Daniel Weaver lay awake for what felt to him like a very long time, musing on all that he’d heard. The earlier conversation, he sensed, was something to do with Karis. Was she the one to whom they’d made the promise? And what kind of promise had they made, if it involved him? The answer prowled as a presence on the edge of his consciousness, but he would not, or could not, allow it into the light.
In time he fell asleep, and dreamed confused dreams, until he was drawn back to wakefulness by the sound of his mother’s alarm clock in the next room, except that when he opened his eyes the dark was too deep for it yet to be morning, and the sound was coming not from inside the house, but outside.
He pushed back the comforter. He climbed from his bed. He walked to the window and pulled back the drapes.
There, on the windowsill, smeared with dirt, stood the toy phone.
It was ringing.
IN HER BEDROOM IN Vermont, Sam was roused from sleep by the sound of a telephone. It wasn’t familiar to her, not like her mother’s cell phone, or her grandparents’, or even the landline in the main house that no one seemed to use, but which her grandfather refused to get rid of because, he said, “you never know,” whatever that might mean.
The ringing of the phone came from far away, and had an unpleasant, jangling tone. Sam didn’t like it. She wished it would stop. She was weary, and it wasn’t even close to morning. It appeared to be coming from outside her window, but that couldn’t be right, not unless someone was in the garden, and anyone who was had no reason to be.
Quietly, Sam got out of bed and padded to the window. She and her mother lived in converted stables adjacent to Sam’s grandparents’ property, linked to it by a glass-enclosed walkway that doubled as a conservatory. Sam’s room was on the second floor, separated from her mother’s by a small bathroom. The bedroom window was a mix of stained and clear panes, recently replaced following an incident involving a bird strike earlier in the year.
Sam opened the window. The garden beyond was dark, and she could see no signs of movement, but still the sound of the phone came, although it was no clearer for being unimpeded by glass. It might have been coming from under water, so distorted was it.
Sam turned to the figure sitting on the windowsill: her half sister, Jennifer, her face glistening behind the strands of hair that overhung it, concealing the worst of the damage inflicted on her by the Traveling Man so many years before.
Jennifer, who walked between worlds.
“Why are you here?” Sam asked.
Jennifer reached out and took Sam’s hand. Her touch was cold, but not lifeless. Jennifer’s body appeared to exist in a state of soft vibration, as though a small electrical charge were constantly being passed through it. And although Sam had no fear of Jennifer, even loved her in her way, still she did not enjoy physical contact with her. It made her feel dizzy, and caused her head to ache.
But sometimes it was easier for Jennifer to communicate through touch. Jennifer was a creature of emotions and impulses. Jennifer didn’t think so much as feel.
Now Sam was made to feel too.
The lake by which Jennifer sat, watching the dead pass, keeping vigil as they were called to the sea; the approach of Jennifer’s mother, or some manifestation of her, leading an unknown woman by the hand; an exchange of words, of concerns, with Jennifer by the water; then the departure, the two older women returning to the place whence they came, with a pause only for the familiar exchange between Jennifer and her mother.
how is your father?
alive
and will you continue to stay with him?
yes
if you choose to leave, you have only to say
i won’t abandon him
then goodbye
No kisses, no embraces. But then, this was no longer really Jennifer’s mother. It retained her form, and some of her memories, but one could not emerge unaltered from the Sea Eternal. To enter it was to be lost, the dissolution gradual but ultimately entire. Each time Jennifer’s mother came back, she brought with her less of her old self. In the end, Jennifer knew, her mother would no longer be able to recall her at all, or the man she had once called “beloved,” the father Jennifer and Sam shared.
The contact between Sam and Jennifer was briefly broken.
“Who was the woman with her?” Sam asked.
her name is karis
“And what does Karis want?”
for the sad part of her to rest
Jennifer touched her sister again, this time just brushing the back of her hand with an index finger, and Sam understood why the woman named Karis had come to Jennifer for help. In dying, Karis had gone to the sea, but she had left something of herself behind, a vestige entombed in a hole in the ground, surrounded by high trees and the cries of birds. It was a dangerous entity, filled with fear and anger and hurt, but also with a terrible, thwarted love. It had desires. It wanted its offspring close. It sought to take its child and gather him to itself, to hold him amid dirt and roots, and there they would lie together, until in time the child, like this version of his mother, slept in the earth.
our father is trying to put a name to it
Not “her,” Sam noted: “it.” Whatever remained of Karis was female in appearance alone.
“Does our father know about the child?”
not yet
“You can’t let the boy go to it. It will kill him. It won’t mean to, but it will.”
i know
Only then did Sam notice that she could not hear the ringing of the phone. It had stopped.
And Jennifer was no longer present.