The Dark Beneath the Ice

by Amelinda Bérubé

  You’re here to help her, you mean. You’re here to help that stupid, worthless waste of space. You just want to get rid of me!

  “Now let’s be reasonable,” Niobe says sternly, and Not-Marianne lets out an awful, wordless banshee shriek, a sound that stabs through my ears, leaves them ringing. I flounder away from it, scrambling backward till my shoulder thumps into the edge of a bookcase.

  And now I can see them. On the green cushion in the middle of the room, someone is sitting in my place. Something. Wearing the same shapeless sweater as I am, the skirt I’m wearing pooled around its knees. Its hair is floating, a restless, writhing shadow around its head. Niobe stands a few paces away with her hands on her hips, shining so bright I have to raise my hand to shield my gaze. As I watch, the thing sitting in my place hefts the stone I was holding in one hand and whips it at her. It moves almost too fast to see, like a video skipping forward. I can’t hear when the missile hits the wall, but it leaves a gash punched into it, a crescent of shadow.

  I will not! I WILL NOT. You think you can control me? You think you can trap me here?

  “Of course not,” Niobe says, adjusting her spectacles, brushing her hair back from her face. She sounds calm, but her hand is shaking. “You’re obviously very powerful. Very strong.”

  I am, Not-Marianne says fiercely. I am. I’m taking back what’s mine. And you can’t stop me!

  Niobe studies it for a moment.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it,” she says softly. “Being strong.”

  Silence.

  “You’re fighting so hard. You’ve been fighting for so long. Don’t you want to rest? Even just for a little while?”

  I can’t, it says wildly. I can’t. I can’t.

  “There must be someone waiting for you,” Niobe says, her voice even gentler, a mother’s voice.

  No. There’s no one. Never. I’m all alone. I’ve been alone for so long. They’ve all abandoned me. They only want her. That good little fucking Barbie doll!

  “I’m not talking about her,” Niobe says firmly. “I’m talking about you. There are people you love, aren’t there? I can help you find them. That’s my job, all right? Tell me about them. I’ll find them for you.”

  You can’t help me, Not-Marianne whispers.

  “Try me. Come on.”

  I don’t remember. She stole so much. There was a place with tall windows. It wasn’t for dancing. And it filled up with water, she filled it up to the top so I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe!

  Niobe crouches down beside the thing, wraps an arm around its hunched shoulders, reaches out to tame the swirling cloud of its hair.

  I thought I made it back. My mother was right there. She held me, she sang to me. Like she used to. She sang me to sleep. But when I woke up I was there, I was alone.

  “Where do you mean? Where did you wake up?” Niobe murmurs.

  That horrible place, it breathes, and I shrink back against the bookshelf, goose bumps tingling over my arms. That dark place. I haven’t seen the sun in so long. The water’s always waiting. And she pushes me down. Again and again and again.

  It reaches out, suddenly, to clutch Niobe’s arm. Niobe winces, but doesn’t pull away.

  There was a girl with a painted face, it says urgently. She called me. She showed me the way back. She had a smile like the sun. I don’t need the sun back if only she’ll smile at me again. She doesn’t understand. It’s me she wants. I know it. I just have to make her understand. I’m the one who’s real.

  It’s Niobe’s turn to stay silent, stricken.

  If you’re here to help me, Not-Marianne begs, help me find her. I have to see her again. I need her. I need her.

  “And what will you do,” Niobe says, failing to be nonchalant, “when you find her?”

  She’ll stay with me. I know she will.

  “You sound very sure of that.”

  Of course I am. Suspicion clouds its voice. Niobe leans back a little; it yanks her closer. Why are you looking at me like that?

  “I need to know she’s not in any danger.”

  I just have to make her see. It’s pleading, which is somehow more threatening than its scream. I just have to persuade her. She has to love me. She called me.

  I push myself slowly to my feet, every muscle taut and trembling. I reach, fumbling, for the door. I have to find Ron. I have to warn her. Any second it will turn and see me. Does it know I’m here?

  But the doorknob won’t turn under my hand. It’s not slippery exactly. Somehow I just can’t make contact, though my fingers seem to close around it. They told us in math about Zeno’s paradox: how the hare should never catch up with the tortoise because all it can do is halve the distance, and halve it again, and again into infinity.

  Behind me a giggle rises into a mean and cheerless laugh. I bite back a sob and hammer against the door; my fists are as mute as my voice. When I steal a glance over my shoulder I’m looking into my own face, transfigured by a hard-eyed smile I’ve never worn. I recoil from it, the corner of the bookcase sharp against my back.

  Fun, isn’t it? Not-Marianne whispers.

  “That’s enough,” Niobe says, but fear has crept into her muzzy voice, she can’t pull away, and the ghost makes a noise of scoffing disgust.

  I’m done talking to you. You’re a fraud. You can’t keep me here. A pause. Its eyes don’t reflect the candlelight. But you do know where she is, don’t you?

  Beside me, the door swings open, a mouth opening wide into inky darkness. And then Ron blinks into view as she steps across the threshold, not so brilliant as Niobe, but uncannily bright, like she’s been snipped from a sunny picture and pasted onto the surface of the night. She speaks in a murky, underwater jumble, with some words still submerged, unintelligible.

  “Shut up,” she says. “…here, all right?…alone!”

  Not-Marianne’s smile turns radiant.

  I knew it, it whispers. I knew you’d come back.

  “That’s enough!” Niobe repeats, terror a knife-edge in her voice. She closes her eyes, reaches her hands out to either side as if she’s going to pull the walls down. “MARIANNE, COME BACK. I CALL YOU BACK.”

  It’s like someone’s caught hold of my sweater, jerked me forward; I can’t catch my balance, and I throw my hands out, trying to break my fall—

  —and my hand, my elbow, jars against the floorboards. I yelp as sparking numbness travels up my arm, and I hear the sound as it leaves my lips, a pathetic bleat. When I push myself up, my legs are still folded over the green cushion. I breathe in patchouli. Niobe kneels beside me, limned with flickering shadow, clutching her head.

  A pounding starts on the wall, the wild, frantic hammering of someone trapped in a room with water rising around their knees. The candles gutter out as if in a single gust of wind, but the air is still except for the same chilly draft creeping across the floor. And all around us comes the sound of smashing glass, a furious staccato like popcorn, little objects from the shelves hitting the floor with an impact that vibrates through the wood. The window implodes, the curtains lashing, shards spraying out toward us, muffling Ron’s scream.

  When silence falls, Niobe, a hunched silhouette, hasn’t moved. Her breath is ragged. Ron slaps at the light switch, but it doesn’t work; the bulb must have gotten smashed with everything else. Her face springs into the light of a single wavering flame. A lighter.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Mom,” she says faintly. She takes a couple of long, crunching steps toward Niobe, but Niobe puts out a hand to stop her, shrinking down a little, her other hand cradling her face.

  “S’okay,” she pants. “Migraine. Oh. Ow.”

  Ron turns to me instead, sweeping debris out of the way with her boots as she makes her way across the room. She takes my elbow, pulls me up.

  “Watch your feet,” she mutters.

  “Don’t t
ouch her. Stay where you are!” Niobe’s voice is a whipcrack, making us both jump. She hauls herself to her feet, one hand still pressed to the side of her head. She wavers there for a moment, then squints at me. “You. Need to leave.”

  In the shattered room I can hardly argue. I shrink from her stare.

  “Mom, what the hell!” Ron cries.

  “I’m not strong enough.” Niobe’s words are quiet, pained, but as final as a door falling closed. “It’s already got its hooks into you. It’s already inside you. It couldn’t have gotten in here otherwise. I can’t help you. And I can’t risk my daughter. You need to leave.”

  “Uh, excuse me?” Ron waves her hands in the air. “Hello! I’m right here!”

  “You,” Niobe breathes, stabbing a finger at her, “have messed this up worse than you know.” She looks at me, then closes her eyes again, like the sight of me hurts. “There was a time I could make sacrifices. And it was a long time ago. I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

  I pull away from Ron, who makes a sound like she’s going to protest, but she doesn’t. I take long, awkward strides to the door, glass crunching under my shoes every time I put my feet down. Niobe ignores me, rocking back and forth a little bit, her face twisted up in pain.

  Once I’ve closed the door behind me I can run. I pelt down the stairs, away from Ron’s voice rising furiously behind me, and throw the door open with a bang.

  I fly down the sidewalk, past hedges and fences covered in trailing grapevines, but it’s been a long time since I was any kind of athlete, and I’m exhausted. Eventually I stagger to a halt, leaning over my feet and bracing myself against my knees, waiting for my breath to stop burning in my throat. The streetlights are on, glinting from chain-link fences, bleeding other colors from the world, leaving only the murky remnants of the brightest reds and blues. It’s a false light, a netherworld light that lets you see but doesn’t push back the darkness.

  I can’t go home. What do I do now?

  Eventually I lurch back into motion, following the sidewalk without caring which direction I’m going. That was it. My last hope, the last person who might have helped me. And her one defense, the one thing she said might give me a better chance, only invited it in. It’s already inside you. It felt like a sentence. Dead girl walking.

  I could lie down right here in the street, just let it wash over me. Let go and sink. But the dream is a chilly breath on my neck: the memory of fighting for air, knowing there’s only water there to breathe. Animal panic prods me forward, hurries my steps.

  I think of Mom’s lined, tired face. If—when—the ghost takes over for good, will she know it? Or will she just think it’s me, turned wild, lashing out, becoming Hurricane Marianne? Would anybody see the difference?

  Ron would. She would know.

  She must have been listening at the door that whole time. This time she heard it, all that demented rambling. The naked want. She should have run. But she thought her mom was in danger, and she opened the door. She told it to shut up. Would I have defended my mom like that, if our places were reversed? Could I?

  It’s a stupid question. I know exactly what a hard, cold moment of truth like that would reveal in me. I’ve already seen it. I would crumble; I would run. I would hide. It’s all I know how to do.

  There was a reason it was the adage that I couldn’t master. “There’s no faking the adage,” Miss Giselle always told us. “You need a lot more than strength to make it flow.” When you slow everything down that much there’s no disguising your weakness, your lack of center, the quaver in your leg that threatens to unbalance you. There’s no faking control. And there’s nowhere to hide from the mirror, not with the merciless line rotation pushing you forward.

  The day I gave it up was all wrong from the start, and stuck in front of the mirror I couldn’t turn away from any part of it: my leg too high, my arms chicken wings, stiff and brushed with goose bumps. I’d been up later than my parents the night before, practicing the same stupid thing over and over again, the long languid moves.

  “Long lines, Marianne,” Miss Giselle called. “Extend!”

  And I wobbled, stumbled out of step completely, had to fumble for my place again. No one met my eye in the mirror. I could feel their stares on my back.

  It broke like a bone, whatever was holding me together, and I thumped down onto the flats of my shoes and ran from the room. The only place I could think of to come unglued was the bathroom. I slammed into a stall, curled up on the toilet seat, sobbed into my arms. The echoes bounced off the tiles. They hid the sound of the door swinging open.

  “Are you all right?” someone called. I choked on my sudden panic, swallowed it down. Too late.

  “Yes,” I called back. Utterly unconvincing. And they left: there were two of them, two voices, giggling in embarrassment as the door fell shut behind them. Soon everyone would be talking about it. How I was falling apart. How I didn’t have what it takes.

  I left the stall, splashed water on my face, looked into my red-rimmed eyes in the mirror. Under the fluorescents I was skinny and sallow, my lips purple-tinged, my breastbone an ugly shadow under my skin.

  That was when I knew. I couldn’t do it. I was never going back.

  I don’t know what’s more pathetic, the memory or that I’m thinking about it now. I shake my head, hug my elbows, and blow out a long, trembling breath, like they taught us in yoga, exhaling everything negative like a stream of silver bubbles underwater.

  But the sound of it sinks away from me into rushing silence. It’s lost as the sun. And a weight settles into the backs of my legs, though I stumble to a stop, leaning back against it.

  “Not again,” I whimper. Or try to.

  Everything around me is the same, but immobile, breathless, the windows of the houses blind and dark. I stand there hesitating on the sidewalk, panic beating through the murmuring noise in my ears.

  That horrible place, the ghost said. That dark place. The water’s always waiting. It pulls at me, calling me northward like a compass needle, to where the river should be. I turn my face away, fight to take deep breaths I can’t hear. I have to get away from it.

  I force myself to take a step. Another. And another. Into the middle of the empty street. Which way should I go? How far can I get? I think all the roads here must lead to the water eventually. I can feel the weight of it bending all the paths, a black hole drawing down the stars.

  White light, I think desperately. White light. I stare straight ahead, trying not even to blink, fixating on the dark, empty facades of houses, the way the orange light shines on the wet asphalt, so that it can’t slip back toward the water like it did in the park. And I walk.

  Stirling leads to one street, then another, and I’m forced to turn, though I’m afraid to, afraid to find the street suddenly sloping down toward the same empty beach. Even the main arteries, usually bustling with traffic and restaurant-goers, are silent and dark. The quiet there is so uncanny I give up and turn back onto the side streets, at random, just to get away from it. I pass empty chairs on dark porches, wind chimes hanging motionless, the leaves of trees hanging wetly down, gleaming in the streetlights. Above the rooflines on one side, a church steeple slices into the sullen sky, pale sea green in the glow of a floodlight shining up from below.

  I creep on and on, the only moving thing. Maybe I’ve been walking forever. The street corners are featureless lakes. A tall, wrought-iron gate leads into a playground where a bright white streetlamp shines like a star, illuminating the slides and monkey bars with a pale wash of color. The swing set stands as if in midair, its whole shape made alien by the flawless reflection underneath it.

  I give the water a wide berth, but I’m drawn like a moth to the brilliance of the light, drifting silently along the paved path. The rose window of the church looms on the far side of the park. The halo cast by the streetlamp fades into murky shadow under the trees, a
cross the black swath of a submerged lawn. How long will I be wandering here, waiting for the current to build, for the water to pull me down? How long have I been gone? Will this be the time it doesn’t let me come back? Is it still in the real world in my place, like it was before?

  If it’s in my place…if we’ve switched places…is this where it came from?

  I turn slowly around, seeing the silent world with new understanding. I’ll drown her instead. She can rot in the dark. Is it ever daytime here? When I look back through the gate, the dark tunnel of the street beyond seems to stretch out forever, and time gapes open with it, bottomless, an eternity without sunlight or sound or warmth. An eternity fighting the current, fighting for my life, all alone.

  Yes. That’s it. I know I’m right, like I know my name. This is where it came from, this dark, silent, unchanging noplace.

  And it thinks I’m the one pulling it down. Into the water. Into that icy, mirror-smooth surface from my dream.

  I put my hands to my mouth. No. That can’t be it, that can’t be true. What power do I have to do something like that? This has to be a mistake. There has to be some way to tell it so, to convince it, whatever it is. Can it hear me from here?

  It wasn’t me, I try to shout, and then again. It wasn’t me! It’s no good, there’s no sound, not so much as an eddy in the air. It’s like I’m not even breathing.

  Think. I sink down on a bench, ignoring the chilly bite of water soaking through my skirt, and put my hands over my eyes. Come on, think. If this is where it came from, then there’s some way to affect the real world, the daylight world, from here. It must have found a way. Right? I think of the books sweeping themselves off the shelf, the knives hanging in the air. It can find me. I should be able to find it too.

  I sit there for a moment, quailing, but then I think of Ron, her plain pale face in the light of the candles; her fearful eyes, the thin determined line of her mouth. Bit by bit, as if I’m edging around a corner, I force the image of that half-glimpsed figure to coalesce in my mind, its floating hair, its rage like lightning. Come find me, I think. I’m waiting.