The Mammoth Book of Terror (62 page)

HURTSS ME MERYMORE THAN CAN NO

NO HELP NO HELLP ME

She laid down the sheet of paper and tore another from her pad, the pad she used for her afternoon lessons, spelling and arithmetic, and slid it beneath the door to Avery.

“Avery, you
knew you
couldn’t bear the key. You knew it had to be me or mother,
didn’t
you? That it had to be a woman?”

Again the scritching, and the paper came back to her even stickier than before.

HAD TO TRY MOTER WOULD NOT LISSEN SO

I HAD TOO TRIE

“Oh, Avery,” Meredith said, “I’m sorry,” speaking so quietly that she prayed he would not hear, and there were tears in her eyes, hot and bitter. A kind of anger
and a kind of sorrow in her heart that she’d never known before, anger and sorrow blooming in her to be fused through some alchemy of the soul, and by that fusion be transformed into a pure
and golden hate.

She tore another page from the pad and slipped it through the crack between the floor and the attic door.

“I need to know what to
do
, Avery. I’m reading the newspapers, but I don’t understand it all. Everyone seems think war is coming soon, because of the assassination in
Sarajevo, because of the Kaiser, but I don’t
understand
it all.”

It was a long time before the paper came back to her, smeared with slime and stinking of corruption, maybe five minutes of Avery’s scritching and his silent pauses between the scritching.
This time the page was covered from top to bottom with his clumsy scrawl.

TO LATE
IF
TO STOP WAR TOO LATE NOW

WAR IS COMING NOW CANT STP THAT MERRY

ALL
SET IN MOTION NINTH WAVE REMEMBER?

BUT MERYYOU CAN DONT LISSEN TO FADER

YOU
CAN
HOLD
NINE
THEE LINE STILL TYME

YOU OR MOTHER KIN HOLD THEE LIN STILL

IT DOEZ NOT HALF TO BE THE
LADST
WAR

When she finished reading and then re-reading twice again everything Avery had written, Meredith lay the sheet of paper down on top of the other two and wiped her hand on the floor until it
didn’t feel quite so slimy anymore. By the yellow-white light of the candle, her hand shimmered as though she’d been carrying around one of the big banana slugs that lived in the
forest. She quickly ripped another page from the writing pad and passed it under the door. This time she felt it snatched from her fingers and the scritching began immediately. It came back to her
only a few seconds later and the pencil with it, the tip ground away to nothing.

DUNT
EVER
COME BAR HERE AGIN MERRY

I LOVE YOU ALWAYTS AND WONT FERGET YOU

PROMISS
ME YOU WILL KNOT COME BACK

HOLD THEE LINE HOLD THE LINE

“I can’t promise you that, Avery,” she replied, sobbing and leaning close to the door, despite the smell so strong that it had begun burn her nose and the back of her throat.
“You’re my brother, and I can’t ever promise you that.”

Another violent thud against the door then, so hard that her father was sure to have heard, so sudden that it scared her, and Meredith jumped back and reached for the candlestick.

“I remember the ninth wave, Avery. I remember what you said – the ninth wave, greater than the last, all in flame. I
do
remember.”

And because she thought that perhaps she heard footsteps from somewhere below, and because she couldn’t stand to hear the frantic strangling sounds that Avery had begun making again,
Meredith hastily gathered up the sticky, scribbled-on pages from the pad and then crept down the attic stairs and back to her bedroom. She fell asleep just before dawn and dreamt of flames among
the breakers, an inferno crashing against the rocks.

March 1915

“This is where it ends,” Merry, her mother’s ghost said. “But this is where it begins, as well. You need to understand that if you understand nothing
else.”

Meredith knew that this time she was not dreaming, no matter how much it might
feel
like a dream, this dazzling, tumbling nightmare wide-awake that began when she reached the foot of the
rickety staircase leading her down into the deep place beneath the house. Following her mother’s ghost, the dim glow of a spectre to be her Virgil, her Beatrice, her guiding lantern until the
light from the pool was so bright it outshone Ellen Dandridge’s flickering radiance. Meredith stood on the pier, holding her dead mother’s barnacle- and algae-encrusted hand, and stared
in fear and wonder towards the island in the pool.

“The infinite lines of causation,” the ghost said. “What has brought you here. That is important as well.”

“I’m here because my father is a fool,” Meredith replied, unable to look away from the yellow-green light dancing across the stone, shining up from the depths beneath her bare
feet.

“No, dear. He is only a man trying to do the work of gods. That never turns out well.”

The black eye set deep into the flesh of Meredith’s palm itched painfully and then rolled back to show its dead-white sclera. She knew exactly what it was seeing, because it always told
her, knew how close they were to the veil, how little time was left before the breach tore itself open once and for all.

“Try to forget your father, child. Concentrate on time and space, on the history that has brought you here. All the strands of the web.”

Meredith squeezed the ghost’s soft hand and the dates and names and places spilled through her like the sea spilling across the shore, a flood of obvious and obscure connections, and she
gritted her teeth and let them come.

On December 2, 1870, Bismarck sends a Utter to Wilhelm of Prussia urging him to become Kaiser. In 1874, all Jesuits are ordered to leave Italy, and on January 8th, 1877, Crazy Horse is
defeated by the U.S. cavalry at Wolf Mountain in Montana. In June 1881, Austria signs a secret treaty with the Serbs, establishing an economic and political protectorate, and Milan is crowned King
of Serbia—

“It hurts,” she whispered; her mother frowned and nodded her head as the light from the pool began to pulse and spin, casting counterclockwise glare and shadow across the towering
rock walls.

“It will always hurt, dear. It will be pain beyond imagining. You cannot be lied to about that. You cannot be led to bear this weight in ignorance of the pain that comes with the
key.”

Meredith took another hesitant step towards the end of the short pier, and then another, and the light swelled angrily and spun hurricane fury about her.

“They are rising, Merry. They have teeth and claws sharp as steel and will devour you if you don’t hurry. You must go to the island now. The breach is opening—”

“I am afraid, mother. I’m so sorry, but I
am
afraid.”

“Then the fear will lead you where I can’t. Make the fear your shield. Make the fear your lance.”

Standing at the very end of the pier, and Meredith didn’t dare look down into the shining pool, kept her eyes on the tiny island fifteen or twenty feet away.

“They took the boat when you crossed over,” she said to her mother’s ghost. “How am I supposed to reach the gate when they’ve taken the boat away?”

“You’re a strong swimmer, child. Avery taughtyou to swim.”

A sound like lightning, and
No
, she thought.
I
can’t do that. I can do anything except step off this pier into that water with them. I can stand the pain,
but—

“If you know another way, Merry, then take it. But there isn’t much time left. The lines are converging.”

Merry took a deep breath, gulping the cavern’s dank and foetid air, hyperventilating, bracing for the breathless cold to come, all the things that her brother had taught her about swimming
in the sea. Together they’d swum out past the breakers, to the kelp forest in the deep water farther offshore, the undulating submarine weald where bat rays and harbor seals raced between the
gigantic stalks of kelp, where she’d looked up and seen the lead-pale belly of an immense white shark passing silently overhead.

“Time, Merry. It is all in your hands now. See how you stand alone at the center of the web and the strands stretch away from you? See the intersections and interweaves?”

“I see them,” she said. “I see them all,” and she stepped off into the icy water.

October 30th, 1883, an Austro-German treaty with Roumania is signed, providing Roumania defence against the Russians. November 17th, 1885, the Serbs are defeated at the Battle of Slivnitza
and then ultimately saved only by Austrian intervention. 1887 and the Mahdist War with Abyssinia begins. 1889 and a boy named Silas Desvernine sails up the Hudson River and first sees a mountain
where a namekss being of moonlight and thunder is held inside a black stone. August 1889 and her father is led to the edge of the Pacific by a Miwok guide. August 27th, 1891, the Franco-Russian
Entente—

The strands of the web, the ticking of a clock, the life and death of stars, each step towards Armageddon checked off in her aching head, and the water is liquid ice threatening to freeze her
alive. The tiny island seemed miles and miles away.

1895 August and Kaiser Wilhelm visits England for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. 1896, Charles E. Callwell of the British Army publishes
Small Wars – Their Principles and
Practice.
February 4th, 1899, the year Aguinaldo leads a Philippine Insurrection against U.S. forces—

All of these men and their actions. Lies and blood and betrayals,
links in the chain leading, finally, to this moment, to that ninth wave, mightier than the last, all in flame, and Meredith swallowed a mouthful of sea water and struggled to keep her head above
the surface.

“Hurry, child!” her mother’s ghost shouted from the pier. “They are rising,” and Meredith Dandridge began to pray then that she would fail, would surrender in
another moment or two and let the deep have her. Imagined sinking down and down for all eternity, pressure to crush her flat and numb, to crush her so small that nothing and no one would ever have
any need to harm her again.

Something sharp as steel swiped across her ankle, slicing her skin, and her blood mingled with the sea.

And the next stroke drove her fingers into the mud and pebbles at the edge of the island, and she dragged herself quickly from the pool, from the water and the mire, and looked back the way
she’d come. There were no demons in the water, and her mother’s ghost wasn’t watching from the pier. But her father was, Machen Dandridge and his terrible black book, his eyes
upturned and arms outstretched to an indifferent Heaven; she cursed him for the last time and ignored the blood oozing from the ugly gash in her right foot.

“This is where I stand,” she said, getting to her feet and turning towards the small cave at the center of the island, her legs as weak and unsteady as a newborn foal’s.
“At the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss.”

The yellow-green light was almost blinding and soon the pool would begin to boil.

“The ebony key to the first day and the last, the key to the moment when the stars wink out one by one and the sea heaves its rotting belly at the empty, sagging sky. The blazing key that
even angels fear to keep.”

For an instant, there was no cave, and no pool, and no cavern beneath a resentful, wicked house. Only the fire, pouring from the cave that was no longer there, to swallow her whole, only the
voices of the void, and Meredith Dandridge made her fear a shield and a lance, and held the line.

He read the newspapers.

He watched the stars for signs and portents.

When the moon was bright, the women still came to dance beside the sea, but he’d begun to believe they were only bad memories from some time before and so he rarely paid them any heed.

When the weather was good, he climbed the hills behind the house and sat at the grave of his dead wife and whispered to her, telling her how proud he was of Meredith, reciting snatches of
half-remembered poetry, telling her the world would come very close to the brink because of what he’d done, because of his blind pride, but, in the end, it would survive because of what their
daughter had done and would do for ages yet.

On a long rainy afternoon in May, he opened the attic door and killed what he found there with an axe and his old Colt revolver. He buried it beside his wife, but left nothing to mark the
grave.

He wrote long letters to men he’d once known in England and New York and Rio de Janeiro, but there were never any replies.

And time rolled on, neither malign nor beneficent, settling across the universe like the grey caul of dust settling thick upon the relics he’d brought back from India and Iran and the
Sudan a quarter of a century before. The birth and death of stars, light reaching his aging eyes after a billion years racing across the vacuum, and sometimes he spent the days gathering fossils
from the cliffs and arranging them in precise geometric patterns in the tall grass around the house. He left lines of salt and drew elaborate runes, the meanings of which he’d long since
forgotten.

His daughter spoke to him only in his dreams, or hers, no way to ever be sure which was which, and her voice grew stronger and more terrible as the years rushed past. In the end, she was a
maelstrom to swallow his withered soul, to rock him to sleep one last time, to show him the way across.