The Girl on the Dock
It is the middle of the night. The moon is huge and high, reflecting off the surface of the lake. I lead Izzy by the hand, out of the woods and toward the shimmering lake. Suddenly she stops.
"I don't want to go there," she says.
"Why not?" I say. "It's only the lake".
"I just don't want to go, that's all," she replies, shaking her head.
She is afraid, yet I do not think she has seen the dagger I carry concealed in my other hand.
"It'll be alright, Iz," I say. "I'll hold your hand the whole time."
Izzy looks at the lake and then up at me with large, serious eyes and nods once. We continue toward the dock, but she stops again at the top step.
"I don't want to go any further, Petra."
"But I want to show you something," I say. I am surprised at her reluctance. I tighten my grip on her small hand and coax her down the stairs to the wooden planks of the dock.
"I don't want to see the gazebo," she says. "It's creepy. Please, Petra." I realize she has remembered the incident with the dead spiders; the day I saw my mother's face in the lake, the day I understood I could still bring her back, if only the sacrifice was great enough. The dead spiders were only enough to show me her reflection. To speak to her, I must offer something much more. I told Izzy that I was looking down in the water because I could see the old sunken gazebo in its watery grave, but she suspects more. She is unusually sharp in my presence. Her own mother would barely recognize her.
"It's not the gazebo that I want to show you," I tell her.
"What then?" she asks.
"My mother." I answer, and raise the dagger in one hand, Izzy's open palm in the other. She screams and begins to struggle, pulling away and trying to pry her hand out of mine.
"Stop fighting me, Iz," I plead. "It'll only hurt for a moment. Just a little blood…that's all. I need to talk to my mother! She'll tell me what to do, Iz. She'll tell us both."
Izzy is terrified and my words do not calm her. Some part of me knows I should stop, and yet I do not. I must finish the task. I grip her wrist and lower the dagger point.
Izzy screams again and pushes me. I lose my balance as I grab the wooden piling, dropping the dagger into the lake and releasing Izzy's hand. To my horror, she falls into the water with a loud splash and I suddenly remember that Izzy cannot swim.
"Izzy!" I cry out frantically, dropping to my knees on the dock. I hear her thrashing at the black water but I cannot see her. "Swim to me!" I shout and prepare to jump in after her.
"No!" I hear a voice in my thoughts say firmly. "no… wait…"
Izzy is flailing in the water and yet I remain there, watching.
"This was your intent all along…. The girl must die. Only then will you have peace."
I am frozen in place. I watch Izzy begin to sink beneath the dark water. I shake my head.
"I didn't mean for this to happen," I say. "It can't end this way."
"No one will know," the voice says soothingly. "Her body will eventually be found. A tragic accident… You will mourn her properly. You, with your own mother at your side."
I glance around the lake and look intently back toward the woods behind me.
"No one is coming," I say, amazed and surprised.
"No," the voice deep in my thoughts agrees, "the boy James does not come this time. The misguided force of good has no voice here. 'Good' is a myth. There is only power. Nothing else matters."
James stopped reading. His eyes were wide, shining in the wandlight, and his heart was pounding so hard that the parchment shook in his hands.
Merlin predicted this, he thought, nearly saying the words aloud. Back at the end of last term, when he, James, and James' dad had met in the Headmaster's office to discuss the aftermath of Petra's encounter with the Gatekeeper, Merlin had warned them that Petra's battle might not truly be over.
"Don't think that, despite her actions," he had said gravely, "she will not lie awake on cold, lonely nights, pining hopelessly for her dead parents, and wondering, wondering, if on that fateful night in the Chamber of Secrets she made the wrong choice."
Now, if any of what James was reading in Petra's dream story was true, he knew that she had indeed wondered those very things. According to the story, she was still haunted by the events of that night, and had subsequently seen her mother's face in the surface of the Morganstern Farm's lake, after she, Petra, had dropped some inexplicable load of dead spiders into it. The spiders functioned as a tiny sacrifice, giving Petra one more fleeting glimpse of what she had lost in the Chamber of Secrets.
Somehow, incredibly, Petra appeared to possess the power to recreate the Gatekeeper's awful bargain, only this time without any outside interference. Still, if the dream story was accurate, even then she had not consciously meant to sacrifice Izzy in order to retrieve her mother from the dead. She had meant only to offer the lake some of Izzy's blood, in order to simply talk to the vision of her mother, and hear her guidance. But then, apparently, things had gone very wrong, and the horrid voice of Voldemort had taken advantage of it, pushing Petra to commit the act she was meant to have committed in the Chamber of Secrets: the murder of another human being.
James was stunned, not so much by the power of the story, but by the nagging question: how much of it was true? He recalled the short bit of Petra and Merlin's conversation that he and the gremlins had listened in on with Ted's Extendable Ears. In it, Petra had referred to the dream, commenting that it was a reminder that one decision can have monumental repercussions. So where, in the dream story, did it stop reflecting what had actually happened on that night? How much of it was real, and how much was plain and simple nightmare? Obviously, Izzy had survived that night, either because she had never really fallen into the lake or because Petra had somehow managed to rescue her. But how? James furrowed his brow and bent over the pages again, reading on.