2000
I’m holding the phone to my ear when Sonia enters the kitchen. I don’t remember getting from James’s office door to the phone, but I’m holding a piece of typing paper in my hand, my fist crunching the message on it. Sonia is calling my name, hollering it now from the doorway, but my attention is on the sound of water coming through the phone. It’s so strong a sound that I take the receiver away from my ear to see if liquid is about to rush out.
“Hello?” I push the earpiece back to my cheek. There’s gurgling, thrashing, and in the fuzz of all the noise, I hear a voice.
“Henrie!” I shout into the phone. “B.B.!”
“Carrie.” The voice is female. It is breathless and echoey, fighting to be heard.
“Who is this?”
“… top … the house,” she says, the effort clearly exhausting.
“I don’t understand,” I say, my voice turning to tears.
“You need to push,” the woman on the other end of the phone says, and I remember Henrie’s birth. Drug-free. A water birth. My body in a huge tub, pushing and pushing and pushing. Twenty-six hours of labor and finally she was born underwater. Her eyes open and staring up at me—we recognized each other immediately. I scooped her up and pulled her into my arms, and she took her first breath of air. A long, deep inhale that set her to crying until I held her to my breast. I remember too that night a decade ago when James pulled us all from the quarry. The monster in Henrie fully violent, almost deadly enough to kill her and all of us. How we gathered around her, put our hands on her body, brought her back to breath.
“We have to go. All … us,” the woman says, then static takes over, almost blurring out what she says next, “Beatrice…” Something in me recognizes the panic, the determination of another mother. Olivia Rose? “Cameras…” I do not have time to ponder if this is possible. The line goes dead.
“Wait!” I scream into the phone. No dial tone. No nothing. I hurl it at the wall, and it bounces back, almost hitting me in the face.
“Carrie!” Sonia shouts as she moves toward me. Wilderness is behind her, taking up the entirety of the doorframe. The kitchen table sits between us. The plaster on the ceiling has almost entirely come down, revealing more of the ceiling beams and the underside of the floorboards above. I see movement in the office overhead. Typewriter keys pounding. James still trying to tell me what I need to do next.
“Do you hear that?” I ask, but I don’t listen for an answer. Instead, I flatten the paper in my hand. In all caps, it says, FREE THE GHOSTS.
“Carrie?” Wilderness walks around the table and touches my shoulder.
“You’ve cut yourself,” Sonia says.
I look where she is looking and see that my palms are bleeding. Four neat cuts where I’ve dug my fingernails in.
“I don’t know,” I manage, but I’m tired. I have no words. I crumple the paper before she can read the command on it. “They’re in trouble. I think they’re in trouble.”
“The girls?” Sonia asks, but we are interrupted by a sizzle, a pop, like bacon in a frying pan.
A flash of light follows and then Wilderness says, “Don’t touch anything!”
A thin layer of water is forming around my feet. Tiny streams of it at first that quickly turn into rivers.
“This way,” Wilderness says. He is pulling me around the kitchen table to the hallway, where the water deepens up to our ankles.
“I have to go!” I shout, all of it catching up with me. “I have to get to the quarry pond.” I scoot down the hall before Sonia can stop me.
The front door swings open just as I reach it, and Joshua steps inside with Wally close behind him, water sloshing in with them. Their clothes are soaked, hair stuck flat to their faces. I catch a glimpse of the world behind them, and it’s not one I recognize. The water is up to the porch. The sidewalk gone. The street gone. The tree trunks shorter than I remember.
“Where’s Henrie, Joshua? Where is she?” I yell into his face like it’s his fault she’s out there somewhere instead of with me.
“Isn’t she here?” he asks.
“B.B. took her somewhere,” I say, and instantly hear the accusation in it, and I realize that I do think this is B.B.’s fault. I’m placing blame on her and have maybe done so for years. “They’re in trouble!” I add, changing my pronoun to include both girls. I will not blame her. I will not. I will be her mother too. I try to slip past Joshua, but this time I’m not fast enough. He grabs my arm, and Sonia catches hold of my wrist.
A wave of water rushes the front door, pushing up to our knees.
“You can’t go out there without a plan,” Joshua says, pulling me up the stairs behind Wilderness and Wally. Sonia follows, placing herself on the stairs between me and the front door.
“The island is sinking,” Sonia says. “I thought we had a little more time. I really did.”
“You knew this would happen?” I ask, shifting my fear and anger to Sonia.
“No, I mean, maybe. I mean, I told you! Showed you that day after the funeral.”
“Really? That’s you trying to tell me that we were all going to drown? Jesus, Sonia.”
“Stop. None of it matters now. If B.B. and Henrie are together, they’ll figure out what to do. We need to get to the third floor. As high as we can,” Wilderness says.
I remember the voice on the other end of the phone. She was telling me to get to the attic. I’ll be able to see the quarry from the turret windows. The cliffs above the Killing Pond. The girls.
Joshua takes the steps two at a time. The house is rocking enough to throw him off-balance. He holds on to the railing to steady himself and we follow suit.
The attic is empty and the only windows, the best exit if I need to get out and swim to the cliffs, are the turret windows. I rush to the darkroom door, only to see it’s padlocked.
A tool belt is on Henrie’s bedroom floor. She’s left it in a pile of dirty clothes. I rush to it, pull out a hammer and a screwdriver. Wilderness sees what I mean to do and takes the screwdriver from me, inserts the flat end under the clumsy metal that holds the padlock, and pries the whole apparatus off like it is nothing.
The small darkroom smells so strongly of chemicals that I gag, cough. Photos hang from clothes wire, stacks of them sit on shelves. I rip the plastic from the windows. The house is tilting toward the water. The great weight of it easing over the edge of the quarry. I look left toward the Killing Pond—although it is all water now. I see the cliffs, but the girls aren’t there. Not yet.
“What the fuck?”
I look back to Wilderness. He’s staring at Henrie’s photographs. They appear to be of the house. On closer inspection, I see that they are of the walls, dark and bending light in weird ways. Shadowy figures pushing at the middles.
“The ghosts,” I say. “They’re real.” I pluck photos off the drying rack. Faces molding themselves out of the wall. Hands tangled in plaster.
The house rocks under us, leans farther over the edge. We have to steady ourselves to stay upright, as if we are on a ship being tossed by waves.
“What are these?” Sonia’s hands are on a small box.
“Henrie’s cameras. She’s been photographing the—”
“Ghosts,” Sonia says. There are dozens and dozens of photos.
“Where are the others?” I ask. “I never see the same one twice.” I don’t know why it’s important, but it feels important. I look around the little darkroom. Joshua leaves, presumably to look around the attic.
“Open the fucking windows. I need air,” Wilderness says as he moves to do so.
“Don’t!” Sonia shouts. “Everything stays shut.”
“But we’ll need to get on the roof,” he says.
“Everyone stays right fucking here,” Sonia says.
I’m afraid he will insist, but he doesn’t. He listens to Sonia.
I nod my support, then look back to the room. I need to find the cameras.
The window seat. I lift up the center board and then the one to its left and the one to its right, and there they all are. Dozens of them.
FREE THE GHOSTS, I think.
Cookie tins, cereal boxes, a cedar jewelry box. I go for a cookie tin, duct tape wrapped around the edges of the lid, meant to keep the light out, I’m sure. It’s incredibly heavy, like it houses a boulder. I rip off the tape, and the others step up beside me as I open the lid.
At first it looks empty.
“What’s that?” Joshua asks.
Not until he asks do I see it. The bottom of the tin is covered in a fuzz of silver, like dandelion seeds, resting there. It’s beautiful, but then the house tilts, and cameras clatter down from the pile and the dust blows up.
“Shut the tin! They’ll spill!” Sonia yells, rushing toward me. I barely keep my hands from getting slammed shut in the lid. “We’re going over!”
The house groans. Shrieks.
“Get into the attic! Now!” Sonia shouts, and we do as we’re told, slamming the darkroom door shut. We push our backs to the attic wall, and I tilt my head up to look at the curved wood. The center support beam is not so high above our heads. I can hear the windows of the turret groan as the whole of it, this ship of a house, goes over, headfirst, into the quarry.