The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook - Lydia Millet (primary phonics .txt) 📗

roof just beneath her windowsill. Dead leaves, she thought, maybe—but why had they hit the window? There was no wind.

She raised the screen to see them better—she was nervous but felt like she needed to know. She leaned over with the penlight’s beam sharply focused.

It was a cluster of dark-brown packets that looked like seaweed: shiny, black rectangles with thorny-looking ends. She had found pouches like these on the beach many times and knew what they were: skate egg cases that people sometimes called “mermaid’s purses.” Skates were like rays, her mother had taught her—carnivorous rays that slithered over the ocean floor.

So these were just skate eggs, right? A frequent find for beachcombers?

Though you didn’t usually encounter them on the roof. At night. Outside your bedroom window.

Skates didn’t fly, after all.

She reached out to push them away, then jerked her hand back. She remembered what Jax had said: the Pouring Man controlled water, and you had to make sure you didn’t invite him in.

She stuck her head and shoulders out over the window ledge, her elbows on the shingles of the porch roof, and held the penlight over the mass of eggs. Steadily, steadily. Before she even touched them to push them away she should make sure they were what they seemed to be.

For a long moment she held the spot of the penlight in one place, shining into the brown translucence of an egg pouch, and noticed nothing unusual.

Then she saw the squirming.

Inside the pouch, small things squirmed and pulsed. Their movement was rapid … as if they were about to burst out.

And whatever was inside them, she didn’t think it wasn’t baby skates. Unless skates had claws.

In a shudder of revulsion she stretched out her penlight and pushed the egg pouches with it, once, then again. She couldn’t touch it with her own fingers, but she knew she had to get it away. Get rid of it.

She stretched farther and farther onto the roof. The egg pouches didn’t roll down by themselves—the grade of the roof wasn’t steep enough—so she had to keep pushing and prodding them toward the edge. Finally her whole body was outside her bedroom window, with her feet hooked around the inside ledge of the sill, and she was quickly prodding the cluster farther and farther toward the edge. It seemed to be moving more frantically now, like the eggs would hatch any second. She shivered in disgust as she flicked it away from her.

One last push—stretching, stretching, almost letting go with her feet—and the brown mass protruded over the gutter, caught a bit on the gutter’s outer lip, and finally tumbled off the edge.

She stayed there for a minute, slowing her breathing. Then she let the penlight roll out of her grasp. She didn’t want it in her room either, not after it had touched that.

She heard a clink as it rolled off the shingles and into the gutter.

Once she was back inside she closed her window and pulled the curtains closed again. Climbed into her bed and pulled the coverlet all the way up to her chin.

Her room door was open, and it creaked as it opened wider. She gasped and sat bolt upright in her bed.

But it was only Rufus.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she told him.

Four

She and Max came out of their rooms into the upstairs hall at exactly the same time in the morning. It was early; she was surprised to see him. Usually he liked to hole up in his room till 11 on weekend mornings, headphones securely engaged.

“What can I say,” said Max, and grinned. “Curiosity and felines.”

They stood at Jax’s door and Cara knocked. When Jax didn’t open it they went in. A window was open, as usual, curtains fluttering in the breeze, but Jax was nowhere to be seen.

“Wait,” said Max. “There’s something else missing.”

Jax’s terrarium was gone, and so were his two saltwater tanks. In fact, his whole room appeared to be wildlife-free.

“No way,” said Cara.

They went down the stairs together; Max peeled off for the front yard while she went through the kitchen to the back. Past the clothesline, where the towel from the Pouring Man’s puddle still hung, through the pitch pines and bear oak, down onto the marshy shoreline. Past the patch of grass beneath her room where the skate eggs must have fallen—the eggs that were not skates but something else instead.

But there was nothing there.

The tide was low.

And there was Jax, looking absurd in nothing but big rubber boots and baggy blue swim trunks, his bare stomach and ribs smeared with dirt. He stood at the water’s edge, and a few feet behind him in the reedy mud were his tanks, tipped over and empty.

She wondered if it was dangerous, so near the water. But then, Jax had said the Pouring Man moved best at night, and it was daytime now.

“What’s going on?” asked Cara.

“Just releasing them,” he said. “They’re animals, you know. Wild animals don’t enjoy captivity.”

“Uh-huh,” said Max, coming up behind Cara. “So that’s what the turtle did? Sang you the theme song from Born Free?”

That was a famous but boring old movie their mother made them watch, about training a tame lion to go back in the wild again. Totally seventies, but Jax loved it.

“No, the turtle, as you call her,” said Jax with some dignity, “was far less juvenile than you are.”

“Whoa-ho,” said Max. “Testy.”

“Really, Jax,” said Cara. “We’re dying to know, here. Did she—communicate something?”

Jax looked at Max, and then back at her.

“I told him,” she said.

“She said we have to go underwater,” said Jax after a few seconds, and sloshed through the shallows to pick up a plastic cup. He poured it out gently, and Cara thought she saw minnows glitter in the falling stream. “She said we have to watch the sea, and when the sea—lights up at night, I guess it was?—we have to go in. And if everything goes right, a