Unwritten Books 2 - Fathom Five (8 page)
“We must hurry, Peter,” she breathed. “The portal awaits!”
“Portal? What portal?”
The fog veiled all. Peter could barely see where to put his feet on the ground. He could no longer tell where he was in relation to the road, but he could hear the sounds of waves against a rocky shore, and the squeal of seagulls, and he figured they must be approaching Clark’s Point.
The pathway levelled out and they stepped onto a ledge. The rocks of the escarpment rose sheer on his right, topping out ten feet above him. On his left, the ground dropped away to nothing. The ledge curved away in front, making his small patch of land look like the only solid ground in existence. Somewhere beneath the sea of white the waves of Georgian Bay rolled.
He pressed himself against the rocks, stabbed by a pang of vertigo.
Fiona smiled at him. “Don’t be afraid. We’re almost home.”
Peter stared at her. “Where?” He had a sinking sensation the answer was “down there.”
“You shall see.”
She let go of his hand, stepped to the edge of the cliff, threw back her head, and sang.
Fiona’s voice was barely on the edge of human hearing. There was no melody. It was a chord, higher than a piccolo and more beautiful. It made the fog roll back. The water below grew more distinct until it was as though they were standing in the eye of a small hurricane.
Then Fiona leaned forward. For one heart-pounding moment, Peter thought she was falling, but she cast her arms out and jumped into the air. Her body glowed, and then flew apart into a dozen sprites of light that drifted down out of sight.
Then Fiona’s voice rang in his ears. “
Now it’s your turn, Peter. Come to the edge.
”
Peter leaned out and looked down. The rock wall stretched below him fifty feet. What looked sheer from the ground was full of outcroppings and protrusions of stone from this perspective. Whitecapped waves lapped at a narrow stone beach.
Vertigo tugged at him. He staggered back and gripped the wall as best he could with his hands and his back. His breath came in short, sharp gasps.
But he could hear her voice in his head. “
Come
,” it whispered. “
See, the portal is opening.
”
The compulsion to look returned. Keeping a hand on the wall, he leaned out and looked down. In the centre of the small cove, the water was bubbling and frothing, as though there was a ship beneath the waves, leaking air.
“
Come home, Peter
.”
“Peter!”
Peter whipped around. Rosemary was standing on the ledge with him, her face pale, and the knuckles of her right hand white where she gripped the rocks. She reached out with her left.
Peter fumbled with his words. “Rosemary, how … go away. Leave me —”
Rosemary took a step towards him. “Peter, please, you don’t need to do this!”
“Get out of here,” Peter gasped. “I don’t want you to see me.”
“I’m not leaving without you!”
Peter looked down. His knees wobbled. He pitched back into the wall.
“Rosemary, get out of here!” he yelled. “I have to do this.”
“No, you don’t!”
“She’s calling me, Rosemary! I have to go to her!”
Rosemary shouted over him. “There are people you can talk to. There are other ways you can deal with this! For God’s sake, Peter, don’t jump!”
Fiona’s voice rang in his ears. “
Don’t listen to her, Peter!
”
Peter gulped air into his lungs. He pushed away from the rock face and straightened up.
“Peter!” Rosemary was crying.
The voice grew dark. “
Enough! Come, Peter!
”
The vertigo grabbed his legs. He staggered forward, arms cartwheeling. He tilted, beyond his balance, beyond any hope of getting back. He screamed.
Rosemary leapt forward, grabbing at him. She caught his arm. Peter’s stomach lurched as he saw her feet slip on the leaf-covered edge.
“No!”
Peter and Rosemary’s screams echoed as they fell the fifty feet into the water.
R
osemary floundered, struggling for air and light.
She felt herself rising through the murk, towards a shimmering ceiling. Darkness pushed in on all sides.
Rosemary rocketed out of the water. She barely had time to breathe before falling back in.
She flailed and splashed, blind with spray. Hands clasped her arms and hauled her above the waves. The wind broke against her back, breathtakingly cold.
“Peter!” she gasped.
“Find your feet,” said a voice like a strict schoolteacher. “Put your feet down!”
Rosemary found ground beneath her feet. She was waist deep in the cold water. A hand pressed against her back. “Now, walk,” said the stern voice.
Rosemary tried. Then she bent double and threw up water. The voice sighed and pressed her forward, marching her to the shore.
They left the water, and Rosemary collapsed onto a flat stone. She curled up into herself, retching.
“You were a fool to follow us!” It was a woman’s voice, young and sweet as a girl’s, but with an edge of power and age. Rosemary rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. She sat up to stare.
A woman-creature glared at her with shark’s eyes. She was tall and thin, wearing green robes. Her skin was like sea glass, and her red hair was long enough to cloak her. Hair and robes billowed in the wind. She looked as though the waves would break her, but they didn’t dare.
“You wake at last.” The sea-woman sneered, baring white triangles of enamel. “Good.”
“Who … who are you?”
“Peter’s friend.”
“Where is he?”
“Safe,” the sea-woman replied. “Do not concern yourself with him. Worry about yourself. You are halfway between your world and mine. I have stayed back to show you the way home.”
“Wait a minute;
you
pulled Peter off that cliff?” All she had seen was Peter holding hands with a thickening of the fog, but this felt like the same being. Maybe it could take whatever shape it wanted, like something worse than a shark-woman. Rosemary swallowed hard, then squared her shoulders, and faced up to her. “You can’t just take him away. That’s kidnapping!”
“I am taking him home. You need to go to your home. Look around you.”
The tone of her voice gave Rosemary no choice but to look around.
She was sitting on a rock at the base of a line of cliffs stretching along the shore of an endless lake. The world was bathed in perpetual twilight, with no sun or stars in the sky. The dome overhead was a smooth navy blue, broken only at the cliff tops where clouds hung as thick as the fog around Clarksbury.
“That pathway will take you home.” The seawoman pointed to a gully cut into the cliff. There was a fin growing along the back of her arm. “It is difficult terrain, but you should make it. Don’t look back, for the path will vanish behind you.”
Rosemary shivered in the steady wind. “I’m not leaving without Peter.”
The woman’s smile wasn’t sympathetic. “Suit yourself. Good luck. It is a cold wind.” She walked backwards into the lake. “This place echoes memories. Don’t be ensnared.”
“Hey!” Rosemary scrambled to her feet. “Come back here!”
The sea-woman cast up her arms and the lake rose.
The wave dodged around her and charged at Rosemary. She barely had time to clutch at her glasses before the wall of water smashed her into the cliff face. Rosemary struggled against the suck of the undertow. Stones cracked against her legs and arms. Her lungs begged for air once more. Finally, the water receded, leaving Rosemary clinging to the flat stone, gasping.
The woman was gone. The only sound was the roar of the waves, and the whistle of the wind.
When she recovered her senses, Rosemary pulled away from the shoreline. She sat on a stone and tried to dry her glasses with her sopping cardigan before she realized that was silly. Blood trickled from a cut on her knee, and her head ached. The wind was so cold it burned her skin. And somewhere a bell tolled.
“Well,” she said at last. “That went well.” She sat shivering as she took recent events apart and put them back together again, trying to think of what to do next.
Around her, the fog that had been at the top of the cliffs descended, wrapping around her. The rocks seemed to dissolve like candle wax.
That woman had pulled her out of a lake. Not the same lake they had fallen into, but a lake nonetheless. And the woman had stepped back into that lake before leaving. Then there was the path the woman wanted her to take, without Peter. The direct opposite to that path was the lake.
That settled it. She had to get across that lake.
But how? A boat?
The bell tolled again.
Wait a minute. Where is that bell coming from?
She looked around, holding herself against the cold, but she was surrounded by fog now. Waves rolled in from nothing and broke at her feet. But the sound of the bell was as plain as day. It echoed from the cliff face behind her, and it was getting closer.
Then black burst out from the white: a threemasted schooner in full sail, its prow already above her. Rosemary rolled away, yelling, and covered her head. The ship bucked like a wounded animal. Wood crunched against stone. Rigging fell around her, bombarding her with sound. There was a snap of ropes and the plosh of objects hitting water. The masts toppled with the sound of timber, and Rosemary heard the screams of men.
Then the screaming stopped. Rosemary chanced a look up, and then stumbled to her feet. She gaped.
There was no sign of the ship that had broken on top of her, unless the shipwreck had occurred years ago. Instead, she stood in the middle of a graveyard of snapped masts. Multiple ships rested here. Nearest her, the wooden ribcage of a stern poked above the waves. Beyond the waves, the navy blue sky could be seen through holes in the metal hull of a tanker. Planks and chunks of metal littered the shore among large cargo boxes, some made of wood and others of corrugated metal. Several of the boxes had broken open and spilled out their contents. There were no bodies.
Rosemary drew her arms around herself. Her teeth chattered. She took a step, tripped, and fell on her face.
What was wrong with her? She struggled to her hands and knees, as her legs wouldn’t hold her up. Her fingers were numb. Her teeth were chattering so hard she could hardly breathe. It was so
cold
.
Cold. With a gasp, Rosemary looked at her fingertips. They had gone pale.
Hypothermia. The wind was strong and bitter. Worst of all, she was soaking wet. She needed shelter, dry clothes and a heat source. Now.
The gully looked very tempting, but to go along it meant leaving Peter behind forever. Besides, she doubted she could make it back to Clarksbury before she passed out. The means to save herself had to be here.
She stumbled among the wreckage, pulling aside planks, looking into crates. She fell several times, once into a tide pool. Each time, it was harder to get up.
Her hand fell upon something soft and she pulled it out. A blanket fluttered in the wind. She wrapped herself up, but it was too little, too late. Her fingertips were blue.
She peered into box after box, casting aside food canisters, boxes of nails, more blankets. Then, as she was about to toss aside another can, she stopped and stared at it with shaking hands.
The writing was decades old, though the metal shone like new. The words made Rosemary gasp with new hope. “S-s-st-terno!” Canned heat. She was halfway to being saved. Her eyes darted from container to container, looking for … oh, to be this close!
She let out a shuddering yell of delight and stumbled to a crate whose contents had spilled out and broken open. Thick wooden matches lay scattered about. She scooped up a dry box.
The beach had cut into the cliffs, and one could sit on stones beneath a rocky overhang, out of the wind. Rosemary ducked underneath. Using a nail, she pried open the can of Sterno and placed it on a dry stone. Her fingers could hardly hold a match, let alone strike it, but desperation drove her forward and she finally lit one. The can flared up in blue flame.
Rosemary breathed a shaky sigh of relief. She placed the flaming can just outside the overhang and started putting wood over the flames. The wood sputtered and smoked, but finally caught. The heat singed her cheeks, and burned away the fog, but she couldn’t stop shivering. Her clothes clung to her and felt like icepacks.
“I need dry clothes,” she gasped. “Or I need to dry these clothes.”
She stood up, almost banging her head on the overhang. With no thought of modesty, she threw her windbreaker, jeans, cardigan, t-shirt, shoes, underwear, and socks in a damp pile beside the fire. Soon she was wrapped in her blanket, wilting towards the heat.
The waves rumbled and crashed.
As she stared into the flames, the fog drew closer. Her vision blurred, and she tried to shake it clear. I mustn’t sleep, she thought. Worst thing to do if you have hypothermia. Just stay close to the bonfire … and remember.
