The Wicked Deep

by Shea Ernshaw

  I don’t want to be that anymore.

  I move in the opposite direction of Coppers Beach and the boathouse, and I head up to Alder Hill at the south end of town. The same part of Sparrow where I was supposed to deliver a vial of rosewater and myrrh perfume the day I met Owen Clement. I never made the delivery.

  Blackbirds circle above, eyes roving the ground, following me. Like they know where I’m headed.

  Alder Hill is also the location of the Sparrow Cemetery.

  The graveyard is a broad, grassy plot of land encircled by a partially fallen-down metal fence overlooking the bay so that the fisherman buried here can watch over the sea and protect the town.

  I haven’t been here in a very long time. I’ve avoided this place for the last century. But I find my way to the tombstone easily, my feet guiding me even after all these years, past graves covered in flowers and graves covered in moss and graves left bare.

  It’s one of the oldest stone markers in the cemetery. The only reason it hasn’t turned to dust is because for the first century I made sure to keep the weeds from growing over it and the earth from pulling it under. But then it became too hard to come. I was holding on to someone who I would never see again. It was my past. And the person I had become—a murderer—was not who he had loved. I was someone else.

  It’s a simple marker. Rounded sandstone. The name and date carved into the rock have long ago been smoothed away by wind and rain. But I know what it used say; I know it by heart: OWEN CLEMENT. DIED 1823.

  * * *

  After the day his father caught us together in the barn’s loft, Owen wasn’t allowed to leave the island. I tried to see him, I rowed across the bay, I pleaded with his father, but he forced me away. He was so certain I had cast a spell on Owen to make him love me. That no boy could love a Swan sister without the sway of some hex or wicked enchantment.

  If only love were so easily conjured, there wouldn’t be so many broken hearts, I remember Marguerite saying once, back when we were alive.

  I didn’t realize what was coming—what Owen’s father was plotting. If I had known, I wouldn’t have stayed in Sparrow.

  Clouds hung heavy over the town the day my sisters and I were led from the courthouse down to the docks. Aurora wailed, screaming at the men as they forced us aboard a boat. Marguerite spit curses into their faces, but I remained still, scanning the crowd of gathered spectators for Owen. I had lost sight of him after we were taken into a small dark room at the back of the courthouse, stripped bare, and forced into simple white gowns. Our death gowns.

  They knotted rope around our wrists and ankles. Aurora continued to weep, tears making lines down her cheeks. And then just as the boat pushed back from the dock, I saw him.

  Owen.

  It took three men to restrain him. He yelled my name, scrambling to the end of the dock. But the boat was already drifting too far away, with his father and several other men steering us out to the deepest part of the harbor.

  I lost sight of him in the low fog that settled over the water, muffling all sound and obscuring the dock where he stood.

  My sisters and I sat together on a single wood bench at the bow of the boat, shoulders pressed together, hands bound in front of us. Prisoners being led to their death. The sea spray stung our faces as the boat pushed farther out into the harbor. I closed my eyes, feeling its cool relief. I listened to the harbor bell buoy ringing at long intervals, the wind and waves gone nearly still. One last moment to breathe the sharp air. The seconds stretched out, and I felt as if I could slip into a dream and never wake—like none of it was real. It’s rare to know your death is approaching, waiting for you, death’s fingers already grasping for your soul. I felt it reaching out for me. I was already half-gone.

  The boat drifted to a stop, and I opened my eyes to the sky. A seagull slipped out from the clouds then vanished again.

  The men tied burlap sacks filled with stones to our ankles—the stones likely pulled up from a farmer’s rocky fields behind town, donated for the occasion of our death. We were forced to stand then pushed to the edge of the boat. Marguerite eyed one of the younger boys, her gaze clawing into him, as if she might be able to convince him to free her. But we would not be spared. My sisters and I were finally being punished: adultery, lust, and even true love would find atonement at the bottom of the sea.

  I sucked in a breath of air, bracing myself for what would come next, when I saw the bow of another boat breaking through the fog. “What the hell?” I heard one of the men say behind us. It was a small boat, oars driving fast through the water.

  Aurora turned and looked at me—she realized who it was before I did.

  He stole a boat.

  A second later, I felt the swift push of two hands against my back.

  The water shattered around my body like razors, knocking the air from my lungs. Death is not a fire, death is a cold so fierce it feels like it will peel the skin away from your bones. I sank quickly. My sisters plummeting just as swiftly through the murky water beside me.

  I thought death would take me quickly, a second, maybe two, but then there was movement above me: an explosion of bubbles, and a hand wrapping around my waist.

  I opened my eyes and focused through the dark, speckled with bits of shell and sand and green. A haze dividing us. But he was there—Owen.

  He grabbed hold of my arms and began tugging me upward toward the surface, fighting the cold and the weight of rocks around my feet. His legs kicked furiously while mine hung limp, tied together. His face strained, eyes wide. He was desperate, trying to save me before the water found its way down my throat and into my lungs. But the stones around my ankles were too heavy. His fingers worked at the rope, but the tension was too great, the knots too stiff.

  Our eyes met, only inches apart as we sank deeper to the bottom of the harbor. There was nothing he could do. I shook my head frantically—pleading with him to give up, to release me. I tried to pry his hands off of me, but he refused to let go. He was falling too deep, too far. He wouldn’t have enough air to make it back up. But he pulled me against him and kissed his frigid lips to mine. I closed my eyes and felt him against me. It’s the last thing I remember before I drew in a breath and the water spilled down my throat.

  He never let me go. Even when it was too late. Even when he knew he couldn’t save me.

  We both lost our lives in the harbor that day.

  The following summer, when I returned to the town for the first time—hidden in the body of a local girl—I walked up the steep slope to Sparrow Cemetery and stood on the cliff over his grave. No one knew who I really was: Hazel Swan, come to see the boy she loved now buried in the ground.

  The day we both drowned, his body eventually drifted to the surface of the harbor and his father was forced to pull his only son from the sea. A fate that he had set in motion.

  Guilt seethed through my veins as I stood over his freshly dug grave so long ago. His life had ended because of me. And that guilt quickly turned to hatred for the town. All these years, my sisters sought revenge for their own death, but I wanted revenge for Owen’s.

  He sacrificed himself to try to save me, maybe because he felt he had betrayed me—for the trial, for confessing to having seen the mark of a witch on my skin. He believed he caused my death.

  But I caused his.

  I should have died that day—I should have drowned. But I didn’t. And I’ve never forgiven myself for what happened to him. For the life we never got to have.

  * * *

  I kneel down beside the grave, brushing away the leaves and dirt. “I’m sorry. . . .” I begin then stop myself. It’s not enough. He’s been gone for nearly two hundred years, and I’ve never said good-bye. Not really. Not until now. I lower my head, unsure how any words will ever feel like enough. “I never wanted to live this long,” I say. “I’d always hoped that someday the sea would finally take me. Or old age would bury me in the ground next to you.” I swallow down a deep breath. “But things have chang
ed. . . . I have changed.” I lift my head and look out at the sea, a perfect view of the harbor and Lumiere Island, where Bo is waiting. “I think I love him,” I confess. “But maybe it’s too late. Maybe I don’t deserve him or a normal life after everything I’ve done, all the lives I’ve taken. He doesn’t know who I really am. And so maybe what I feel for him is also a lie.” The wind brushes my cheeks, and a light rain starts to scatter over the cemetery. Confessing this to Owen’s grave feels like a penance, like I owe him this. “But I have to try,” I say. “I have to know if loving him is enough to save both of us.”

  I wipe a palm over the face of the tombstone, where his name was once etched. Now just a smooth surface. A grave without a name. I close my eyes, the tears falling in slow, measured rhythm with the raindrops.

  Maybe I did die that day. Hazel Swan, the girl I once was, is gone. Her life taken on the same day as Owen’s. My voice trembles as the last word slips out—I say it to him as much as to myself. “Good-bye.”

  I stand before my legs are too weak to carry me, and I leave the graveyard, knowing that I’ll never come back here again. The people I loved are gone.

  But I won’t lose the one I love now.

  EIGHTEEN

  Memories can settle into a place: fog that lingers long after it should have blown out to sea, voices from the past that take root in the foundation of a town, whispers and accusations that grow in the moss along the sidewalks and up the walls of old homes.

  This town, this small cluster of houses and shops and boats clinging to the shoreline, has never escaped its past—the thing it did two hundred years ago. Ghosts remain. But sometimes, the past is the only thing keeping a place alive. Without it, this fragile town may have long ago been washed out with the tide, sunken into the harbor in defeat. But it persists, because it must. Penance is a long, unforgiving thing. It endures, for without it, the past is forgotten.

  I stop in front of the old stone building that sits squat and low on a street corner facing the sea. Rain pings off my forehead and shoulders. The sign above the door reads: ALBA’S FORGETFUL CAKES. But it didn’t used to. A sign with bold black swirling letters hand-painted by Aurora once hung across the sidewalk, clattering with the afternoon breeze. This was once the Swan Perfumery. Although I’ve walked past it thousands of times in the summers since our death, seen countless businesses occupy it, and even watched in dismay during a fifteen-year period when it sat abandoned and crumbling before it was restored, sometimes, like today, it still strikes me that after all this time it has endured . . . just as we have.

  A woman steps out through the glass door, her rain boots splashing through a shallow puddle as she walks to her red SUV holding a pink pastry box surely filled with tiny frosted cakes intended to wipe away some sticky memory caught in her mind.

  I spent nearly every day inside that shop, concocting new scents made of rare herbs and flowers, my hair and fingers and skin always bursting with scents that couldn’t be washed away. The oils soaked into everything they touched. Marguerite was the saleswoman, and she was good at it, a natural peddler. Aurora was the bookkeeper; she paid bills and tallied profits from a small, wobbly wood desk behind the front counter. And I was the perfumist, working out of a windowless back room that should have been a storage closet—a place for brooms and metal buckets. But I loved my work. And in the evening my sisters and I shared a tiny home behind the shop.

  “It doesn’t even look like the same place,” a voice says beside me. I flinch. Olivia Greene is standing next to me, a black umbrella held over her head to protect her sleek, charcoal-black hair from the rain. My eyes pass through her fair skin to Marguerite underneath.

  “The windows are the same,” I say, looking back to the building.

  “Replicas,” she answers, her voice more somber than usual. “Everything it used to be is now gone.”

  “Just like us.”

  “Nothing that lives this long can stay the same.”

  “Nothing should live this long,” I point out.

  “But we did,” she says, as if it were an accomplishment to be proud of.

  “Maybe two hundred years is enough.”

  She blows out a quick breath through her nostrils. “You want to give up eternal life?”

  “It’s not eternal,” I say. Marguerite and I have never viewed our imprisonment the same way. She sees it as our good fortune, a lucky draw of the card that we should live on for centuries, indefinitely perhaps. But she didn’t lose anything the day we were drowned. I did. She wasn’t in love with a boy who loved her back—not real love, like what Owen and I had. With each passing year we spent beneath the waves, each summer we rose again to claim our revenge on the town by taking their boys and making them ours, we lost a part of who we once were. We lost our humanity. I watched my sisters’ cruelty grow, their ability to kill sharpen, until I barely recognized them.

  My wickedness grew too, but not to a place I couldn’t come back from. Because there was a thread that bound me to who I used to be—that thread was Owen. The memory of him kept me from slipping completely into the dark. And now that thread ties me to Bo. To the real world, to the present.

  “We’ve spent most of our lives trapped in the sea,” I say. “Cold and dark and miserable. That’s not a real life.”

  “I block it out,” she rebukes swiftly. “You should too. It’s better to sleep, let your mind drift away until summer arrives.”

  “It’s not that easy for me.”

  “You’ve always made things harder for yourself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “This thing you have with that boy, Bo. You’re only dragging out the inevitable. Just kill him and get it over with.”

  “No.” I turn to look at her, a shadow settled over her face beneath the domed umbrella. “I know you tried to lure him into the harbor.”

  Her eyes twinkle, as if delighted by the memory of almost drowning the boy I love. “I just wanted to help you finish what you started. If you like him so much, then take him into the sea, and you will have him for eternity.”

  “I don’t want him like that. His soul trapped down there just like ours.”

  “Then how do you want him?”

  “Real. Here—on land.”

  She laughs loud and full, and a man and woman strolling past us turn to look at her. “That’s absurd and not possible. Tonight’s the last night to make him yours.”

  I shake my head. I won’t do it. “I’m not like you,” I say.

  “You’re exactly like me. We’re sisters. And you’re just as cold-blooded as I am.”

  “No, you’re wrong about that.”

  “Have you forgotten about Owen? How he betrayed you? Maybe if he hadn’t spoken up about the mark on your skin, you wouldn’t have been found guilty. You wouldn’t have drowned with us. You might have lived a normal life. But no”—her lips curl up at the edges, a wolf baring her teeth—“boys cannot be trusted. They will always do whatever they can to save themselves. They are the cruel ones, not us.”

  “Owen wasn’t cruel,” I snap. “He had to tell them about the mark.”

  “Did he?”

  I bite down on the rage building in my chest. “If he hadn’t, they would have believed he was one of us, helping us. They would have killed him.”

  “And yet he died anyway.” One of her eyebrows arches upward.

  I can’t stand here anymore, listening to Marguerite. She’s never known real love. Even her infatuations with men when we were alive were all about her: the attention, the pursuit, the satisfaction of winning something that wasn’t hers to start with. “Owen tried to save me that day, and he lost his life. He loved me,” I tell her. “And Bo loves me now. But you wouldn’t know what that’s like because you’re incapable of love.”

  I turn away from her and start up the sidewalk.

  “Did you hear?” she calls after me. “Our dear sister Aurora has been sprung from her jail in the boathouse. It seems someone decided she was innocent af
ter all.”

  I look back at her over my shoulder. “She’s not innocent,” I say. Marguerite squirms inside Olivia’s body. “None of us are.”

  * * *

  The dock is slick from the rain. Waves push into the marina at steady intervals, a ballet choreographed by the wind and tide. I climb into the skiff and start the motor. A few persistent rays of sun break through the dark clouds, spilling light over the bow of the boat.

  Tonight, the summer solstice party will happen on Coppers Beach, marking the end of Swan season. But I won’t be there. I’m staying on the island with Bo. I’m staying in this body—whatever it takes, no matter how painful, I’m going to fight it.

  Yet I have the acute, anxious feeling that something bad is stirring out on those waters, in that approaching storm, and none of us will be the same after tonight.

  SHIP

  The Lady Astor, a 290-ton merchant ship owned by the Pacific Fur Company, left New York City in November of 1821 for its five-month passage around Cape Horn and up the west coast to Sparrow, Oregon.

  It carried mostly supplies and grain to be delivered to the rugged western coastline, but it also carried two dozen passengers—those brave enough to venture west to the wilds of Oregon, where much of the land was undeveloped and dangerous. Aboard the ship were three sisters: Marguerite, Aurora, and Hazel.

  Four months into the voyage, they had encountered mostly storms, dark seas, and sleepless nights when the ship rocked so violently that nearly everyone aboard, including the crew, was ill with seasickness. But the sisters did not clutch their stomachs and heave over the side of the boat; they did not press their palms to their eyes and beg the ocean to cease its churning. They’d brought herbs to sooth their swirling stomachs and balms to rub into their temples. And each evening they walked the deck even in the rain and wind to stare out across the Pacific, yearning for the land that would eventually rise up on the horizon.

  “Only a month remains,” Aurora said on one of those nights as the three sisters stood at the bow of the ship, leaning against the railing, the stars spinning bright above them in a clear, boundless sky. “Do you think it will be how we’ve imagined?” she asked.