“What’s that?” she asked, interrupting because she didn’t want to hear anymore. “Is it from Father’s book?”
“No, it’s not,” he replied, sounding more like himself again, more like her brother. He opened his eyes, and a tear rolled slowly down his wind-chapped cheek. ”It’s just something they taught me at school.”
“How can a wave be in flame? Is it supposed to be a riddle?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“No,” he said and wiped at his face with his hands. “It’s nothing at all, just a silly bit of poetry they made us memorize. School is full of silly poetry.”
“Is that why you came home?”
“We ought to start back,” he said, glancing quickly over his shoulder at the high cliffs, the steep trail leading back up towards the house. “Can’t have the tide catching us with our trousers down, now can we?”
“I don’t even wear trousers,” Merry said glumly, still busy thinking about that ninth wave, the fire and the water. Avery put an arm around her and held her close to him for a moment while the advancing sea dragged itself eagerly back and forth across the moss-scabbed rocks.
January 1915
Meredith sat alone on the floor at the end of the hallway, the narrow hall connecting the foyer to the kitchen and a bathroom, and then farther along, leading all the way back to the very rear of the house and this tall door that was always locked. The tarnished brass key always hung on its ring upon her father’s belt. She pressed her ear against the wood and strained to hear anything at all. The wood was damp and very cold, and the smell of saltwater and mildew seeped freely through the space between the bottom of the door and the floor, between the door and the jamb. Once-solid redwood that had long since begun to rot from the continual moisture, the ocean’s corrosive breath to rust the hinges so the door cried out like a stepped-on cat every time it was opened or closed. Even as a very small child, Meredith had feared this door, even in the days before she’d started to understand what lay in the deep place beneath her father’s house.
Outside, the icy winter wind howled, and she shivered and pulled her grey wool shawl tighter about her shoulders; the very last thing her mother had made for her, that shawl. Almost as much hatred in Merry for the wind as for the sea, but at least it smothered the awful thumps and moans that came, day and night, from the attic room where her father had locked Avery away in June.
“There are breaches between the worlds, Merry,” Avery had said, a few days before he picked the lock on the hallway door with the sharpened tip-end of a buttonhook and went down to the deep place by himself. “Rifts, fractures, ruptures. If they can’t be closed, they have to be guarded against the things on the other side that don’t belong here.”
“Father says it’s a portal,” she’d replied, closing the book she’d been reading, a dusty, dog-eared copy of Franz Unger’s Primitive World.
Her brother had laughed a dry, humorless laugh and shaken his head, nervously watching the fading day through the parlor windows. “Portals are built on purpose, to be used. These things are accidents, at best, casualties of happenstance, tears in space when one world passes much too near another.”
“Well, that’s not what Father says.”
“Read your book, Merry. One day you’ll understand. One day soon, when you’re not a child anymore, and he loses his hold on you.”
And she’d frowned, sighed, and opened her book again, opening it at random to one of the strangely melancholy lithographs—The Period of the Muschelkalk [Middle Trias]. A violent seascape, and in the foreground a reef jutted above the waves, crowded with algae-draped driftwood branches and the shells of stranded mollusca and crinoidea. There was something like a crocodile, that the author called Nothosaurus giganteus, clinging to the reef so it wouldn’t be swept back into the storm-tossed depths. Overhead, the night sky was a turbulent mass of clouds with the small, white moon, full or near enough to full, peeking through to illuminate the ancient scene.
“You mean planets?” she’d asked Avery. “You mean moons and stars?”
“No, I mean worlds. Now, read your book, and don’t ask so many questions.”
Meredith thought she heard creaking wood, her father’s heavy footsteps, the dry ruffling of cloth rubbing against cloth, and she stood quickly, not wanting to be caught listening at the door again, was still busy straightening her rumpled dress when she realized that he was standing there in the hall behind her, instead. Her mistake, thinking he’d gone to the deep place, when he was somewhere else all along, in his library or the attic room with Avery or outside braving the cold to visit her mother’s grave on the hill.
“What are you doing, child?” he asked her gruffly and tugged at his beard. There were streaks of silver-grey that weren’t there only a couple of months before, scars from the night they lost her mother, his wife, the night the demons tried to squeeze in through the tear, and Ellen Dandridge had tried to block their way. His face grown years older in the space of weeks, dark crescents beneath his eyes like bruises and deep creases in his forehead. He brushed his daughter’s blonde hair from her eyes.
“Would it have been different, if you’d believed Avery from the start?”
For a moment he didn’t reply, and his silence, his face set as hard and perfectly unreadable as stone, made her want to strike him, made her wish she could kick open the rotting, sea-damp door and hurl him screaming down the stairs to whatever was waiting for them both in the deep place.
“I don’t know, Meredith. But I had to trust the book, and I had to believe the signs in the heavens.”
“You were too arrogant, old man. You almost gave away the whole wide world because you couldn’t admit you might be wrong.”
“You should be thankful that your mother can’t hear you, young lady, using that tone of voice with your own father.”
Meredith turned and looked at the tall, rotten door again, the symbols drawn on the wood in whitewash and blood.
“She can hear me,” Meredith told him. “She talks to me almost every night. She hasn’t gone as far away as you think.”
“I’m still your father, and you’re still a child who can’t even begin to understand what’s at stake, what’s always pushing at the other side of—”
“—the gate?” she asked, interrupting and finishing for him, and she put one hand flat against the door, the upper of its two big panels, and leaned all her weight against it. “What happens next time? Do you know that, Father? How much longer do we have left, or haven’t the constellations gotten around to telling you that yet?”
“Don’t mock me, Meredith.”
“Why not?” and she stared back at him over her shoulder, without taking her hand off the door. “Will it damn me faster? Will it cause more men to die in the trenches? Will it cause Avery more pain than he’s in now?”
“I was given the book,” he growled at her, his stony face flashing to bitter anger, and at least that gave Meredith some mean scrap of satisfaction. “I was shown the way to this place. They entrusted the gate to me, child. The gods—”
“—must be even bigger fools than you, old man. Now shut up, and leave me alone.”
Machen Dandridge raised his right hand to strike her, his big-knuckled hand like a hammer of flesh and bone, iron-meat hammer and anvil to beat her as thin and friable as the veil between Siamese universes.
“You’ll need me,” she said, not recoiling from the fire in his dark eyes, standing her ground. “You can’t take my place. Even if you weren’t a coward, you couldn’t take my place.”