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LONG WAY DOWN

Seanan McGuire

In "A Long Way Down", a young woman has a complicated relationship with the creek that runs through her town. River spirits are common in folklore and mythology, and like the one in Seanan McGuire's story, they are not always benign.

Stories all over the world tell of river spirits. In Mexico and in the United States, children are taught to beware of La Llorona, the ghost of a woman who drowned her children and who wanders the night near creeks and rivers searching for their bones, wracked with grief and remorse. In some versions, she's harmless, in others, anyone who hears her cry will die within a week, and in others she will snatch up any children who are playing by the river and drown them, a twist which has presumably kept a lot of kids from falling into creeks.

In locations as diverse as Scotland, Gemany, and Japan, legends of river spirits remind the traveller to be wary and the child to keep away from the riverbank. The Kelpie of Scotland can appear as a human or a horse, and if a greedy traveller tries to ride the kelpie, the kelpie runs into the water and drowns the rider. Lorelei, a beautiful mermaid, guards the Rhine River in Germany and lures sailors to her death with her song. In Japan, the kappa are river tricksters, who are sometimes annoying, sometimes helpful, and sometimes dangerous, dragging children into the river to drown.

Rivers give and they take. Towns and cities are built around rivers and depend on them for sustenance and for recreation. But anyone who has lived near even the merest trickle of a creek knows that water can be treacherous. Life came from water, and according to legends all around the world, sometimes water takes us back.

***

Come to me.

Oh, sweet child, come to me. Come to me, and be at peace.

Come.

Janie stole another glance at the top of her test. The scarlet “F” blazed there like a mark of shame, forever branding her as a failure and a fool. She looked away, cheeks burning as red as the ink. She should have known better. She shouldn’t have allowed her boyfriend to convince her that there was nothing wrong with lowering her guard and letting him use her notes during the test. He was so busy with his extra-curricular activities that he didn’t have time to study. It wasn’t fair for the school to expect that from him! He was paying for an education, and anyone who looked could see how smart he was, how much he understood the material. Why couldn’t he just pay a little bit more and get his degree without tests that measured his ability to regurgitate pointless facts like some sort of trained monkey?

If anyone had ever needed proof of how smart he was, all they had to do was look at the grade at the top of her paper. How could a dumb man have talked her—a certified genius, a scholarship girl—into helping him cheat, even knowing what the consequences might be?

“I can still change your grade, you know,” said the professor, dragging Janie’s eyes back to his face. He was watching her, holding the crib sheet she’d written out for Danny, a disappointed look on his long face. It was the same look he’d had when he found the crib sheet on the floor during the test period, so clearly in her handwriting. She hated being the one who’d put that expression there. She wanted to impress her teachers, to shine, and instead, all she was doing was betraying their trust. “If you’d just tell me who you made this for, I can let it go. Just this once. Please.”

Janie bowed her head, looking down at her desk. “I didn’t write it for anyone. I don’t know how someone got a copy of my study notes. I don’t know.”

“Janie…”

“I’ll do what I can to make up the damage to my grade. I’m sure I can bring it back up to a C by the end of the semester.” The damage to her GPA would be harder to undo. If it was bad enough, if she slipped far enough, she could wind up losing her scholarship.

It was almost more than she could stand to think about. But Danny would find a way to keep that from happening; Danny loved her, and he would figure something out. That was the way things worked between them. She helped him pass his classes, and he helped her pass her life.

“If you’re sure.” Professor Tillman sounded more disappointed than she had ever heard him. Tears burning in her eyes, Janie grabbed her things and bolted for the door. She was moving too fast, she knew that; she was running away. She couldn’t think of anything else to do. In this moment, as in every other moment in her life that had burned behind her breastbone like this, she needed to get to someplace where she could think, where she could see the shape of things more clearly.

She needed to go to the river.

Poverty was not just a state of being: Janie was sure of that, had been sure of it since she’d started Kindergarten in her thrift store shoes, with her chewed-up pencils dug from the bottom of the kitchen junk drawer. All the years of school since then, elementary to university, had done nothing to shake her conviction. Poverty was a place, one that no one moved to voluntarily, but that crept in the cracks and the crevices until it had transformed the world into its own image. Poverty was a religion that claimed its converts from low-rent apartments and neighborhoods on the edge of falling off the map forever. It changed a person. Poverty was a kind of witchcraft. Maybe that was the truest comparison of all. Poverty transformed you, like a witch turning a prince into a frog. There were ways out, but no matter how hard you worked, you would never be anything but “that kid from the poor part of town,” with poverty still clinging like a shroud.

Unless you could find someone so bright and clean that they scrubbed that stain away by their mere presence, turning poverty’s frog into a princess with true love’s kiss and true love’s bank account. Janie had been a frog for most of her life. Never mind that she hadn’t chosen to be born into poverty, that she had never done anything to justify or deserve a life of dumpster diving and government cheese; that was what the world had given her, and that was what she’d done her best to live with. She had always worked hard and gotten good grades, fully aware that if she was going to get out of the pit, she was going to have to be better than anyone around her would ever have to be. She would have to be smarter, faster, and more ethical.

And she was throwing that all away because she’d finally found a prince, and maybe he was the one who could kiss her into princesshood, who could press his lips against her skin until it turned soft and perfumed and perfect, not green with envy for the girls who had everything so easy, not scented with vegetable oil and fried potatoes by her hours at her cafeteria work/study job. Wasn’t a prince like that worth risking everything for?

Wasn’t it?

But for all the downsides of growing up poor and alone and scared of the future, there were a few small consolations. One of them was her river. She had been a local kid with a stellar GPA, and the local college was expensive but exceptional: it had looked good for them, publicity-wise, to be able to talk about the little girl who’d grown up in the shadow of their clock tower, who could now walk the campus as one of their own. She still lived at home, which meant she saved the cost of room and board…and better yet, she could walk the half mile to her favorite place in the world, the one place where she had never been poor, or different, or anything other than totally at peace.

Her mother was still at work when Janie let herself in, creeping through the apartment to her room, where she stripped out of her school clothes and wriggled into her swimsuit. It was two sizes too small and five seasons out of date, but that was almost better than having something new and fashionable. This suit knew her body like she knew her river, hugging every curve and forgiving every imperfection. It wasn’t safe to go down to the river naked—not even for a skinny poor girl from the bad part of town, where most people looked out for their own—but it was safe in her swimsuit, which was skin-tight and yet still somehow no more sexual than a burlap sack.

(She had a different suit for school, of course, for the frat parties that spilled over into the pool and the campus mixers that smelled like fruit juice and chlorine and next-day regrets. It had been a gift from Danny, and it touched her like a stranger’s hands, and she never wore it any longer than she had to.)

She left her clothes scattered on the floor, took her patched old inner tube down from its place on the wall, and turned and walked out of the room. Her flip-flops made no sound on the threadbare carpet, and the front door closed behind her.

Come child, come. It’s been too long and it’s all been shallow time, hasn’t it, shallow time that skitters like a creek-bug on the surface of the water, too much tension to break down into the depths where peace lies dreaming. Come, child. It’s been too long and I’ve been waiting as patient as I can, but you know I’m not made for waiting. Never was, never will be, not even for you. Oh, I can try, but I’ll fail. We both will, if you don’t come.

Come, child. Oh sweet child, come to me, and be at peace. You know you want to be at peace.

Come.

People in the neighborhood were so accustomed to the sight of Janie walking by with her inner tube over her arm and her legs bare to the world that she barely registered with them anymore. A few teenage boys whistled at the sight of her, only to find themselves smacked upside the head by their older friends. “That’s Janie,” said the older teens, the ones who had reached the cusp of adulthood, with all its trials and responsibilities, and chosen to hang back for just a little longer. “She’s local. You don’t look.” And none of those younger boys questioned them, because they’d all heard her name, invoked by their mothers like some sort of talisman. Be smart, be diligent, and most of all, be lucky, and you could grow up to be Janie: you could grow up to see the way out opening in front of you like the very road to Heaven. You didn’t catcall a talisman. You stood quietly by as it passed, and you hoped that one day, you might be that lucky.

Janie walked along the cracked sidewalk, eyes tracing patterns of cracks that had been there since she had been a little girl in pigtails, drawing her hopscotch grids around the broken places. There were smudges of chalk on the gray concrete, marking the spots where the neighborhood kids had kept up the tradition. No matter how poor the neighborhood got, there would always be children, and chalk, and games that required nothing more than the bodies that your parents gave you. Janie found that sad and hopeful at the same time, which was really the definition of her life to that point. Everything had its purpose. Everything had its cost.

Clutching her inner tube to her side in an effort to keep it from catching on the scrubby, untrimmed bushes, Janie walked between two apartment buildings and into the rough stretch of scrub that came after the half-dead, weedy strip of lawn. The apartment management claimed no responsibility for the scrub, which grew outside the reach of the sprinklers and despite the best efforts of every brand of over-the-counter weed killer. Periodically, a new family would move into the buildings that faced the scrub, one that still harbored thoughts of getting out, of moving into a house with three bedrooms and a big green yard, and then there would be a short-lived, highly focused war against the scrub, usually waged by a single man, his face flushed red in the summer heat. But those people always got beaten down like everyone else, and the scrub grew on, unchallenged ruler of its domain.

Sticker bushes snatched at Janie’s ankles as she walked, hearing their dry stalks crunch under her flip-flops like the sound of coming home. She had always been grateful for the scrub. It was a barrier of sorts, a passageway between the world of kitchens that smelt like boiled cabbage and classrooms packed with rich kids who stared down their nose at you (starting in first grade, first grade, and how did they even learn to look down on other people in first grade? Who was standing by to make sure their kids knew that rich was rich and poor was poor, and never the twain shall meet?), and the world of green and brown and the smell of mud and water. That second world was a better world, always had been, always would be.

Janie reached the place where the scrub gave way to the trees, and slipped inside, out of the present, into the never-ending past.

Ah, child, there you are. There you are, with your toes like stones and your teeth like pearls and your hands like crawfish scuttling quick as ripples over the bones of my bed. I have been calling, child. I have been calling, and you have not heard me. What made you stay away so long?

No matter, child; no matter.

You will not stay away again. You are coming home to me at last, and home is where you’ll stay from here until the tide rolls out. Here is where you belong.

Come, child, come home. Come home to me.

Even on the hottest days of summer, the temperature under the trees was bearable, easily ten degrees cooler than the blistering heat that bounced off the cracked asphalt and filled the air with blacktop phantoms, the visible shadows of the summer. It wasn’t that hot by the middle of fall, but it was still a relief to slip through the loosely clustered trunks and down into the dark, green world that surrounded the creek.

The weeds down in the dark were different, species that never made it past the treeline, never cropped up among the prickly bushes and robust weeds of the scrub. These were more delicate plants, creepers that slithered like snakes around tree roots, patches of moss that squished between the toes, and tiny white flowers the color of fish bellies, so pale that they seemed to glow in the artificial twilight. Janie kicked off her flip-flops and waded into the moss, heedless of the possibility of snails, enjoying the way the spongy green groundcover felt under her feet. Sometimes she thought that the whole point of shoes was to make moments like this one better: to make it more obvious that humans were designed to be barefoot, and needed to feel the ground beneath them if they wanted to understand the world.

As always, she kept her eyes downcast as she approached the water, counting the little white flowers and marking the jittery progress of the cabbage moths that sometimes got confused about where the food was and wandered down into the dark beneath the trees, where they would never be seen again by their forgotten cabbage moth families. Lotus eaters, every one of them, courting flowers that couldn’t feed them and laying eggs where they would never be nurtured.

Bit by bit, the green beneath her feet gave way to smooth and earthy brown. The sound of the creek, which had been in her ears since she stepped into the trees, became too loud to ignore, as did the good, clean smells of mud and water. Janie had nearly wept the first time she set foot in a ceramics class. It had smelled, so amazingly, like coming home.

Finally, she lifted her eyes, and there it was: her second mother, the reason she had wanted to go to a college close to home, even knowing that the threat of princes would be great there for a frog like her, who should have chosen a college that could bring her into princesshood without anyone’s lips touching hers.

The creek was five feet across at its widest point—an infinity once, when she was smaller and the world was larger. Now she could span the whole thing with her outstretched hands when she floated in the exact center, placing the fingertips of her right and the fingertips of her left on opposite banks. It was still wide enough to let her place her inner tube in the cool water, and deep enough that her butt didn’t quite brush the bottom when her weight pushed the inflatable circle down.

“Hello, ma’am,” she said to the creek, with the same ritual politeness she’d been using since she was a very little girl. The creek glittered silver in the light that filtered through the branches overhead, seeming to appreciate her manners. She stepped forward just a little more, letting her toes slide into the cool water. A crawfish went skittering off, vanishing under a big flat rock and leaving only a runnel of silt behind.

“I had a bad day, and I thought I’d come to see you,” Janie continued, after tracking the progress of the crawfish. She set her inner tube down on the surface of the water. “You always know what to say.”

The creek, glittering silver and bright and perfect, said nothing.

Oh, child.

You were always going to come to me.

Janie floated in the exact center of the creek, her hands trailing in the water for curious fish to nibble, her toes just barely touching the bottom. It had seemed like such a long way down when she was little, and now it seemed like no distance at all. Her mother’s long-ago warnings that one day she’d be a drowned girl if she didn’t learn to play on dry land held no strength, not here, not now. Not with the scarlet “F” blazoned bright across her mind, not with Danny’s kiss aching on her lips.

“I don’t know what to do,” she murmured. The sun was warm where it touched her face, and the water was cool where it held her. “It all got so…so complicated, somewhere along the line. It shouldn’t be so complicated.” Life had been simpler when she’d spent all her days down at the creek, either with homework in tow, to be completed on the hard-packed mud of the bank, or floating in her inner tube. The future had seemed so big, and so untouchably grand.

But bit by bit, the future had gotten smaller, just like the creek had. Unthinkingly, Janie reached out to touch the opposing banks, expecting her fingertips to find resistance. They found only empty air. Janie frowned, fumbling a little, and still found nothing.

Janie opened her eyes.

She was still floating at the dead center of the creek, still with her head turned upstream and her feet turned downstream and her shoulders to either bank. But the banks themselves had moved, somehow: the creek’s span was at least seven feet, putting even the nearest bit of land at least six inches outside of her reach. Janie sat up in her inner tube, briefly, bemusedly convinced that she was dreaming. Her mind had taken her back to an earlier, easier time, and she would find herself looking at her own childhood self, sitting on the bank, filling out a math worksheet.

But the bank was empty, save for her abandoned flip-flops, and she was still in an adult’s body, and the water around her seemed suddenly so very cold. It had never been that cold before.

Janie pushed her feet down, seeking the bottom. She would wade to shore if she had to. Creeks didn’t change their dimensions, not like this. Maybe there had been an earthquake? Maybe she had fallen asleep and it had jolted her awake, and this was a consequence, land erosion and decay. Never mind that the water was as clear as crystal, with none of the mud or cloudiness that would have accompanied that sort of shift.

Never mind that her feet didn’t find the bottom, but kicked, seemingly suspended in space, above the depth that had no end.

“Ma’am?” whispered Janie.

Something wrapped around her left wrist.

Dully, with a sort of inevitability, she turned and looked at the thing that was holding her. It was something like an octopus’s tentacle, but smooth, like glass, like crystal…like water. She could see tiny bubbles suspended inside it, and an infant crawdad, almost as clear as the tentacle around it, its little legs paddling as it looked for a rock to hide under.

hello child hello child hello child hello, chortled the water as it ran across the rocks upstream, and everything made sense, and nothing made sense, and it didn’t really matter, because Janie was never going to be a princess. She was always going to be a frog.

Maybe it was better to be a frog with someone to love you than a princess with nothing but a crown. Maybe this had been the only way out that had ever been really open to her. And maybe it was past the time for thinking those thoughts, because the inevitable was upon her, and Janie was going home.

“Hello, ma’am,” said Janie, recognition and longing and yes, quiet, beaten joy in her tone.

She didn’t scream when the water reached up and closed over her face, pulling her down, pulling her a long way down. It was a mother’s embrace, after all, for all that it was cold and formless and filled with little silver glimmers of light. It was love, of a kind…

And more, she would have needed air to scream.

Hello, child.

Hello, ma’am.

Welcome home.

They found her inner tube washed up against a bank; they didn’t find a body. Some people in the neighborhood said they weren’t surprised, that Janie had always been a drowning waiting to happen, but most of them didn’t say anything at all. They just looked toward the creek, remembering voices bubbling over the rocks when they were children, remembering how they had always felt safe there…until the day they didn’t. Until the day they’d grown up and left such things behind. Janie, for all that she’d been an old soul in a young body since she was born…Janie had never grown up. Not like that.

There was no body at the funeral. Danny didn’t attend. None of her friends from college did. What would have been the point?

Time moves differently, for water. It’s slow when the freeze comes and fast during the melt; it’s never still, and hard to keep track of. It was nearly six months before a hand broke the surface, clear as glass and filled with tiny eddies.

The creek watched approvingly as Janie pulled herself together. The girl used none of her original body; the bones were buried deep, the flesh long gone to feed the fish and crawdads a good meal. But she drew on the water and the weeds, and there was a big green bullfrog where her heart should have been, swimming lazy circles and occasionally rising to the surface of Janie’s rippling breast to steal another breath.

yes child go child I will be waiting, bubbled the water over the rocks, approving mother to the end.

Janie stood on tributary legs and waded toward the surface. It would be a long walk to the school, but she thought she could hold herself together that long, before her surface tension broke and she flowed downhill, back into her mother’s arms. There was a boy there who had broken her faith in the world, and she was grateful; he had been the one to drive her home. He had tried so hard to kiss her until she became a princess, even if he had never really loved her.

It was time for her to kiss him back, and see if she could turn a prince into a frog.

The creek laughed, and Janie walked on.