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

for Rufus, had two overstuffed armchairs, a fireplace with a marble mantelpiece and lion heads at both ends, and dusty old bookshelves on two of the walls. Cara had always thought it was a nice room. Beyond the chairs was a bay window that looked out over the water—or would if they didn’t have the deep-red drapes pulled shut.

Max had insisted on driving back to the park and keeping vigil from the car with his friends, though Jax had made them promise not to go near the tent till dawn. Max had never seen the Pouring Man—the so-called dead soldier—which was why, Cara thought, he didn’t take her story too seriously.

Though he hadn’t said so, maybe he even thought she was imagining things.

“There’s no way you’re gonna convince me that thing coming out of the mirror was just some weirdo who likes spying on girls,” went on Hayley.

“Not so much,” admitted Jax.

He sat cross-legged on a thick rug on the floor and was eating sugary cereal from the box with his fingers. That was his habit when he was trying to think something through.

“I haven’t been a hundred percent honest with you,” said Cara to Hayley sheepishly.

“Yeah. No kidding.”

“I’m sorry,” Cara told her, and meant it.

Before this whole thing, she’d always thought of herself as pretty truthful, aside from the rare white lie to save someone’s feelings. She wanted to have integrity.

“So what the hell was it?” asked Hayley. “I mean there was that—face thing in the mirror—and the hands were stretching out longer than any hands could ever be, like they were groping for us….”

“You said he was in the tapwater?” said Jax, turning to Cara.

Cara kept her own hands cupped around her mug of cocoa, alternating between sipping and blowing on it. She’d toweled off, so she wasn’t still soaking, but both she and Hayley were wearing bathrobes and thick socks—Hayley had brought puffy pink bedroom slippers in her overnight bag—and had their hair wrapped up in soft towels.

“That was how he got in,” she said to Jax, nodding. “Through the pipes. Not the door.”

“Yeah, um, pipes? I’m not getting it,” said Hayley.

“He travels through water,” explained Cara. “He has to have water to travel. And he likes the nighttime, too. Maybe there was enough wetness in the pipes that he could move through them? But then he turned to steam when he came out, because it was too bright or dry in the bathroom for him to, you know, materialize all the way….”

“Before that,” said Jax, “you said he took the shape of Hayley?”

“He did,” said Cara. “He really did! Jax, I swear. I was inside the tent, and she’d gone out across the parking lot to the bathroom, and I thought it was her. I heard these hands scratching and scrabbling, you know, trying to undo the zipper on the flap in the dark? And I turned my flashlight on them and they were her hands. Her fingers! They looked just like them! So I told her to come in.”

“You invited him,” said Jax.

“It was meant for Hayley. But I guess I did.”

“I didn’t know he could do that,” said Jax. “Shapeshifting. He’s more powerful than I thought, that’s for sure.”

“Wait,” said Hayley. “Shapeshifting? But that’s, like, the sci-fi channel! You guys have got to be kidding me.”

“It’s a kind of mind-control, I would guess,” said Jax. “I can’t be certain, of course, but that would be a more efficient strategy, to make the observer think he looks a certain way. He’s not actually transmuting atoms or anything. ’Course, mind control’s a pretty good trick too.”

“Whatever!” said Hayley. “You guys need to tell me what’s going on. I mean, he was after me, too, right?”

“He won’t bother you unless you’re with us,” said Jax. “I’m pretty certain of that.”

“And, of course, I mean, you can go home now, if you want to,” said Cara. “I wouldn’t blame you, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t want to go home,” said Hayley. “At least—not while it’s still dark out. No thanks.”

“You’re pretty safe in here,” said Jax.

“We think,” added Cara.

“But then—what does he want from you?”

Jax turned to Cara, expectant.

“You know more now, don’t you?” he said.

His eyes seemed to be taking her measure.

“I had a dream,” she confessed. “A really realistic one. Mom was in it.”

“Oh, man. The creepy guy has something to do with your mother?” asked Hayley.

“He’s trying to keep us from her,” said Cara.

She leaned forward and set her empty mug down on a table, on a stack of her dad’s books. Then she sat back, feeling spacey … she twisted her favorite ring back and forth on her middle finger. Her mother had given it to her for her twelfth birthday: silver, with a round white and blue design that looked like an eye. She had said it was for good luck. To ward off the evil eye, her mother said.

“Um,” said Hayley. “Like, why?”

Jax shook his head, then looked sideways, checking with Cara.

“We don’t exactly know,” he said.

“There’s something going on,” Cara told Hayley.

“Yeah, I got that much,” said Hayley.

She was winding a strand of her yellow hair around a pencil.

“In the world. Beyond us. Some kind of a fight. And he’s on one side and our mother is on the other. And we’re supposed to be there, too. At least, I think that’s what she was telling me.… We’re supposed to be joining in the fight, but to do that we have to get to her. Or to the others, her friends, maybe? And she’s trying to help us, but he doesn’t want us to succeed, because he’s one of the bad guys. She called him dead. One of the dead soldiers, is what she called him, though I don’t know what she meant. She also said his name is fear. She said he works for the someone called the Cold Man. Or wait, the Cold One…”

Jax was gazing up at her from the floor, his cereal box forgotten, while Hayley stared from