The Girl in the Water

by A J Grayson

  I glance over at the countertop. The coffee pot is empty, which means she had her dose this morning; and one of the wine bottles I’d prepped is also open-necked by the microwave, a large glass poured next to her cooking. Her medication isn’t an issue.

  But the moment doesn’t feel right. I sense it, and I’ve learned to trust my feelings about things like this.

  ‘I’m going to go change out of these shoes,’ I announce, releasing my grip from her waist and walking towards the stairs. I can’t allow myself to behave abnormally, despite my foreboding sense of concern. It would only compound things. ‘Been a long day at the pharmacy. I’d kill for a few minutes with a cold beer.’

  Sadie’s leash isn’t hanging by the door.

  Inconsequential, but unusual.

  ‘Supper won’t be ready for another half-hour,’ Amber says, ‘so you have plenty of time for your mannish end-of-day collapse.’ She glances my way and smiles, then is back at her labours.

  No, something is definitely different.

  I ascend the stairs to our bedroom and go to the closet to kick off my wingtips, trying to put my finger on why I just feel – wrong. My feet genuinely are sore, though it’s more from a poor choice of shoe than anything truly trying at work. Anyone working at a pharmacy gets used to spending time on his feet.

  I crouch down to undo my laces, when I spot something peculiar in the corner. The wicker lid of our clothes hamper is askew. Amber’s normally tidy about such things, but even so, if I weren’t already in a suspicious mood I probably wouldn’t think any more about it. But something isn’t right, and until I know what that something is, any change of habit might be revealing.

  I right myself and walk over to examine the hamper lid. A trouser leg dangles over the edge at its rear. It’s covered in something, and I remove the lid entirely to have a better look.

  An entire outfit is crumpled inside, all of it wet, smelling of earth and moisture, caked in mud.

  My stomach tightens.

  The clothes, in and of themselves, mean nothing; but it feels like they’re screaming out at me. This is it! Something has happened! Something has gone terribly wrong! My suspicion becomes overpowering.

  I take the muddy clothes in hand and descend the stairs.

  ‘Amber,’ I ask, rounding the corner into the kitchen, ‘where did you go today, with all your free time?’ I demand that my voice stay light, though my anxiety is monumental. Amber’s back is still to me.

  ‘Took a walk by the river,’ she answers. ‘You know, just up the way? Never gone walking there before. It’s such a beautiful spot.’

  ‘Is that where this happened?’ I hold up the dirty clothes as she turns around, and in the instant that her eyes make contact with them, a flash of uncontrolled blankness crosses her features. She stops moving, her pupils dilate, and her whole body goes rigid. For an instant, she is a woman made entirely of stone.

  Then, almost imperceptibly swiftly, she returns to life.

  ‘Oh, that,’ she answers nonchalantly. ‘I must have fallen in, I guess. Don’t quite remember. One of my clumsy moments, I suppose.’ She gives me a loving smile, and turns back to the soup. But I saw the split-second change, and I’ve never been more terrified in my life.

  I’m out of the apartment before another five minutes pass. I came up with a quick excuse – I need a little air after a hard day, just a quick stroll and I’ll be back for the meal – and as I go through the door, I try not to let Amber spot me racing as quickly as I am.

  Her reaction to the muddy clothes has me petrified. That expression: I’ve seen it before. It’s the hollow look and the blank eyes of the tormented creature I’d saved – and they’ve burst through into the present. I’d prayed so hard that I’d never see them again.

  I’m trying to formulate a plan as I walk. I need to retrace Amber’s steps. Something happened on her walk, and I’ll be damned if I believe it was just a clumsy slip into the water. An accident doesn’t cause hollowness. When she saw the clothes, it triggered a memory, and one she’s already repressed.

  What kind of memory can carve through her consciousness, through all those drugs, and then be pushed down so quickly?

  My pace along the path is becoming a jog. The light is failing as dusk takes over from daytime, and I feel the desperate need to cover as much ground as I can. Out here, somewhere, is something that …

  The answer to my puzzle comes a few minutes later, around a bend at the water’s edge. Beyond the kept-up areas, into the forested cover of the river’s wilder shores. I’m following muddier paths now, twisting in turns that weave through weeds and overgrowth. And then a few steps, onto a little cul-de-sac in the path, and with shattering certitude I know what’s broken Amber’s peace.

  There is a woman lying in the water. In the surroundings, in her attire, she looks barely more than a girl, though she’s clearly around the same age as Amber herself, maybe a little older.

  No. I can’t pretend.

  I know exactly how much older.

  With everything in me I wish I didn’t know who this woman was, because with that knowledge comes an awareness of what has actually taken place here, and just how disastrous it really is.

  I step to the edge of the water, and Emma Fairfax’s lifeless face gazes back at me. Her eyes are fixed open. Despite a red stretch of rope wrapped around her neck, which a moment later I recognize as Sadie’s leash, she looks almost peaceful.

  Like she did when I met her two-and-a-half years ago, back in the psych ward. Beautiful, but haunting. Wretched.

  All at once, I understand. She and Amber met, right on this spot. Today.

  Why in Christ’s name did you come here?

  Emma’s eyes look through me. Had she wanted to confront Amber? Try to make some kind of – I can’t even fathom it – peace, after all these years? The thought brings the taste of vomit into my throat. Peace. Or maybe she had wanted to check on me. Some humane act. But her eyes are hollow and inhuman.

  Amber will have seen these eyes, too. God. It causes me physical pain to think what that encounter must have felt like for her. Two worlds, one she doesn’t remember she was ever in, colliding. Would she have recognized Emma’s face? The memories have been so disassociated by now, it’s possible she wouldn’t actually know what was happening inside her. But something obviously clicked. Emma’s body bears witness to a pain that hasn’t subsided.

  To come face to face with the woman who had turned you over to the men who abused you as a child. Who could bear that?

  And who could blame anyone for reacting to it?

  That’s the thought that overtakes me, gazing down at Emma Fairfax’s lifeless body. This monster I so hated as she told me of her crimes. She’s finally received justice for her life, and at the hands of one of her victims, whose mind might no longer remember her torments but whose soul hasn’t forgotten. It strikes me as, in the strangest of ways, entirely just. Righteous.

  But with a flash of certainty, I know that no one else will see it this way. And a swirl of thoughts starts to bend through my head, new ideas, new plans.

  The sure knowledge that the plan I’d abandoned all those years ago, was the one I had to enact now.

  PART SEVEN

  FINALE

  63

  Amber

  THE PRESENT

  I’m in bed. David brought me here a few minutes ago. I couldn’t walk, my feet too heavy to lift, and he carried me up the stairs like we were newly-weds. The killer, the man I thought was a killer, who calls me a killer instead. Holding me in his arms.

  ‘You drugged me.’ I mutter as he adjusts my position on our mattress, propping a pillow beneath my head. I remember watching him drop the clear substance into my water as I sat collapsed at the table. ‘You bastard.’ But the word has so little power behind it. I don’t have the venom inside me that I had before.

  ‘Medicated,’ he says, as if the alternative vocabulary explained everything. ‘You feel it now, right? Coming back into your
system?’

  My toes are tingling, but I don’t think this is what he’s referring to. The abyss I’d been falling into is closing up, and the light above me has become more inviting. A sense of hope I’d thought I’d lost – I can almost grasp it. I suspect it’s this his ‘medicine’ is bringing about. The gaps in my soul are starting to fill and solidity is slowly returning to my mind, though there’s a headache forming at my temples, squeezing at me without mercy.

  ‘It’s been the only way to keep your childhood away from your present,’ he adds, pulling a blanket over my legs. ‘To let you be free to be someone new in the here and now.’

  Whatever.

  I decide to give in to the drug. I can feel its effects circulating through my system, each beat of my heart driving it to the extremities of my members. It is taking me over again.

  Taking me over.

  ‘What gives you the right?’ I ask, drowsiness pulling me away. For the moment, though, the will to protest is still stronger. ‘What gives you the right to steal my past from me?’

  ‘Oh, Amber,’ David answers. ‘I’m so sorry you were brought to this. Your past, your childhood … it’s not something you need to remember. I promise you. It was truly terrible. Just let it go.’

  There’s a look about David, like he’s unwilling to tell me more. This new, sudden spirit of openness, and he still wants to hide things from me.

  ‘That can’t be right,’ my voice trails off. ‘It was mine, however bad it may have been. Who did you think I would be, if you took it all away from me?’

  Then my voice is just an echo, bouncing against the bone of my skull, fading into nothing.

  64

  David

  Christ, everything in me is on fire. I feel I’ve betrayed everyone. Amber. My sister. Even myself.

  But it’s Evelyn’s voice that is strongest in my head. She’d shouted at me there at the river, when I’d seen Emma’s body floating in the water and realized what Amber had done. She had started, right then, to scream in my chest, pounding, clawing her way at my insides. A beast caged far too long, yearning to be let loose.

  In her cries, I could just make out her will. She pushed me away from the water, away from the false world in which I’ve lived since I took Amber into my arms.

  ‘You know their names,’ she whispered into my head. ‘The names of the men who did this to her. The men you should have punished from the beginning. You know who they are.’

  And her instruction is clear. My own voice, hers, it doesn’t matter.

  Go, now. Go, and find them.

  Things were never going to be right again. That was something that simply had to be accepted as fact. My gut instinct told me everything I needed to know. The encounter with Emma Fairfax had started something in Amber that wasn’t going to stop. A cascade into the past. She might have repressed it for the moment, but it wouldn’t stay buried forever.

  That encounter had started something in me, too. The change inside was palpable, and I left the river racing through my new reality. Emma had come here. The old world was forcing its way into the new. Like I’d once thought it would. Sometimes, the worst of life’s sorrows is to learn you’re right. She’d come here, and that meant at least one person had found out what I’d done. What our life here had become. And if one, then more could easily be possible – and then the past in all its horror, cascading into the present. Amber, forced to confront the bastards who’d hurt her. The pain they’d caused, rekindled.

  Amber is all that matters. Emma is a corpse, like she’s long deserved to be. The only question was whether now Amber could be saved from becoming one, too.

  During the first day that followed, there were signs that she was doing better than I’d have anticipated. Apart from the brief flash of recognition when I’d shown her the dirty clothes she’d worn at the river, there were no further indications that the trauma had broken through into the rest of her life. When I came back from the water, careful to keep all the horror and sorrow from my face, she appeared to be functioning as normal. Calm. She had her humour about her.

  I increased her dosage anyway. Christ, I halfway wanted to take a dose myself.

  Then, the next night, as I’d taken her warm body on to mine and we’d intertwined ourselves in the kind of passion I’ve always thought helped free her from her memories, she’d said it.

  ‘Emma.’

  That was it, just her name. But with that single, whispered word I realized that Amber hadn’t escaped the experience at all. What she’d done to Emma had dislodged something within her, and she’d made it barely more than twenty-four hours before it was breaking into her thoughts, despite the drugs. Even her words, and even in such an intimate moment.

  Measures were going to have to be taken, and quickly.

  My first thought was that we needed another re-start. I wasn’t sure if it could be done a second time, but the massive dose of the drug cocktail I’d given Amber at our encounter in the Headlands had effectively knocked her memory clear the once. It at least held the potential of being able to do it a second time.

  But I didn’t have enough. The dosage has become a science over these past years, and the only way to keep off the radar of suppliers, who are always looking out for junkies or dealers, has been to source the various compounds in small doses. I get some from my own counter at CVS, others from little independent pharmacies around the Bay. A few from online retailers in various parts of the country, delivered in increments over lengthy spans of time. Inconspicuous. Hard to trace.

  Not good, though, when I need a lot, and need it fast.

  At the pharmacy the next morning, I powered up my computer intent on placing orders. Some things I could buy in person later in the day from a nearby shop, but I needed to set the shipments in motion immediately. I could rush the postage, get them here within twenty-four hours.

  It was all in hand. I stepped away from the counter at lunch, ready to run the necessary errand.

  But it wasn’t fated to happen. Life sometimes forges its own turns, and they take you where they will.

  Or where you won’t.

  65

  Amber

  I think this is a dream. I’m out for a walk and the earth bounces a little beneath my feet in the way that non-dream earth never does. Trees bend to meet me. The songbirds don’t just sing: they follow me around as they do, dancing in the air just above my shoulders.

  The whole world moves in creative ways, all to help that other woman, the one inside me, whom I met at the water’s edge. She’s on a march. She was in my belly, she says, buried and abandoned but filled with pain. The world bends to help her, now, cooperating in the desire to unbind the next links in a chain I didn’t realize was shackling my own feet.

  I remember all this. I remember her, though I don’t know from where. A familiar voice. It makes me strangely happy to hear it.

  And we ring the neck of that monster together, tightening the red rope around it. Who is she? She has such a pretty face. But it feels good to use my own hands to force the breath from her throat.

  Our hands. We are doing this together.

  I blink, and it all goes away, the way it does in dreams. The river is gone, and the bouncy earth beneath my feet has become carpeting. A strange room, with musty smells. All the good feelings the other woman within me had brought on a moment ago are gone. Inside I feel a horrible replacement: Terror. Anger. Fear. All of them stirred together like some vile soup.

  Inside, I am completely alone.

  My vision is slanted. The walls are a strange colour. I hate this place.

  I see the first man’s face. He’s middle aged. Overweight. Silver hair flops on a sweaty head. Then another man, fatter than the first, a beer belly protruding over tight trousers. And a third, slender, almost sickly, with a gaunt face.

  Then violence, just like at the river. My hands touching their flesh. Clawing. Rage.

  Attack.

  And I hear my voice cry out, a bestial roar like the
one I’d emitted at the river. ‘You’ll pay for this! You’ll pay!’

  Only it’s not my voice. Not the voice I hear today. It’s the voice of a little girl. The voice I’d had when I was a child.

  I don’t know why I hear it. But that’s the way things go in dreams.

  66

  Amber

  Morning comes. Sight of our hideous bedroom ceiling assaults me as I blink away the blur of night-time – and then the thrashing in my head, worse than I can ever remember it, begins. And memories, hurting me worse than the pain.

  I lie still for a few moments, listening for sounds that might tell me what kind of events are going to arrive next. Sounds of normalcy. But I sense normalcy is a thing only of the past. I won’t see it again.

  I remember my dream.

  I start to weep.

  The woman in the water. I see my hands on the rope around her throat. I can feel it, so vivid that I know it can’t just be imagination. I can feel the cord pull against the meat of my palms, the squirm of her flesh beneath my legs.

  I’m sweating through my sheets. David was right. I killed her. His words last night were impossible. Only this morning, I have the awfullest sense that they are true.

  I can feel her flesh.

  And the men. That part of the dream snaps into my mind. What makes the tears stream down my face isn’t just the memory. It’s that the memory matches what I had learned about the other killings by the river, scanning through the Internet in the bookshop over the past two days. The man with the silver hair. His build.

  Middle aged. Overweight.

  The police report said he had silver hair.

  It flops sweaty on his head …

  And then there are other men, and I remember David telling me three had been killed in the past days. I can feel their flesh in my hands. I can still feel the jostling bodies.

  I can hear the scream in my voice.

  And I know David didn’t do this at all.