“Yes,” Machen whispered. “She is.” And the wind whipping across the hillside made a hungry, waiting sound that told him it was time for them to head back to the house.
This is where I stand, at the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss…
“But it’s better that way,” the girl said, her ear still pressed tight against the obelisk. “She couldn’t stand the pain any longer. It was cutting her up inside.”
“She told you that?”
“She didn’t have to tell me that. I saw it in her eyes.”
The ebony key to the first day and the last, the key to the moment when the stars wink out, one by one, and the sea heaves its rotting belly at the empty, sagging sky.
“You’re only a child,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to see such things. Not yet.”
“It can’t very well be helped now,” she answered and stepped away from her mother’s grave, one hand cupping her ear like maybe it had begun to hurt. “You know that, old man.”
“I do,” and he almost said her name then, Meredith, his mother’s name, but the wind was too close, the listening wind and the salt-and-semen stink of the breakers crashing against the cliffs. “But I can wish it were otherwise.”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
And Machen watched silently as Meredith Dandridge knelt in the grass and placed her handful of wilting wildflowers on the freshly turned soil. If it were spring instead of autumn, he thought, there would be dandelions and poppies. If it were spring instead of autumn, the woman wrapped in a quilt and nailed up inside a pine-board casket would still be breathing. If it were spring, they would not be alone now, him and his daughter at the edge of the world. The wind teased the girl’s long yellow hair, and the sun glittered dimly in her warm green eyes.
The key I have accepted full in the knowledge of its weight.
“Remember me,” Meredith whispered, either to her dead mother or something else, and he didn’t ask which.
“We should be heading back now,” he said and glanced over his shoulder again.
“So soon? Is that all you’re going to read from the book? Is that all of it?”
“Yes, that’s all of it, for now,” though there would be more, later, when the harvest moon swelled orange-red and bloated and hung itself in the wide California night. When the odd, mute women came to dance, then there would be other words to say, to keep his wife in the ground and the gate shut for at least another year.
The weight that is the weight of all salvation, the weight that holds the line against the last, unending night.
“It’s better this way,” his daughter said again, standing up, brushing the dirt off her stockings, from the hem of her black dress. “There was so little left of her.”
“Don’t talk of that here,” Machen replied, more sternly than he’d intended. But Meredith didn’t seem to have noticed or, if she’d noticed, not to have minded the tone of her father’s voice.
“I will remember her the way she was before, when she was still beautiful.”
“That’s what she would want,” he said and took his daughter’s hand. “That’s the way I’ll remember her, as well,” but he knew that was a lie, as false as any lie any living man ever uttered. He knew that he would always see his wife as the writhing, twisted thing she’d become at the last, the way she was after the gates were almost thrown open, and she placed herself on the threshold.
The frozen weight of the sea, the burning weight of starlight and my final breath. I hold the line. I hold the ebony key against the last day of all.
And Machen Dandridge turned his back on his wife’s grave and led his daughter down the dirt and gravel path, back to the house waiting for them like a curse.
November 1914
Meredith Dandridge lay very still in her big bed, her big room with its high ceiling and no pictures hung on the walls, and she listened to the tireless sea slamming itself against the rocks. The sea there to take the entire world apart one gritty speck at a time, the sea that was here first and would be here long after the continents had finally been weathered down to so much slime and sand. She knew this because her father had read to her from his heavy black book, the book that had no name, the book that she couldn’t ever read for herself or the demons would come for her in the night. And she knew, too, because of the books he had given her, her books—Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, The World Before the Deluge, and Atlantis and Lost Lemuria. Everything above the waves on borrowed time, her father had said again and again, waiting for the day when the sea rose once more and drowned the land beneath its smothering, salty bosom, and the highest mountains and deepest valleys will become a playground for sea serpents and octopuses and schools of herring. Forests to become Poseidon’s orchards, her father said, though she knew Poseidon wasn’t the true name of the god-thing at the bottom of the ocean, just a name some dead man gave it thousands of years ago.
“Should I read you a story tonight, Merry?” her dead mother asked, sitting right there in the chair beside the bed. She smelled like fish and mud, even though they’d buried her in the dry ground at the top of the hill behind the house. Meredith didn’t look at her, because she’d spent so much time already trying to remember her mother’s face the way it was before and didn’t want to see the ruined face the ghost was wearing like a mask. As bad as the face her brother now wore, worse than that, and Meredith shrugged and pushed the blankets back a little.
“If you can’t sleep, it might help,” her mother said with a voice like kelp stalks swaying slowly in deep water.
“It might,” Meredith replied, staring at a place where the wallpaper had begun to peel free of one of the walls, wishing there were a candle in the room or an oil lamp so the ghost would leave her alone. “And it might not.”
“I could read to you from Hans Christian Andersen, or one of Grimm’s tales,” her mother sighed. “‘The Little Mermaid’ or ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’?”
“You could tell me what it’s like in Hell,” the girl replied.
“Dear, I don’t have to tell you that,” her ghost mother whispered, her voice gone suddenly regretful and sad. “I know I don’t have to ever tell you that.”
“There might be different hells,” Meredith said. “This one, and the one father sent you away to, and the one Avery is lost inside. No one ever said there could only be one, did they? Maybe it has many regions. A hell for the dead Prussian soldiers and another for the French, a hell for Christians and another for the Jews. And maybe another for all the pagans.”
“Your father didn’t send me anywhere, child. I crossed the threshold of my own accord.”
“So I would be alone in this hell.”
The ghost clicked its sharp teeth together, and Meredith could hear the anemone tendrils between its iridescent fish eyes quickly withdrawing into the hollow places in her mother’s decaying skull.
“I could read you a poem,” her mother said hopefully. “I could sing you a song.”
“It isn’t all fire and brimstone, is it? Not the region of hell where you are? It’s blacker than night and cold as ice, isn’t it, mother?”
“Did he think it would save me to put me in the earth? Does the old fool think it will bring me back across, like Persephone?”
Too many questions, hers and her mother’s, and for a moment Meredith Dandridge didn’t answer the ghost, kept her eyes on the shadowy wallpaper strips, the pinstripe wall, wishing the sun would rise and pour warm and gold as honey through the drapes.
“I crossed the threshold of my own accord,” the ghost said again, and Meredith wondered if it thought she didn’t hear the first time. Or maybe it was something her mother needed to believe and might stop believing if she stopped repeating it. “Someone had to do it.”