The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (21 page)

“Swerved, yeah,” said Max. “So I, uh, wouldn’t hit the deer.”

“Deer sighting or not, it’s not going to look good to our insurance company. Believe you me.”

“He’s in the dreaded under-25 male driver bracket,” said Jax to Cara, nodding sagely. “They wreck everything. It costs the earth to insure them.”

“You got me into this,” said Max testily.

“Got you into what?” asked their dad.

There was an awkward silence.

“Oh, I—I made him go out in the car just then,” said Jax. “I wanted a bear claw.”

Their dad looked at them in the rearview mirror—it was a thin explanation, and Cara could tell he didn’t buy it.

Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, as her dad liked to say.

“He was whining, so Max just said, you know, give me a break, I’ll get you your stupid donut,” she elaborated. “You know how they have them at the general store sometimes, and Jax didn’t want to walk.”

“Huh,” said their dad.

The silence started up again.

“Sorry, everyone,” said Jax, and leaned up to pat Max on the shoulder.

“Yeah, well,” said Max.

“Look, guys,” said their dad. “Sure, maybe I shouldn’t have gone. It’s tough that you had to be without me after everything that’s happened this summer …”

They came off a fast roundabout and merged onto Route 6. Cars rushed by, overtaking each other and whipping past, and Cara thought how lucky Max had been, in the end. How lucky they all were. She remembered how their car had looked last time she saw it, wrapped around the tree like the tree was a part of it.

Their dad was going to get another shock when he saw the car.

“… and I think maybe part of me was hoping that by going away, even for just two days, I might—I might return to find something had changed. Or more precisely, that things had returned to the way they used to be. In other words … that your mother would magically
be
here when I got back.”

Cara shot a quick look at Jax and saw that, like Max, he was studiously staring out his window. All of a sudden things were very interesting outside all the windows, in fact.

“And it impaired my judgment. You could have been hurt far worse than you were, Max, and that would have been partly my fault.”

“Come on,” said Max after a moment. “Don’t make this so global, Dad. You didn’t do anything wrong. You went to a conference, I got in a fender-bender. Accidents just happen.”

“If that’s a fender-bender, I’d like to see a head-on collision,” muttered Jax under his breath, but luckily their dad was still talking and didn’t hear.

“… but I’m afraid you’ve got to take responsibility, too,” said their father. “You weren’t authorized to take the car out, Max, except for emergencies and to pick me up at the ferry. I was perfectly clear there. You knew that.”

“Yeah,” said Max. “But—”

“No buts,” said their father. “I’m sorry about your arm, I really am. But I’m also going to have to ground you. Until school starts.”

They were silent. Max was the one who’d gotten hurt—he’d gotten hurt for all of them. And now he was grounded.

It wasn’t fair at all, thought Cara.

Max wasn’t saying anything, and she couldn’t see his face to know how pissed off he was.

The radio droned.

“… for the first time in human history, the Arctic could be ice-free as early as within the next few years—meaning mass drownings for polar bears….”

Listening to it, her dad shook his head.

“Will they cover a new car for us, at least?” asked Max. “I mean, I get that the premiums will go up. And that really sucks. But will we get a new car soon?”

“As far as I know,” said their dad, preoccupied.

“I’d feel bad,” said Max—trying to inject some levity, Cara thought—“if you, like, had to hitchhike to teach next week.”

Her dad shushed them and turned the radio volume up. “This is the stuff your mother is working on,” he said.

“Global warming, right?” said Max. “The paranoid left-wing conspiracy that doesn’t really exist.”

Their dad looked at him sharply, then saw he was kidding.

“Left-wing, right-wing, rubbish,” said their father. “It’s a little thing called science.”

“Actually,” said Jax, “technically she’s working on ocean acidification, which is related to climate change via the CO2 connection but not the same phenomenon.”

“So, this weekend,” said their dad, once the news turned to sports, “we all need to sit down and have a talk about what’s going to happen this fall, how things will work with just the four of us, and how we’re going to deal with the problem of your mother being missing. Going forward. We need to talk it through. OK?”

Cara raised her eyebrows; Jax shot her another sidelong look.

“And we’ll pick up a pizza from Red Barn and watch a movie afterward,” added their dad, as if to lessen the blow.

“Sure, Dad,” answered Max, their delegate to the older generation. “We’ll talk.”

“I wonder if Hayley should be here,” said Max.

It was the quietest hour of sunset, the sky a dim pastel-colored wash of fading colors over the trees and the water of the bay silvery-black and lapping at the shore. Faintly they could smell barbeque smoke from down the street and hear the sound of mosquitoes hitting the neighbor’s blue-light bug zapper.

They’d eaten dinner early and were sitting on the porch, swinging back and forth. Their dad, who seemed to have given them a free pass on chores for the day, was inside tidying up with Lolly. He’d said that after that was done he’d do some pruning in the back before it got dark; gardening took his mind off things, Cara suspected.

“I mean, didn’t you say she turned out to play the role of the arbiter, or whatever I was supposed to be? So maybe she should be here for the ritual too,” Max went on.

“I talked to her earlier,” said Cara. “Her mom’s not letting her come over for a while. She’s mad because Hayley showed up all exhausted and dirty from the sleepover and wouldn’t admit we did anything, you know, out of the ordinary. She didn’t want us to get in trouble, so she just said we stayed up late talking. But then she collapsed and slept, like, forever. All day, up until an hour ago. So anyway, her mom’s making her work at the salon till further notice.”

“So,” said Max. “We need to prepare, I guess.”

Jax nodded. “There are some things we need. We need salt, for example. It should be sea salt, ideally.”

“I think there’s some in the kitchen,” said Cara.

“Then we each need something of Mom’s. It could be even hair, from her hairbrush. I got the feeling it should basically be something that has her DNA. Or something a dog would use to track her scent, you know? Though I couldn’t exactly swear to that.”

“Creepy,” said Max. “Eye of newt, or whatever.”

“Huh?” asked Jax.

“Wow, something you don’t know,” Max marveled. “We had to read it in English this year.
Macbeth
. The play by Shakespeare? There’s witches in it, and they have this recipe for a potion, I think: eye of newt, toe of frog. Then something else I forget. Wait, maybe the hair of the dog … ?”

“The point of the whole deal,” said Jax, “is it’s a warding spell, basically. When we do the ritual, we make her safe from him. At least, for a while. More than that, I don’t know.”

“So what else?” asked Cara.

“There are a couple of herbs I think we have in the kitchen. Apparently they’re ancient. People have used them for centuries even though you can pick them up for $1.99 at Stop & Shop.”

“Who knew,” said Max, deadpan.

The sprinkler started up in front of them, going back and forth in the humid, dusky air. Its movement was hypnotic and oddly calming.

“No, really,” said Jax. “The selkie told me there are things all around with these properties. These properties that seem to defy physics, defy chemistry. And some of the things with extraordinary properties are totally basic-seeming—even trivial. You’d never think they were anything more than that. Unless you knew. Unless you had this secret, ancient knowledge. It used to be passed down by word of mouth, between generations of—shamans, I guess she called them? But now that tradition has died out. It’s all, I don’t know, TV and advertising and selling things and the old secrets have been lost.”

“To all but the seal people,” said Max, a bit mockingly.

Max could mock, but Cara didn’t mind. She knew with perfect certainty about the world that was hidden—knew it was there, though she didn’t understand it. So Max could mock, but she didn’t mind. The mockery had no teeth.

“Not seal people, exactly,” said Jax, and was going to explain, but Cara stopped him.

“We should focus,” she said. “We don’t have that long for the gathering. Tell us what else we’ll need.”

The sprinkler, which had started low, had gotten taller until the lines of spray were falling down on the roof of the porch as it passed them.

“Dad,” called out Max, craning his neck around the corner of the house, “you made the sprinkler too big. Can you cut it down? We’re about to get wet here.”

“But I didn’t turn the sprinkler on,” their dad called back. He was clearly still in the kitchen.

Cara looked at Jax. In that second of recognition—Cara thinking
Oh, not again. How stupid can I be?
—the lines of water coming out of the sprinkler shot up into the sky suddenly, as though the water pressure had hit infinity.

At the same time the water turned color—turned dark red, red as blood. Then it was pouring down on the roof, hitting the roof of the porch so hard it leaked through the cracks above them, flowing down over the sides in thin curtains of red.

“Inside!” Cara screamed, and all three of them piled through the front door. She slammed it behind them, and they stood there breathing hard.

From the kitchen, Lolly called out a question—what was going on, or something. Before they could answer, or even pay attention, Max said: “
Rufus
.”

He had been beside them on the porch, curled up on the wooden slats as they swung.

“Oh
no
,” said Cara.

How could they have left him behind?

“I’ll get him!” said Max, and before they could stop him he had opened the door and was through it.

“Don’t bring him in!” yelled Jax, but it was too late: there was Rufus, Max holding him by the collar with his good hand, the arm in the cast hanging limp; the dog was soaked, soaked in the blood-red water.

“Oh. No,” said Cara again.

“Max, you don’t get it,” urged Jax. “You have to get him out of the house! Now!”

Rufus growled.

And Cara knew it, she knew it instantly.

He wasn’t their Rufus anymore. He was
inhabited
.

“Max invited him,” said Jax. “Now he’s in.”

And then Rufus smiled.

It was far worse than the growling. It was one of the most frightening things Cara had ever seen.

It was like his lips were being formed into a grin by some force beyond him—a manipulation, a form of cold, ugly puppetry.

“Jesus!” said Max as the dog swiveled its head and looked at him. He snatched his hand off the collar as though it was hot to the touch.

“Get him out!” cried Jax.

Cara grabbed a coat and threw it over the dog’s head, his teeth snapping, head thrusting up and down. She backed him up toward the door as Max wrenched it open, and then they had him out again and the door slammed behind him.

“What were you
doing
to that poor dog, for Chrissake?” asked their dad, sounding angry. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen, holding a dishtowel.

He’d never been able to stand it when people mistreated animals.

“He was—” began Jax.

“We think he got skunked,” rushed Max. “Maybe right in the face? He was bringing it in.”

“I don’t smell anything,” said their dad.

“That’s because of Cara’s quick thinking, then,” said Max.

“Huh,” said their dad. “Well, if he was really skunked you’ll need the special soap. It’s still under the basement sink from last time. I’ll let the three of you deal with it.”

“Will do,” said Max.

“And don’t bring him inside, whatever you do,” he added before retreating again.

“He’s right about that part,” whispered Jax. “When the water dries off Roof, or isn’t in him anymore, he should revert. I
hope
. But for sure we can’t go near him, at least until then.”

“Whew,” said Max. “So that was the guy I saw? He can do that? Horrorshow.”

They sat down on the bottom stairs of the staircase, all three of them in a row. Cara thought the sound of the sprinkler had stopped, but she wasn’t sure. They could hear a faint but steady scratching at the door. She wondered if any of the neighbors had come outside, had watched the blood-red water shoot up into the sky and rain down on their house in a torrent.

They’d get some weird looks tomorrow if the neighbors had noticed. That was for sure.

“Wait him out,” said Jax. “It’s all we can do.”

“But what about the warding charm?” asked Cara. “What if it’s not dry outside by then?”

“We’re lucky on that one,” said Jax. “Except for the Rufus factor, that is. The path of the ritual is from the back of the house, the basement door, right down to the water. The front yard’s not part of it.”

“But he could attack, couldn’t he?” said Max. “If he still has … that … inside him.”

“Probably someone should leash him,” said Cara. “We should tie him up. Shouldn’t we? I mean it’s not only us—he could hurt someone else, with the Pouring Man telling him what to do. And then poor old Roof would be blamed. And none of this is his fault.”

“But it’s too dangerous,” said Jax.

“I’ll do it,” said Max.