31 Liney To Transform
Liney
To Transform
I’ve never been one to scream. Too hard on my lungs. Too violent for my constitution.
Lying on the floor of the cave, my back to the sealed-off entrance, I try anyway. It starts as a whimper, then becomes a ragged cry, then the cave walls fill with echoes of my raw howling. The echoes redouble themselves until I’m a chorus of banshees.
How much more can be ripped from me before there’s nothing left but this sound?
My fingernails are jagged and the pads of my fingers are bloody from scraping at the rough stone wall. I try to catch my breath, but a choking wet sound in my throat won’t stop.
Grief spouts out of me. Tears, spit, blood. Why did I think I could beat this place?
I should’ve prepared Bridget for Chamomile. She could’ve defended herself. Recognized the danger before it was already grabbing fistfuls of her hair. I should’ve run away with her, not dallied to bring Douglas’s skull up only for his ghost to be captured.
My jaw shudders with the tension I force on it, yet I’m still making ungodly noises.
There’s no ice in me anymore. This magnitude of guilt has flooded me, breaking through me like a river does a glacier.
I let in the water that’s been pounding against my mind since my drowning.
Fire can suffocate itself. But water only grows with more poured in until it’s an ocean.
A force of nature beyond the meddling of men or demons.
In ice, rain, snow, fog—it covers the world. I’m only one girl. Forever drowning.
Snow swirls at the entrance of the cave as the water swirls inside me. There’s nothing left to believe in. Not my prayers or my sister. Not even my Bridget.
Her name startles me back to reality. If Chamomile had taken me instead, Bridget wouldn’t sit here. She’d find me. That’s what makes her brave and me a mouse.
But if my sister can turn into a monster, and Chamomile can come back from the dead, then perhaps a mouse can become something greater.
My muscles ache and my lungs burn, but I stand. Bridget isn’t yet lost. I won’t believe it until I see the lights from her eyes fade. And God—
No more prayers. If I’m to pray to anything, it’s to my own resolve.
I walk out of the cave. The snow has thickened.
It’s a dangerous day on the water, the flurries so thick I can’t see the mainland.
The cold should prickle my skin, but I’m numb to the gales.
My whole body, as I walk back to the infernal lighthouse, doesn’t feel entirely part of me.
There’s a current inside me. I’m not afraid.
This separation between my body and my senses, allowing a force of nature to guide me, is a relief.
When I reach the lighthouse, I consider the options. Douglas spoke of something deeper under the lighthouse. A secret passage or hidden chamber? The cave went underneath the island. Is there a connection here?
It’s nearly too dark to see anything in the basement. Nothing but damp stone walls. I nearly trip on Douglas’s bones. He doesn’t appear. Nothing illuminates the room.
I stamp my feet against the stones on the floor, seething at the burn blisters that have begun to form, and grasp any edge on the walls. Nothing budges. If there’s something bigger than this place, it’s beyond what my bleeding, mortal fingers can clutch.
I need another plan. If that doesn’t work, yet another. I channel Elle’s resolve. I understand now how it feels to need someone. How that urge can rot you from the inside out.
I close my eyes. Nothing has granted me power.
I don’t commune with a deity or demon. I won’t open another opportunity for Chamomile’s meddling.
While Elle may control, somehow, the island and the lighthouse, I center myself on my constant.
My fear, my refuge, and nearly my final resting place.
Nothing of heaven or hell. Only the sea and the woman I want to cross it with.
The crashing waves, the whitecaps, the rain that melts snow, and my tears that returned to the ocean. All of its eternal cycle. Could an ounce of its strength grant me clarity? I imagine it drinking my sorrows, nearly consuming me whole, and coming to my aid.
This harbor is the deepest in the world. If anything can touch where Bridget’s been taken, it’s here.
Something bright makes me open my eyes. A brilliant line traces up and down the wall like cracks in a dam. It reaches out through the wall yet not into the ground or ocean beyond. Are these the layers that Douglas spoke of?
The seam glows. First the red I’ve loved and feared, then it settles on a color I’ve grieved for: the lavender of home, of her.
She comes barreling out, feet first, tackling me to the ground with her force. She’s here, she’s breathing, and I’m cradling her to my chest. I glance up long enough to see something dark on the other side of the seam, but then it closes, and the world is only us.
Bridget clutches me, wild-eyed and panicked. I soothe her, or try to, but I’m also scrabbling to make sure she’s real. Her arms find my waist, and she buries her face in the crook of my neck. I hold her close on the basement floor until our heartbeats fall back into a seminormal rhythm.
“Let’s get upstairs,” I whisper.
I rise, so does she, and we leave the basement.
Bridget’s legs are unsteady on the ladder rungs.
When I take her to the chesterfield and sit her down, kneeling before her, I want to burst, to tell her what I learned, of how I’m a waterfall and a flood and a stream all in a person.
But the expression in her eyes isn’t one of joy.
There are edges of relief but something darker too.
“What happened?” I ask.
“That woman dragged me to hell, I think. I don’t know.
She brought me to a man I’d never seen before.
I tried to get away when she handed me over to him, but his grip was even tighter than hers.
He didn’t say a word to her, just turned around with me in tow.
But I saw her change. Not a woman anymore.
A doll. Ceramic, maybe? Something a child plays with, tossed aside in the tunnel.
He brought me to the edge of this huge underground lake. Elle was there, waiting.”
Chamomile was a doll? A tool against me and my sister, wedging us apart. A trick.
“He spoke to Elle like he knew her,” she continues, shaking her head. “Like he could control her. It wasn’t Mr. Douglas. Someone else.”
Thomas? “What did he look like?”
She describes ash-white hair, a gaunt face, and bright eyes with no color. Not Thomas.
“He said a lot I didn’t understand,” she admits, as though it were a flaw not to process otherworldly horrors. “But the important thing: He told her to sacrifice me. To create…more of this place. A…a network of…suffering, I guess? But she didn’t, Liney. She saved me.”
It’s not in me to hope anymore. “Who?”
“Elle! She did something, opened something so I could—”
“No, that was me!” I can’t get the words out fast enough, rapids of excitement course through my veins. “I can’t say how. I concentrated on the ocean, and you, and suddenly—”
“You what? Slow down. Come here.”
She holds me as I explain the phenomenon.
Bridget’s brow furrows. “That’s amazing. Truly. But…are you sure it was you?” She explains Elle creating something in the floor, telling her to find me.
“A seam beneath you?” I ask. The more I think on it, the less it makes sense that I’d done anything but hope.
Bridget squeezes me again, seeming a little amused at my disappointment. “Do you think”—Her brow knits—“Did you both make it? Together?”
Was this the last effort I made with my sister? Working together to guide her chaos to my heart?
Bridget grabs me and holds me tight. I lean into the embrace. She’s safe. That’s what I need to focus on. The currents in me flow at dizzying speed with her so close, a whirlpool.
“You’re sure she did that intentionally?” I whisper, as though if I’m quiet enough it might be true. “Brought you here? To me?”
Bridget leans back and smiles at me, tears brimming in her eyes. I could look into them until my last breath. Until the ocean boils over. They feel like the same thing.
“I think so, Liney.” Bridget’s mouth sets in a determined line, and she grips my hands. “I don’t know what happened to your sister next, but that man offered her a place by his side. Power beyond this island. By not killing me, she refused. If you need to stay, to find out…”
I’m tempted. To leave this place without seeing her again, to always wonder what happened to her, may drive me mad. Yet can I trust my sister one more time? She’s misused my good faith every day on this island. Lied to me. Hurt me, though she’d say it was all in service of my survival. Necessary.
But for all my threats against our sisterhood, that connection is deeper than simple blood. Her protection comes with its poisons, but she did save me. Misguided as she might be, there was never a time in this chaos that she abandoned me. And if Bridget can still see the humanity in her, I can too.
“You don’t need to stay with me,” I tell Bridget. “You don’t owe her anything.”
“I know,” she says, squeezing my hands. “Let’s find her.”