24 Liney To Bathe #3
I get out of the bed. Bridget isn’t lying behind me in the dream. It’s a relief, though I miss her presence. The less I see of her here, in the unreal, the more I can count on her being real.
A light comes through the cracks of the trapdoor. It burns brighter until my bleary eyes hurt and my heart races and I scream.
The noise carries through into the waking world, strangled at the back of my gummy throat. Bridget’s turned away from me, and her form shudders awake in surprise.
“What? Where?” she calls out, turning to hover over me, inspecting my face.
I shake my head. I can’t get the words out. My rabbit heart beats in triple time. I can’t get enough air.
“B-breathe,” I stutter. “Can’t—”
Bridget tugs the blankets away and grabs my hands. “Push into my hands,” she says, softer now. “Push to breathe out, pull to breathe in.”
I push my palms into hers, interlock our fingers, and pull her back, until my gasps catch step with her rhythm. The physical action grounds me. I slowly breathe deeper. My head breaks through the surface of fear, and then I don’t need to concentrate to breathe. I release her hands in awe.
“How did you know to do that?”
Bridget shrugs, looking almost sheepish in the dim light. “It felt like what would help.”
“I’ve never recovered that quickly.” I’m in awe of her as she settles down next to me, the danger subsided.
“What happened?”
I explain the dream, the light.
“Have you ever felt something wrong here?” Bridget asks after a long pause.
I laugh. Plenty wrong. An entire island of wrong. But that light did me no harm. Why was I so scared? “Nothing like in my dream.”
“You’ve got to wonder, right? I mean it’s called Devils Island, Liney.”
“That’s a mistranslation.” The correction is instinctual from how many times Elle explained it to me in our first weeks here. “It was called Isle Verte, for the forest, then Rous Island for a captain who owned it, then a man named Deval or Deville bought it—”
“The naming of a thing is important,” Bridget interrupts, her gaze grave as she levels hers with mine again. “It doesn’t matter if the evil came first or second to the name.”
That doesn’t sound right to me. People put names on places, not devils. “So there’s an evil presence in the basement?” I ask for clarity. “And my dream told me after a year of nothing?”
Bridget bites at the inside of her cheek, her gaze shifted away from me.
“Go on,” I prod. “We should consider anything, given what we’ve seen.”
“Do you know of any ghosts or spirits here?”
I shake my head. There was Chamomile, but I’ve accepted she was a specter of the mind, not the soul.
“Who was here when you arrived?” Bridget prompts. She’s searching for something, but I’ve got nothing to give.
“No one.” Like the name of the island, it’s the answer I was told when I asked last year. Elle checked on the lighthouse while I cowered in the boat and reported no one inside.
“How did Elle know to come here? That you wouldn’t be caught?” Bridget continues, each question faster than the last. “And if no one was here, who owns all the men’s clothes you both have?”
“There was an obituary in the paper.” I sound like Elle. Sharper. “The keeper drowned trying to save a fishing boat. Elle knew we could come here to hide with the supplies he’d left.”
Bridget considers this, then shakes her head. “Why did no one come to take his place? Surely, they need a keeper out here?”
“Someone asked after the keeper,” I offer. “The man I told you about: Mr. Croxton.”
“Why would he have to ask if it was known he was dead? Mr. Croxton would’ve known, right?” Bridget’s tone is almost too patient. Leading me to a conclusion she’s already come to. To the impossible.
“Perhaps he missed the obituary,” I offer between gritted teeth. “It was tiny.”
“Did you see the obituary?”
“The light was still being lit,” I continue in a rush, ignoring her. “Perhaps he believed the keeper had washed up, come back, and kept working.”
“Did Elle show you the obituary?” Bridget presses. She says it gently, yet it rubs me rough with embarrassment. I should’ve asked these questions. “I don’t think that—”
“Stop it! ”
Bridget leans back, hurt clear in her scrunched brows.
My breath comes ragged, as though I’ve run instead of shouted. I don’t shout. Certainly not at Bridget. But I don’t want to know what she’s deduced. I look to the chesterfield and the trapdoor beneath instead.
“I’m sorry. This is a lot,” I say slowly, drawing my outburst back like a net. Unlike Elle, my anger catches nothing. “We can keep talking, or we can go find out.”
I can’t believe I’m suggesting this. There are few places Elle has forbidden me from that I still respect, but this one is a hard line to cross. I look back to Bridget, to her neck. My sister’s hands were pressed against it yesterday.
Elle lost the right to keep secrets. Truth and lies have mixed into sea-foam between us.
Bridget nods. There’s already forgiveness in a small smile that spreads as she closes the distance between us and threads her fingers between mine.
We push the chesterfield out of the way.
I must find the truth below, myself.