Benjamin Percy
THE rental home was a cedar-shingled Cape Cod, one of many on the forested island. In the driveway sat a Mercedes, polished to an opal glow. Several suitcases waited on the porch. In an hour, the ferry would take them back to the mainland.
A girl walked down the steps—eight years old, wearing a yellow dress with a matching ribbon in her hair. She carried a stuffed tiger, a pillow, and a small backpack. She opened the rear door of the car and hefted everything inside. Then a voice sounded behind her, and she startled.
“You can’t go already,” it said.
The fog was thick this morning, and it took her a moment to see through the gray filter of it and find the stranger standing among the trees that edged the property. The two of them were about the same age, both with brown hair, but the other girl wore sneakers and jeans and an overlarge sweatshirt. “Not until we’ve played,” she said.
“My dad says we have to get ready to go.”
“There’s plenty of time,” the girl said and reached into her pocket, withdrawing a bandana that would serve as her blindfold. “Come on.”
* * *
The gulls were screaming. They swirled overhead, winging the air, their gray and white bodies dodging past each other, and the sand rippled with their shadows. Their hunger had been interrupted.
The deputies would only allow Ellie to get so close. Crime tape rippled in the wind, staking off an area roughly thirty square feet. But she could see, from her vantage at the top of the dune, the remains.
A jogger had spotted them near the damp line of sand that marked high tide. An arm, laced with seaweed, the skin grayed and blackened with rot. Crabs and gulls nibbled at it.
This wasn’t the first time this had happened. That’s why The Globe agreed to send her here—to the coast of Maine.
A deputy named Wallace with a thick black brush of a mustache said, “Sometimes it’s just a foot. Sometimes a hand. One time a head. For as long as I been working here, the ocean likes to cough up its dead. Usually happens this time of year, too. Really gets you in the holiday spirit.”
This was December, and Ellie wore a fleece and jeans, her hair in a ponytail knocked around by the chill wind. She gripped a notebook. The pages fluttered as she scratched down fast ciphers. She once lost an entire interview to a digital error, so she preferred the permanent memory of paper and ink.
“Do you mind if I take a closer look?” she said. “I came all the way from Boston.”
“What do you think you’re going to see there you’re not going to see here?”
She shrugged her answer. “Devil’s in the details, we like to say.”
Wallace hesitated a moment, before lifting the tape and waving her through, saying they had already searched and bagged and photographed the area, so what the hell.
She wore flats and the sand seeped into them when she descended the dune, making every step feel like a chill uncertainty. “To be honest,” Wallace said, “kind of surprised to see you up here.”
“I specialize in this kind of thing,” she said, and he said, “Crime beat?”
“I’m an investigative reporter. Part of the spotlight team at The Globe.” She had a reputation for reviving cold cases, some of which led to prosecutions. Everything from the Long Island serial killer to the highway murders of the Tri-state to the missing boys of the Catskills. She helped the dead finish the stories they couldn’t tell themselves.
Wallace missed a step and nearly tumbled down the rest of the dune before righting his balance. “Well, then I guess you’re in the right place.”
A woman in a windbreaker that read Forensics across the back was in the process of readying a bag to place the arm inside. “Hold up,” Wallace told her. “Press. Take a smoke break or something.” And then he said to Ellie, “But no pictures, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
Waves boomed. Sand fleas bit at her ankles. The air was cold but her nose was hot with the smell of rot. A gull swooped near, screeching a warning, but she barely noticed.
A bone stuck whitely out of the purple, fish-bitten flesh. The fingers curled into a claw. Some of the nails were broken, others gone.
“What is that?” she said, and Wallace said, “What is what?”
“In the hand,” she said, aiming at it with her pen. “In the palm.”
Wallace waved over forensics. The woman wore shoe-shield booties that whispered in the sand. “Says she sees something.”
The woman—her hair styled short and spiked—crouched beside Ellie and snapped on a fresh set of latex gloves. She nudged the dead hand, cranked two of the fingers stiffly back. The skin tore, the grip unlocked. “She’s right.”
From the hand she withdrew a carved totem. A wooden gull with oversized eyes and a beak that took the shape of a snarl.
* * *
Ellie lived in a Cambridge townhome that was never clean. There were always toys or clothes or books underfoot, post-it note reminders stuck to the walls, crayons rolling off counters, dirty dishes waiting in the sink. Now, to add to the mess, there was a half-decorated Christmas tree and a tangled ball of lights.
There was never a time she and her husband didn’t have something hurriedly to do. She was a journalist, he was a financial consultant. They were parents to a busy seven-year-old.
In the kitchen, her husband chopped vegetables and tossed them into the wok with a sizzle. NPR played from his phone and the noise of the market roundup knotted up with Christmas carols projected from the iPad her daughter was watching in the living room.
Ellie sat at the kitchen table now with her laptop open. She was studying tide charts, mapping currents. She cross-checked this tab with another open to Google Maps. She dragged it northeast and homed in on a cluster of islands off the Maine coast, then zoomed in until a single island dominated the screen.
At The Globe, she sat in a hive of cubicles and constant noise, so despite the news blaring and the carols fa-la-la-la-la-ing and the silverware rattling in a drawer, she remained lost in her own zone of concentration.
“Ellie?” Ron said, and she realized only then that her husband was hovering beside her.
“I’m sorry, what?” she said.
“I was just asking you what’s so interesting about Gull Island.”
“Oh, nothing really—it’s just a story I’m working on.”
He held a stack of plates in his hands. “Mind shutting it down? So I can set the table?”
Five minutes later, they scooted in their chairs and hovered their faces over their plates. The chardonnay was cold and crisp and the chicken stir-fry was hot enough to steam on their forks. Their daughter chatted happily between bites. Her name was Lyra and she had a mess of black hair and a gap-toothed smile that couldn’t contain her constant stream of questions. She was always asking things like, “What’s the difference between nice and good?” and, “What’s the difference between mad and angry?” and, “What’s the difference between fun and satisfying?”
On the one hand, it was endearing and made Ellie proud that she was raising her own little reporter. But at the end of the day, her brain felt gray and frost-bitten and sometimes she had to start a timer and say, “For fifteen minutes, there will be no questions.”
Ellie had stowed away her laptop, but her notepad was never far from her hand. She had it open beside her now and jotted down a note: “Feed the hag.”
She startled—and the tail of the g scritched off jaggedly—when her husband again called her name.
“What?”
“Have you heard anything I said?”
She crossed out what she had written. “I’m sorry. I just—I’m going to take a few days to chase a story. Is that okay?”
“It’s getting close to Christmas,” he said.
“I’ll obviously be back before then. Obviously.”
He didn’t say anything. He only wiped his mouth and stood to clear his dishes.
Lyra jogged her eyes between them, and when Ron marched away to the kitchen to scrape the leftovers into a Tupperware container, she said, “Don’t go. Please. I hate it when you go.”
“I have to. For work.”
“But all you do is work.”
“Yes,” Ron said from the kitchen. “All she does is work.”
“Finish up, okay?” Ellie said, neglecting her own unfinished plate, standing and retreating to the bedroom.
She closed the door behind her and walked immediately to her bureau, the top of which was a clutter of perfume bottles and scarves and jewelry and medicine bottles. She found her prescription for Lorazepam. She strangled off the cap and dry-swallowed a pill.
She stared at herself in the mirror for a long minute before opening up a polished wooden jewelry box. She pulled open its bottom drawer and pushed past the bracelets and necklaces and watches until she found what she was looking for, dusty and unseen after so many years.
A carved totem. In the shape of a nightmarish gull.
* * *
The girl in the yellow dress wore a blindfold when she stumbled through the woods. She took high steps to avoid tripping. Her hands were out before her, feeling the air, as if her fingers were worms struggling through the dark. Her shoe caught on a stone. Her shin bashed against a log. But she wasn’t afraid. Giggles punctuated her words when she called out, “Ten… nine … eight… seven… six…”
Though she couldn’t see the pines and hemlocks and tamarack around her, they were cloaked in a fog that swirled in her wake. The ground was moist with it, the rocks slick. And the moisture in the air carried sound strangely. A gull cried and a tree creaked and a stick snapped and her voice called out its countdown and everything sounded both faraway and dangerously near.
The other girl was up ahead. She did not wear a blindfold, so moved much more swiftly, kicking through bracken that dampened her jeans with dew. She leaped over a moss-furred log. She made it almost to the ruins up ahead—the stony ruins of the first settlers on the island— when the voice behind her finally called out, “One!”
Now the girl stopped, rooted in place. And began to count aloud herself, despite her panting breath. Because these were the rules of the game. An old game of tag called Hunter/Hunted, similar to Marco Polo. “Ten… nine… eight… seven… six…” she began and watched, in the near distance, as the blindfolded girl in the yellow dress tripped and shuffled toward the sound of her. “I’m going to get you,” she said, laughing. “I’m getting closer!”
Back and forth they went with their countdowns, with their halting pursuit and escape, until the leader among them, the hunted, rushed out of the woods and onto a basalt ridge. The hush of the forest gave way to the shush and boom of the ocean.
Before her was a peculiar landmark, known by the locals as the Witch’s Cauldron. A ringed and recessed section of shoreline that looked exactly like its name. At high tide, the sea came crashing through an eroded arch and into this basin, frothing and surging, rising up into a boiling mass of water. The cauldron was thirty feet wide and just as deep.
The girl in the jeans only hesitated a moment, because a voice could be heard behind her, yelling, “Five… four… three…”
She scrambled out onto the rim of the Witch’s Cauldron, sometimes upright, sometimes on all fours, crabbing her way to its far side. The blindfolded girl on the shoreside of the ringed gap cried out, “Hello? Are you there? You’re supposed to be counting.”
For a moment there was only the crash and salt spray of waves, and then the girl began her countdown once more, beckoning the blindfolded girl forward.
“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six…”
And the blindfolded girl marched toward her, seeking her voice, with the mouth of the Witch’s Cauldron gaping only a few steps before her.
* * *
The ferry was rust-pocked and mildew-stained. The small garage in its belly was empty except for one other car. Ellie walked to the deck to take in the blustery view. She pulled on a wool cap and zipped her jacket to her neck and tucked her hands into mittens.
The sky was the same concrete gray as the ocean. Rain-misted. The air tasted like aspirin. The ferry chugged through waves that rose and dipped. She walked slow laps around the deck. After thirty minutes, the tree-studded, fog-cloaked island was visible in the distance, like a castle with a boundless moat.
Two months ago, the sun would be burning down and the ferry would have run several times a day, jammed with tourists in white tennis shoes. But this was December, and now the ferry only ran in the late morning, so she didn’t have to jostle anyone for the bow of the ship.
She leaned over the railing to take in the chop. Something caught her eye. A flash in the murk. The smear of a pale face staring horribly up at her.
She pulled back and counted to ten, then looked again and saw only the cold nowhere of the sea. The ferry blew its horn, the air throbbing with its bass. She could see lobster boats chugging through the water. The wharf that awaited them and the dark-windowed buildings squatting beyond it.
She returned to her car and tucked herself into her seat and dug around in her purse until she found the bottle of Lorazepam. She shook out another pill, swallowing it down with a gulp of cold coffee.
She blew out a sigh—and reached for the rearview mirror to check her makeup. But when she readjusted it, a face curtained with hair appeared behind her.
She screamed and the face in the mirror screamed too. The high-pitched yelp of a girl. Her daughter, Lyra.
* * *
Ellie drove off the ferry and parked in the first spot she could find beside the wharf. Boats bobbed in the water when she said, “Will you please stop crying?” and dug out her phone.
She always kept her cell on mute. She couldn’t stand the constant distraction of calls and texts and notifications. When she checked it, the screen brightened with voicemails and messages from Ron. All about how he couldn’t find their daughter.
“That’s because she’s sobbing in the back seat,” she said through her teeth. And then, louder, “Lyra! Stop! That’s enough!”
Her daughter was curled up in a ball, her face red and damp with tears, her breath hitching when she said, “But you’re mad at me.”
“Just because I’m angry doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” The cabin of the car amplified all sound and made her head feel too full of noise. “Now stop crying! Please!” This she said at a shout, and it only made Lyra wail louder.
A white splat of bird shit hit the windshield as a gull swooped past. Ellie closed her eyes and took a deep shuddering breath. She quieted her voice when she said, “Hey. Hey, Lyra. Come up here. It’s okay. Climb up in the front seat by Mommy.”
The girl’s cries lowered to a whimper. With her sleeve she wiped away a slug of snot. Then she clambered over the console and into Ellie’s lap. “It’s all right. It’s okay.”
“I just,” Lyra said. “I just wanted to spend time with you.”
“I know, I know.” She combed her fingers through her daughter’s tangled hair and kissed the crown of her head. Another gull swooped past the car and distracted her gaze. Her eyes focused on a figure in the middle distance. Big and box-shaped. A long silvering beard that looked like something washed in with the tide. His face was so deeply creased it appeared scarred. He wore black bibs and a gray wool sweater. He was in the process of docking his boat. He swung a leg over the gunwale, a coil of rope in hand. He knotted it swiftly around a cleat. It was difficult to tell from here, but his hands appeared gloved in blood.
“I’m going to call Daddy, okay? Because I’m sure he’s worried about you.”
She kept one arm curled around the girl, while the other brought the cell to her ear. The signal was weak, and it took some time before they were connected. His panicked voice said, “Please tell me she’s with you?”
“Stowed away in the back seat.”
He blew out a heavy sigh. “I was this close to calling the police.”
“If I put her back on the ferry, will you be there to pick her up?”
“What?” he said, his relief giving way to anger. “That’s a two-hour drive. I can’t believe you’re even asking me that.”
“I’m on assignment. How am I supposed to work?”
The man with the silver beard dragged a shark out of his boat. It left a blood trail on the rough brown planks of the docks. He approached a hitching post with oversized hooks hanging from it. He hoisted the fish and hung it from its gills. Some gulls dropped down—called by the blood—and roosted nearby, hoping the guts might get tossed aside.
“Ron?” she said. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Try being a mother,” he said.
For a moment she believed the call cancelled, but then his voice, softer than before, said, “I’m sorry. But I have to work too. Can it wait until tomorrow?”
“If it has to.”
“It has to.”
“The morning ferry,” she said. “Be there.”
From his belt the man with the silver beard withdrew a filet knife that flashed silver. He jammed the blade into the shark, prodding the anus and then ripping upward, unzipping its belly. He reached his hands into the gap. He withdrew a sodden mess of what looked like hair jeweled with teeth. He sniffed at it before heaving it aside with a splat.
The gulls descended to feast.
* * *
The fog poured off the ocean like a second tide out of rhythm with the noise of the crashing waves. On the coastal side of the Witch’s Cauldron stood a girl, counting down, “Five… four… three…”
Inside the formation, the sea foamed and whirled. Toward it walked the girl in the yellow dress. Blindfolded, her arms out before her, hurrying along a little faster as the countdown neared its end.
“Two…”
But the other girl never yelled out, “One!” Maybe she was afraid to. Or maybe she was hoping to draw her pursuer a few more paces.
Then the girl in the yellow dress tripped, fell hard to her knees, only a foot from the drop.
She cried out in pain and nudged off her blindfold, but any injury she felt was soon forgotten when she saw the cauldron yawning before her—and the girl on the other side of it, staring miserably back at her.
* * *
There were two parts of Gull Island. The wild place studded with evergreens and knuckled with rocky ridges and creamed over with fog. And the domesticated face of it. Which was mostly clustered along the western shore.
Here, along a single street, stood a cedar-shingled inn, a small brick library, a chowder house, an ice cream shop, a mercantile and knick-knack shop, a tavern called The Lonely Gull, and a seafood shack called The Lobster Pot.
They were all shuttered or posted signs for reduced hours. Because the tourist season was long over. These were the thin times. A tiny windmill turned slowly and creakily at the mildew-spotted miniature golf course. A rusted collection of rental scooters and bikes had been left out like abandoned toys.
In The Lonely Gull, an old man in a flannel jacket hunched over the bar, nursing his beer, while the jukebox played the same song over and over, and on the beach there was a single set of footprints bothering the gray-black sand.
Ellie and Lyra took all of this in as they walked the town and poked their heads in and out of buildings. They desperately wanted a cup of cocoa but the best they could find was a dry-mix packet for sale at the mercantile. They bought it, along with some black-spotted bananas, a bag of bread, and a faded box of granola bars.
The man behind the register had only a few hairs on his head and wore a denim shirt and glasses with thick, yellowed lenses. A fly swatter hung on a nail behind him. He did not greet them when he rang up the order. He paused his hand on the granola bars when she said, “Funny question, but do you know of any missing persons cases? Here on Gull Island?”
“I’m sorry?” he said in a reedy voice.
“Has anyone gone missing here?”
“That is a funny question.”
“I just—you know how unreliable memory can be—I seem to remember a news report from back when I was a kid? About a missing girl? Or a drowned girl? Or maybe I’m misremembering.”
“A missing girl, you say?”
“Yeah. Maybe twenty-five years ago?”
“Twenty-five…” His lower lip quivered. “I don’t remember anything about that.”
“Just curious. Who has police jurisdiction here?”
“There’s no police here.”
“But if there was a problem, who would you go to?”
“There’s Thatcher,” the clerk said and finished totaling up the cost.
“Who’s Thatcher?” she said and counted out some bills and change.
“Works a lobster boat. But he’s our constable.”
“Is he a big old guy? With a gray beard?”
“That’s the very one.”
She thanked him as he bagged up their food. From here they traveled to the inn, walking down the middle of the street, because there was no traffic. The blacktop was spotted white from the gulls. Feathers swirled and revealed the shape of the wind. A face peered out of a foggy window and she remembered the face staring out of the water.
“You know I came here once,” Ellie said, “when I was your age. On vacation.”
“Was it fun?” the girl asked and Ellie took a long time to give a hollow-voiced answer. “No.”
“Then why did you come back?”
“Because I think there might be a story here.”
“A funny story? I like those the best.”
“No.”
“A scary story?”
Ellie did not answer and her daughter said, “I don’t like scary stories.”
* * *
Though it was December, there were no wreaths or sleigh bells or menorahs anywhere. Instead, strange decorations hung from porches and dangled in windows and spiked the hillside and beaches. They were gulls. Carved wooden gulls. Some were as small as a brooch, others were as big as a man. All were of a similar design, with their eyes wide, their beaks open, their wings outstretched.
Such an ornament hung in the inn—near the reception desk, on the wall, like a crucifix. “I don’t have a reservation,” Ellie said. “I hope you have a room for us?”
The old woman behind the desk coughed out a laugh. Her breath smelled like the ghosts of a thousand cigarettes. “That’s funny.” She motioned a hand at the cabinet behind her. In every cubby hung a brass key. “Nothing but room here.”
Her eyes were milky. She wore a cardigan sweater over a dress with anchors printed on it. She moved slowly, as if her joints were full of rust, when she hefted the ledger onto the counter with a thump and asked Ellie to fill it out.
“How many people live here?”
“Well, there’s the people who own houses here, and then there’s the people who live here. You see a big house? That belongs to someone who vacations here or rents out to tourists. You see a fish shack or an apartment over a shop? That’s the rest of us.”
“Year-round residents,” Ellie said. “That’s what I meant.”
“Few dozen. Housekeepers. Bartenders. Cooks. Fishermen.” The old woman smiled and showed off a gap in her yellowing smile. “Servants.”
“It’s so quiet here now.”
“Thin,” the old woman said. “Things get thin here in the winter.”
Footsteps thumped down the stairs, and a woman appeared carrying a bucket of cleaning supplies. She had no eyebrows. She wore a paisley scarf on her head and her skin had gone the thin yellow of old paper. Maybe she was in her thirties, maybe her fifties; it was hard to tell. She stared at them without a hello and then disappeared through a door that flashed a glimpse of the kitchen.
“Thin,” the old woman said again.
Ellie offered a credit card and the old woman ran it through an old flat-bed imprinter and had her sign the carbon paper. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while,” Ellie said, and the old woman said, “Sometimes the old ways are best.”
Lyra stood beneath the gull hanging on the wall. It was nearly as big as her, anchored by big screws that fissured the wood. She ran her fingers along the detailed ridges etched into its claws. “Don’t touch that, sweetie,” Ellie said and the girl pulled back her hand as if burned.
“It’s all right,” the old woman said. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
“It’s kinda pretty but kinda also freaky,” Lyra said.
“Can you tell me about that carving?” Ellie said. “I noticed quite a few of them decorating the storefronts.”
“Oh, it’s an old pagan tradition here. Connected to the winter solstice.”
“The solstice. On the twenty-first.”
“Two more days.” The old woman winked. “Not everyone who came across the Atlantic was a Puritan, you know.”
“Mommy’s a writer,” Lyra said, followed by an “Ow!” and it was only then that Ellie realized she was digging her fingers into her daughter’s shoulder.
“A writer?” the old woman said.
Ellie’s words came out in a quick tumble. “I never really get a vacation. Always on deadline, you know. So I thought I’d get away. Do a touch of work. But mostly get away.” She tried to neaten her daughter’s hair and then gave up. “We’ll get some quality time in—right, Lyra?”
“Until you get rid of me.”
Normally, Ellie used silence as an invitation; when people were uncomfortable, they said too much too quickly. Now she was falling victim to her own techniques. This whole island felt like one big watchful silence, and she had to be careful not to give herself over to it. “This little one—she’ll be going back on the ferry tomorrow, but I’ll stay on.”
The old woman made a sound that could have been the clearing of phlegm or the uttering of disapproval.
“Maybe we’ll get a few good walks in.”
“Don’t turn your back on the water,” the old woman said. “You’ll want to take care at this time of year. The ocean is… unforgiving.”
* * *
After they collected their key and dropped off a bag in the room, they headed out again. Ellie had asked about the library—noting it was closed—and the innkeeper said if they were curious, they’d find the back door unlocked.
“It’s an honor system, of course,” the innkeeper said, and Ellie said, “Of course.”
The building was small, square, and rowed neatly into sections. The lights buzzed on, one of them flickering. The air had the musty tang of a cellar. They found the children’s section in a corner. Somehow it seemed hard to believe they had one at all. She set up Lyra in a beanbag chair with some Frog and Toad books before searching the stacks.
She found what she was looking for near the rear of the building. A few dust-coated shelves of local history. Some of the books—published by presses she had never heard of—featured photos and illustrations of shipwrecks, fishing boats, trees, gems, birds, and lobsters. They concerned the Maine coastline or the surrounding islands more generally. But some of the older volumes—bound in cracked cloth, a few leather-backed, even a finer vellum—gave her the particulars of Gull Island.
She sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled books down and scribbled what she found in her notebook. Here was a book of recipes on everything from blueberry lattice to fish stew to lamb bake. Here was a ledger that simply listed years of population counts, taxes, goods traded going all the way back to the 1700s, the same family names listed over so many years that today they might as well be one blood. She traced her way back a few decades, looking for births that might match up with her own. Here was one. A Haddie Ragnar. She jotted down the name. And then tried to plug it into Google, but her phone wasn’t picking up a signal inside the brick building.
Here was a book of photographs without any captions or dates. She thumbed through it once, and then again. Boats in the harbor. A pile of lobsters as tall as the frowning man who stood beside it. The construction of the inn. A dead tree on a rise with children standing in a ring around it, holding hands and wearing gull masks. Stone ruins in the woods. A dead seagull with flies crawling all over it. The Witch’s Cauldron. There it was, as if ripped right out of her memory. The ring of stone splashed full of surf resembling nothing so much as a boiling pot. She would find it. Tomorrow.
Her daughter appeared at the end of the aisle, silent and watchful. She was normally so full of questions, but since they arrived on the island, she had gone mostly silent. Her face was slack and her eyes distant. “Are you okay?”
Lyra pulled a curl of hair into her mouth and chewed on it. “I’m okay.”
“I’m bored of reading.”
“Here.” Ellie ripped some pieces of paper out of her notebook and popped the cap off a pen. “Then draw.”
A cold draft bothered her ankles and spiked its way like hoarfrost up her legs and through her body. She gave a shiver and returned to her reading. There was a book—a black book—but she couldn’t read whatever writing was within it. The rough ink characters might be Old English, but she didn’t know for sure. At its center was an illustration that spilled across two pages. At first she thought it was an ocean current—or perhaps the wind—for the way the black tendrils swirled across the paper.
But then she spotted eyes and teeth within it and determined that it might be hair.
Her daughter was scraping the pen back and forth with such speed, soaking the page with so much ink that the paper tore. “What are you doing?” Ellie said. She snatched up the messy scribbles and made out the words Feed the Hag.
“Lyra? Why did you write that?”
The girl’s shoulders rose and fell.
“Did you see Mommy writing that?” Ellie waited only a half-second before raising her voice to a yell. “Answer me!”
* * *
At their room at the inn, wind hissed through the cracks around the window and trembled the curtains. Above the bed hung a painting— framed in drift wood—of a fisherman dragging up his fish-fattened net in a storm. “It’s cold in here,” Lyra said when they closed the door behind them.
Ellie dropped her backpack—heavy with a few books she had borrowed from the library—and cranked up the thermostat, and the baseboard heaters began to tick and glow orange.
“No TV?” Lyra said and opened the drawers of the bureau one by one. “Then what are we supposed to do?”
“Here,” Ellie said and offered her cell phone. “Watch some YouTube videos. You might need to stand by the window for them to load.”
The girl snatched the phone and climbed up onto the bed and pulled the quilt over her. “What are you gonna do?”
“Mommy needs to think,” she said as she entered the bathroom and cranked the hot water to a steaming roar.
There were two mugs on the bureau next to a coffee maker, and she dipped them each under the faucet and stirred in the packets of cocoa. “One for you,” she said, passing it along to Lyra. “And one for me. Don’t spill, okay?”
“Okay,” her daughter said, the glow of the screen on her face.
In the bathroom, Ellie stripped off her clothes and lowered herself slowly into the tub. Wisps of steam danced on the surface of the water. Her skin prickled with the heat. She leaned back and closed her eyes—and remembered.
* * *
The gulls seemed to eddy and surge in the same patterns as the ocean below. Their voices came together into one voice that sounded like crying.
The girl in the yellow dress—Ellie—threw down her blindfold and the wind caught it and swept it out into the Witch’s Cauldron, where it vanished into the frothing crowns of water.
She marched out onto the ring of rock—the width of the walkway only six feet or so, with a perilous drop to either side—toward the girl who had drawn her there. But who was the Hunter and who was the Hunted seemed suddenly confused.
Both of them were crying, their hair knocked about by the wind. “What are you doing?” Ellie yelled. “You could have killed me. What’s wrong with you?”
The nameless girl hunched in on herself, as if expecting a blow. The fog clung to the air like wet cotton. The waves boomed below. The wind whistled all around. Ellie almost didn’t hear her say, “She made me do it.”
“Who?”
The girl spoke in a low voice, as if afraid someone might be listening. “She’s hungry. The island is hungry.”
“Who?” Ellie said. “What are you talking about?”
“The hag,” the girl said. “We have to feed the hag. Or she feeds on us.”
“You just hate the fact that I’m rich and you’re poor,” Ellie said. “You hate the fact that I can leave this place and you’re trapped here.”
Right then the girl slapped Ellie—and Ellie wheeled around and slapped her right back.
And the girl lost her balance and fell.
* * *
The bathwater was growing cold. Ellie lifted her foot and used her toes to grip the knob. The faucet churned out more hot water. But then there came a moan and a sputter as the stream lessened to a dribble and choked off entirely.
Ellie sat up, the water streaming off her chest, and used her hands to fiddle with the knobs. Squeaking them back and forth and back and forth. The faucet visibly shuddered—and then began to expel a yellow and then brown and then black trickle of water.
“Old pipes,” she said, but then something else appeared, oozing out, draining slowly into the tub. A thick clotted mess of hair. Barnacled with what looked to be fingernails.
She didn’t realize she was screaming until Lyra hurried into the bathroom, the phone clutched in her hand and blaring cartoons. When she saw the hair spreading its black tendrils through the water, and her mother scrambling back in the slick tub to avoid it, the girl dropped the phone and the screen shattered on the tile floor.
* * *
There was no landline in the room, and the innkeeper didn’t respond when Ellie called down the stairs. She looked over the railing, still wrapped in her towel, and found the reception desk empty, as revealed by the golden glow of a lamp.
Night came early, and the thick darkness beyond the windows could have passed for midnight.
She dressed and threw the gelatinous mess of hair—what felt like seaweed—out the window of the bedroom. She then scrubbed her hands with soap three times over. Her whole body felt unclean.
“You’re mad,” Lyra said. “You’re mad about me sneaking into the car and now you’re mad about the phone too.”
“I’m frustrated. That’s all.”
Lyra buried her head beneath a pillow and Ellie rubbed her back and said, “Hey. How about we get some dinner. I bet that would make us both feel better.”
“Okay.”
Ellie dressed and they went downstairs and walked outside, leaving the front door yawning open, because they could see from here that all the storefronts were dark. So they returned inside and ate a dinner of mushy bananas and stale granola bars while sitting cross-legged on the bed. The phone wouldn’t turn on—and Lyra didn’t pack anything of her own—so Ellie read her a copy of the Atlantic Monthly she had brought along, until eventually they fell asleep in their clothes.
She wasn’t sure what time it was when she awoke, nor was she sure why her pulse was thudding in her ears. She sat upright, her face tipped toward the window. Her dreams still clung to her like cobwebs, but she felt certain a door had closed somewhere, the sound shivering through the inn.
She climbed carefully from the bed, trying not to disturb her daughter’s sleep, and crept to the window, the floorboards cold and creaking beneath her feet. The waves could be heard even through the glass, a shush and boom, shush and boom, as if the island were breathing.
There was nothing at first, just the side yard of the inn, a patch of meager grass. Then a figure appeared below, moving across it. The innkeeper, Ellie was almost certain. But the darkness was so severe—a clinging black that washed away all color and acuity.
Whoever it was, she was heading toward the road. The road that led away from the town and along the shore studded with vacation homes. But before she stepped onto the blacktop, she turned, as if she could sense someone watching. Ellie pulled back from the window with a sharp intake of breath. When she looked again, there was nothing, but it appeared the woman was wearing a mask. With big hollow eyes. And a hooked beak.
* * *
Ellie tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. This was what she had come here for, wasn’t it?
She slipped on her shoes and zipped into her jacket and hesitated over her daughter, wondering if she should wake her and tell her she was going out for a bit. Back at home, she and Ron could be streaming a movie in the next room and no matter how many gunshots or explosions shouted from the screen, Lyra never woke. Ellie was counting on her being such a sound sleeper now.
She locked the door behind her and stepped gingerly down the staircase, cringing at every squeak and moan. Outside, she wished for her phone’s flashlight, but the moon soon cracked through the clouds and offered a silver glow. The waves lulled.
The farther she walked, the farther out the houses were spread. Cottages and cabins mostly, but a few gothic revivals set up on basalt ridges or tucked back in the woods. She had gone nearly a quarter-mile when she saw lights up ahead. The yellow rectangles of windows burning through the dark.
She remembered what the innkeeper had said—about the bigger houses belonging to those who didn’t live here—and this was one of them. A Victorian revival with gables and a turret and many chimneys knifing toward the sky. Inside there were bodies moving. Dozens of them. A holiday party, perhaps.
But when she crept off the road and up the broken-shell driveway, she noticed that several inside wore masks. Gull masks. They were dancing to a music Ellie couldn’t hear, their bodies throbbing and writhing.
One person—she thought it was a man at first, but no, no, it was a woman—wore no shirt. Her chest was scarred over from a double mastectomy. Her skin was yellow where it wasn’t a raised, angry pink. The housekeeper—it must be her—though her face was hidden, masked like the others.
Before Ellie could get any closer, headlights flared down the road and a truck pulled up the driveway. She scrambled off into the brush before she could be spotted.
* * *
Back at the hotel, Ellie keyed open the door, but forgot to try the knob first, so maybe it was already unlocked? Because the bed was empty. The room was empty. The bathroom was empty. The closet was empty.
Lyra was gone. Her daughter was gone.
She called out her name as she wandered the halls and pounded up and down the stairs twice in the bewildering dark. Her shoe caught on the edge of a rug. She banged a hip into a table. She felt like she was breathing too much and not enough.
“Lyra?” she said one last time, and heard a noise then. In the bathroom. Slowly she entered and stepped toward the tub. Nestled in its bottom was her daughter, whispering into the drain.
Ellie scooped her up and said, “Thank God, thank God,” and hugged her hard. The girl complained—“Stop it”—in a sleep-slurred voice.
“What were you doing? Didn’t you hear me when I was calling for you?”
But the girl was not really here, still lost to some dream, and Ellie tucked back into bed. Then she chewed down two pills and climbed under the sheets herself. She wrapped herself around the girl as much for warmth as to hold her in place.
That night Ellie dreamed of gulls pecking her skin down to the bone and a long-haired hag who squatted on her chest and crushed the breath from her lungs as she leaned in for a hungry kiss.
* * *
In the morning, while waiting for the ferry, they walked up and down the wharf, breaking up pieces of bread to throw to the gulls that followed them in a shrieking cloud.
“They like me,” Lyra said, hurling a handful of crumbs into the water, laughing when they gulls dove and fought.
“That’s only because you’re feeding them.” This was said by a hunchbacked man in a buffalo-plaid flannel jacket. “You’ve got to feed them or they’ll turn on you.” He walked to the end of the dock and untied a rope. Hand over hand, he dragged up a netted pot he had left out overnight. He had hair like gray straw. He clamped a pipe between his teeth and puffed smoke that smelled like fried oysters.
The pot oozed and dribbled when pulled from the dark water— hand over hand, six feet, three feet, onto the dock with a clunk. Lyra crouched down to study what was trapped inside and said, “Gross.”
Ellie at first believed them to be crabs or lobsters. But they were something else. Black- and white-shelled. Insectile. One like a crab crossed with a spider, another like a lobster crossed with a centipede. Barbed and terrible. With long mandibles and pulsing stingers.
Lyra said, “Can you eat them?”
“No,” the man said and hoisted one out to show her. With no more effort than it would take to tear apart a sodden piece of paper, he ripped the crustacean open and black and green guts squiggled in his hands. “No, you can’t eat them.” He tossed the mess into the water. “There’s not much to eat during the thin time. But the seasons turn. And the island gives back.”
“Do you know where I could find Haddie Ragnar?” Ellie asked.
“Haddie, you say? Well, you might have already met her. At the inn.”
“How’d you know we were staying at the inn.”
“Fair guess.”
“Haddie is the housekeeper, then?”
“Ah yuh.” The man cleaned out the pot. Then he pulled a plastic bag from his pocket. In it was a chopped-up fish. He used the chunks to bait the pot and kicked it off the dock again.
A boat motored by and Ellie made eye contact with its captain. The man from yesterday. The one the grocery clerk called Thatcher. He stared at her in his passing, and her eyes were the first to drop.
* * *
The wind was picking up. It ripped the spume off the waves and whipped Ellie’s hair across her face when she spoke to the ferry captain directly. She paid him an extra twenty dollars, if he wouldn’t mind watching after the girl, keeping her in the cabin. She would be no trouble. It was only a half-hour passage and Lyra’s father would be waiting to pick her up on the mainland.
She kissed Lyra on the forehead and told her they would finish decorating the tree when she got home, probably tomorrow. Did that sound like fun? The girl nodded, but then dropped her eyes to the floor and asked if she could stay. Please. Please, could she?
“I wish you could,” Ellie said, but the words came clumsily. “I wish that too. But remember? Mommy has to work. So we can have nice presents under the tree.”
“But I’m supposed to stay,” the girl said under her breath.
“You mean you want to stay?”
The girl did not respond, and so, with another kiss to the forehead, Ellie wished her goodbye and headed off.
* * *
The front desk of the inn was empty, but Ellie followed the smell of cigarettes to the door behind it and gave a gentle knock.
“Yeah?” a voice said.
Ellie pushed open the door. She stepped halfway into the room and paused at the sight of the woman with the headscarf. The housekeeper from yesterday. She was sitting at a round table in the kitchen. She smoked a cigarette and ashed its red tip into a coffee mug.
“You’re Haddie Ragnar.”
“I am.”
“I’m Ellie Templeton.”
“You don’t need a formal introduction to ask for fresh towels or a roll of toilet paper.”
Ellie stepped fully into the room. “I think we might know each other?”
The other woman inclined her head, waiting for an explanation.
“When I was a girl, I came here.”
“Okay.”
Ellie blurted the story out in the rush of a few minutes. Then she was quiet for a beat before saying, “It was you, wasn’t it? You were the girl? At the Witch’s Cauldron?”
“It was.” She took a deep drag and blew out a cloud of smoke that ghosted around her. “I was.”
“I’m sorry… I can’t tell you how happy I am… You don’t know how sick I’ve felt…” She suddenly seemed unable to pin words together.
“Sick? Hmm.” Haddie danced her cigarette around in the air as if to trace out an explanation with the smoke. “Way I remember it, it happened a little differently, though.”
Ellie took another step forward. “Can I buy you a coffee?”
“Grill’s closed through the winter.” Haddie reached into her cardigan and pulled out a flask and set it on the table and indicated Ellie should take a seat. “So this’ll have to do.”
* * *
Ellie ran away. She ran back through the fog, back through the woods, past the ruins, and eventually into the yard of their vacation rental, where her parents loaded their suitcases into the trunk of the car.
She had left the girl behind. An island girl. Haddie. That was her name.
Ellie had slapped her and the girl lost her footing and slipped and skidded and fell. And now here Ellie was, clinging to her father’s leg as he said, “Was it a fun vacation?”
“Yes. But I’m ready to go home.”
“Me too,” he said, and then reached into the pocket of his jacket and offered her something. “I got you this. A souvenir.” It was one of the gull totems, the wooden carvings she had admired in the shop near the wharf. “So you’ll always remember.”
Ellie took it and her mother said, “Who was that girl you were playing with?”
“Nobody,” Ellie said.
She was already trying to shove the memory deep into a closet of her mind. To forget about the girl. To forget about what happened. It hadn’t seemed real, so she made it unreal.
What she didn’t know then—or all this time later—was that the girl, Haddie, had not fallen into the water. She caught herself. She clung by her fingers to a stone ledge. The waves boomed below her and wetted her shoes. But she was very much alive.
* * *
In the kitchen at the inn, Haddie brought down another coffee mug from the cupboard—and poured the flask into it. “You can’t trust memory. Life’s taught me that much.” In her version of that morning, they had paused their game in the ruins—and Ellie had taken off her blindfold as the two of them explored—and from there they walked out onto the Witch’s Cauldron. Haddie slipped and fell, but it was the wind that did it. “Not you, Ellie. Not that I recall.”
“I should have tried to help you.”
“It’s hard to blame a child,” Haddie said and toasted the flask. “Besides. I’m still here.”
Ellie cupped both hands around the mug and brought it to her mouth. The liquor was spicy and lit a candle-flame in her stomach. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that.”
There was a flicker of a smile. “If you can call it living. But there’s always a spring that follows winter. A fat time after the thin time. That’s what keeps me going. That’s what keeps us all going.” She wore earrings, Ellie noticed, carved in the shapes of gull heads. They swung and dangled as she spoke as if riding invisible currents of air.
“Health to follow sickness?” Ellie said, and Haddie nodded and said, “Let’s hope.”
Ellie almost told her that she had been carrying this wound around with her ever since then, that she became a crime reporter because of Haddie, became a person obsessed with investigating secrets and dark impulses. And for her entire career, it’s been a necessary comfort to take the microscope away from herself and analyze other horrors.
But she didn’t say any of this. Because she had always been more of a writer than a talker. “There was a body,” she said instead.
“What’s that about a body?”
“Multiple bodies, actually. They wash up. On the coast of Maine. Sometimes it’s just a leg. Sometimes an arm.”
“Okay.”
“A few days ago, there was a hand. Looked like a shark had chewed it up and spit it out. It had something in its palm.” She reached into her jacket pocket and removed the gull totem she had received so many years ago from her father. When she set it on the table, there was a clunk that made its weight seem heavier than it was. “It was a gull totem. Just like this one. The one my father gave me as a souvenir when we visited.”
“So that’s why you’re really here, then?”
“I studied the tide charts.”
“What’s your theory? An old sad lady with cancer is chucking people in the drink?” She let out a wheezy laugh.
“No. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know much, do you? Maybe you should have been a fiction writer instead? Then you can bend the truth however you want it.”
“There was a party last night,” she said.
Haddie barely had any eyebrows left. They were more like faint feathers. But she raised them now. “What’s that?”
“You went to a party last night? What was it for?”
“How do you know about a party?”
“Your mother told me,” Ellie lied.
Haddie studied her a long few seconds before dropping the spent butt of her cigarette into the mug. “That old bat is losing her mind. She’ll be telling people her social security number and bank account next.”
“What was it for? The party?”
“Solstice of course. The most important holiday of the year.”
* * *
Ellie parked in the weed-choked driveway. She had driven past the overgrown lot twice, but now she was certain this was it, the vacation home where she had stayed as a child. The windows were gone and gulls swooped in and out. The cedar shingles had fallen off in places like old teeth. A tree grew through the roof.
She felt strangely light and warm—and not just from the whiskey— when she stepped out of the car. A smile teased the edges of her lips.
Her feet barely seemed to tap the ground before springing her forward. She had been unburdened. She peered through the front door and glass-fanged windows. She sat on the porch but felt as though maybe there was no real reason for her to be here anymore. The plain gray light of day washed away her sense of urgency. What mystery was she even trying to solve anymore? Was it her own guilt, now allayed, or the severed hand on the beach that had brought her here? Any deadline she had in her mind seemed to be dissolving by the second.
Then she pulled a book from her backpack to review, and that old feeling soaked into her again. The nerve-shredding anxiety she had experienced on the beach when she saw the totem clutched in the sea-rotten hand. Early Tales of Gull Island, the cover read. She thumbed through its pages, learning about how settlers crashed a boat against these shores one brutal winter. And here they were stranded for several dark, cold months as squall after squall rolled in off the ocean, battering them. Their provisions ran out and the fish wouldn’t bite and so they ate one of their own. A woman they had brought over as a servant. Their camp overlooked the Witch’s Cauldron, and that is where they threw her bones when they finished with her.
It was said that she still haunts the island, that the cauldron became an extension of her, like a terrible gaping throat. And it’s in the winter—when the wind sharpened with ice, when the shadows lengthened and the island was at its most desperate—that her spirit grew especially tempestuous. The ocean won’t give the islanders fish or lobster or scallops if they don’t give back to it.
The hag can only be sated when fed. She gave to the island and now the island must give to her. The solstice was a platter upon which sacrifice must be served.
Ellie closed the book with a thump. Her legs were numbing in the cold and she thought to stretch them in a hike through the woods. Beneath the trees all sound hushed. She could see the crowns of the pine and hemlock trees shaking with the wind, but she felt protected here. The light was dim and her footsteps hushed by the needles carpeting the ground.
After two hundred yards of clambering over logs and kicking through dried tangles of ferns, she came upon the ruins. They were roofless. The stone walls had crumbled unevenly, but still patterned out a clear collection of dwellings with sunken foundations. There was a staircase that rose to nowhere and another that descended into the dark. She moved among the buildings and discovered a round stone recession, what she assumed to be a well, but when she looked into its shadow-thick bottom she gasped at the sight of two black eyes gleaming back at her.
Her vision took a moment to adjust—and then the doe solidified below. It had fallen down and broken its rear leg. When the deer tried to stand, the joint bent wrongly. A cry sounded, a rasping whine like metal drawn across a file. There was corn and hay strewn about— both below and above—and around the same time Ellie recognized this was a baited trap, she heard a crackling in the woods behind her.
Someone was coming.
She ducked and slunk over to the stairs she had spotted earlier, hurrying down into the shadows herself, where her nose twitched from the mildew. There were ciphers etched into the stone here. Scars of the past. Glyphs that told a story she didn’t quite understand, but seemed to indicate a story of solstice and sacrifice.
A minute later the light shuttered as someone passed by overhead. She only caught a flash, but that was enough to recognize the big body of Thatcher.
She could hear his heavy footsteps approach the deer, and she crept up a few paces and peered over the lip of the foundation and watched him unspool a rope and knot it swiftly into a kind of noose. He lowered it down and then yanked up. The deer’s hooves clacked and skittered against the stone when he fished it out—and then stilled it with a jab of his filet knife. There was a soft mewl, and then silence.
After a minute, he hefted the deer onto his shoulder and started through the brush, toward the treeline, where the forest gave way to the basalt cliffs and the ocean beyond.
She snuck after him, staying low. Blood oozed down his back when he stood at the edge of the Witch’s Cauldron. He didn’t fling the deer carcass so much as let it slip off his shoulder and into the roiling surf.
* * *
The clouds were thickening and dropped thick flakes that the windshield wipers sloshed arcs through. Her car came around the bend, and the road sloped down toward the harbor, where she saw— as big as a building—the docked ferry.
A ferry that shouldn’t be here. She said as much when she parked out front and hurried up the steps of the inn and found the old woman seated at the front desk. “There’s a Nor’easter coming,” she said. “Captain decided it wasn’t worth the trip.”
“I put my daughter on board that ferry. It was supposed to take her to the mainland. My husband was waiting for her.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with me.”
“My daughter would have come here. She would have asked about me. She would have gone to our room.”
“What daughter?”
“The daughter I had with me. Right here. When I checked in with you.”
“You never checked in with no daughter.”
“I did,” Ellie said at a shout. “I—what are you even talking about? You’re not making sense.”
“You’re not making sense. I remember it like it was yesterday, because it was.”
“She was right here.”
“You were right here. But not with any daughter. No, miss.”
Ellie knew she needed to stay calm, to think rationally, to remember what Haddie said earlier about her mother’s mind fraying at the edges. The old woman had probably just forgotten. Ellie herself had lost—seemingly—the memory of what happened to her as a child, so couldn’t this woman conceivably lose what happened to her yesterday?
“Where’s your daughter? Where’s Haddie?”
“Oh, now it’s my daughter you want, is it?”
“Where is she?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
The old woman’s voice grew severe. Her lips peeled back to reveal a gray, uneven line of teeth. “You tourists. You come here and you think you can tell us what’s what. I’ve seen it my whole life. You come here and you use us. You use the island. You wring all the pleasure from it like a wine-sopped dishrag. Then you leave.” Her eyes went someplace faraway and her voice grew sad and thoughtful. “But we need you to come back.”
She focused her eyes on Ellie again and flicked her hand dismissively, as if to say away with you. “Because we use you just as you use us. We’ll keep using you. Without you, the island starves.”
* * *
Her phone wouldn’t work. She punched her thumb at the cracked screen and a few shards stuck to her. She tried voice commands. She tried powering on and off. It wasn’t just the signal—spotty yesterday, gone today, maybe interrupted by the rising storm—it was the phone itself, broken after being dropped. Dropped by her daughter. Her daughter had been here. Her daughter was here.
She checked every room in the inn, with the old woman pacing her and berating her. She ran down to the ferry and—as it sloshed in its moorings—walked its empty deck and checked its cabin. There was no one to be seen in the harbor and no lights on in any of the windows when she walked along the quay and pounded on doors.
She tried the back door to the library and the wind ripped the knob out of her hand. She rushed inside. Hundreds of pages stirred at once as the wind bullied its way through the shelves. Origami gulls—hung from fishing line—wobbled from the ceiling.
She left and jogged the rest of the way to the inn. Along the shore, waves crashed like thunder. The wind carried sharp drops of sleet in it and knocked the trees into a frenzy. At the inn, she found the old woman gone and the phone behind the front desk dead. From her purse she dug out her prescription bottle and shook it with a rattle. Only three pills left. She took them all.
* * *
Night fell. The storm worsened. Silver stripes of snow collected in the cracks of rocks, the bark of trees. Ellie stood at the lip of the Witch’s Cauldron, because this time she would be the one who waited, not the one lured. There was more than once that she doubted herself—with the night pressing in all around her and the pills fizzing in her veins—wondering whether her mind was broken, if her memories were as confused as the swirling dark. Who knew what was real anymore? Maybe she didn’t have a daughter. Maybe she didn’t have a husband or a career either. Maybe she had been the one who had fallen into the Witch’s Cauldron all those years ago.
But then a figure came out of the woods. A shadow bleeding out of the shadows. Wearing a bone-white gull mask.
Ellie’s whole body shook, soaked and chilled, her teeth chattering so hard she felt they might crack. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…” she said, and the figure paused at her voice and tipped her head and yanked at a rope.
And out of the trees followed her daughter, Lyra. Her wrists bound and her mouth gagged. Her hair was a damp, seaweedy mop. Any tears she shed were lost to the sleet melting down her face.
Ellie stepped forward and said, “Please.” In that one word trying to say, She didn’t do anything, and, I’m the reason we’re here, and, Stop acting like a crazy person all at once.
Haddie pulled off her mask. Her eyes were black hollows. Her skin looked so insubstantial it might have been painted over bone. She told Ellie the rest of their story then. About how, so many years ago, after she fell, she managed to curl up on a ledge, but found herself trapped, unable to climb out of the cauldron. It was a day later that someone found her. Half-dead from hypothermia. “Maybe you think I deserved it. Because I brought you here. Because I tried to make you fall. But I didn’t have a choice. She made me.” With the utterance of that word—she—Haddie gestured toward the cauldron. The hag haunted her, just as she haunted them all, demanding to be fed.
“I know you think that’s true,” Ellie said. “But it’s not.”
The waves crashed so hard the stone below them vibrated.
“You think I’m terrible. But after I fell, you left me. You left me to die. You’re no better.”
Ellie risked getting closer, and closer still, small steps as she reached out her arms pleadingly. “It’s like you said. We were just girls.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you before. But maybe I want to hurt you now.”
“This isn’t real. You don’t have to—”
“Did you not see us? Did you not take a look at the people who live here? We’re sick. The island is starving. If we don’t—”
Before she could finish, Ellie lunged and grabbed hold of her daughter. She yanked at one of the girl’s arms, while Haddie snatched at the other, with Lyra screaming between them.
Near the edge of the cliff, Haddie lost her grip, but recovered by staggering forward, dropping Ellie with a tackle. “She’s hungry!”
Ellie fought for control—and swung around—and their entangled momentum carried them toward the chasm. They threw jabs, ripped at each other’s hair, rolled over, and then over again, and over once more. And here—at the edge of the cauldron—Haddie slid over.
For a second she seemed gone. Lost to the seething bowl of whitewater. But when Ellie leaned forward, she saw the woman dangling, her arm curled around a knob of rock.
She didn’t help before, but she would now. She would save Haddie, and somehow they would put the past and this night behind them. “Come on.” She reached for Haddie, seizing her wrist. “Take hold of me. I’ve got you.”
But her grip was slippery. And Haddie was too heavy. And when Ellie tried to yank her up, the woman fell, plunging into the water below. She struggled there for a minute or more, thrashing in the waves, trying to stay afloat. And then—but it couldn’t be—something rose from the water. Something with long black kelpy hair. Something that wrapped an arm around her throat and pulled her down into the froth with a gargling scream.
The hag.
Ellie staggered to her feet and called out for her daughter and saw that, along the cliffside, impervious to the driving sleet, stood the other islanders. Dozens of them. All wearing gull masks. They made no effort to stop her when she ushered her daughter away.
* * *
Ellie drove at perilous speed to the harbor, nearly skidding off the road more than once. Her right hand gripped Lyra all this time as if something might crash through the window and rip her away.
She thought about rolling directly onto the ferry, but didn’t know how long it would take to unmoor from the docks, let alone how to negotiate its navigation system. She had grown up in a family that loved waterskiing and fishing, so she abandoned the car at the wharf and raced Lyra onto a lobster boat that surged and thudded in the storm. She untied its ropes—peeling back a fingernail in her hurry—and cranked the engine to life. There was a scrape when the bow nudged against the stern of another boat. She cranked the wheel and eased the throttle, spinning them around to chug into open water.
Then the boat lurched and the motor whined. The anchor. She had neglected the anchor. The island didn’t want to let go of her yet.
She chased her way to the back of the boat, searching for the anchor crank, and then scudded to a stop. Because he stood at the end of the dock. Thatcher. Watching her in the sleet-blurred darkness. The boat was only ten yards offshore and he leapt into the sea and surged his way toward her, his big arms scissoring the water.
She said, “No, no, no,” and unlocked the anchor reel and began winding it in as fast as she could manage. She dared a glance overboard just as a big hand rose out of the water and snatched hold of an algae-slimed fender. Up from the chop rose the bearded face. Thatcher spit water from his mouth and tried to haul himself up to the gunwale.
And then, in a rush, her daughter appeared beside her. Holding a filet knife. She slashed once, twice, three times at the anchor line— and it snapped free. The boat chugged suddenly forward. At that Ellie charged and kicked Thatcher full in the mouth, knocking him back into the waves that rose into points like teeth.
The ship motored blindly out to sea and Ellie blinked through the sleet at her daughter, already worried about the scars she would carry inside her and how the memory of this place would stain her, as the girl gripped the knife and stared blankly out into the windswept night and said, “We can go now. We fed her. And now, for a little while anyway, she’s done being hungry.”