Chapter 29
That night Harper found herself alone in the locked cell of a room.
Her feet were bare but for the woolen socks, soaked through with the damp.
Her toes had long ceased screaming for comfort and were not usable, aching pain.
Harper knew if she were to look there would be tips of blackened dead flesh, which was only going to spread up her feet and legs.
And if there was a God anywhere in this life, straight to her heart before the wooden door opened again.
The man with the rough beard and foul breath would be back before long.
And suddenly the veil thinned between Harper’s waking life and this dream-vision and she knew the man’s name.
Father Taine, father, husband, rapist, monster, tyrant.
Father would be back soon. Harper’s dream-self quaked with fear.
On the other side of the door, she could hear the faint murmur of the women, and Harper found she knew their names as well: Huldah, Elizabeth, Sarah, Fawn, Constance, Perne.
They would not open the door, they would not defy Father Taine.
She found her mind cycling. The man with the apple-green eyes, was he alive?
Why hadn’t he come for her? She tried to move her frozen hands or blink her eyes and found she had no control over this form, just the faint awareness that she knew things that she could not know, and felt things that were not real in her waking life.
The light under the door swayed and moved with the motion of the ship, and Harper curled tight into a ball as she stared at this only connection to the outside world.
She longed for her mother, gone long ago from her dream-self, only the faint way she’d brush her long hair and the feel of her work-hardened hands on her face left to remember. The edge of a lullaby in her ear:
Baloo, balilli, baloo balilli
Baloo, balilli, baloo ba
Dey’ll sheen ower da cradle
In a rush, Harper’s waking self intruded. She was overwhelmed with the smell of salt and soil, her own mother’s lost touch, the dream voice replaced with her own mother’s low, husky tone singing a fairy rhyme:
Sofeu unga ástin mín
úti regnie graetur
The collision of the two worlds was unbearable and Harper strained to wake.
The waking memory and the dream world both too strong, this girl’s desperation too much to bear.
She would die when the morning light filled the chamber and the others came for her.
Harper would never hear her mother’s voice again, never hear the fairy song …
outside the rain is weeping … the dream girl would suffer at first light, she would be tortured, and not allowed to die.
Harper’s waking self was helpless to intervene.
She could no more save this girl than her mother, her father.
… Harper was overwhelmed with a wave of rolling grief.
She woke in her bed, tears running down her cheeks, the chill of the cell clinging to her toes and fingertips.
As the dream uncoiled, and waking awareness filled her senses, she was aware of a sound, faint at first and then more urgent.
Someone was shouting. Harper shook off the dream haze and tried to focus out of the night cell with its slip of muted light and into her bedroom with its wool blanket, the crescent moon in her window.
The sound snapped her back into the here and now.
Kyle. It was Kyle and he was shouting undecipherable words, the sound of something heavy and wooden falling over, glass breaking.
Harper startled awake and stumbled out of bed.
From the doorway, she saw utter chaos. Kyle was waving a wooden stick they used to prop the door wildly about the room.
A smashed table lamp littered the floor, glass catching the overhead light.
A chair lay on its side. Kyle was wild-eyed.
He saw her in the doorway and dropped the stick; it clattered to the floor.
He fluttered his arms helplessly, looking suddenly very young, like a child caught in a nightmare.
“Kyle!” Harper said firmly, sliding on her slippers and carefully crossing the glass-littered floor. “Kyle,” she said again, more gently. He looked at her with a lost look in his eyes.
“I saw it. I saw it,” he said in a broken voice that tore into a sob.
Harper pulled him to her and held him as she might a child. “What did you see?” She led him to the couch, making sure it was free of glass before easing him down. “What did you see?”
“A monster.” Kyle shook with another involuntary sob, and Harper put her arm around him until he stopped shaking.
As he calmed, she started to lead Kyle back to his room.
They were interrupted as the ground beneath them seemed to roll like the waves on the Atlantic.
Harper held Kyle tight and planted her feet firmly as the motion continued.
A clock on the far wall shelf fell to the ground, the glass face joining the mess on the floor.
Polly appeared in the window, her fur sticking up wildly, eyes wide.
A book on the edge of the coffee table fell to the floor.
Harper held Kyle steady as the waves subsided.
“C’mon. Before the aftershocks hit.” She pulled him into his room and helped him back to bed.
“I … don’t understand what’s happening. I feel like a kid,” he whispered.
“That’s okay,” Harper said softly. “You saw something that frightened you. Rest.”
Kyle nodded miserably, exhausted.
Later, after Harper had swept the room amidst a few trembling aftershocks and checked the perimeter of the house, she sat in front of her laptop.
She knew what Kyle had seen. She didn’t know if Polly had brought the bark-covered creature in or if had entered of its own will, but she was sure that was what had inspired Kyle’s mayhem.
He wasn’t prepared to see an impossible thing.
Shuri had been ready for unlikely things.
Harper had no explanation as to why she had accepted their presence, but combined with the earthquake, Kyle was broken. Akiel’s text blinked in front of her:
I’m pulling him. No need for him to be there for the storm, you can return too—Your choice. I’ll use him in the lab, send him back as the weather clears. We’ll get Kyle from the morning ferry.
Harper stared at the words and texted back:
I’m staying.