The Fog (3 page)

At orientation back in July, the island parents and children had met Mr. Shevvington. He had strange eyes. Unblinking and hypnotic, like a dog’s. Christina had wanted to stare right back, but the mad dog image frightened her, as if to stare wrongly would make Mr. Shevvington bite her, and she would be mortally wounded and die in agony.

How impressed all the parents were with the principal! He’s such a caring man! they said to each other. He’s so understanding and yet so well disciplined. He’s gentle with the children, but strong and firm. He will be a perfect role model for the boys and a father figure for the girls.

Christina had been amazed to hear her own parents talking like this, as if they had all just read the same pop psychology book.

Christina, Anya, and the boys stood on the dock, surrounded by piles of possessions. Trunks, cardboard boxes, tennis rackets, suitcases, tote bags, backpacks. Christina felt like an immigrant who would probably have to get shots before she would be allowed to stay.

High on the cliffs to their left, on the other side of the Singing Bridge, perched on top of Candle Cove, sat the Schooner Inne.

Nobody in his right mind would build on Candle Cove. It was a fine place for warehouses or factories, but not for homes.

Tide at Candle Cove was twenty-eight feet — as high as the roof of a house! The sides of the cove were rocks, huge outcroppings with ledges and shelves that appealed to children and romantics.

A hundred years before, a couple on their honeymoon had picnicked on a granite outcropping that was twenty-five feet above the mud. How happy they must have been, sharing lemonade, perhaps nibbling at the same scarlet apple. How exciting the tide must have seemed, rumbling forward, the waves leaping and lashing. And suddenly the two lovers must have realized that twenty-five feet was not high enough to be safe from a twenty-eight foot tide. Christina imagined them trying to get off the ledge, the boy lifting the girl, her long skirts snagging, the water roaring around them, the boy thinking
No, no, no, no, please don’t
—

Their bodies were never found. The sea took them to picnic forever and ever. The town had fenced off the cliff around Candle Cove, but still people went down there, climbing on the rocks, or worse, walking on the mud flats exposed at low tide.

If nobody in his right mind would build on Candle Cove, thought Christina, then the sea captain was not in his right mind when he built his house. Why did his bride step off the roof?

“If the Shevvingtons don’t hurry up and get here,” said Benj irritably, “we’ll use your father’s truck to haul this stuff to the Inne, Christina. You got keys?”

“Of course she doesn’t have keys,” said his brother. “She’s only thirteen. She doesn’t know how to drive.”

A solid trunk of a woman appeared between them. She had no female shape at all. She was without curves: a large thick post with hair on top. Even her head had no curves. Her features were very flat, so that she had no profile, only a face. “There will be no bickering in my household,” she said, laying a hand on the shoulders of the brothers. Her hands were fat, the flesh bulging over the many rings on her short fingers. The nails were long and hooked and had just been polished dark red, so that they seemed to bleed.

Michael and Benj, who, with their sister Dolly, had never done anything except bicker, pulled away from her hands.

“I am Mrs. Shevvington. Load your belongings into the van. Do not dillydally. There will be no dillydallying in my household.”

Christina could not imagine this pie dough wed to Mr. Shevvington. Many years and many pounds separated them. Mr. Shevvington was so graceful, handsome, and silvery.

The creature closed her thick, curved palm over Christina’s cheek. “Dillydallying?”

“No, no,” said Christina, leaping away from the hand. It was sweaty. It had left a damp print on her cheek.

The boys began loading the mountain of possessions into a dark green utility van with rust along the bottom. A driver sat motionless behind the steering wheel.

Mrs. Shevvington commented that they had brought a considerable amount with them; she did not know where they thought they would store all these things. Certainly she, Mrs. Shevvington, did not propose to have her precious space given up to old tattered suitcases.

“You have an inn,” protested Christina. “You must be able to store a million suitcases and trunks.”

“When I state a fact, Christina, do not contradict me.”

Christina flushed. The others looked embarrassed for her.

Their posters had been rolled into one cardboard shipping tube, which had fallen on the dock. “Is this garbage?” Mrs. Shevvington asked.

“No, I just didn’t see it,” said Benj.

“Sloppy,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “There will be no sloppy thinking or acting in my household.”

Benjamin’s smile faltered and vanished. Christina’s face would not even form a smile. She has flattened all our faces to match hers, thought Christina, and we have known her only for a minute.

Mrs. Shevvington waved the van away. It drove off without them.

“We will walk,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “It is a brisk walk, straight up Breakneck Hill. Good for you.”

Michael nodded. “There will be no laziness in your household, huh, Mrs. Shevvington?” he said, with his most charming smile, the smile that won all the summer visitors over and made them come back the next year.

Mrs. Shevvington smiled. Her teeth were as short as her fingernails: tiny yellowed stubs that hardly seemed like teeth at all. Michael’s sweet smile vanished slowly, as if being erased. When Michael’s smile was entirely gone, Mrs. Shevvington closed her own lips. Her face remained solid. “It is called Breakneck Hill,” she said, “because a hundred years ago, when bicycles first came into fashion, a young boy — about your age, Christina — rode his bicycle down that hill. Of course it was too steep for the rudimentary brake his cycle possessed.”

“What happened to him?” Michael asked.

Mrs. Shevvington raised thin wispy eyebrows. “He broke his neck, of course.”

I don’t want to live with her for a year, Christina thought. I can’t bear to sit at breakfast with her, or sort laundry with her, or have her say good night.

Christina wanted to run back down Breakneck Hill and leap back on the boat with Frankie, where Rindge would wag his tail and keep her safe, with his salty, doggy smell.

How could the others walk so calmly up Breakneck Hill?

Christina looked back. Frankie was already leaving. She clung to the safety fence, and it wobbled beneath her grip.

Breakneck Hill was very steep, and no effort had been made to terrace it. It hurt their feet to walk at such a tilt. The wind tore at them, alternately pushing them away from the edge and yanking them toward it. In winter, spray from the waves would glaze the sidewalk with ice.

It must have been a tragic time, a hundred years ago, she thought, what with the boy on the bike, the honeymooners, and the sea captain’s wife.

Mrs. Shevvington handed Anya the poster tube to carry, and Anya went white and shivered, taking it.

Michael pointed down into the mud flats that spread on either side of the channel. Out on the flats walked a man in a wet suit. The wet suit was brown rather than the usual black, and it was hard to distinguish the man from the mud. He seemed body-less. Skinless. Rubbery and slick.

“Idiot,” said Mrs. Shevvington. She sounded rather pleased, as if she liked comparing herself favorably to idiots. She paused to watch the man.

They were directly over Candle Cove, with breathtaking views out to sea and into Maine.

The tide crept slowly in. Licking the barnacles, inching toward the docks and the town, it slithered along like a great flat fish.

The man in the brown wet suit looked at the pancake of water and cocked his head, as if wondering whether to bother about it.

A queer, sickening whisper had begun.

Benj said, “It’s the tide. It’s coming.” He ran to the edge of the cliff and leaned over the flimsy wire. “Get out!” he yelled at the wet suit. “Get out of the cove! Now!”

Christina, whose life was governed by tides, had never seen a tide like this. Although she had sat on the town docks a hundred times as this very tide came in, and from safety had laughed at its power, she had never seen the tide from above — the horror of the ocean coming home to Candle Cove.

The pancake of flat water that had crawled over the mud flats rippled, as if monsters were writhing in it.

The wet suit began running now, in a horrible slow pattern, like a man living out all Christina’s nightmares: his feet caught, the mud sucking on him.

The wet suit reached one of the ladders that stuck down into the cove like trellises for roses.

The water at his feet buckled like a milkshake in a blender.

The wet suit ran up the ladder, and the water ran with him, eating his ankles.

The rest of the ocean hurtled into the narrow granite opening of the Cove. It was loud as thunder, loud as a rock concert when you’re sitting next to the stage.

Tons of green water crashed toward the docks.

As the first wave passed beneath them, the children actually tasted it. The wind lifted salt up toward them, and the air was colder from the cold of the Atlantic, and it brushed their cheeks with ocean air.

Anya cried out, but her cry was drowned by the crash of the tide.

The wet suit made it.

He stood only inches above the waves that had tried to taste him, and delicately shook off his feet to get rid of clinging seaweed.

The wet suit did not seem like a person, but like brown rubber that moved. Christina wanted to say so but she was afraid to yarn in front of Mrs. Shevvington. When she looked around for comfort, Mrs. Shevvington’s one-dimensional face horrified Christina as much as the wet suit.

Christina took Anya’s arm for support.

Anya was smiling insanely. It was a weird, glowing smile, as if something fluorescent moved inside her. “You don’t want to be here this year after all, do you?” whispered Anya. “For all your dreams of freedom, and first love, and sea captains’ houses, you know it’s wrong, don’t you, Christina? The sea is wrong, the year is wrong, the — ”

“Anya,” said Benj, “stop making Chrissie nervous. She’s got enough to worry about, starting junior high.”

T
HE SEA CAPTAIN HAD
built his house solidly — white clapboard with shutters in a green so dark it was almost black, like the sea in bad weather. There was no land around the Inne: The back steps opened onto the sea cliffs, and the front steps opened right to the street. Stapled to the cliff edge, high above the sea, the house loomed against an empty sky as if there were not one thing between the house and Europe.

Mrs. Shevvington slid her key into the gleaming brass handle of a green front door so large three people could walk in at once. The door swung silently open.

Inside, the hall was narrow, with narrow stairs going steeply up, as if the captain had forgotten this was a mansion he was building, not a crowded ship.

Christina looked up the stairwell. It was like looking up a lighthouse. The steps ran in ovals, curving at the landings. High, high above, the glass in the cupola glittered in the September sun. The cupola did not seem to have a floor. Christina was disappointed. “I thought you could sit up there,” she said to Mrs. Shevvington. She had thought of herself with a book, binoculars, and a bag of potato chips, sitting tucked away in the cupola, with the best view in Maine all to herself.

“No. It is unsafe. It can be reached only by a ladder. Never go up there.” Mrs. Shevvington made it sound as dangerous as picnicking on railroad tracks. “If I find I cannot trust you children to stay away from it,” said Mrs. Shevvington, her voice slowing down and getting rougher, “I will have to take Steps.”

In the dining room, black-and-gold willow trees arched over narrow bridges, while black peacocks strutted in stone-littered gardens. What strange wallpaper, thought Christina.

“The sea captain sailed to Japan a lot,” said Mrs. Shevvington in explanation. “House has the original wallpaper. Very historic. Nothing children should ever be near,” she added, glaring, as if they were already attacking the walls with crayons.

“Are there any guests right now?” Christina asked.

“No.”

Michael started to walk into the dining room but Mrs. Shevvington caught his shoulder. What strength was in that grip. Michael froze like a child playing Stone Tag. His mobile face and laughing mouth became solid, his knees stiff; he was a tilted statue.

“These rooms are not for you,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “These rooms are for paying guests.” She let go of the statue and he turned back into Michael.

“We pay,” Christina objected.

“A pittance from the town; it’s hardly an income.”

Michael rubbed his shoulder where her hand had been attached.

“And do not run down the stairs. It will bother the guests, and you might fall.”

It was Christina’s opinion that there was no way to get down a staircase except by running. And she had never fallen in her life.

Mrs. Shevvington showed them the formal living room. It too was Oriental in flavor, with shiny lacquered furniture and pearl inlaid flowers.

Christina was beginning to have sympathy for the bride who had hurled herself off the cliff. Who could be comfortable in rooms full of black-and-gold peacocks?

“For guests,” said Mrs. Shevvington.

She showed them a library. Walls of shelves, but very few books. Big leather chairs and a bare desk. “For guests,” said Mrs. Shevvington.

“But we’re guests, too,” Christina said.

Mrs. Shevvington led them into the kitchen, which was enormous. It must have been remodeled in the 1950s, because it had rows of white metal cabinets with curved edges. The countertops were green marbleized Formica with stainless steel rims. Near the sink tiny steel cabinets with little doors opened to reveal rolls of waxed paper and aluminum foil, waiting to be torn off. A very large table with a white surface and wooden legs as thick as thighs sat in the middle of the room.