The Water Witch

by Juliet Dark

  “They’re really quite simple at this age,” Soheila said as she deftly cast her owl kite into the water. Instead of merely sinking, the kite performed an elaborate parabola above the pool and then dove in the water as if it had spied a tasty fish.

  “Show-off,” Diana said with a laugh. “Just because you’re a wind spirit doesn’t mean you have to make the rest of us feel inadequate.”

  There was nothing inadequate, though, in the way Diana’s deer kite bounced merrily over the surface of the pool and then somersaulted into the water with a flick of its white tail. My companions might not be giddy teenagers, but they hadn’t lost the will for friendly rivalry.

  Peering down through the water I saw swarms of undines circling the colorful kites. They had formed three separate circles.

  “I’m afraid all we’ve done is make the current even more confusing for them,” Liz said. “The underwater passage to Faerie is right below you. Can you see it?”

  I leaned farther to look into the water. At first it was difficult to make out anything among the whirling water, colorful kites, and semi-transparent undines, but at last I saw something flash among the rocks at the bottom of the pool. It looked like a bright gold coin, so bright it was hard to look at. But as I stared, it grew larger and shot out rays of gold light into the roiling water.

  “See!” Diana crowed triumphantly. “Callie just needed to look at the passage to make it grow bigger. I told you she was a powerful doorkeeper.”

  Clearly there’d been some dispute about the matter, which might have bothered me if I didn’t have my own doubts about my power. I squinted up at the three women who stood between me and the midday sun.

  “You’ve opened the door before,” Liz said. “I know you can do it again.”

  “The first two times I was letting creatures into this world. I have a feeling that’s easier.”

  “Yes,” Soheila agreed. “If the creatures want to come through, it would be.”

  “And the third time was on the solstice, which is when it’s supposed to open,” I said, recalling the brief glimpse of Faerie I’d had that time: sloping green meadows and distant blue mountains. It looked lush and beautiful and I had felt a sudden yearning to go there … but then, recalling my dream last night, I felt a chill. As Liz had pointed out, my power was unstable. I might find myself in the Borderlands if I tried the passage to Faerie.

  “But the last time you opened the door to throw Mara through it,” Soheila said. “And she certainly didn’t want to go.”

  Mara was a liderc—a life-sucking bird monster—who had masqueraded as my student. She had attacked me and chased me into the woods and nearly succeeded in killing me. “No, she didn’t want to go, but she was going to kill me if I didn’t get rid of her, so I was pretty motivated. Also, I used an opening spell from my spell book …”

  “Really?” Liz said. “You combined witchcraft with your fey power? That’s … unusual. Do you recall the spell?”

  I did, but I didn’t tell them that. I also didn’t tell them that I’d had help ejecting Mara into the Borderlands. I’d opened the door, but I hadn’t been strong enough to get her through it. At the last moment before Mara would have eaten me whole, Liam had appeared in shadow-form, torn Mara off me, and thrown her through the door. Liam hadn’t been able to follow because the iron manacles on his wrists kept him from entering Faerie. He was forever trapped in the Borderlands.

  I was the one who’d clamped the manacles on him.

  I hadn’t told the three women about Liam coming to help me. I knew they felt bad about convincing me to banish Liam when it was really Mara who had been feeding on the students. They didn’t need to know that Liam had saved me even after I’d condemned him to eternal pain.

  Or maybe I just didn’t like to admit that the man I’d banished—the man I hadn’t been able to make human with my love—had saved me.

  I blinked and a tear fell into the swirling water. I bent closer to the pool, pretending to study the situation more closely but really trying to hide my tears from the other women.

  “Well, then,” Liz said briskly, “you should have no problem being motivated now. These undines will die if we don’t herd them through that passage.”

  I nodded my head, still too close to tears to trust my voice, and lowered my face nearly to the surface of the water. The undines had formed into one circle now, moving so fast that it was hard to make out individuals. I wondered if the undines would melt into water if they kept up this frantic pace—or beach themselves on the bank and die tangled in the thickets. I laid my hand just above the surface of the water and felt a thrumming vibration, a nervous energy that traveled through my hand, up my arm, and lodged in my chest. Like heartburn.

  I suddenly knew that the undines’ hearts were burning up. If I didn’t open the door for them, they’d die. I focused on the chink of light at the bottom of the pool and called out the opening spell.

  “Ianuam sprengja!”

  The only thing that grew was the burning sensation in my chest. And the tingling in my arm. I was too young to have a heart attack. Wasn’t I?

  And you couldn’t get one from having a broken heart. Could you?

  As if in response to my unvoiced question a sadness spread throughout my body—a sadness that was a hundred times worse than my grief over losing Liam, but somehow encompassed that grief. A sadness that had a theme song.

  Who will we love? it went. Will we ever find someone to love?

  Of course. They were teenage girls going to their first dance and they wanted to know if there would be boys there. According to Soheila, there wouldn’t be. And if the door to Faerie closed forever these undines would be the last of their species. I was sending them to their extinction. And they knew it. I felt their minds probing mine, their frantic thoughts traveling up the fingertips of my outstretched hand.

  Don’t make us go! Don’t make us go!

  With their high-pitched screeching searing my brain, I tried to reason with them. “But you’ll die here. Your sisters will be waiting for you on the other side.”

  I might as well have been shouting at a tornado. In fact, the air around me was beginning to spin. The watery maelstrom was spreading into the air. It tugged at my clothes and whipped my hair into my face.

  “I think I’m just pissing them off,” I shouted into the wind. I started to pull back from the water, but before I could, a translucent hand broke the surface and clamped onto my hand. It was cold and gooey as jelly, but with a grip like a lobster claw. I opened my mouth to scream but got only a mouthful of water as it pulled me into the pool.

  THREE

  The water was ice cold. The shock of it pushed all the air from my lungs and turned my limbs into useless sticks. Unable to resist the undine’s grip on my arm as she pulled me into the center of the pool, I sank like a stone before we were both sucked into the whirlpool of revolving undines.

  When we were eleven, my friend Annie dared me to ride the Whirl-a-Gig at the Feast of San Gennaro festival in Manhattan’s Little Italy. It was a rusty metal drum that looked like a cake tin and it had reduced my insides to batter when it spun. This was ten times worse and the hand I clutched wasn’t Annie’s: it was the cold, gelatinous fish hand of an alien creature. Still, I held on tightly as the whirlpool whipped me in circles. I tried to look into the creature’s eyes to discover why she had dragged me into their mad dance. Her eyes were full of a manic glee that would have chilled me if I hadn’t been already frozen to the bone. Up close, their mossy green was variegated with veins of gold and chips of silver mica. They gleamed like marbles of polished agate. Looking into them was like staring into something elemental: the night sky or the center of an exploding atom. Cold, indifferent, and beautiful, they sucked me into their depths as surely as the whirlpool pulled me to the bottom.

  As I stared into her eyes, my head was full of a high-pitched hum that crowded out every other thought. It was like trying to study with your college roommate blasting heavy metal.


  Turn it down! I screamed inside my head.

  The sound went up, reached a pitch that sizzled my neurons, and then, just when I thought I was about to have an aneurism, it abruptly ceased. The undine who held my hand smiled. The cacophony inside my head evolved into something like music—a cross between Enya and the Pixies. It was the song I’d heard before, above the water, the “Who will we love?” song, only it had acquired another verse.

  We’ll go if you go, we’ll go if you go, the undines sang.

  Go where? I asked.

  To Faerie, Faerie, Faerie. We don’t want to go alone.

  But you’ve got one another.

  At this they returned to their first line:

  We’ll go if you go, we’ll go if you go.

  I had a feeling that they could keep up this argument a lot longer than I could—certainly longer than I had breath, which, come to think of it, I should have run out of already. At the frantic thought that I should already have drowned, my undine companion squeezed me close and pressed her cold lips against mine. I was so startled I let her force my lips apart. Her breath tasted like watercress and tunafish … and something improbably fruity and sweet—as if she’d applied raspberry lip gloss after lunch.

  Razzzberry? A voice inside my head inquired. Lip gloss?

  An image of a hand holding out a red berry bloomed in my head. A misty blue sky beyond … no, not misty … I was seeing the hand through a film of water. Then the film shattered and I felt sunlight warm on my cold skin. A nearly unbearable sweetness swelled on my tongue.

  Mmmm … razzzberry, the voice cooed inside my head. The sweetness was on both our tongues, filling my mouth, my throat, my lungs … then her lips, no longer cold, left mine, and I was staring once again into those cold green eyes … only now I thought I saw a spark of humanity or individuality among the mica chips and gold veins.

  We’ll go if you go, she said as clearly as if the words had been spoken instead of sung inside my brain. Her eyes shifted and I followed her gaze to the bottom of the pool, where the chink of gold light lay like sunken treasure. It was the passage to Faerie. I had only to will it open. I had only to need it to open. Just looking at the light now was making it grow. I felt myself being pulled toward it. The undines, seeing the growing light, had begun to swim toward it, as if attracted by a shiny bauble. I was pulled in their wake, all the while feeling undiluted desire thrumming through the swarm.

  To Faerie, Faerie, Faerie …

  We’ll go if you go.

  They urged me on, excited at the prospect of bringing a prize to show their sisters when they arrived.

  Oh, what the hell, I thought, let’s go to Faerie. I’d like another glimpse of it … and I could always get back. After all, I was the doorkeeper.

  Ianuam sprengja! I shouted as we plunged toward the bottom of the pool where the light was spreading, yielding to the desire in my voice.

  Ianuam sprengja! The undines mimicked. What the hell!

  We shot through a wall of light that fizzled with electricity. I felt like I’d been electrocuted, but the undines liked it. What the hell! What the hell! they chanted. We’re going to Faerie!

  But rather than emerging into Faerie we were plunged into utter darkness. The undines went suddenly quiet, like a group of chattering schoolgirls silenced by the entrance of a stern principal. I couldn’t see them but I felt their slim shapes slipping ever closer to me. The one who’d dragged me into the pool still held my hand, but now she seemed to be holding on to it for reassurance.

  Uh oh, I thought, we’ve strayed into the Borderlands.

  The name sent waves of terror skittering through their hive mind. Vestigial images, encoded into their DNA, flitted through the flock, gaining gruesomeness as they passed from one to another. Skeletons and decaying bodies with crawfish and slugs crawling out of hollow eye sockets, black slimy eels that swallowed their prey whole, sharp-fanged zombie beavers …

  Zombie beavers?

  Yes! The undines shrieked back at me as one. Zombie beavers! Everyone knows that dead beavers come back in the Borderlands as zombies!

  In a flash, a wealth of urban legend was transmitted to me about these mythical (I hoped) creatures. As a folklorist I was fascinated by the mingling of real-life threat (the beavers snacked on the undines when they were only fingerlings) and the universal love of teenagers for zombie stories. As someone currently swimming in the dark, I could only hope that zombie beavers were no more real than that story about the Hook Man.

  They have hooks? buzzed the undines in thrilled and horrified voices.

  No, no, I assured them. That’s only a story … we just have to stay together and find our way out. I see a light ahead.

  Now that my eyes had adjusted I made out a number of lights ahead, although none as bright as the chink of light I’d seen at the bottom of the pool. Where had that light gone? As I led the undines toward a faint green glow, I wondered if that other shimmery light had been a trick to lure us into this netherworld. Or maybe, a sly voice inside my head suggested, you wanted to go here because it’s where he is. Suppressing the thought—and hoping that my companions hadn’t heard it—I swam toward the light.

  Nearer to the dim glow, I saw what happened to those who had been left in the watery Borderlands. A tangle of bleached white limbs littered the bottom of the pool, so crowded together it was difficult to make out what sort of creatures they had been in life. I made out human limbs and faces, but also fishtails and deer antlers, bird wings and … heaven help us … beaver claws. No matter what their shape, all their flesh had been bleached white and emitted a pale greenish glow, like some kind of radioactive decay. A fine luminescent mist rose off them that I thought at first was light until I noticed that it was clinging to my hand.

  I tried to rub a greenish slime off on my arm—the undine was still gripping my other hand—but it only spread. It crept up my arm. I tried to pull my hand away from the undine so I could get the stuff off me but our hands seemed welded together. Turning to her, I saw that she was also covered in the chalky green silt. Her face was frozen in a silent scream of horror. Only her moss green eyes remained and the silt was seeping over them … except that it wasn’t silt. In the glow she gave off I saw that the dust was actually composed of tiny creatures knitting together some kind of hard shell. All around us the undines, coated with the nacreous shells, were sinking onto the body heap. I heard the undines’ terrified cries in my head as they sank—one hit the bottom and cracked in two, half her face falling away—but even worse, I heard the tiny minds of the shell creatures. Once they sealed my limbs inside a shiny hard carapace that bore my shape, they would feast on my flesh. Slowly. They enjoyed a feast of live human flesh … Mmmm, even better than undine … and they intended to make it last.

  I heard a silent scream inside my head and knew it was the undine whose hand I held. She was still alive under the chalky carapace, but soon wouldn’t be. I felt her consciousness flicker …

  Raspberry, I said silently to her. Remember the taste of raspberry. Then I squeezed her hand and directed my energy toward the hard shell encasing her. If a spell worked for opening doors, maybe it could break other barriers. Ianuam sprengja! I commanded.

  The shell burst into a million brittle shards.

  Swim up! I screamed to her and to the rest of the undines. Shake it off!

  I tried to swim upward but my limbs were weak. Already the shell creatures were regathering on my skin. I made one last desperate stroke upward … and felt something grab my hand. Above was a dark swirl, some other predator, perhaps come to tussle over my bones with the shell creatures. But this creature was at least pulling me toward bright gold that looked like sunlight. Anything was better than spending the next hundred years as the shell creatures’ live snack.

  I called out the opening spell again to break the shell creatures’ grip on the undines and then sent a message to the undine whose hand I held to grab one of her sisters. Their hive mind still worked, even hal
f-encased in shell goo. By the time we reached the surface, I was trailing two dozen undines behind me. They wriggled out of the water, shucking the last shell fragments off like last year’s dowdy hand-me-downs—and shucking their tails as well. Somehow in the journey their tails had split into two legs. They jumped up and ran along the grassy bank showing off their slim calves and long, trim thighs with nary a thought for the poor undine who had died in the Borderlands. Thoughtless.

  Thought-less? I heard one of them think as she turned around to look at me over her shoulder. She had red tangled hair and I recognized her as the one who had shared her breath with me in a kiss. But she is always in our thoughts. She is part of us forever. Then she turned back to her sisters and joined them as they ran over a grassy hill, leaving me gasping on the bank, beneath a weeping willow tree, feeling all the more alone for the absence of their buzzing hive mind.

  Alone except for the dark creature who had saved me.

  It was still in the water—a swirl of oily black on the surface. I struggled to my knees and leaned over for a closer look … and the black swirl coalesced into a face.

  His face.

  Liam.

  But not Liam.

  In the months he’d spent as a bodiless entity in the Borderlands he’d lost some of the features of Liam Doyle, the shape he’d assumed to seduce me so I’d fall in love with him …

  You almost did.

  I heard his voice in my head. His lips were parted in a rueful smile, an expression I recalled so well that I automatically reached my hand out to the surface of the water where the image of his lips appeared … and touched flesh.