Ivy
Dolly walks with me all the way home, talking in a never-ending stream about the properties of blood.
Coming from someone who looks like a pink Barbie, it’s a jarring contradiction.
She's cotton candy wrapped around macabre interests.
When we reach my gate, she peels off toward her own home, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Just a few steps away, she turns and smiles.
“It’s nice to have someone new on the island,” she says genuinely, before flipping her hair and continuing on.
Dolly is strange, pink, and a little scary. But she’s also kind. Maybe I could get used to whatever this is.
Just as I think it, something catches my eye. A shadow on the edge of the woods. A man. The same man I saw last night. It might be the same man from the café line, but I can’t be sure, and even I can acknowledge that feels paranoid.
I blink, and he’s gone. I scan the treeline to the water’s edge, but there’s nothing. Dolly’s door opens as she steps inside her little pink cottage, and I hurry along my own cobblestone path, not wanting to be caught outside alone in the failing light.
Setting the books down on the little round table, I flick the light switch inside the cottage, and nothing happens. A power outage? I saw the circuit breaker box yesterday.
Thankfully, it isn’t so dark. Light still slants through the windows that look out over the lake.
I find a full pack of matches in a drawer and a plethora of unused candles around the house.
I guess Claw and Law expected outages. Lighting one, I open the closet where all the utilities are stored.
I flip every switch in the breaker box on and off.
No circuits appear to have blown. I wonder if it’s island-wide. I head upstairs with a few candles.
Once lit, they flicker around the room, casting shadows and adding to the eerie feeling I’ve had since I arrived.
It eased in the company of Layla and even Dolly, but now it’s back tenfold.
I slip on my pajamas, just cloth shorts and a tank top, wrap myself in a blanket, and curl up in the wingback chair next to one of the big picture windows in the loft.
I pull the top book off the pile Layla gave me and open it without reading the title or the description.
I enjoy going into books blind if I trust the person who chose them, and Layla seemed to understand exactly what I wanted.
For a while, I read a paragraph and then scan the scene outside. Another paragraph, another look. From the angle of my cottage on the bluff, I can see the lake, the lighthouse, the long slope of the bluff down to the forest, and even Dolly’s little pink house at the tree line.
On the fourth or fifth scan, my eyes stop on something out in the water near the lighthouse.
Something protruding from the surface. Long and thick.
I can’t make out anything except its shadowed outline against the setting sun, but it looks like it could be a large rope.
Until it moves. I startle back. It writhes up and down and then gently descends back into the lake.
I try to dismiss this. Even if a squid or whatever got big enough to have a tentacle that size, it wouldn’t be here. This is a lake. An enormous lake, but it’s fresh water. The worst things living in these waters are the invasive zebra mussels that can cut your feet.
Movement in my peripheral vision pulls my eyes away from the spot where the wriggling thing went under.
Light pours from the back door of Dolly’s house, proving not everyone has lost power. Dolly steps out in a short, lacy pink nightgown.
Of course it’s pink.
In her hands, she holds a saucer of some dark liquid that sloshes a little as she sets it down on the porch planks. The kitchen light catches it, and it shines red. Bright red. And my mind immediately goes to the first red liquid I know.
Blood.
I almost dismiss the idea before Dolly confirms it. She kneels and produces a small pocketknife from somewhere. The steel gleams in the last of the day’s light. She pricks the end of her ring finger and lets several drops fall into the saucer.
I gasp and back away from the window. A bright light shines in at me. I let out a small scream, convinced someone is shining a flashlight in my face.
But it’s the lighthouse beam sweeping across the water. The last of the sun is swallowed by the horizon.
My hand presses over my heart. Whatever was in the water is gone now, and it’s too dark to see anything at Dolly’s since she’s turned off her kitchen light.
Just when I think I’ve found a little corner of this place I might get used to, something like this happens. I stay up reading until sleep pulls me under.