Seaborn 01 - Saltwater Witch

by Chris Howard

  In fact, I couldn’t.

  Deirdre the Bitch and her friends finally cleared out, making sure they made plenty of streaks on the baseboards on their way.

  “Give her something to do while we’re enjoying ourselves outside.”

  School had just started again, and this had been the sunniest summer I could remember in all my years here—somewhere in the heart of Nebraska. Even I wasn’t clear where we were on the map. You’d think I’d know. Been here long enough.

  Matrothy was right about my birthday, which was a bit creepy. Someone had dumped me at Clement’s when I was a little over a year old.

  The last girls left the hall, a group of eleven-year olds who gave me some serious glaring and head-shaking, like Deirdres-in-training.

  Folding my arms, I glared right back. Snotty little fucks.

  Leaning on the handle of the push-broom, I sat alone in the hall, half listening to the talking, laughing, and music drifting in from the yard. Then got up, lifted the window to let it all in.

  Someone said my name, but when I looked down, I couldn’t tell who. I turned away from the window and took in the long row of twenty-six beds, nightstands and curtains, then beyond them to the lounge with the homework tables, couches and TV, to the hall door.

  I was angry and alone, a prisoner here, doing things I didn’t want to do.

  Nothing ever changes, I started, but cut the thought short.

  Some things had definitely changed. Somewhere under the water, deep in Red Bear Lake, lived a woman with sharp teeth and a voice that felt like needles on my skin.

  Things haven’t changed?

  How about I’m a total water breathing freak? I should have drowned. I was under for half an hour with water heavy in my lungs. I was breathing it in like air.

  And I can swim.

  The whole witch attacking me thing felt dreamlike now. I was underwater, fighting for my life. It’s possible that part could have been...delirium setting in.

  That’s another problem that’s surfaced recently. I’m thinking in words that aren’t always mine, like “delirium.” Who the hell uses the word “delirium” anyway?

  What is this, like some kind of latent blooming of last year’s vocabulary lessons?

  Latent?

  Blooming?

  I ground the broom into the floor, and liked the way it made my muscles burn and made my arm shake. The broom’s bristles rustled against the wood like a box of scurrying rats.

  I was so angry I felt like...

  Crying was something I’d seen a million times. I just didn’t know how it worked. My head sunk forward. I squeezed my eyes closed, and tried to make them, you know, do their thing. Crying. Knew exactly what it looked like. People seized up, shuddering, streams of water poured from their eyes, over their cheeks, running into their mouths, dripping off their chins. When they wept they made coughing and choking noises, sometimes moaning and shrieking hysterically.

  I tried all of these but nothing happened. My eyes are broken. I had just never been able to cry tears.

  When I stopped shrieking hysterically, I noticed the noise from outside had died. I got to my feet and moved to the window overlooking the yard. Some of the girls had heard me screaming and looked up with curiosity at the second floor windows.

  Deirdre stood out among her dull friends, swishing her long hair like a show pony’s tail. She laughed too loudly, pointing at me.

  Holding my mouth shut so I wouldn’t be tempted to shout something, I turned away and got to work. Threw off pajamas, pulled on jeans, a tank top under a boy’s button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and my old hiking boots.

  The chores weren’t too bad, didn’t require a lot of thinking on my part, and I could spend those thoughts on important things like how come I can’t drown? Or what the fuck was up with that witch and her needly screaming?

  I started by dusting under the beds and sweeping the hall. I even made a game of kicking the metal dustpan down the aisle, letting it soar between the beds before it struck one of the legs or stopped on its own, spinning and scraping noisily across the floor. Landing on someone’s bed was out of bounds. The trick was to get it to fly as straight as possible.

  The dustpan was sharp and heavy and had a tendency to flip to the left, making extra long kicks tricky. I was going for a record of kicking it past six beds when Matrothy made a surprise check, slipping into the hall and down the aisle just as I gave the pan a solid boot.

  Too late to recall it.

  It flew in a beautiful arc and nailed the director high on the shins.

  Matrothy staggered, throwing out one arm, grabbed a bed-frame to get her balance, clutching at her knees with the other.

  “What are you doing?” She managed to shout the question before the pain sunk in. The heavy dustpan had dug deep into one of her legs just below the knee, the handle caught her solid in the other leg.

  And the pain affected her ability to speak. Her lips kept moving without sound. Her face went red and puffy like a scalded plum. Shaking, she made a fist, but was unable to find more words. She bent forward feebly, huffing for one long minute while I just stared at her, powerless to help and too frightened to move.

  What could I do?

  Matrothy hunched down over her bent legs, and finally glanced up, stammering something about strangling me in a high-pitched whisper. Then she limped out of the room in a crouching waddle, stumbled at the threshold, and slammed the door. A second later she opened it with some trouble, and then slammed it again.

  Frozen in place, I waited for the director to return, but the shot to the legs had apparently taken her down.

  I leaned on the broom and stared at the door. Then shrugged, nodding over a conclusion I’d just drawn.

  In the world of uncertainty Matrothy made for me, there was one thing—at this moment in time—I knew for sure: short of sneaking a guy into the hall, what could I possibly do to get into more trouble? What catastrophe could I cause that would lower me any further in Matrothy’s eyes?

  What hell could I possibly raise now?

  It was time to get back to business. The sun blazed through the windows while I cleaned every pane, wiping the dust from the mullions. I stood on a chair to get the tops of the frames. I paused over my open window for a moment, catching the late summer breeze, and wiped the sweat from my forehead and throat.

  There’s a sense of order I like about the hall when it’s clean, but the real reason I worked hard was that the sooner I finished, the sooner I could slouch on my bed and read. Books are all I have left.

  I hopped off the chair and ran the length of the hall with the cloth, sliding it along each of the windowsills, and then back down the other side, wiping every surface.

  Lost in thought about the pale witch in the lake, and most of the way done with the baseboards, it took me a few seconds to understand the nature of a wet slapping and thudding noise that came from behind me. I looked around the room. Laughter outside rising in loud choppy barks.

  “Kassandraaaaaah!” Someone—it sounded like Deirdre—was shrieking with delight. “Come out and plaaaaaaay!”

  A sloppy wad of dirt came through my open window, splashing across the floor, spraying my bed.

  There was mud everywhere.

  I jumped to my feet, raced across the room, and slammed the window down. Autumn—Deirdre’s enforcer—sneered at me and hurled a handful of mud. Cornelia followed. Wet chunks of dirt splattered the glass and oozed into a solid brown film at the bottom. Deirdre stood next to them, encouraging them, but not about to get her pretty fingers dirty.

  Autumn and Cornelia pointed up at the mess they had made all over my window, and then bent down around the water pipe that stuck out of the ground not far from the building. The faucet dripped continually and there was always a shallow muddy pool beneath it, green and slimy.

  For a moment, I couldn’t think of anything to do other than stare down at them through the mud-streaked glass. Then I turned and looked at my bed,
stunned, my heart suddenly thumping hard. There was a weird loose and scattered feeling in my head, not dizziness, maybe paralysis, no way to decide if I should let my anger off its leash or...cry.

  I wish.

  There was one clear section of floor at the foot of my bed, and I jumped to it, wheeling to take everything in. My hands were shaking, so I curled them into fists. Then my fists shook, and then my arms. My head felt light. I really had to find some place to sit down.

  Greenish slime oozed over my blankets, pillow and sheets. Mud all over the curtains, the floor, dripping down the nightstand and seeping into the drawers. The breakfast tray was splattered brown and there were chunks of something solid in the bowl of soggy cereal.

  I groaned and dropped on the clean end of my bed, let my face fall into my hands. A small spasm rushed up my back and snapped my head down. Then an unzipping crinkle of bone and muscle ran up my spine. I sniffled and wiped my nose, staring at the mud on the blanket next to me.

  I froze. Felt it. A small cold line of water inching down my cheek, a teardrop.

  Aren’t tears supposed to be warm, body temperature? But what do I know? Never done this before.

  My fingers came up automatically, but I stopped them an inch from my face. I was about to touch it—really wanted to, but then I wanted to feel it on my face.

  I’ve made one tear. I’m really crying. A real tear.

  It tickled as it traveled down the side of my cheek, rolling over my skin. I leaned forward and it dropped to the floor. I followed it down, starting to smile.

  I listened for an insignificant wet tap. The tear hit the wood, rang like a tiny bell, and spread out. The small wet circle hissed and a watery cloud puffed out of it. It broadened and bubbled, sharp points rolling jaggedly up its sides as if something inside was trying to claw its way free.

  That can’t be right. I stared at it, jerking my feet off the floor.

  “What is wrong with me?”

  The cloud expanded, growing thicker and taller, oozing over the beds, covering the space between me and the far wall in seconds. I screamed and scrambled back across the width of my bed, somersaulted rearward, and fell sprawling in the gap between mine and the next bed.

  “Why is this happening to me?”

  Breathing hard, heart thudding in my chest, I pressed my fingers into the floor and lifted my head an inch at a time over the top of the bed. I had to yank my neck all the way back to see what it was.

  A wall of water rippled from the floor to the ceiling. It stretched from one side of the hall to the other.

  I got to my feet, unable to look away from it.

  Colossal liquid bars broke away from the central mass and swung together like arms, and then the whole mass shifted along the far wall to make a semicircle around me. It reeked of salty ocean spray and seaweed, a body made of lapping seawater with a fluid lump centered on top.

  The thing has a head on it!

  The water around its face folded into a big ridge above two deep indentations, its eyes. It was doing the water monster equivalent of scowling down at me. Then it spoke to me. Its voice was heavy, a deep shuddering rumble that drove through my body like thunder.

  “You are not Ampharete.”

  I couldn’t move, rooted to the floor, staring up at the monster’s face. My mind stuttered over its words. Amph-air-eh-tay...Who? And then everything in my head disintegrated into a shuddery fearful cold soup.

  “You are a girl,” he rumbled.

  And I just stared up at him stupidly.

  “Why have you summoned me?”

  I didn’t know what he meant, but that line shuffled things back into place in my mind—even thought I caught a slight surprised tone in the deep growl. It also sounded like he wanted to know my name.

  “M—My nnnname is Kass—Kassandra.”

  He nodded, slow and watery. “I can see that you are the Wreath-wearer.” His voice built up like a freight train, and I stood like a stunned deer on the tracks, unable to get out of its way. “Why have you sent for me, Kassandra?”

  The head of the monster rotated side to side as if studying the hall.

  “Why have you called me to this place?” His voice pounded its way through my skin, bones, and then into the floor, and made me stagger back.

  “I called you? Oh, I cried! It’s my first time.”

  The two big branches of water swung in again, sending waves swirling up its body. It folded its arms, not very impressed.

  “Do not make a habit of it.”

  Sharp ridges of water danced along the edges of its shoulders and arms like pale blue flames. It was impatient. If it had feet, it would have been tapping one edgily.

  “But...but I cleaned...” I gestured around the hall. With all the water in the room, my mouth was completely dry. “Th—They threw mud.” I pointed to the window next to my bed.

  The monster made a deep rumbling noise that made the floor creak, and ripples of water eddied around its sides, a crest of sloshing ocean along the middle of its back, like the pointed clash of two opposing currents in a harbor.

  I dropped my arms to my sides, trying to read something—anything—in its face. It had deep sockets where eyes should have been, and a wide horizontal line for a mouth with something glistening and sharp behind it. There was just no way I could tell what it was thinking. The rumbling could have been something like purring in a cat or it could be an I’m-starting-to-get-annoyed noise.

  “Okay.” I need to do something. Tell him something. Before he get’s mad. The words rammed up against the back of my throat and wouldn’t come out.

  But I knew what I wanted.

  My arm rose slowly, straightening out. My finger shook as I pointed to my bed, the window next to it, and the floor. It was a perfect match. They were covered in mud, and this giant...thing...it was made of water.

  My voice came back, but only in a dry whisper. “Can you help me...uh...clean this up?”

  A deep spasm shook me from my toes to my scalp. My hair shuddered across my face. Every muscle in my body tightened until it hurt.

  I knew immediately I’d made a mistake, but I peered up at him through my hair just to see what he’d do.

  I tried to smile. Please don’t kill me.

  His eyes deepened, maelstrom eyes, and then widened. He swelled to twice his bulk, swallowing most of the room in a wall that covered the windows with a glowing mass of water and claws. His mouth gaped with gigantic pointed teeth of ice.

  “I am a king among the offspring of Poseidonos!”

  It was like a landslide of boulders, his voice rolling deeply. The beds bounced around like pebbles on a trampoline.

  “Two thousand five hundred years ago I destroyed the entire fleet of King Darius in the waters off Mount Athos. I sent thirty thousand to their deaths! I devoured them by the hundreds and picked their bones out of my teeth with the oars of their ships! I can snap an oil tanker in half and pull it to the floor of the ocean. I can make a wave taller than the mountains. I can level cities. I am the son of Periklymenos and the Nereid, Eione. You may call me Ephoros!”

  I was shaking like a flag in a hurricane. All I heard were a bunch of names and a bunch of people killed and bones being picked out of teeth.

  “...and you have sent for me...TO DO YOUR LAUNDRY!”

  Ephoros was like a lion roaring at me, a lion twelve feet tall and thirty feet from tail to teeth.

  I swallowed hard, made a few panicked “uh” noises. It could have been part of the whole begging-for-my-life-and-shaking-in-fear package, but I managed a slight nod and the faintest whisper, “Please?”

  Ephoros blinked and then shrunk down to his former size, stretching half the width of the room. His voice still boomed at me and made me shiver.

  “It sounds like something your mother would have liked me to do.” He paused and nodded wisely, rubbing his chin with a claw, and then sighed. “Actually...I am pretty good at it. I can get bloodstains out of a cotton and raw silk blend. Mud is very simpl
e. Consider it done.”

  “My...mother?”

  Just that fading memory of a song. I didn’t have parents. There wasn’t even a mention of them in my records.

  Ephoros ignored me. Two thick appendages, probably his fingers, emerged from the elephantine block of water that must have been one of his fists. They blended into one, and then broke away to make a thunderous bang that rattled the windows. For a king among the offspring of Poseidonos, it was the equivalent of snapping his fingers.

  Light came in hazy from outside, flickering colors through the moisture in the air. There was a rushing noise of water over rocks, and a blurred glassy sphere expanded to the ceiling over my bed, the floor, and furniture around it. I backed away, my hands going instinctively to my face.

  The sphere vanished and there was no sign of the mud that Deirdre’s asshole friends had hurled through the window. Even the blankets and pillow looked dry.

  Then the door banged open as if someone had kicked it in. I whirled toward the end of the hall, sucking in a breath at the same time.

  Matrothy stood on the threshold, fuming and snorting like an ox, her shoulders pumping up and down on each side of her big ugly head. She was still a little bent from the dustpan incident, but the painkillers had obviously kicked in.

  Chapter 4 - Ephoros

  Matrothy stormed into the hall, boots thudding, fists up. “What the hell are you doing up here!”

  I tried to look innocent. Wide and innocent. That’s how you’ll get out of this. Eyes wide, mouth hanging wide open. Surprised I wasn’t drooling.

  “Uh...Nothing. Nothing’s going on.”

  “Then why does it sound like you’re training several herds of elephants!”

  What, was she blind?

  “That was hi—” I turned and pointed. Gigantic, enormous water monster Ephoros was gone. He’d simply vanished. “Him.”

  Matrothy caught that one word, and was going to beat the hell out of me with it. “Him? Him?”