Rules for Vanishing

by Kate Alice Marshall

  ASHFORD: Lucy?

  SARA: No, her.

  She points to Becca and lets out a strangled laugh.

  SARA: But you don’t believe me. You think I’m the one who has something wrong with me, but it’s only what she’s done to me. She’s not even Becca, don’t you see that?

  Becca presses a hand to her mouth, turning her eyes away as if she can’t bear to look at her sister in this state.

  ASHFORD: If that’s the case, then it’s all the more reason for you to tell us what happened, Sara.

  Becca comes around the table, pulling a chair with her. She sits beside her sister and covers one of Sara’s hands with her own.

  BECCA: It’s going to be okay, Sara. But we have to talk about what happened.

  Sara lets out a sigh and leans her head against Becca’s shoulder.

  SARA: I’m so tired.

  BECCA: I know.

  Sara touches one of Becca’s bandages gingerly.

  SARA: Did I do that to you?

  BECCA: It’s not your fault.

  SARA: I did, didn’t I? I hurt you.

  BECCA: You saved me, Sara. You fought so hard to get to me. But you have to keep fighting a little longer. Think about the crows, Sara. Think about the crows, and write it down.

  SARA: You’ll stay?

  BECCA: I’m not going anywhere.

  In the corner, Abby leans against the wall, watching closely. Sara’s fingers tap out the now-familiar rhythm. Ashford slides a pen and paper toward her. She picks up the pen, but doesn’t yet begin to write.

  BECCA: We were getting ready to leave the road.

  SARA: That’s right. Lucy said she knew the way.

  BECCA: Mel and Kyle paired up. And then we argued about who was going to go with who. You said Anthony and I should go together, but I wanted to go with you. Except I didn’t want to say that, because that might make Anthony feel bad, and—

  SARA: And then Lucy chose.

  BECCA: Lucy chose you.

  Sara fixes Becca with a steady look.

  SARA: Are you sure about that, Rebecca? You don’t remember what happened in the dark, do you? It isn’t that I need to remember on my own. It’s that you can’t. You’ve tried, and you can’t.

  BECCA: Sara . . .

  SARA: Maybe I’m not the problem at all.

  BECCA: Do you really believe that?

  SARA: I don’t know. Do you?

  Becca looks away. Sara sighs.

  SARA: I’m sorry. I’ll try to remember. We were at the end of the road . . .

  She writes.

  27

  “I WILL GO with Sara,” Lucy says. It cuts short our argument—our not-quite-an-argument, none of us wanting to state anything too firmly because then we’d be forced to acknowledge that it is an argument. We’re standing by the ruined end of the road, and daylight is seeping over the horizon. It catches on Lucy’s skin and slides over it the way it should, and a tension I have been holding in my chest without realizing it eases. I’m not sure why, except that it has something to do with sunrise—and with bones.

  “Are you sure?” I ask. “Becca’s more experienced.”

  “All the more reason to spread out our knowledge,” Lucy says. She glances at Kyle and Mel, who paired up without any discussion or objections. “It’s unlikely we’ll be able to stick together once we leave the road. I’ll do my best to keep you all in sight, but we need to plan to be alone in our pairs.”

  “So how do we find our way? How do we stay alive?” Mel asks.

  “You need to keep your destination fixed in your mind,” Lucy says. “The gates of Ys. Do whatever you need to in order to keep that name in your mind. There are still traces of the road. Try to follow them. They’ll look different to all of us. But the rules are the same. Stay to where the path should be, and you’ll be safe. Or safer.”

  “This sounds impossible,” Mel says.

  “But it’s not. Other people have gotten off,” Becca replies. I find myself nodding.

  “There’s one more gate before the gates of Ys,” Lucy says. “It’s wrecked, but obvious. If you get there, stay there. It’s a safe point and we can find each other again. Past that is the dark. The last stretch before we reach the gates of Ys.”

  “And then?” I ask.

  Lucy hesitates. “I’ve never gotten that far,” she says. “I lost my partner. I couldn’t get through the dark. But I think if you get through the last gate, if you get to Ys itself, you can just . . . leave.”

  “Sounds straightforward,” Mel says drily.

  “It sounds like something we can’t possibly prepare for,” Becca says. “Which means that we should just go for it, before we talk ourselves out of it.”

  “I agree,” Anthony says. “We can do this. And dark or no dark, whatever you do, don’t let go of your partner’s hand. We survive by sticking together.”

  “Don’t let go,” I echo.

  Lucy nods, smiles encouragingly, and reaches out her hand to me. I hesitate the barest fraction of a moment before taking it.

  I hardly hear the click of Becca’s camera.

  The light is strengthening. It makes Lucy almost glow, her veins a blue tracery under her milk-white skin. Her hand is warm and very much alive, but still the hair on the back of my neck prickles, and I cast an uncertain look at Becca. But she is busy putting away the camera and whispering with Anthony. Which of them is confessing worry and which offering encouragement, I’m not sure.

  “Let’s begin,” Lucy says primly, settling a cloth satchel over her shoulder. She gives me a dimpled smile, waves farewell to John, and takes a prancing step. I follow behind less gracefully. We pick our way over the last few contiguous stones of the road. I try to make out the shape of it snaking through the trees, but I can only be certain of fragments here and there.

  “We’ll make it,” Lucy assures me with confidence I envy. “I’ve been this way before.”

  “You didn’t both make it,” I remind her.

  “You’re stronger than he was,” Lucy says. “And you have better friends.” She doesn’t explain what she means; she steps off the stones, and I follow.

  The world pulls itself apart. There is no other way to describe it. Colors separate. Matter reorganizes itself and then becomes chaos and then becomes a new order. We stand in a forest, in a desert, in the middle of a city square with people bustling past us, gray eyes fixed on the ground. I stagger, but Lucy steps through one world and then another with dogged determination.

  The air whispers and thrums around us.

  Where are you going?

  Where is she taking you?

  I know you.

  I know her.

  The gates are open.

  The sea rushes in

  Coral and bone

  Where are you?

  Who are you?

  The whispers grow into a forest, and we stand among its trunks. An ancient forest, trees too big for three men to wrap their arms around. The canopy so thick that only speckled light filters down to us, shivering with the shapes of leaves. We stand on a patch of road, seven stones knocked up against each other. I pant. Lucy grins, cheeks pink and eyes bright.

  “See?” she says. “It’s not so bad.”

  I can still feel reality pulling apart inside of me.

  “No time to waste,” she says.

  “Wait—” I begin, but she’s already stepped off our little island and—

  —and into the sea. It closes over us, deep and dark and filled with echoes. Whale song and weeping. I hear my name and start to turn, taking in a breath before I think. Water rushes in, but I don’t choke. A man stands—floats—stands beside me, staring ahead, wrapped in cloth like a funeral shroud, his mouth gaping and mournful.

  We’re all coral and
bones since she let the water in. They get the story wrong. They say that, besotted and foolish, Dahut opened the gates for her lover, and the tide came and snuck in after. But her lover was no man of blood and bone and breath. It was older, greater, than any man. It sang to her of destruction, and she let it in. To cover every part of her. To devour every part of us. Do you understand?

  And a laugh. We’ve moved on. Another step, another ten, I can’t tell. We shouldn’t be able to walk, surrounded by dark water, but walk we do. And now a woman walks with me.

  We’re all coral and bones since she let the water in. They get the story wrong. They say it was an accident, that she forgot to close the gate against the tide, but it isn’t so. Dahut opened the gates to a power more ancient and terrible than we could comprehend and spread her arms in welcome. But the wise men of Ys called to the sea, and drowned all of Ys to stop her. Do you understand?

  I don’t, I want to tell her, but she is already gone, and a child walks beside me, our feet stumbling over silt and stone.

  We’re all coral and bones since she let the water in. They get the story wrong. She opened the gates, but she drowned before she could let her lover in, and the gates were shut once more. Yet she persists. The road persists. She draws them in, the travelers, sings to them that they may come to Ys and she might escape, and find her lover again. The sea cannot drown him forever. The road cannot hold her forever. Do you understand?

  I gasp, and we are on dry land again. Another cluster of stones, a remnant of the road.

  “What did you see?” Lucy asks, head cocked. “What did you hear?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “There were—we were under the water—and there were people down there with us. I think they were talking about Ys.”

  “A scholar came down the road once,” Lucy says. “He said that the city of Ys was a French myth. He said it bore some similarity to the things about Ys he’d heard on the road, but there were differences, too, and he never did decide whether it was just a story the road manifested for him, or if it was the truth behind the road’s illusions.”

  The story is shifting and sliding in my mind. Dahut, this woman, was trying to let something—something ancient and terrible—into the city. She failed, but the city was destroyed, creating the road. At least that’s what I think Lucy is telling me, what Becca told me before.

  The road calls to some people, I remember. Becca heard Lucy calling. What did Lucy hear, to lure her to the road? Ys? Dahut? “What do you think?” I ask.

  “I think it’s real,” Lucy says. “I think there was a city called Ys, and a woman called Dahut who drowned it. I don’t know about the rest of it—this ancient power, the reason Dahut flooded the city. But I don’t think it matters, do you? It doesn’t matter why we’re here, only that we are, and we want to escape.”

  It’s one of many moments where her age strikes me—the depth of it. She’s not just older than fifteen. She’s been here decades. A lifetime. How much must that change you? But she smiles her dimpled smile, and looks over her shoulder, and the moment passes.

  “Look,” she says.

  I glance back. Behind us is not water but a hill that drops away, and at the bottom, fields of golden wheat spill in all directions. In a gap between the wavering stalks, Mel and Kyle run, hand in hand, Mel’s bag thumping against her back with each step.

  “They’re running from something,” I say. I can’t make out Mel’s face but I can imagine the fear etched on it. I start back toward them. Lucy holds me in place. “We need to help them,” I protest.

  “They’ll be all right,” she says. “And if they aren’t, there’s nothing we can do from here. We need to get to the gate. We’re almost there.”

  She steps off the stones. And we are—

  In the woods. I know these woods and I don’t. We’re in the Briar Glen Woods, but they’re younger, with slender trunks and too much light, and a voice calling.

  Lucy. Lucy, where are you?

  Lucy, I didn’t mean to.

  Goddammit, Lucy.

  Lucy’s hand trembles in mine. Her eyes are wide. She suddenly looks like layers of her have been peeled away. Decades. She is a child, shivering beside me.

  “We have to go,” she says. “We have to get away from here. He’s coming.”

  “Who’s coming?” I ask, but her hand has slipped from mine, and she’s running. Vanishing between the trees.

  I see her—or is that her, there? Lucy and an echo of Lucy, Lucy and a memory of Lucy. A child and—and whatever she’s become. Both of them running.

  I run after.

  Lucy!

  That voice. It booms between the trees, impossibly deep and impossibly loud. Footsteps crash, thunderous, and I think of the beast, but when I look back there is only a young man in a formal shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, his hair mussed. He looks like her.

  Lucy, come back, you idiot child!

  She’s beside me, but it isn’t her—it’s the wrong her, the echo-memory, the child as thin as tissue paper.

  “We have to go,” she tells me. “He’s going to catch us.” She reaches out to take my hand, but I flinch back. Echo-child. Not real. Not right. He’s coming. Each step takes him six feet, ten, the ground crawling to bring us together, and before I can move, he catches her.

  He seizes her by the shoulders and he bears her up, and slams her back against the trunk of a tree, onto the jutting spike of a broken branch and he pushes her back to pin her there, the wood sliding bloodlessly through her middle, and she screams and she thrashes but he presses farther still.

  She stops screaming. She hangs limp. He steps back, as if checking to make sure that the picture he’s hung is level, and then he turns to me.

  She’s such a brat. Do you understand?

  “Sara.” My name hisses between clenched teeth. Lucy—the real Lucy—is up ahead, crouched at the base of a tree, her whole body shaking and her eyes wide with terror. “Sara, this way. Quick.” She beckons, her hand outstretched.

  I dash around the man. He lunges for me, but his grip strikes my shoulder and slides right off. Lucy holds her hand out to me, and I can see every muscle of her body tensed, desperate to flee.

  I catch her hand, and together we sprint between the trees. They tilt, folding in toward us, like a trap snapping shut in slow motion, and still his footsteps crash behind us. The pale ribbon of a patch of road gleams between the trees, a promise of safety—or something like it—but it’s so far away. We aren’t going to make it. He’s going to catch us. Unless—

  Ys. We have to get to Ys, I think, as I have been thinking as often as I can remember, but I shift the thought in my mind. Focus on me, I think. Not Lucy. Me.

  I direct the thought at—I’m not entirely sure. The road, I suppose. And I feel something hungry turn toward me. It’s all mouth and tooth and wet. The forest falls away abruptly, and the crashing footsteps vanish, knife-cut quick.

  We stumble to a walk. We aren’t in the forest any longer, but a park. A familiar one.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy says. “That old fear lives in the body. I thought I’d left it behind, but I suppose it still has power.”

  I’m not listening; my eyes are fixed on the path ahead. It leads up to a bridge, and beyond that the stones of the road, but between us and our destination a girl and a boy stand on the bridge.

  Me. And Anthony.

  “What, it’s all my fault?” the other me asks, glaring at him.

  “We all loved Becca,” he says.

  This is the way it happened. That night on the bridge. This is the conversation we had.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the other me whispers. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “No. It doesn’t,” Anthony says. “Because whatever happened then, I’m here for you now. I don’t know if this is a prank or a trap or if there’s really something hiding out in t
he woods, but I’m not letting you go alone.”

  “And what about the others?”

  “If you ask them, they’ll come,” he says.

  The other me shakes her head. “They won’t. Especially not if they know—”

  “You don’t have to trick them into being your friends.”

  “Can you promise me that? We haven’t spoken in months, Anthony.”

  He looks away. “Trina would come.”

  “If I asked? Maybe. But if you ask—if you tell them you’re worried about me, and you know I’m going to go alone, that I need support . . .”

  “You want me to lie to them. Sara, you don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do. It’s the only way I can be sure they’ll come. And if Becca’s really still alive, we should all be there to try to find her. I’m right. About all of it. You know it.”

  He’s silent for a long while. “Sara. Did you send the text?”

  The other me doesn’t answer. She snaps a photo of the dark water, frowns at the screen.

  Anthony sighs. “I don’t get why you assume that none of us care enough to go with you. All you have to do is ask.”

  “Really?” the other me asks. She reaches for her phone. “Let’s see.”

  Her voice fades. Lucy is tugging me along, and with every step toward the bridge, it grows more indistinct, until it’s only mist, and so is everything else—mist roiling around us, and nothing at our feet but tendrils of it, cold and damp, until the ribs of the gate rise from it, dark and brutally bent back until the top almost touches the ground. Lucy halts. She looks sidelong at me.

  “That’s what you’re running from?” she asks.

  “It’s my fault,” I say. I look back into the formless mist, my hands cold and limp at my sides, as if waiting for the illusion—the memory?—to reappear. “All of it is my fault.”

  INTERVIEW

  SARA DONOGHUE

  May 9, 2017

  BECCA: Is that really what happened?

  Her voice is soft. Gentle, but wounded.

  SARA: I don’t know. I remember seeing it on the road. And I didn’t remember that before. But I thought I remembered the way it happened, and that wasn’t it. I didn’t tell Anthony to get the others. I told him I didn’t need him to come. I told him I didn’t need any of them to come.