2000
My sister is gone. The whole of her disappeared into the foul mouth of that ugly, translucent troll. The rage is in me now, and I can still feel how good it was to rip into the monster—its belly soft as jelly when I pushed my talons inside. All those gnashing teeth and his swollen center was just there soft and exposed, a big pouch of a thing ready to be emptied. This whole island a sadistic ecosystem held up by shame and ugliness. Sorrow and grief. Let it sink if that’s all it ever was, but it can’t have B.B.
The water has risen higher and the cave, our cave, is almost under. Then there is a beam of light. It comes to me from outside the cave, somewhere under the water. It is bright and full and made up of a hundred tiny beings that float into the cave, twining around me like a warm blanket, telling me that I am strong, telling me not to quit. I recognize them, my ghosts, hundreds of voices humming on the surface of my body.
I stand up and the ghosts unwrap themselves from my body and shoot down into the water, establishing a trail that I can follow. A trail that will lead me straight down into the dark toward the monster. I follow, dive in among them. I hold my human shape and the glittery souls all around me fill my lungs with air, and I think, This is where it stops. Below me the devil sinks, a black and bloodied ink of a shape. All these years he’s feasted, and we fed him. Fed and fed and fed him. He hid down there, soaking in bodies, when we could have dragged him out into the light and said, No. Now we, my ghosts and I, will take the light to him.
I dive down, changing as I go, and think of B.B. weakening inside that filthy beast. As I get closer to the dark froth of him, I see him struggling. His mouth gaping open and closed. His hands clawing at his own throat. Something is poking out the front of him. He’s been sliced open from the inside, and the culprit is sticking out of him. He swats at it. I get closer and see that it is my sister’s arm. She’s alive. I’m filled with hope.
I move quickly. The ghost women get to her first. The light of them, rage, and power warm the water, and I watch as they wrap around B.B.’s arm, soaking into her until they are one with her body. They shoot inside the troll through B.B., electrifying her, making her into a lightning bolt of a girl.
His mouth is now wide open, light pouring out of him, and I know that it is my chance to shoot past his teeth and find B.B.
I dive straight into his mouth; his teeth graze my tail. It’s just a scratch but the poison of him is real and the cut burns, flames up my body. I ignore the feeling and move faster toward B.B. I can see her, bright as a firefly, full of ghosts yet still stuck in his throat. I graze the surface of his paling tongue, its cracks and bumps as hot as asphalt in the summer sun, and I push forward into the now-bright tunnel of his throat. I don’t hesitate or stop to plan. I just go. The dank tunnel of his throat tries to tighten around B.B., around me, my body fitting to him like he is our quarry-pond cave or a glacial groove. I reach forward, grab my sister. She is too weak and jammed in too tightly to reach back, but the light of the ghosts stays in her, wrapping around my wrist to link us tightly to each other. We are one thing now and I pull. The beast has drunk from her, but her spirit is still there. She’s wedged herself tightly inside his throat on purpose, I think, holding on to half of her monster form so that she can be big enough to choke him to death.
Beatrice, keep fighting. Push. She hears me and tenses her shoulders, pushing her upper arms against his throat. The ghosts whisper and groan, their effort clear.
I pull hard and harder still. I will not leave her. Finally, there is a feeling of a pop and space opens up around her, water rushing past, and she is moving more freely. Blood is in the water all around us. I don’t have time to find how much is the monster’s and how much is B.B.’s, but I taste it, feel its thickness on my eyelashes. I pull B.B. up through the endless dankness of his throat, onto his gritty tongue, past his great teeth, and into the pond water again.
I drag my sister to the surface, holding her as gently as I can. I cannot tell yet if she is still alive. Her arm is missing at the elbow. The wounds look even worse as her monster bits fade. I let mine go as well as we reach air.
The world we surface into is not the one we left. Even the island’s sinking was less grim than what I see now. I adjust my sister in my arms, hold her like a baby, and look at the quarry cliffs, which are almost even with the water. The island is sinking more quickly than imaginable, and the quarry, or what once was the quarry, is full of bits and pieces of human bodies, decomposing rapidly now that they are exposed to the light and free of the monster’s hungry magic. The air smells of meat left out on a counter too long and I gag, losing the surface for a second and slipping under. Water rushes past my tongue, and the taste matches the smell. Death and sorrow and so many decades of silence. I fight for the surface. My sister limp in my arms.
I swim to the cliff and find the rock with my feet, climb up onto the cliffside. The sun is on my back as I turn to pull B.B. up with me. I work, sweating, crying, until we are at the top. The last of the dry rock of the island underneath us. I look out over the horizon and think I can see the museum’s old bell tower still poking up through the water, the tallest island trees greening the surface.
“Henrie Henrie Henrietta,” my sister whispers, and my attention is on her. “We did it.”
I hug her and she moans.
“It was you and me, baby sister. We got him.”
“We had some help, Beatrice.” But there is no need to explain. She felt them too. “But the island is almost gone, you’re hurt, and we’re stranded on this cliff, B.B. I don’t know what to do. You look bad.” I start crying again, harder than before.
“Do you hear that?”
I shake my head no before I realize that I do.
“Girls!” I hear my name too. My sister’s. Voices that I recognize that echo in my rib cage, live in my heart.
“Henrie.” The sound interrupts my thoughts. “Look.” B.B. points.
I follow her lead and see the hulking shape that must have been there all along. A shape is high in the water. A vessel almost as big as the monster.
It’s our house. Upside down it floats, a big hull of a thing bobbing toward us. The foundation sticks up in the air, rebar and chunks of earth still attached. The mossy concrete stretches toward the sky. The first-floor windows float above the surface of the lake, and inside, I see people standing on the ceiling, peering out, searching for us.
“Impossible,” I say to myself.
“Possible,” B.B. whispers.
I am crying when I stand and wave my arms in the air, my sister resting at my feet. I watch as the ship of our house finds me, moves magically in our direction. It takes another moment to be sure it is my mother and Ms. Sonia I see waving their arms, crying.
Joshua is waving too, next to my mother, and a new rush of feeling floods through me. Gratitude. Love. Others stand with him. Wilderness is there with Wally at his side, and the tears come back as I imagine what B.B. will have to say to him. How we will have to explain that the dream of the babies is gone. I feel weak knowing this is coming. The sorrow moves through me so thick and fierce that for a moment it is all I feel.
The hand of the beast shoots out of the water. It is a big calloused thing with torn pads from fighting. Its claws are still thick and sharp. His body follows, rising until he is treading water between me and my ship. He is badly hurt, his throat ripped wide open. The water around him fills with blood, a red slick on the surface. He is gasping, spurting water from his throat, but rage drives him, and he swings his great ghoulish arm to smack my body, sending me sailing into the air. I see him below me, the top of his nasty troll head and the base of Quarry Hollow, its insides turned to the sky to keep my people safe—their mouths turned up toward me, screaming my name. I hit the surface of the water hard and the world goes quiet. I sink down, down, down, catching a glimpse of the house as I go; the same turret I’d made into a camera watches me now. I imagine it opens its great eye wider before snapping shut around my image.
Sadness sinks me deeper as I imagine that this is the end. We almost did it. The water is dark, the sun blocked by the body of the devil. He swims toward me, his neck split open, and his belly punctured with open wounds, yet he is still here, hungry for the part of me that has given up. I want to let him have it. I want the peace of an ending. Any ending. It doesn’t need to be happy. It doesn’t have to be right. Just leave my sister. My family.
I can feel his breath on my head. The great sharp teeth orbit my body. He will drain me, and I shut my eyes, waiting for the end.
The water around me begins to warm. I feel it long before I open my eyes, and I know that he should have crunched down by now. Light glows behind my closed eyelids, and when I open them, the world is bright.
Electric, like lightning shattering through a rainstorm, the brightness of it has pushed him back even before it pierces through him, breaking him into pieces. He is squinting, squirming, his face ripples with pain. A hundred little underwater points that glow and flit.
I am in my monster form in an instant. I move in concert with the ghosts, aiming at his center. The strength of our collective potential is greater than anything he ever planned for. We howl and dive. Bright as lightning. All of us propelled in one direction. A force.
This time, he doesn’t stand a chance.