Chapter 55
That night Harper dreamt not of Meg or the familiar universe of her dreamscape for the first time in her memory.
Instead, she found herself in a small, scabby yard at the foot of a hill of volcanic rock.
Harper sat in a wooden lawn chair. She could see the wildness of Eldfell, the paths that led up and around, the lupine and avens dotting the landscape.
It was entirely silent save the occasional screech of the gannets overhead.
Inside the flat, she heard the sound of dishes being pulled from a cupboard.
Harper felt the awareness that this was a dream, and experimentally tried to pull herself from the lawn chair.
Her body was slow and clumsy, but it obeyed.
Harper stood, looking at the space around her, all of it familiar, all of it lost.
Harper turned around and in slow motion reached for the doorknob.
It took immense effort and it kept slipping from her hand, but she pulled the door open, revealing the room beyond.
As though walking on the moon, Harper entered the space and looked around.
A neat line of shoes sat in the doorway, waiting for their owners.
A woman stood with her back to Harper in a small, efficient kitchen.
A wooden dining table dotted the space and divided it from the couch and television to her left.
Harper turned back to the woman and watched her preparing something at the kitchen counter.
Her hair was the same as Harper’s, a dark amber, almost red, not quite black like her father’s.
Her bare arms and shoulders were pale, freckled.
She hummed as she worked, the song familiar but just out of reach to Harper’s mind.
Harper tried to speak, but there was no sound.
She raised a hand to her face and found only smooth skin where a mouth should be.
The woman turned, holding a plate that contained fresh flowers, blooms, spiny points of cacti and vines that hung off the edge of the plate.
Her face was a blur, a finger through paint, the features smeared and indecipherable.
She nodded, offering the fauna to Harper, her presence comforting, and calm.
Behind her, Harper felt her father’s strong hands on her shoulders.
She tried to turn, but her body disobeyed her command.
The warmth from his hands spread through her body.
Harper felt the wall of static that she had built to keep out reality melt.
Her heart and body felt wholly at ease. She was home.
A jolt broke through the scene and Harper felt herself ripped from her father’s embrace, the disorientation of freefall overtaking her as the flat, her mother’s smeared face, Eldfell, and the cry of the gannets were ripped away.
The message went immediately to received and the reply dots started blinking.
Yeah—one piece here, woke me up, knocked stuff off shelves
Harper looked around the room warily, waiting for aftershocks.
Same here, lights out. Can you check on Hedy a little later? Worried about her
The three dancing dots bounced up and down.
Yep. I’ll tell Einar you were worried about his mom, he’ll like that.
Harper choked on a laugh, making Polly glare at her interruption to the silence.
Thanks, yeah—I’m telling you, wrong tree, wrong forest.
Murphy replied with a smiley emoji and Harper put the phone back on the nightstand. She could feel the tug of sleep. She crawled back under the covers and Polly finally stood down and curled up next to her. A black-and-tan cat nosed its way into the room from the hallway and joined them on the bed.
As she closed her eyes, she heard a soft rap on the door.
“Harper? You okay in there?” Lady Bell’s voice was hesitant.
Harper sat up. “Yeah, I’m fine, come on in.”
The door cracked open to show Lady Bell’s face lit by a camping lantern. “Just checking. Big one that time.”
“5.0,” Harper said. “Really big—lights are out.”
“Anna’ll be on it, lights get knocked out pretty often up here in storms. I brought you this.” Lady Bell entered the room carrying another camping lantern. “I’ll leave it by your bed. Try to get some sleep.”
With that Lady Bell gave Harper a kindly look, a mother tucking in a child, and left the room. Harper found herself fighting tears out of the corner of her eyes and then flustered at her lack of control over her emotions. She closed her eyes and let her control slip away.
This time Harper was back in Meg’s world.
The awareness that this was a dream hung on but tentatively, it was a thing that her dream-self constantly forgot and remembered.
She was slumped against the brick wall of her cell.
The cold was numbing; a thin blanket was wrapped around her shoulders, the only protection from the bitter cold that hung in the stale air.
She wore a plain cotton shift and worn leather shoes on her feet.
She knew without looking that her toes had a creeping blackness that had spread from the tips to the joints and they had no feeling now.
It hurt to walk, but the pain was deep in her bones, the flesh was dead.
In her dream a creature scuttled across the floor, its long, hairless tail tracing her feet.
She shivered in disgust; the rats had finally defied the fairy magic and crossed the line of salt and mint.
She knew she was not long for this world and they were planning their feast. Already they bit her if she nodded off, her skin was raw with scabs from their attacks.
Her heart felt heavy, her whole body ached with pain that felt ancient and eternal.
She had always felt this terror, and she always would.
She thought of her Rory, far below in the depths of the sea, free from cold and hunger.
She longed for just one more whiff of his little-boy hair, just one more touch of his little fingers in her hand.
Beneath the ship the sea creatures swirled and danced.
Harper could hear them whisper to her through Meg’s ears.
The moonless night, two nights hence, they sang, and Harper could see the luminescent tentacles and eyes that held eternity as they hummed in the water beneath Meg’s cell.
Do not sleep, watch for us, two nights hence.
Harper tried to whisper back and found her words muted.
How would she know when the moonless night arrived?
There was no moon in this place, only blackness, only death.
Harper could feel Meg’s weakness, the hunger that had gone beyond pain and want and turned into a numb ache.
She could feel the burns and cuts that lined her arms and chest. Two nights hence, the moonless night.
Harper awoke to the lights blazing from the overhead fixture.
She glanced at her phone: 6:43. She must have forgotten to turn off the switch when she’d checked it last night.
She looked down at the bed. They’d been joined by a third cat, this one small and tawny colored.
Making sure not to disturb her bedmates, Harper pulled herself out of bed and flipped off the lights.
The sun was up, the light filtering weakly through the window.
The rain had stopped and Harper could see the rain-soaked landscape below.
The sky was gray, black clouds over the water, so the spell wouldn’t hold for long.
There were stacks of sandbags on the marble patio below, Anna’s work no doubt.
Harper had a sudden, electric memory of Anna’s hand on her face and she felt a warm glow spread through her chest. She was unaccustomed to being touched, her skin did not know how to react properly.
The heat spread to her face, and Harper was glad no one could see her flush.
Harper brushed her teeth, washed her face, and stood staring in the mirror.
She looked less zombie-like than she had the previous morning.
She had gone to sleep shortly after dinner the night before, no after-dinner talks or too much gin in the formal sitting room.
With a sort of disoriented realization, Harper said out loud, “It’s Monday.
It’s only been a weekend.” The words felt strange in her mouth.
She had arrived here on Friday night, but she felt like it had been months, years even.
The idea of leaving felt strange. This was her room, this was her home.
Harper stared at herself in the mirror and closed her eyes.
Behind her lids she could see Meg MacGruer’s thin, pale face, her mousy hair pulled back off her face.
She was a child. It was easy to forget in the reading of the journal and historical records that she was a seventeen-year-old child in 1690; that this man, Ewin Taine, had raped and tortured a child, and she was being made to answer for invisible crimes, every day knowing that no one had courage enough to fight for her.
Harper swallowed the emotion in her throat.