“Avery? Can you hear me? It’s me, Merry.”
That time there was a sudden thumping and a heavy, dragging sort of a sound from the other side of the attic door. A body pulling itself roughly, painfully across the pine-board floor towards her, and she closed her eyes and waited for it. Finally, there was a loud thud against the door and she opened her eyes again. Avery was trying to talk, trying to answer her, but there was nothing familiar or coherent in his ruined voice.
“Hold on,” she whispered to him. “I brought a writing pad,” and she took it out of a pocket of her gown, the pad and a pencil. “Don’t try to talk anymore. I’ll pass this beneath the door to you and you can write what you want to say. Knock once if you understand what I’m telling you, Avery.”
Nothing for almost a full minute and then a single knock so violent that the door shivered on its hinges, so loud she was sure it would bring her parents to investigate.
“Not so loud, Avery,” she whispered. “They’ll hear us,” and now Meredith had begun to notice the odor on the landing, the odor leaking from the attic. Either she’d been much too nervous to notice it at first or her brother had brought it with him when he’d crawled over to the door. Dead fish and boiling cabbage, soured milk and strawberryjam, the time she’d come across the carcass of a grey whale calf, half buried in the sand and rotting beneath the sun. She swallowed, took another deep breath, and tried not to think about the awful smell.
“I’m going to pass the pencil and a page from the pad to you now. I’m going to slide it under the door to you.”
Avery made a wet, strangling sound and she told him again not to try to talk, just write if he could, write the answers to her questions and anything he needed to say.
“Are you in pain? Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked, and in a moment the tip of the pencil began scritching loudly across the sheet of writing paper. “Not so hard, Avery. If the lead breaks, I’ll have to try to find another.”
He slid the piece of paper back to her, and it was damp and something dark and sticky was smudged across the bottom. She held it close to her face, never mind the smell so strong it made her gag, made her want to vomit, so that she could read what he’d scrawled there. Nothing like Avery’s careful hand, his tight, precise cursive she’d always admired and had tried to imitate, but sweeping, crooked letters, blocky print, and seeing that made her want to cry so badly that she almost forgot about the dead-whale-and-cabbages smell.
HURTSS ME MERYMORE THAN CAN NO
NO HELP NO HELLP ME
She laid down the sheet of paper and tore another from her pad, the pad she used for her afternoon lessons, spelling and arithmetic, and slid it beneath the door to Avery.
“Avery, you knew you couldn’t bear the key. You knew it had to be me or mother, didn’t you? That it had to be a woman?”
Again the scritching, and the paper came back to her even stickier than before.
HAD TO TRY MOTER WOULD NOT LISSEN SO
I HAD TOO TRIE
“Oh, Avery,” Meredith said, “I’m sorry,” speaking so quietly that she prayed he would not hear, and there were tears in her eyes, hot and bitter. A kind of anger and a kind of sorrow in her heart that she’d never known before, anger and sorrow blooming in her to be fused through some alchemy of the soul, and by that fusion be transformed into a pure and golden hate.
She tore another page from the pad and slipped it through the crack between the floor and the attic door.
“I need to know what to do, Avery. I’m reading the newspapers, but I don’t understand it all. Everyone seems think war is coming soon, because of the assassination in Sarajevo, because of the Kaiser, but I don’t understand it all.”
It was a long time before the paper came back to her, smeared with slime and stinking of corruption, maybe five minutes of Avery’s scritching and his silent pauses between the scritching. This time the page was covered from top to bottom with his clumsy scrawl.
TO LATE
WAR IS COMING NOW CANT STP THAT MERRY
ALL SET IN MOTION NINTH WAVE REMEMBER?
BUT MERYYOU CAN DONT LISSEN TO FADER
YOU CAN HOLD
YOU OR MOTHER KIN HOLD THEE LIN STILL
IT DOEZ NOT HALF TO BE THE LADST WAR
When she finished reading and then re-reading twice again everything Avery had written, Meredith lay the sheet of paper down on top of the other two and wiped her hand on the floor until it didn’t feel quite so slimy anymore. By the yellow-white light of the candle, her hand shimmered as though she’d been carrying around one of the big banana slugs that lived in the forest. She quickly ripped another page from the writing pad and passed it under the door. This time she felt it snatched from her fingers and the scritching began immediately. It came back to her only a few seconds later and the pencil with it, the tip ground away to nothing.
DUNT EVER COME BAR HERE AGIN MERRY
I LOVE YOU ALWAYTS AND WONT FERGET YOU
PROMISS ME YOU WILL KNOT COME BACK
HOLD THEE LINE HOLD THE LINE
“I can’t promise you that, Avery,” she replied, sobbing and leaning close to the door, despite the smell so strong that it had begun burn her nose and the back of her throat. “You’re my brother, and I can’t ever promise you that.”
Another violent thud against the door then, so hard that her father was sure to have heard, so sudden that it scared her, and Meredith jumped back and reached for the candlestick.
“I remember the ninth wave, Avery. I remember what you said – the ninth wave, greater than the last, all in flame. I do remember.”
And because she thought that perhaps she heard footsteps from somewhere below, and because she couldn’t stand to hear the frantic strangling sounds that Avery had begun making again, Meredith hastily gathered up the sticky, scribbled-on pages from the pad and then crept down the attic stairs and back to her bedroom. She fell asleep just before dawn and dreamt of flames among the breakers, an inferno crashing against the rocks.
VIII
March 1915
“This is where it ends,” Merry, her mother’s ghost said. “But this is where it begins, as well. You need to understand that if you understand nothing else.”
Meredith knew that this time she was not dreaming, no matter how much it might feel like a dream, this dazzling, tumbling nightmare wide-awake that began when she reached the foot of the rickety staircase leading her down into the deep place beneath the house. Following her mother’s ghost, the dim glow of a spectre to be her Virgil, her Beatrice, her guiding lantern until the light from the pool was so bright it outshone Ellen Dandridge’s flickering radiance. Meredith stood on the pier, holding her dead mother’s barnacle- and algae-encrusted hand, and stared in fear and wonder towards the island in the pool.
“The infinite lines of causation,” the ghost said. “What has brought you here. That is important as well.”
“I’m here because my father is a fool,” Meredith replied, unable to look away from the yellow-green light dancing across the stone, shining up from the depths beneath her bare feet.
“No, dear. He is only a man trying to do the work of gods. That never turns out well.”
The black eye set deep into the flesh of Meredith’s palm itched painfully and then rolled back to show its dead-white sclera. She knew exactly what it was seeing, because it always told her, knew how close they were to the veil, how little time was left before the breach tore itself open once and for all.