Full Fathom Five (The Keys Trilogy Book 3)

by Anna Roberts

*

  The room faded. She smelled moss and rot and the pain came again, so fierce that Yael couldn’t sustain the illusion any longer; she saw the boarded windows and the filthy floorboards.

  Blue felt his panic. Babies didn’t remember this: their brains weren’t formed enough to make memories, but Yael had crammed his old, old consciousness into the brain of a baby and now he was being forced to feel everything as he squeezed his narrow way into the outside world.

  Good.

  “He’s flesh,” she said, when she could breathe again. “My blood is his blood. I could shed every drop in my veins and it wouldn’t do shit – there’s no power in it any more.”

  Gabe shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Get out. That’s all you need to understand.”

  “No,” he said, gripping her arm firmly with his good hand. “You need to go to the hospital.”

  Oh God. Of course he would say that. Everything was so simple to him. “And say what?” said Blue. “That I’m like, ten months pregnant with a ghost who wants to be human? He’s distressed, Gabe.”

  “Which is exactly why –”

  “ – no. You don’t understand. He’s pretty deep in the body he stole, but if it gets bad he might just decide to abandon ship. Which is why you can’t be here.”

  “He’s not gonna jump into me. Not when he’s waited all this time for a body of his own.”

  “He’ll try,” she said, and she must have sounded too certain, because Gabe stared at her with a slow, gathering horror that hurt more even than the ache splitting her pelvis apart.

  “‘If it gets bad?’” he said.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  But he couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t blame him. In spite of everything it was still unnatural and disgusting, perhaps the most terrible crime a person could commit. Whatever Yael was, whatever he had been, he was still going to come into the world looking like an innocent.

  “It’s our baby,” said Gabe.

  “No,” she said, too firmly, as another strong cramp gripped her. “It’s not. Not any more. Whatever he was is already dead. There’s nothing in there but Yael.”

  Maybe he could still hear her, because when he kicked he aimed unerringly at her spine, dropping her to the dirty floor. Her muscles squeezed, wringing out everything from the waist down. She’d stood for as long as she could, but her legs ached all the way down to the knees, like someone had taken all the period pains she’d ever had in her life, packaged them all together and turned the whole thing up to eleven.

  She scrambled to her hands and knees, teeth clenched, spine in a vise. All her vindictive fantasies about crossing her legs and suffocating him inside her were just that; her body, her brain and her whole being were hardwired to push. One way or the other, this thing was coming out.

  “Look at me, listen to me,” Gabe kept saying, but she could barely hear his voice, and when she did manage to meet his eyes he looked lost and distant like men always looked in delivery rooms, separated by a pain they could never experience. Maybe she’d looked at him in the same way when the moon was full.

  “Blue,” he said. “How long have the pains been going on for now?”

  She caught her breath, bracing for the next contraction. “Oh, a while.”

  “How long is a while?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and when she closed her eyes she saw the dark ocean again, back on that boat with a gun in her hand. Grandma had some wild times back in the day. “I kinda lost track of time.”

  *

  He won’t eat or drink anything she hands him any more, and she can’t blame him, not after the valerian tea. He might have left a trail of corpses all over the South, but at least she didn’t raise a fool.

  West drinks from his hip flask instead and she lurks at a safe distance, waiting for the moment when he passes out or dozes off. He’s going through the old record collection – Iron Butterfly, Inna Gadda Da Vida. She has the necklace in her bag, rusted now but iron all the same. Iron enough for what she has to do.

  He sings and drinks and smokes and she stays out of the way. Can’t get the chickens these days; she bought a capon from the butcher but it’s not the same as a fresh bird from the yard. Still, the freezer needs filling and she chops up leeks and onions while her mind floats off over the ocean, past the dark horizon. It doesn’t matter if the world is about to end; a woman still has chores to do.

  The drums pound on her nerves. She presses a hand to her heart, like she can hold it in place, stop it beating right out of her chest, but then the Tupperware container on the side jerks wildly and she almost screams.

  She left the lid ajar; he needs to be alive for this. Carefully she peels back the lid far enough to see that the frog has kicked through the damp paper bag and his long, graceful leg is sticking out. He kicks again and almost dislodges the lid, but she holds it down with one hand and reaches for an elastic band to hold it in place, just to be sure. There’s all kinds of coiled power in those little legs.

  Gloria hears a thud and holds her breath, unsure if it’s just another beat in the endless drum solo. But then there’s a groan and she floats, weightless with nerves and lack of sleep, into the living room. He’s cheek down on the couch, already drooling a dark spot on the scarred green velvet, his hip flask held in slackening fingers. She watches, barely daring to breathe, as the flask slips and falls to the floor. There’s nothing in it to spill.

  So far, so good. Or bad, depending on your point of view.

  His eyes open. He blinks like the tender blind young of animals who are born with their eyes closed, but she reminds herself that West had his eyes wide open from the very start, and that he was barely two months before he cut his first fang. His eyes swim boozily as Yael tries to get to grips with a brain full of liquor.

  He gags a little, wipes the drool off his cheek and sits up, unsteady. “Oh dear,” he says, and it’s not his voice. It’s Yael’s.

  “Is he sleeping?” she asks.

  Yael swallows a hiccup and takes a moment to digest this new sensation. She asks again.

  “Passed out cold,” says Yael. “Are you ready?”

  “No,” she says. “But let’s get it done anyway.”

  He sways as he stands, and for a second she thinks he might go face down through the old glass coffee table. Take a shard to the carotid and spare her the trouble, although the carpet would never come clean. “Wait there,” she says, and goes back to the kitchen. She puts the Tupperware in her purse where it clunks against the gun and the frog inside throws fifty small fits at the change of scenery, poor thing. Quickly she stuffs a scarf between the gun and the container and wipes the onion juice from the kitchen knife with a paper towel. She drops into the bag with the rest; all she needs is some wing of bat and eye of newt and she’ll fit for a witchcraft trial.

  Yael stands where she left him, like he’s still trying to get the hang of feet now that booze is involved. “You need a purse for this?” he says.

  She walks past him and opens the front door, too wrapped up in what’s happening to answer back. It’s only when he’s sat beside her in the passenger seat of her car that she thinks of a retort.

  “I knew a woman,” she says, starting the car. “Nurse at a hospice. One night I got up the nerve to ask her what it was that most people said when they were staring death right in the eye. You know what she said?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “Most of the women asked for their purses, like they were leaving a restaurant or a party.”

  Yael shakes his head – West’s head. “I don’t believe that,” he says. “Most of them ask for their mothers.”

  Of course he knows that. Even if he hadn’t spent the last twenty or more years in the head of a murderer he’s still old as the goddamn hills. And there’s the vexed question of his freedom still hanging between them. If she could set him free he could go anywhere, and she has a nasty feeling where he’ll go, now that he’s clapped eyes
on Charlie, her darling, the young chevalier. Operative word ‘young.’

  There’s the girl, too. That little thing must have just turned eight.

  The frog stirs at the stoplight and she hears a muffled knock. Her heart almost leaps out of her mouth at the sound, but Yael’s in love with night now that he has a pair of eyeballs at his disposal. It rained half an hour ago and he’s bewitched by the way the water droplets on the window turn from red to amber to green as the light gives her leave to go. He’s so deep in West’s head that he’s almost human right now. Vulnerable. And much easier to deceive.

  She stops the car at the marina. As she cuts the engine the sound of the ocean pours into the car, and Yael looks up from his reverie. “Salt,” he says, breathing in the sea air.

  “Suck it up,” says Gloria. “You’re an idiot if you think I’m letting this happen to my carpet. Or my kitchen floor.”

  He gets out of the car, swaying again. “He hates that linoleum, you know.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “He thinks it’s half-assed. Kind of like your second husband.”

  “Well,” she says, and leads the way down the narrow pier. “I guess the boy was right about some things.”

  “Was?” says Yael. “Past tense? No wonder they compare the cold to a witch’s tit.”

  “Just get in the boat.”

  He steps down gingerly, moving like a dog trying to stand up in the back of van. If this is going to go wrong, this is when it’s going to happen.

  “Come on,” she says. “You’ve been on a boat before.”

  “A long time ago. Even for me it was a long time ago.”

  As she starts up the motor it occurs to her that she never really asked. When she said yes to him she’d been a child, incurious and self-absorbed, and as a young woman she’d been forced to serve his appetites in return for him teaching her how to keep the wolf at bay. Sometimes at night something slipped through her dreams – a stone hall, a bloody ax, a woman in a red riding costume – but she had never asked him. There had never been time, what with the messes Yael made. He’d liked to make her sleepwalk, or forget whole portions of her day, and Larry – this was back in the mid-Seventies when everyone with half a brain was huffing the fumes of that stupid Sybil book – had delivered an armchair diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder.

  The lights of the shore grow smaller. She’s never been this far out on her own before, at least not at night. Yael sits West stiff in the bows, his head and shoulders silhouetted against a vast, star-spattered sky. Nothing but sky and dark water, and she thinks she sees him shiver, either an involuntary movement or Yael suddenly realizing that he’s surrounded by something even bigger, blacker and more implacable than himself.

  It’s too late for him. He’s out here now. She’s got him cornered.

  They come alongside a buoy. Gloria cuts the engine and – as it sputs and putters – hooks up the boat. In different circumstances the buoy light might have been comforting in all this darkness, but instead it only serves to highlight the inky black nothing stretching all around.

  Yael looks around wildly, but if he guesses a trick he doesn’t give anything else away. “So,” he says. “About this.”

  “I thought we agreed,” says Gloria, reaching into her purse. The frog is silent; she hopes it hasn’t died in there. “We do this, you go free. We never have to deal with one another again.”

  “And I’m free to go wherever I choose?” he says.

  “Yes.” He’s being tricky again, trying to put words in her mouth.

  “To whomever I choose?”

  “That’s what freedom means, Yael.”

  “Say yes.”

  Here it is. If she says yes this time she knows exactly where he’s going to go next; he’s not going to walk away, not when he can take his revenge by going after her grandchildren. No amount of cocktails and pills can stop him from creeping into her nightmares like that; every other night she sees him standing over Charlie’s crib.

  She fishes out a length of rope, coiled in a corner under the fake Hermes scarf. “Hold out his hands,” she says, and Yael does so.

  That’s always one of the first things people exclaim over when they see a brand new baby – those tiny, perfect hands. And West’s were no exception. So small they barely seemed real. Just the tip of her thumb filled his whole palm. He’d come out needing his fingernails cut, and now as she looks at his torn, dirty adult nails she wonders if that part is also true – if the nails he’d grown before birth will keep on growing when he’s gone and weighted and sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

  He has WOLF CHILD tattooed across his knuckles, with a dot on the thumb where there wasn’t a letter to go there. Yael folds his hands as if in prayer and she pulls the rope tight, lashing his hands together. In different circumstances she might have spat three times on the knot, just to add her will to the binding, but she has a feeling her will might work against her in this instance, in spite of herself. No matter how many bodies there were, she’s still his mother.

  “Ask me for your freedom,” she says, as she secures another knot, just to be sure.

  “You didn’t answer my last question,” he says, determined to get his answer. To whomever. Another yes he can twist when it comes back to bite her.

  “Freedom is freedom, Yael,” she says. “It means just that. Now ask.”

  She reaches back into the purse and feels the gun, heavy and hard. The frog knocks its leg weakly against the Tupperware.

  Yael swallows. He’s been waiting for this so long that she’s almost sorry to disappoint him, but what’s done is done. She can’t risk those children.

  “Will you set me free?” he says.

  “Yes,” says Gloria.

  He flies up out of West so fast that West’s eyes roll back in his head, leaving him lurching, sick and full of booze, wondering once again how the hell he got here. She sees the air shiver as Yael surges up, up, up and then stops. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. It’s all salt, and he’s going nowhere.

  “Ma?” says West, looking wildly around him, and then he sees the buoy light glinting on the barrel of the gun. “Oh God,” he says. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Nothing you haven’t done to a whole bunch of people,” says Gloria, and she’s surprised as anyone to hear her own voice come out steady. Her hand doesn’t even shake, although her belly is doing backflips, and Yael – floating like a trapped fart above the boat – is pissed.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” says West. “You’re my mother.”

  “And you’re my monster,” she says. “How many? A hundred? More?”

  He shakes his head, lying even now. “Who told you that? Yael? Jesus – you’re going to believe that spook over your own son?”

  “It’s too late, West,” she says, and Yael howls in her ears, wordless and enraged. He’s got two heads he can jump into – hers and West’s, and while he can jump into her a lot easier than he could when she still had a set of functioning ovaries, he’s still going to have to fight, especially since she slipped on the iron necklace under cover of darkness.

  Even at this moment, he consumes her thoughts. This is the kind of poison he is; he can’t be allowed to go free.

  “I saw them,” she says. “The church lady, the Mackie boy, the girls in the basement. I know what you did.”

  His eyes glitter and he sighs. “It was him,” he says, still trying, still lying. “It was the only way he’d ever shut up. He’s lying to you, Ma. He wants me dead.”

  “Yes. Yes, he does.” If she could just pull the trigger then this would be over. But she can’t. Her finger doesn’t seem to want to move. “Because you were too much of a monster even for him.”

  “No!” says West. “Because I’m dying.”

  Her hand shakes. Yael rattles the water around the boat, furious. Liar, liar.

  “What?” she says.

  “I’m dying, Ma,” says West. “It’s in my head. Size
of walnut, but they can’t get the fucking thing out without turning me into a vegetable.”

  Yael keeps up his whine – liar liar liar – and she hates him more than she’s ever hated anyone right now. Maybe it would just be easier to make this a murder/suicide. Anything’s better than living with Yael.

  “You’re full of shit,” she says.

  “I’m not. I swear to God, Ma – I know I’ve lied to you in the past, but this time I’m telling the truth. Think about it. He wants out because he needs someone new. Without a body he’s nothing, and mine’s about to up and die on him. No wonder he came telling you tales –”

  “ – shut up.” Tales. They weren’t tales. They were real things that happened, real people with newspaper stories and grieving families.

  “ – Ma, listen to me –”

  “ – no. What happens if I turn this boat around, West?” She swallows down tears, determined not to cry. “You go back to shore and you die. In six months? Twelve months? What happens between now and then? You go on an extra tear because you’ve got nothing left to lose? How many you gonna rack up in your last spree? Another hundred?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Oh, he’s exaggerating,” he says. “It was never more than forty, if that.”

  If that. Her finger comes to life again and then there’s a bang and he falls sideways. Lies still. The gun slides from her grip and lands in the bottom of the boat with a thud that makes her scream.

  Yael is still thrashing at the air but he’s zeroed in on something, that little life kicking away in her purse.

  She can’t think about that now. She scrambles for the bags in the footlocker, two old bowling balls that Ralph – useless husband number three - left behind. West lies motionless and she knows he’s dead, because the blood is only oozing out instead of spurting. She stopped his heart with one shot, right in the middle of his forehead...

  ...and when he was good he was very, very good, and when he was bad he was horrid.

  The old nursery rhyme surges up like a burp, silly and inappropriate. She’s crying but she’s close to laughing at the same time, swinging on that giddy emotional pendulum that doctors used to call hysteria. The wandering womb. Joke’s on them. She had the thing scooped out and the fruit of said womb is now bleeding down the side of a boat into the ocean.