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

Her mind was racing. She didn’t know what he could do to them. What had her mother said? He wanted to come between them; he didn’t want them to find her. His name was fear, and he wanted to keep them apart….

And even if he was gone from the tent by now, he might have left some of his water there. Right? She couldn’t forget how carefully Jax had lifted that towel—how deliberate and grim he had seemed. You couldn’t touch where the Pouring Man had been. You couldn’t take that risk.

His name is fear, her mother had said. He is a dead soldier.

Who knew what that was supposed to mean? A dead soldier? It made her feel kind of sorry for him, if he was a soldier who had died. But then the Pouring Man wasn’t someone she thought she could feel sorry for.

It made no sense.

“Why not?” asked Hayley.

“We just can’t,” said Cara. “Trust me.”

Her back still against the thick metal door, she fumbled in her pocket and pulled out her cell.

“Max,” she said when he answered. “Help. He’s here. Come pick us up in the parking lot, beside the bathroom building. And come now!”

She clicked the phone shut to find Hayley staring at her, so amazed she was even forgetting to chew her gum.

“What’s going on?” asked Hayley. “Come on. Tell me!”

“It’s, it’s just this guy,” said Cara. “He’s been hanging around the house lately. We don’t like him. And now he’s followed me here.”

“What, like a molester dude?” asked Hayley.

“Not exactly,” said Cara.

“Because if it’s a Peeping Tom or something, my mom is gonna freak,” said Hayley, turning back to the sinks to wash her hands. “There was this guy across the street last spring? Renting the Klosterman house? And he—”

Cara couldn’t listen. Her stomach was still flipping. He could be close; he could be right outside. The windows of the bathroom were frosted so you couldn’t see out, and threaded through with squares of wire. As windows they were completely useless.

“Here, lean against the door with me,” she told Hayley. “Just in case he tries to get in.”

She didn’t know what the rules were when the place was public—maybe here he didn’t have to be invited. Maybe here he was free to come and go as he pleased.

“But how’ll we know when it’s Max?”

“We’ll hear him,” said Cara. “And the car, we’ll hear it pull up. He doesn’t drive a car. He’s always … walking.”

“He, like the perv?”

“He’s not—whatever. Yeah. Basically, him.”

Both of them were lined up against the door beside each other now, their backs to it, their arms down at their sides. It took eight minutes to get here from their house—she knew that by heart, since she and Max been coming to Marconi since she was tiny—and more if there was traffic.

She looked at her watch; Max should be here in five minutes now. Could they hold him off for that long?

“So, when did this guy start bugging you?” Hayley was asking, sounding kind of urgent. Cara wanted to tell her to be quiet, but she didn’t want to seem mean. She’d brought Hayley here; she was the one putting her friend in danger.…

“You left the faucet on,” Cara noticed.

“Oh. Whoops,” said Hayley, and darted forward to turn it off.

“No, no, stay put!” cried Cara. “I need your weight on the door. He’s stronger than me. He’s stronger than both of us!”

“Aright, aright, chillax,” said Hayley, already back at the door.

Cara felt a small surge of relief.

“Can’t hear the rain,” said Hayley. “Can you?”

“That’d be good, if it stopped raining,” said Cara, and tried to listen. But the walls of the restroom were pretty thick and it was hard to tell.

Her watch said two minutes more.

“Shoot,” said Hayley. “That faucet must be broken.”

The tap was on again.

“The plumbing in this place never did work that well,” said Cara. “Just leave it this time, ’K? I need you here, against the door.”

And then she looked harder at the stream of water coming from the tap.

Water. Of course.

She felt stupid. And then she also felt afraid.

Steam was rising from the water column, as though it was boiling. The steam rose and fogged the blurry mirror, the mirror where you could never actually see your face anyway. They made them that way on purpose, for some reason … the mirror fogged, more and more. And then there was something moving in it, either in the fog or the mirror itself. The blurry silver sheen of it seemed to churn and roll.

“What the—”

Before Hayley could even finish her sentence, there were hands reaching for them out of the mirror, arms that were long and thin, hands made of water with reaching fingers that were longer and longer and terribly, terribly thin, thin as bones, thin as daggers—

And behind the hands was a long face in the mirror, grotesquely long with an open mouth and a chin dropping down so the mouth opened wider and wider—

Hayley was shrieking right in her ear at the top of her lungs. Cara turned and grabbed the door handle.

She wrenched it open, and both of them threw themselves through the crack, running at full tilt across the wet parking lot toward the road that led through the woods out to Route 6, pounding the wet pavement with their feet. Then they were running up the road, leaving the parking lot behind them. The rain was barely a mist now, Cara realized, and kept running, and then felt flooded with relief.

They were saved. There were Max’s headlights.

Six

“OK. So that was not a Peeping Tom,” said Hayley emphatically.

It was about two in the morning and they were home and warm. The three of them—Cara, Hayley, and Jax—sat in their dad’s study by lamplight with blankets pulled around them, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. The library part of the study, behind the big desk with its jar full of Milk-Bones