The storm arrived. Made landfall. It was physical—there were clouds and wind and a heavy hot rain—but it was also far beyond that.
Every part of Tempest Bay became more itself. Heightened. Strange. Intense. Feelings were literally visible in the air. Trails of passion and hopes and jealousy and infidelity and sorrow and anger and memory and lust and insanity all swirling like dust storms, like motes in the eye of a decomposing god.
This is the world as it will be.
The man arrived at Jessica’s house with the first drops of rain. She was out on her front porch, framed by her miniature fence and neat hedgerows, wrapped in a handwoven blanket.
I need help, he said for the first time since he was seven years old and he realised it was true. His chest hacked. He felt dreadful.
Is that so, Jessica said, rocking in her chair.
No sign of Angela anywhere.
I know you’re cruel but I don’t think you’re evil, the man said. Lucia’s gone. I need her back.
What a funny way of describing a nice old lady like myself, Jessica said. Though I do like that young woman. Sit with me and let’s sort it all out.
He could barely sit still but he knew this was the only way of getting anywhere. On her terms.
Thunder. Shivers. Hissing rain. His mind not his own, not by a long journey.
One of the really big ones, Jessica said with a little disappointment in her voice. But it’s a gee-up and no mistake. it’ll do. It’ll do.
Who are you, really? he said. Underneath it all.
My name was Jessica Plumber, once, she said. Old Glenda’s great-niece. That might not mean anything to you but it means a lot here. The thing I’ve learned, if I’ve learned anything, is that when you get old enough it’s more about what’s missing than what’s there. Negative space, the artists call it. But I’m not an artist. Not like my sister was. I just get things done.
He turned to ask, to try and strike some type of bargain where she’d stop distracting him and just help with Lucia, but he realised in a cobra-quick moment that that’s exactly what she had been doing, distracting him, and now she moved faster than a raindrop, on him with her bony arms outstretched, stopping his neck even though he was a grown man but he was sick and more frail than he’d realised, and she was hideously strong, stuffing pink cake into his mouth and pinching his nose with focused cruelty in a way that made him swallow, and he felt the cake sliding down his throat with dry horror, tasted the thick fishy flavour of the creature from the beach and was absolutely disgusting, but now it was in his stomach and absorbing into his blood and body faster than he’d have thought possible—
She let him go. Took out an old medical instrument, something sharp and hooked that he realised from a nightmare somewhere—
Let’s get some of those nasty burdens out of your head, dear, Jessica said.
Right there on the porch of her little house she began doing something to his head, cutting into it even though he couldn’t feel a thing, could only know the horror of this blade in his temple, letting the sky in—
The world shimmered. The storm laughed. Jessica, right in his face, urgent hissing:
You’ve got something stuck in your maze. Well I’ve got something stuck in mine.