“Well, that’s not what Father says.”
“Read your book, Merry. One day you’ll understand. One day soon, when you’re not a child anymore and he loses his hold on you.”
And she’d frowned, sighed, and opened her book again, opening it at random to one of the strangely melancholy lithographs, “The Period of the Muschelkalk [Middle Trias].” A violent seascape and in the foreground a reef jutting above the waves, crowded with algae-draped driftwood branches and the shells of stranded mollusca and crinoidea, something like a crocodile that the author called Nothosaurus giganteus clinging to the reef so it wouldn’t be swept back into the storm-tossed depths. Overhead, the night sky a turbulent mass of clouds with the small, white moon, full or near enough to full, peeking through to illuminate the ancient scene.
“You mean planets?” she’d asked Avery. “You mean moons and stars?”
“No, I mean worlds. Now, read your book and don’t ask so many questions.”
Meredith thought she heard creaking wood, her father’s heavy footsteps, the dry ruffling of cloth rubbing against cloth, and she stood quickly, not wanting to be caught listening at the door again, was busy straightening her rumpled dress when she realized that he was standing there in the hall behind her, instead. Her mistake, thinking he’d gone to the deep place, when he was somewhere else all along, in his library or the attic room with Avery, braving the cold to visit her mother’s grave on the hill.
“What are you doing, child?” he asked her gruffly and tugged at his beard; there were streaks of silver-grey that weren’t there only a couple of months before, scars from the night they lost her mother, his wife, the night the demons tried to squeeze in through the tear and Ellen Dandridge had tried to block their way. His face grown years older in the space of weeks, dark crescents beneath his eyes like bruises, the deep creases in his forehead, and he brushed his daughter’s blonde hair from her eyes.
“Would it have been different, if you’d believed Avery from the start?”
For a moment he didn’t reply and the silence, his face set as hard and perfectly unreadable as stone, made her want to strike him, made her wish she could kick open the rotting, sea-damp door and hurl him screaming down the stairs to whatever was waiting for them both in the deep place.
“I don’t know, Meredith. But I had to trust the book, and I had to believe the signs in the heavens.”
“You were too arrogant, old man. You almost gave away the whole wide world because you couldn’t admit you might be wrong.”
“You should be thankful that your mother can’t hear you, young lady, using that tone of voice with your own father.”
Meredith turned and looked at the tall door again, the symbols drawn on the wood in whitewash and blood.
“She can hear me,” Meredith told him. “She talks to me almost every night. She hasn’t gone as far away as you think.”
“I’m still your father, and you’re still a child who can’t even begin to understand what’s at stake, what’s always pushing at the other side of—”
“—the gate?” she asked, finishing for him and she put one hand flat against the door, the upper of its two big panels, and leaned all her weight against it. “What happens next time? Do you know that, Father? How much longer do we have left, or haven’t the constellations gotten around to telling you that yet?”
“Don’t mock me, Meredith.”
“Why not?” and she stared back at him over her shoulder, without taking her hand off the door. “Will it damn me faster? Will it cause more men to die in the trenches? Will it cause Avery more pain than he’s in now?”
“I was given the book,” he growled at her, his stony face flashing to bitter anger, and at least that gave Meredith some mean scrap of satisfaction. “I was shown the way to this place. They entrusted the gate to me, child. The gods—”
“—must be even bigger fools than you, old man. Now shut up and leave me alone.”
Machen Dandridge raised his right hand to strike her, then, his big-knuckled hand like a hammer of flesh and bone, iron-meat hammer and anvil to beat her as thin and friable as the veil between Siamese universes.
“You’ll need me,” she said, not recoiling from the fire in his dark eyes, standing her ground. “You can’t take my place. Even if you weren’t a coward, you couldn’t take my place.”
“You’ve become a wicked child,” he said, slowly lowering his hand until it hung useless at his side.
“Yes, Father, I have. I’ve become a very wicked child. You’d best pray that I’ve become wicked enough.”
And he didn’t reply, no words left in him, but walked quickly away down the long hall towards the foyer and his library, his footsteps loud as distant gunshots, loud as the beating of her heart, and Meredith removed her hand from the door. It burned very slightly, pain like a healing bee sting, and when she looked at her palm there was something new there, a fat and shiny swelling as black and round and smooth as the soulless eye of a shark.
V
February 1915
In his dreams, Machen Dandridge stands at the edge of the sea and watches the firelight reflected in the roiling grey clouds above Russia and Austria and East Prussia, smells the coppery stink of Turkish and German blood, the life leaking from the bullet holes left in the Serbian Archduke and his wife. Machen would look away if he knew how, wouldn’t see what he can only see too late to make any difference. One small man set adrift and then cast up on the shingle of the cosmos, filled to bursting with knowledge and knowing nothing at all. Cannon fire and thunder, the breakers against the cliff side and the death rattle of soldiers beyond counting.
This is where I stand, at the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss . . .
“A world war, father,” Avery says. “Something without precedent. I can’t even find words to describe the things I’ve seen.”
“A world war, without precedent?” Machen replies skeptically and raises one eyebrow, then goes back to reading his star charts. “Napoleon just might disagree with you there, young man, and Alexander, as well.”
“No, you don’t understand what I’m—”
And the fire in the sky grows brighter, coalescing into a whip of red-gold scales and ebony spines, the dragon’s tail to lash the damned, and Every one of us is damned, Machen thinks. Every one of us, from the bloody start of time.
“I have the texts, Avery, and the aegis of the seven, and all the old ways. I cannot very well set that all aside because you’ve been having nightmares, now can I?”
“I know these things, Father. I know them like I know my own heart, like I know the number of steps down to the deep place.”
“There is a trouble brewing in Coma Berenices,” his wife whispers, her eye pressed to the eyepiece of the big telescope in his library. “Something like a shadow—”
“She says that later,” Avery tells him. “That hasn’t happened yet, but it will. But you won’t listen to her, either.”
And Machen Dandridge turns his back on the sea and the dragon, on the battlefields and the burning cities, looking back towards the house he built twenty-five years ago; the air in the library seems suddenly very close, too warm, too thick. He loosens his paper collar and stares at his son sitting across the wide mahogany desk from him.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, boy,” he says, and Avery sighs loudly and runs his fingers through his brown hair.
“Mother isn’t even at the window now. That’s still two weeks from now,” and it’s true that no one’s standing at the telescope. Machen rubs his eyes and reaches for his spectacles. “By then, it’ll be too late. It may be too late already,” Avery says.