At the opposite end of the galley, Persephone Remora sat playing a complicated octocard game with one of her younger charges, a boy with lank black hair and pasty skin.
“Vampirates, I’ve no doubt,” she said loftily, carefully covering one of the cards with her hand. When she lifted it, the card had turned over, revealing a picture of a capering, grinning skeleton. “I suspect they normally only hunt the ocean’s face by moonlight, but it may well be that they smelled the presence of their kin. Perchance they meant for us to join them.”
“Begging your pardon, Miss,” one of the kitchen mates commented as he gathered the tea cups and spoons, “but there ain’t no such thing as vampirates.”
“I’m quite sure that that is what they would have you believe, sir,” Remora sniffed delicately. “A secret and mysterious sect are they, known only to those who are doomed to be their prey.”
The mate shrugged. “As you say, Miss. Person’ly, I always did find that a deadly reputation worked much better on the open sea than mysterious secrecy. Saves you having to prove yourself over and over to every new ship you chase after. Frankly, even if they do exist, life amongst your secret vampirates sounds like nothing but work, work, work, if you ask me.”
“Excuse me,” Remora said tiredly, rolling her eyes, “but I don’t believe I did.”
The young man sitting across from Remora sighed. “Mortals,” he said under his breath, pretending that no one else could hear him. James saw the boy glance sideways, but James acted as if he hadn’t noticed.
Eventually, after a dinner of lobster bisque, fresh sea cucumber, and Atlantean colossal clam pudding, James stood on the deck again and watched the sun dip into the distant watery horizon, turning huge and red as it went.
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” Barstow said, crossing his forearms on the deck railing next to James. “But that sky doesn’t look like anybody’s delight to me. Too hot and still, like a beast lying in wait. What do you think, James?”
James shrugged, unsure how to respond.
“I smell a storm in the air,” Barstow went on, nodding. “A big one, methinks. Not tonight, but in the morning maybe. Could be we’ll pass beyond it in the dark. Or it could be that we’ll need to be prepared for a bit of a blow tomorrow. I understand you played Treus in a school rendition of The Triumvirate. Is that right?”
James glanced at Barstow, who was grinning at him crookedly. James nodded sheepishly. “You’ve been talking to Albus. It was just a Muggle Studies production, so we didn’t do any of the magical bits, or at least not with real magic. The storm was just a big fan and a painted backdrop.”
Barstow nodded gravely. “But I bet it gave you some idea of how such things happen on the high seas. Don’t you worry. This won’t be any magical storm like what nearly overtook the fabled Treus and his crew. There’s no Donovan in a jealous rage, whipping up any tempests for us to sail into. Still, even your average, run-o’-the-mill Atlantic squall can put a scare into an unwary traveler’s soul. You’ll be prepared to keep everyone calm since you’ve had a taste of it before, even if it was just a big fan and a painted backdrop. Am I right?”
James nodded and frowned seriously, gazing out over the waves.
On the horizon, the sun seemed to bleed and ripple, bloated deep red. And then, so swiftly that James thought he could see it happening, it slipped beneath the rim of the world. Darkness fell over the ship like a curtain, with no stars this time, and only a low moon, thin as a sickle, on the opposite horizon. Lanterns were lit on the masts, but their light didn’t reach the water. The ship seemed to ply an invisible, cavernous lake, impossibly deep and full of mystery. Barstow went to take his shift on the brass chair at the ship’s prow, and James bid him goodnight. Not liking being alone on the deck between that featureless black sky and bottomless, invisible ocean, James quickly descended into the comforting closeness and warm lantern-glow below-decks.
Quietly, he made his way to the tiny stateroom that he was sharing with his brother and Ralph. For now, the room was empty. Two sets of narrow bunks framed a single porthole with a sink below it. The porthole window was seamlessly black, like an onyx eye. James twitched the small curtain closed, then hunkered and pulled his duffle bag out from beneath the lower bunk on his right. A moment later, he clambered up to the top bunk, his wand lit and Petra’s parchment parcel in his hand. He sat crosslegged in the center of the rough, woolen blanket, set the seamless packet onto the pillow, and tapped it with his glowing wand.
“Revelierus,” he said carefully. Like an origami flower, the parchment blossomed, unfolding and spreading, until it had returned to its original form. A small sheaf of loose parchment, covered in Petra’s neat, dense handwriting, lay on the pillow. James could read the title, written in larger, flowing script along the top: The Girl on the Dock. It was underlined darkly, the lines embedded in the parchment, as if they had been made with a lot of force. James realized he was holding his breath. Slowly, he let it out, picked up the first page of Petra’s dream story, and began to read.
The Girl on the Dock
It is the middle of the night. The moon is huge and high, reflecting off the surface of the lake. I lead Izzy by the hand, out of the woods and toward the shimmering lake. Suddenly she stops.
“I don’t want to go there,” she says.
“Why not?” I say. “It’s only the lake”.
“I just don’t want to go, that’s all,” she replies, shaking her head.
She is afraid, yet I do not think she has seen the dagger I carry concealed in my other hand.
“It’ll be alright, Iz,” I say. “I’ll hold your hand the whole time.”
Izzy looks at the lake and then up at me with large, serious eyes and nods once. We continue toward the dock, but she stops again at the top step.
“I don’t want to go any further, Petra.”
“But I want to show you something,” I say. I am surprised at her reluctance. I tighten my grip on her small hand and coax her down the stairs to the wooden planks of the dock.
“I don’t want to see the gazebo,” she says. “It’s creepy. Please, Petra.” I realize she has remembered the incident with the dead spiders; the day I saw my mother’s face in the lake, the day I understood I could still bring her back, if only the sacrifice was great enough. The dead spiders were only enough to show me her reflection. To speak to her, I must offer something much more. I told Izzy that I was looking down in the water because I could see the old sunken gazebo in its watery grave, but she suspects more. She is unusually sharp in my presence. Her own mother would barely recognize her.
“It’s not the gazebo that I want to show you,” I tell her.
“What then?” she asks.
“My mother.” I answer, and raise the dagger in one hand, Izzy’s open palm in the other. She screams and begins to struggle, pulling away and trying to pry her hand out of mine.
“Stop fighting me, Iz,” I plead. “It’ll only hurt for a moment. Just a little blood…that’s all. I need to talk to my mother! She’ll tell me what to do, Iz. She’ll tell us both.”
Izzy is terrified and my words do not calm her. Some part of me knows I should stop, and yet I do not. I must finish the task. I grip her wrist and lower the dagger point.
Izzy screams again and pushes me. I lose my balance as I grab the wooden piling, dropping the dagger into the lake and releasing Izzy’s hand. To my horror, she falls into the water with a loud splash and I suddenly remember that Izzy cannot swim.
“Izzy!” I cry out frantically, dropping to my knees on the dock. I hear her thrashing at the black water but I cannot see her. “Swim to me!” I shout and prepare to jump in after her.
“No!” I hear a voice in my thoughts say firmly. “no… wait…”
Izzy is flailing in the water and yet I remain there, watching.
“This was your intent all along…. The girl must die. Only then will you have peace.”
I am frozen in place. I watch Izzy begin to sin
k beneath the dark water. I shake my head.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I say. “It can’t end this way.”
“No one will know,” the voice says soothingly. “Her body will eventually be found. A tragic accident… You will mourn her properly. You, with your own mother at your side.”
I glance around the lake and look intently back toward the woods behind me.
“No one is coming,” I say, amazed and surprised.
“No,” the voice deep in my thoughts agrees, “the boy James does not come this time. The misguided force of good has no voice here. ‘Good’ is a myth. There is only power. Nothing else matters.”
James stopped reading. His eyes were wide, shining in the wandlight, and his heart was pounding so hard that the parchment shook in his hands.
Merlin predicted this, he thought, nearly saying the words aloud. Back at the end of last term, when he, James, and James’ dad had met in the Headmaster’s office to discuss the aftermath of Petra’s encounter with the Gatekeeper, Merlin had warned them that Petra’s battle might not truly be over.
“Don’t think that, despite her actions,” he had said gravely, “she will not lie awake on cold, lonely nights, pining hopelessly for her dead parents, and wondering, wondering, if on that fateful night in the Chamber of Secrets she made the wrong choice.”
Now, if any of what James was reading in Petra’s dream story was true, he knew that she had indeed wondered those very things. According to the story, she was still haunted by the events of that night, and had subsequently seen her mother’s face in the surface of the Morganstern Farm’s lake, after she, Petra, had dropped some inexplicable load of dead spiders into it. The spiders functioned as a tiny sacrifice, giving Petra one more fleeting glimpse of what she had lost in the Chamber of Secrets.
Somehow, incredibly, Petra appeared to possess the power to recreate the Gatekeeper’s awful bargain, only this time without any outside interference. Still, if the dream story was accurate, even then she had not consciously meant to sacrifice Izzy in order to retrieve her mother from the dead. She had meant only to offer the lake some of Izzy’s blood, in order to simply talk to the vision of her mother, and hear her guidance. But then, apparently, things had gone very wrong, and the horrid voice of Voldemort had taken advantage of it, pushing Petra to commit the act she was meant to have committed in the Chamber of Secrets: the murder of another human being.
James was stunned, not so much by the power of the story, but by the nagging question: how much of it was true? He recalled the short bit of Petra and Merlin’s conversation that he and the gremlins had listened in on with Ted’s Extendable Ears. In it, Petra had referred to the dream, commenting that it was a reminder that one decision can have monumental repercussions. So where, in the dream story, did it stop reflecting what had actually happened on that night? How much of it was real, and how much was plain and simple nightmare? Obviously, Izzy had survived that night, either because she had never really fallen into the lake or because Petra had somehow managed to rescue her. But how? James furrowed his brow and bent over the pages again, reading on.
I look out over the water again. I can no longer see Izzy, but a figure is rising from the center of the lake. I can see, even in silhouette, that it is the shape I have so longed to see. My mother stands on the surface of the lake. She begins to walk to me, her arms outstretched, and yet I am torn. I cannot let Izzy die! I shake my head and peer down into the water, trying to find her with my thoughts. My wand is broken. I no longer remember how to do the magic without it but I must try. I raise my arms out over the water, close my eyes and concentrate.
“What are you doing?” the voice inside me asks.
“You are right,” I answer, as firmly as I can. “No one is coming. I am being the voice of good. I am choosing it myself….” I force the figure of my mother from my mind. I focus on finding Izzy.
“Don’t be a fool!” The voice is becoming angry now. “Once before you thought you had changed the course of destiny, yet here you are now. You have only postponed the inevitable.”
I cannot sense Izzy in the depths of the lake but something is hidden in the darkness. It has been a long time since I have moved anything without my wand but I discover that the power is still there; buried but not forgotten. I direct all my energy to the object below.
Something in the water begins to move—something large. As a result, the figure of my mother slowly begins to sink again.
“You are not the only one with powers at your disposal….” The voice seethes at me. “I am you and you are me. You cannot choose the light while I choose the dark!”
My left hand is suddenly icy cold. Frosty tendrils extend from it out onto the lake toward the sinking figure of my mother, forming a narrow sheet of white ice. She rises again to the surface and walks toward me on the icy bridge. My power is divided and weakened. I cannot maintain my hold on the large object in the water.
“Give in!” the voice commands. “Good is a myth! All that matters is power. Embrace your destiny or die fighting. You are not good. There is no such thing.”
I look at the face of my mother. All I have to do is reach out and take her hand.
And suddenly I realize that I don’t care.
“Good is only a myth if good people stop believing in it,” I say out loud. “I may not be good but neither am I evil. Whichever direction I go is up to no one but me!” I feel warmth come over me. My hand is no longer cold. I close my eyes, concentrate and the object of my attention begins to rise once more toward the surface of the lake. I see the water mount up in a boil, slowly at first and then with a great surge. With a roar of falling water, the old gazebo lifts from the lake, resuming its original position at the end of the dock. It is waterlogged and draped with seaweed, but completely recognizable. And lying in the center of its rotten floor is Izzy.
I rush to her, kneel beside her, and push the wet hair back from her face. Her eyes are closed and she is not breathing.
“Izzy,” I whisper close to her ear. “I did it! I made the right choice, Iz.”
She does not move. I look at her pale face and touch her forehead.
“Please don’t be dead, Izzy,” I beg her. “Please…” I close my eyes and cast my mind into Izzy’s small body. I feel warmth inside her soul but she doesn’t respond. She has lost hope and is dwindling away. I cannot give up… I will not give up… I feel tears on my face and I try again.
“Come back, Izzy,” I plead silently, speaking directly to that diminishing spark of her life. “Please come back.”
There is no response. Izzy’s eyes do not so much as flutter. I begin to panic. “Don’t go Iz, I need you. You’re all I have left. It shouldn’t end this way. It can’t end this way. Good will win out in the end. It has to…” I hold my sister in my arms and rock back and forth, searching for that spark. “No… No Iz… Don’t be gone. Don’t leave me alone…”
I open my eyes and look down at my sister’s face…
Here, Petra’s story stopped for a space of several lines. James looked at the blank space, but it wasn’t entirely blank. Petra had begun to continue the story three more times, and then scribbled out the results, violently and completely, obliterating the shapes of her neat handwriting. The quill had leaked, leaving ragged black blots on the parchment. Finally, much more roughly, Petra’s story continued.
Izzy lays in the darkness of the gazebo, cold and still, unmoving. The guttering spark of her life is gone. Izzy is dead. As dead as the gazebo. As dead as her dolls back in the bedroom of the farmhouse. Izzy is dead, and I am the one who has killed her.
“No,” I insist. It can’t end this way! I made the right choice! I fought the darkest desires of my soul, and overcame them, all by myself, with no outside intervention. I chose good. Good owes me!
“No…,” I say again, raising my voice, “this isn’t how it’s supposed to turn out. You’re supposed to be alive! This isn’t how the story ends!” My voice is rising, both in pi
tch and volume. I stare down at the pathetic figure below me, refusing to believe what I see. Izzy’s body lays in the center of the gazebo floor, soaked and limp, filthy on the rotten planks.
“No!” I scream now, scooping the small body into my arms. “NO!”
“Yes!” the voice in the backroom of my mind commands coldly. “You cannot fight your destiny. You tried to in the chamber of the pool, and you tried to tonight, and yet… fate prevails! You and I are one! Give in to your powers. Embrace the paths you have opened. It is too late to turn back now. All that is left is power, but that is not a bad thing. In time, you will come to accept what happened here tonight. In time, you will be glad of it, for it makes you who you are, who you were meant to be from the very beginning. Fight it no more. You are tired of fighting, aren’t you? Now, at the end, you see that fighting was always futile. Fighting your destiny only destroys you, and all that you love. Embrace it now. Embrace it, and perhaps destiny will repay you. After all, the path of power has many, many benefits…”
I listen to the voice. I am helpless not to. For the first time, I listen, and I do not argue with it. The voice is right. There is no fighting my destiny. What had been meant to happen in the Chamber of Secrets had not been prevented, only postponed. I gained nothing by choosing good, succeeded only in raising the price that I must inevitably pay. Now, Izzy is dead, and good is annihilated. The voice is right. All that is left is the path of power.
I stand slowly, lifting the light body of my murdered sister. I will bury her, in the woods, beneath the cairn that represents her. And then I will leave. I don’t know where I will go or what I will do, but I have a strong feeling that those decisions will mysteriously take care of themselves. Suddenly, it is almost as if I am merely a passenger in my own mind. My body seems to move of its own accord, carrying me back along the dock, my sister’s cold body dripping lake water in my arms. I am glad to give in. It is too hard to fight, too hard to think. Destiny has claimed me, and I am happy now to relinquish control to it. What is left now to fight for anyway?
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