de-icer and hold my finger over the spray top. But when I peer into the dark cavern I see only Athena, kneeling gagged and tied on the narrow ledge above the ice.

  I take off the gag first.

  “Dr. Lockhart,” she gasps, “she’s crazy.”

  I nod and put a finger to my mouth to shush her.

  “Tace,” I say, “I know. Let me untie you and get you out of here.”

  The ropes around Athena’s wrists and ankles are too tightly bound to come undone. The more I pluck at the wet, frozen cords the tighter they seem to grow. Her trembling makes it all the harder to undo the knots.

  “I need to cut them,” I tell her, as if she could go into the next classroom to borrow a pair of scissors.

  “Don’t leave me,” she cries, swinging her head toward me so that I feel the wet ends of her hair brush my cheek. I look up and see the wild fear in her eyes and the tears that streak her muddy face. “She wants to kill me. First she called me Deirdre, then Lucy, then Jane. She didn’t seem to be able to keep straight who I was.”

  Athena sobs and I pat her shoulder clumsily. I tell her I won’t leave, but she’s got to help me think of a way of getting these ropes off her. I sit back on my heels to consider our predicament and sit down hard on the ends of my skates.

  I’ve got the left skate unlaced and off before I can think through how vulnerable this leaves me if Dr. Lockhart should show up at this moment. What difference does it make though? I’m not leaving here without Athena. I hold the skate by the boot toe, place the blade over the ropes on Athena’s ankles, and start to saw. My travels over the ice have dulled the blades slightly, but they still cut through the ropes, one thread at a time. Or so it seems, so slowly does the rope finally unravel and give way under the metal.

  I go to work on her wrists next, twice slipping and nicking her skin in the dark of the cave, but Athena doesn’t call out or complain. When I’ve got the ropes off I help her to her feet, but she ends up having to hold me up. My legs have cramped and I’m off balance with one skate on, one skate off.

  “I better put the other one on,” I say. I stuff my left foot into the skate. It feels like I’m forcing my foot into an iron vise. My feet have swollen and blistered and my stocking has torn, so it’s like I’m cramming my bare foot into the stiff leather. I pull the laces tight and try to ignore the searing pain.

  “OK,” I say, straightening up, “let’s try to get across the ice to the mansion.” We step out onto the ice and for a moment, after the dark of the cave, I’m blinded by the white glare of the fog. I can barely make out the black mass of the second sister standing guard at the mouth of the cave. The looming shape seems to quiver before me and then to split in two as if I’d started seeing double. But then that second shape comes into focus and sprouts a horrible horn.

  It’s Candace Lockhart, crouched and wielding an eight-foot ice pike like a javelin, its steel tip quivering only a few feet from our throats.

  “You run for the shore,” I whisper without looking in Athena’s direction, “she’ll follow me.”

  “But Magistra…”

  “Do what I say.” I say it in my strictest, no-more-fooling-around-I’mthe-teacher voice and not only does it silence Athena but I see from a slight narrowing in her blue eyes that it momentarily unnerves Dr. Lockhart. I think I know why. For a moment, I sounded just like Domina Chambers.

  I decide to take advantage of the resemblance. “Alba,” I say sternly as I start to back skate along the edge of the Point, heading out onto the lake, “What do you think you are doing with that thing?”

  I see out of the corner of my eye Athena making her unsteady way over the ice to the shore and then she disappears in the fog. Dr. Lockhart appears not to notice, she is staring at me. Then she blinks and laughs.

  “As if you could ever take her place.”

  “I have taken her place,” I say, putting a few more feet between us. I’ve never been much good at skating backward, but I remember Matt showing me how to do it. In and out, little figure eights with your feet, it’s all in the inner thighs. The insides of my thighs feel like melting ice and I can’t even feel my feet, but I widen the distance between us while keeping my eyes locked on hers. I’m afraid that when she notices she’ll throw the pike or rush me, but instead she starts skating toward me, slowly, as if maintaining a polite conversational distance.

  “That’s what you wanted to do with Lucy,” she says. “You wanted to take her place. First you took her scholarship away, then you wanted Matt.”

  I lift my shoulders in an attempt at a casual shrug, but it feels more like cringing. “Lucy wanted me to try for the scholarship,” I say.

  She laughs. I’m surprised at the high-pitched nervousness of it, like a child caught stealing. Something about this conversation is getting to her, unraveling some carefully preserved veil she keeps in place. I have to keep her engaged—entertained, so to speak—or she’ll tire of it and I’ll end up impaled on that ice pike just like Vesta.

  It’s a mistake thinking of Vesta. She sees, I think, the fear in my eyes, but instead of attacking me with the pike, she digs in anot
her way. “Poor stupid Jane,” she says in a voice that’s suddenly not her own. “Thought we were competing for the Iris, as if I wanted it. As if I wanted to be separated from Matt. We picked you that first day as the best one to win it so I wouldn’t have to leave Mattie. Didn’t realize what a slow study you were, though. Didn’t even know what a declension was! Mattie thought that was hilarious.”

  The mimicry is so precise it almost stops me on the ice. But of course that’s what she wants. I keep my feet moving. In and out, little figure eights. Press my thighs together until tears sting my eyes.

  “God, what an idiot you were, Janie. You actually thought we were skating those nights we went to the icehouse,” the voice has changed, now it’s Deirdre’s voice. “But we saw you come creeping out on the lake to spy on us, me and Mattie. That’s why you wanted to get rid of me, isn’t it? So you could have Mattie to yourself?”

  “I didn’t want to get rid of Deirdre, it was Lucy—”

  “Who drove her out onto the Point? You were glad to see her die. Why else didn’t you go and pull her out? You let her die there, clinging to the ice.”

  “That’s not how it happened,” I say, although I know I can’t win an argument with a crazy woman; all I can hope is that as long as I keep her talking she won’t throw that spear. “We went down to the hole in the ice where she went in. She wasn’t there. She didn’t cling to the ice.”

  Dr. Lockhart shakes her head. “I saw it all.” Her voice is small now, the voice of a small, frightened child. “I hid behind the sister stones and watched her until she couldn’t hold on any longer. She said your name over and over again. ‘Jane,’ she called, ‘Jane, you promised.’ ”

  This time her mimicry does stop me dead on the ice. Because it’s not Deirdre’s voice she’s imitating. It’s Lucy’s.

  “You mean Lucy,” I say. “You watched Lucy clinging to the ice.”