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

marshy area before the trees started up. “I’m out of salt! And I’m not down at the water yet! It must have come out of my shaker too fast!”

It’s my fault, thought Cara. They hadn’t had three salt shakers in the house, so for one of them she’d had to use a cinnamon container, and she recalled, now, how large the holes had been in the plastic lid for the cinnamon. She’d made a note to warn the others, and then, when they were distributing the different containers, she’d completely forgotten to mention it.

I’m sorry, it’s my fault, she thought again—more loudly, if that was possible. She tried to send the thought in Jax’s direction, so he didn’t feel like it was him who’d messed up.

“Keep going anyway,” came Max’s confident voice from her other side. “Just keep going. That’ll be a gap in the line of defense, but we can work around it. We’ll have to.”

She saw Jax come down to the water, stuffing the empty shaker into his pocket.

Then they were all side by side at the waterline, at the convergence. They stood there awkwardly for a moment—Cara felt foolish; it was hard to believe anything real would come of this—then turned and began the walk back up, curving apart again as the salt lines separated. This time they were dropping herbs out of the bowls, pinch by pinch, which they lifted with their right thumb and forefinger. Cara retraced her steps back up to the house.

In a few seconds they were through the trees again and flattening their backs against the building’s back wall, standing at their stations. Cara’s station was the back door, where they’d all started out, and as she stood there with her eyes closed, everything went awfully silent—not even, she thought, the sound of a cricket. She stood in the blackness of her closed eyelids, feeling dizzy. Seeing the world kept you stable, she thought.

Then she heard the low growl of a dog.

It was Rufus—up front still, because the growl was very faint. In her whole life she’d never heard Rufus growl.

It must mean he wasn’t himself again. Yet.

But she kept her eyes closed. She couldn’t open them—it would ruin the ceremony. They had to be closed for the whole nine minutes, and she had to stand stock-still for those nine minutes too. No movement was allowed.

Fuzzy sparks pricked the inside of her eyelids—no problem, she told herself, that’s just electrical impulses, isn’t it? She tried to think what Jax would say: the science of it. It’s what always happens when you keep your eyes closed for a long time without sleeping. There’s no perfect black; there have to be interruptions in the blackness. So you imagine the sparks are pictures of things, images, while really it’s neurons firing or whatever—the energy of the brain.

But then a picture was forming, a detailed picture with millions of tiny parts … impossible, yet crystal-clear. Like HD. She saw the front of the house; the light on the front porch must be on, because it was bright enough to see every speck of dust, every hair—she saw the peeling paint on the rail. She could tell it was night, though, from the way dark invaded from the corners….

Rufus was there, colored blood-red, his wet fur still dripping. He had sharp teeth and black eyes—the Pouring Man using the body of Rufus, using Rufus’s poor, faithful old dog face, tail, dog legs.

The not-Rufus was worrying the leash, biting it where it was lashed to the white porch rails with their peeling, faded paint. The sharp teeth made a sawing sound on the nylon strap: saw. Saw. Saw.

She saw the not-dog’s feet, with nails that were long and black and sharp. Not his real nails at all—these were claws like talons, scraping at the wood of the porch.

And then it happened. The leash broke—just as she heard the electronic beep of Max’s watch alarm. And her eyes snapped open.

She realized she was gripping the lipstick so hard it was hurting her fingers.

Three more minutes till the warding charm was finished….he might be coming around the corner right now. His teeth, his needle-sharp teeth—not like her poor, sweet old Rufus at all. And they wouldn’t be able to see him in the dark … she turned so that her headlamp swept the right-hand corner of the house, where Max stood. He must have turned to her at the same time, though, because she was blinded by the light from his headlamp and had to turn away. Then she looked left, to where Jax stood.

She thought: Did you see it, too? Did you see the leash break?

Jax reached up and clicked off his headlamp. She saw the beam wink off. Then he turned to her and shook his head.

No. She was the only one who’d seen it.

Then Max’s watch alarm beeped again.

“Man!” said Max. “We can talk now, right, J? Was that a walk in the park, or what?”

“Be careful,” she said to Max. “I think it’s gotten loose! The dog-thing. And Jax and I are protected from him, I guess?—more than you, anyway, so watch out. He can still get at you. Because you’re not—”

And that was when the not-dog came walking around the corner of the house. Not running; just walking.

Their headlamps illuminated him.

He was walking slowly, placidly.

And smiling as no dog ever should.

Showing long, needle-like teeth.

“He can’t get through the salt line,” said Jax in a rush. “So let’s just keep going. Down to the water. We still have to do the welcoming part of the charm, or she won’t be able to come home.”

They started walking, turning every so often to see what the not-dog was doing. He kept walking parallel to them, down toward the water, outside the farthest salt line. He was on Max’s side, not Jax’s, at least, which meant he’d have to go around to get in where the gap was.

It’ll be up to us to stop him, thought Jax at Cara