The Strength Only Shadows Possess
MATCHES. THE WORD popped in her mind. Followed by another: flask.
“What?” she whispered. The faint echoes of Bode’s shouts had only just faded away. When she first heard him thrash, she’d come this close to bolting forward but stopped herself at the last possible second. Go into the drink with Bode, they were both cooked. She was on her knees, inching forward, trying to remember what she’d seen before the light went out, feeling through icy water for the edge of the hole.
Then she thought, Canvas.
Light. Of course! Her stiff fingers fumbled the button securing her right hip pocket and gave the fabric a vicious yank. There was a tick as the button popped and struck stone. She slid in a hand. Her fingers curled around the match safe. She carefully drew out first it and then the flask. She didn’t even bother to try the button on the right. Ripping that pocket apart, she found the burlap-wrapped scalpel.
Sitting cross-legged, she unwound the burlap and clamped it in her teeth. Uncapping the flask, she stuffed the fabric into the open bottle, jamming it in as far as it would go, leaving enough of a tail for a wick. With a quick flick of her wrist, she upended the flask until the burlap got wet. The liquid inside had no smell, which worried her. Shouldn’t alcohol smell? Remember, might be different for you, like Meg Murry and IT. Food didn’t taste like anything for Meg either, but it was still food. She sure hoped that explained it.
Teasing a match from the safe, she snapped the hinge closed, then felt along the matchstick until she nested the head into the ridged striker. She gave it a sharp swipe. The match head flared with a spit and sputter. Quickly, she held it to her booze-soaked wick. A second later, the burlap caught in a sooty shower of tiny sparks.
“Bode?” Returning the match safe and scalpel to her pocket, she held her homemade torch over her head with one hand as she shuffled forward on her knees, feeling along the rock floor with the other. How much time gone, how much? Thirty seconds, she thought, maybe almost a minute. In the candlelight, the rippling water was a dull bronze. The remaining iron rungs were black slashes. Just got to find the opening. If there’d been ladders bolted to the rock, might there be a rung or something still below? Or a protruding piece of iron he could grab onto?
“Come on, Bode,” she said, “here’s the light. Look up. Think. Bubbles rise.” Where is he? Why hasn’t he come up yet? Flicking her gaze to the left, she looked for the ladder’s boreholes, then followed those to where she thought the opening must be. With a start, she saw the water there was a little darker and then realized that what she was looking at were streamers of diluted blood.
“No.” She thought about it for exactly a half second, then clawed her way to a stand. Hugging the wall, she balanced her makeshift torch on a rung high enough where she thought a splash wouldn’t douse it. She dropped to the rock again, the temperature change stealing her breath. Just one more piece of bad news; she knew that from those CPR lessons Jasper had made her take before he’d let her kayak on Superior. A lot of people didn’t drown in cold water; they suffocated because when cold water hit their faces, they gasped. Reflex. Their windpipes clamped down at the first wash of icy water, and then it was over unless they got to the surface.
Leaning forward, she thrust her right arm through the hole, stretching as far as she dared, afraid of losing her balance and sliding in headfirst. All she felt was cold water and stone and … Something brushed her hand. The contact jerked a gasp from her throat, and she almost flinched away before she registered: fingers.
“Bode!” Flopping onto her stomach, she dug the points of her boots into the rock and plunged both arms into the water. Her left fingers scrabbled over the limp back of his left hand and then a wrist, the bunched folds of his coat sleeve, the hump of his left shoulder. Coat’s hung up on something. Finger-walking around his shoulder, she felt a stout thumb of metal protruding from the wall, and understood at once how he must be oriented: listing to his right, legs falling away from her and to his left, which put his head and chest under the lip on her side of the hole.
You have to go for it. Sucking in a deep breath, she pushed through the surface. She felt her throat convulse from the shock of frigid water on her face. Her eyes burned. What she could see was meager: a pale wash that wasn’t light so much as less dark, and then a much deeper shadow that was Bode. When she reached her right hand, her fingers knotted in his coat. While he was still buoyant—and that means air in his lungs; that’s what my instructor said—he was deadweight dangling from a hook. So push his legs away from her, and his upper torso ought to move in the opposite direction, toward her and the opening. Then, if I can grab his head, get his nose and mouth to the surface …
Walking her right hand down his chest, she pushed as hard as she could, wretchedly aware of how much strength Elizabeth’s frail body didn’t possess. Nothing happened for a long second. Then, all at once, she felt the slow, vertiginous swirl of his body as he twisted; saw the fingers of his right hand, limp as a dead starfish, swim into view. Fingers scrambling for purchase, she clutched a fistful of coat at the base of his throat and hauled him toward her. Through the water, there came a very dull clump as his head met rock, but she couldn’t do anything about that. The water darkened even more, stained with a wash of fresh blood. Screaming with strain, her shoulders balled and clenched as she tugged. Now or never, come on, come on! Just a little more, a little more. … But she couldn’t do it. Her lungs were on fire, and he was just too heavy and damn it! Rearing back, she coughed out the last of that breath, sucked in another, and shouted, “MEME! Help me! This is your space! Do you want Bode to die? Help …”
“Help yourself.” The voice came from only a few feet away, and she looked up to where he stood at the very limits of her pathetic little torch’s light. “You know what to do.” Somehow Kramer’s serpent’s whisper was so appropriate here. “Use the strength only shadows possess. You did before, when that shadow-boy bludgeoned Weber. I know it must have been he. I saw him and so did Meme.”
“That was different. I nearly died. I didn’t do anything.” Her arms were shuddering. Still clutching Bode’s coat in both hands—his dark hair fanning over the surface, his face just inches from open air—she looked at Meme, who stood a little back and to Kramer’s left. “You were there, Meme. You know I had no control over that.”
The other girl, with her face, didn’t answer. She might as well have been talking to a department store dummy.
“Of course you do. Drop your barriers. Let them come. That was the point of putting you down here to begin with. This space responds to shadows.” Kramer readjusted his panops. “Stop wasting time; Bode will be beyond saving in seconds.”
“I don’t know how!” Although she had an inkling of what needed doing. But what if she wasn’t allowed to come back? Eric killed Weber when he didn’t have to. He’s half shadow. Or more than half. Maybe what’s left isn’t close to the boy I knew. What if she ended up like Elizabeth, shut away in some mental prison because Eric, whatever he was now, decided he liked being in control?
In the valley, Bode died to give you time. He’s helped you here when he didn’t have to. She turned her focus inward. Do this for him, and do it now.
IN LESS THAN the blink of an eye, she was in two places at once: outside, straining to hang on to Bode’s body, and inside, in a suggestion of a kitchen at the blank wall from which she’d erased an iron door. Nothing but an expectant silence on the other side. Who knew what waited in the dark? But she had to go through with this.
Make me a door. All around, at once, the space went from a half-gloaming to a blaze of yellow sun; from an amorphous haze to bright cabinets, a potbellied stove, pans on a rack. In the distance, she could hear the thump and boom of water on sandstone. There was a proper door now, too, not of iron but knotty pine.
Please, Elizabeth. Stretching, she reached above the jamb. Her fingers closed around the wire pick that only Sal and Jasper and she knew was there. Don’t fight him; let Eric through. Let him help me. Let us both stay long enough to find a way to end this.
Jimmying the pick into the keyhole, she heard the thumb lock snap, and then she turned the knob and stepped back as the door swung open.
“Eric?” she said.