And Machen Dandridge turned his back on his wife’s grave and led his daughter down the dirt and gravel path, back to the house waiting for them like a curse.
II
November 1914
Meredith Dandridge lay very still in her big bed, her big room with its high ceiling and no pictures hung on the walls, and she listened to the tireless sea slamming itself against the rocks. The sea to take the entire world apart one gritty speck at a time, the sea that was here first and would be here long after the continents had finally been weathered down to so much slime and sand. She knew this because her father had read to her from his heavy black book, the book that had no name, the book that she couldn’t ever read for herself or the demons would come for her in the night. And she knew, too, because of the books he had given her, her books – Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and The World Before the Deluge and Atlantis and Lost Lemuria. Everything above the waves on borrowed time, her father had said again and again, waiting for the day when the sea rose once more and drowned the land beneath its smothering, salty bosom, and the highest mountains and deepest valleys became a playground for sea serpents and octopi and schools of herring. Forests to become Poseidon’s orchards, her father said, though she knew Poseidon wasn’t the true name of the god-thing at the bottom of the ocean, just a name some dead man gave it thousands of years ago.
“Should I read you a story tonight, Merry?” her dead mother asked, sitting right there in the chair beside the bed. She smelled like fish and mud, even though they’d buried her in the dry ground at the top of the hill behind the house. Meredith didn’t look at her, because she’d spent so much time already trying to remember her mother’s face the way it was before and didn’t want to see the ruined face the ghost was wearing like a mask. As bad as the face her brother now wore, worse than that, and Meredith shrugged and pushed the blankets back a little.
“If you can’t sleep, it might help,” her mother said with a voice like kelp stalks swaying slowly in deep water.
“It might,” Meredith replied, staring at a place where the wallpaper had begun to peel free of one of the walls, wishing there were a candle in the room or an oil lamp so the ghost would leave her alone. “And it might not.”
“I could read to you from Hans Christian Andersen, or one of Grimm’s tales,” her mother sighed. “‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’?”
“You could tell me what it’s like in Hell,” the girl replied.
“Dear, I don’t have to tell you that,” her ghost mother whispered, her voice gone suddenly regretful and sad. “I know I don’t have to ever tell you that.”
“There might be different hells,” Meredith replied. “This one, and the one Father sent you away to, and the one Avery is lost inside. No one ever said there could only be one, did they? A hell for the dead German soldiers and another for the French, a hell for Christians and another for the Jews. And maybe another for all the pagans—”
“Your father didn’t send me anywhere, child. I crossed the threshold of my own accord.”
“So I would be alone in this hell.”
The ghost clicked its sharp teeth together, and Meredith could hear the anemone tendrils between its iridescent fish eyes quickly withdrawing into the hollow places in her mother’s decaying skull.
“I could read you a poem,” her mother said hopefully. “I could sing you a song.”
“It isn’t all fire and brimstone, is it? Not the hell where you are? It’s blacker than night and cold as ice, isn’t it, Mother?”
“Did he think it would save me to put me in the earth? Does the old fool think it will bring me back across, like Persephone?”
Too many questions, hers and her mother’s, and for a moment Meredith Dandridge didn’t answer the ghost, kept her eyes on the shadowy wallpaper strips, the pinstripe wall, wishing the sun would rise and pour warm and gold as honey through the drapes.
“I crossed the threshold of my own accord,” the ghost said again, and Meredith wondered if it thought she didn’t hear the first time. Or maybe something her mother needed to believe and might stop believing if she stopped repeating it. “Someone had to do it.”
“It didn’t have to be you.”
The wind whistled wild and shrill around the eaves of the house, invisible lips pressed to a vast, invisible instrument, and Meredith shivered and pulled the covers up to her chin again.
“There was no one else. It wouldn’t take your brother. The one who wields the key cannot be a man. You know that, Merry. Avery knew that, too.”
“There are other women,” Meredith said, speaking through gritted teeth, not wanting to start crying but the tears already hot in her eyes. “It could have been someone else. It didn’t have to be my mother.”
“Some other child’s mother, then?” the ghost asked. “Some other mother’s daughter?”
“Go back to your hell,” Meredith said, still looking at the wall, spitting the words like poison. “Go back to your hole in the ground and tell your fairy tales to the worms.”
“You have to be strong now, Merry. You have to listen to your father and you have to be ready. I wasn’t strong enough.”
And finally she did turn to face her mother, what was left of her mother’s face, the scuttling things nesting in her tangled hair, the silver scales and barnacles, the stinging anemone crown, and Meredith Dandridge didn’t flinch or look away.
“One day,” she said, “I’ll take that damned black book of his and I’ll toss it into the stove. I’ll take it, mother, and toss it into the hearth, and then they can come out of the sea and drag us both away—”
But then her mother cried out and came apart like a breaking wave against the shingle, water poured from the tin pail that had given it shape, her flesh gone suddenly as clear and shimmering as glass, before she drained away and leaked through the cracks between the floorboards. The girl reached out and dipped her fingers into the shallow pool left behind in the wicker seat of the chair. The water was cold and smelled unclean. And then she lay awake until dawn, listening to the ocean, to all the unthinking noises a house makes in the small hours of a night.
III
May 1914
Avery Dandridge had his father’s eyes, but someone else’s soul to peer out through them, and to his sister he was hope that there might be a life somewhere beyond the rambling house beside the sea. Five years her senior, he’d gone away to school in San Francisco for a while, almost a year, because their mother wanted him to. But there had been an incident and he was sent home again, transgressions only spoken of in whispers and nothing anyone ever bothered to explain to Meredith, but that was fine with her. She only cared that he was back and she was that much less alone.
“Tell me about the earthquake,” she asked him, one day not long after he’d returned, the two of them walking together along the narrow beach below the cliffs, sand the color of coal dust, noisy gulls and driftwood like bones washed in by the tide. “Tell me all about the fire.”
“The earthquake? Merry, that was eight years ago. You were still just a baby, that was such long time ago,” and then he picked up a shell and turned it over in his hand, brushing away some of the dark sand stuck to it. “People don’t like to talk about the earthquake anymore. I never heard them say much about it.”
“Oh,” she said, not sure what to say next but still full of questions. “Father says it was a sign, a sign from—”