Gathering Deep

by Lisa Maxwell

  Which was the problem—I couldn’t set foot across the threshold. Not that a little thing like that was enough to talk Lucy out of it.

  “So this spell on the house,” she asked as I drove down the back roads that connected Le Ciel to my neighborhood. “Did it hurt when you tried to get in, or did it just make you feel uneasy, or … ”

  “I couldn’t move,” I told her. It came out a little sharper than I meant it to, but even thinking about that morning had me feeling all kinds of wrong. “I got to a certain point, and I, literally, couldn’t take another step. It felt like there was concrete drying around my feet and a vise squeezing my heart. I couldn’t even breathe. All I could do was stand there, because it felt like moving might kill me.”

  I turned off the road and began to steer my old Nova up the long, unpaved driveway that led back to my house. When I was little, I’d ride my bike up that very same drive, knowing all the while that my momma would have something cool to drink and a smile just for me. When I got older, I’d drive home from school and the windows would be open, like my momma’s arms had always been. And at night, coming home after a party, the windows would be aglow and waiting.

  That morning, though, the windows were dark glass, reflecting the still-sleeping world back to me. But the house seemed to be waiting just the same. The closer we got, the more the pressure behind my eyes built.

  I didn’t pull all the way up to the porch.

  “Ready?” Lucy asked after I put the car in park and killed the engine.

  “Not even a little bit,” I said, but I got out of the car when she did.

  By then the sky had started to turn from a shade of lurid pink to the hazy blue of the day. It hadn’t been a hopeful kind of sunrise. It had been the kind of sunrise that once might have made sailors lower their sails and secure their ships.

  “I’ll make it quick,” she said. “In and out, and nothing’s going to happen.”

  “Says you.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the glaring windows or shake off the unease I felt just looking at the place I’d once called home.

  “Right.” Lucy started toward the house, and I didn’t have much choice but to follow.

  When we got close to the porch, I could feel the beginnings of something. My feet felt heavy, sluggish. “I don’t think this is going to work.”

  “Do you feel it?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Don’t you?”

  She shook her head.

  Still I tried to walk on toward the house, but there came a point where I couldn’t go on. The same solid, invisible wall greeted me, and my feet felt like lead. When I tried to push through it, the same squeezing panic filled my chest to bursting until I stepped back to the relative safety of just feeling uneasy.

  Reluctantly, I handed Lucy the key. “Be careful.”

  “Any idea about where I should look?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to think. “I’m not even sure what we’re looking for.”

  “Something private,” Lucy told me. “Something she wouldn’t have wanted you to see, even before you knew what she was.”

  “Then you’ll need to try her room,” I said. “She never let me in there unless she was with me.” She used to say that a woman had a right to her privacy, but now I wondered if she was keeping me out to keep her secret safe.

  “Anywhere else?” Lucy asked. She was studying the house with an intense look of concentration, like she expected something to change or jump out and attack at any second.

  I combed through the house in my mind, trying to imagine a place where my momma might have hidden that other part of herself. “The basement,” I said at last. “She never wanted me down there when I was little.”

  “Right,” Lucy said, but it didn’t look to me like she was in any hurry to go into the house on her own. Especially not into any basement.

  “We don’t have to do this,” I said. “We could wait until Piers gets back.”

  She shot me another sharp look. “You know we don’t have that kind of time. I won’t let her do to anyone else what she did to Alex.”

  “Okay, then. Be careful,” I told her.

  Lucy took a deep breath and then started up the stairs of the porch, her steps tentative like she was expecting the floor to drop out beneath her at any moment. When it didn’t, her shoulders relaxed a little and she unlocked the door.

  “If you’re not out in ten minutes, I’m calling for help,” I told her as she pushed open the door. She turned back to me and nodded her agreement before she stepped inside.

  Fourteen

  I held my breath as the door shut behind Lucy, and I kept it held until I saw a light come on inside the house. I couldn’t go any farther, but I wasn’t about to go back, either, so I stood and kept watch, taking in the angry-looking house and wondering how my whole life had gotten so far off course.

  A moment later, a light came on upstairs—my momma’s window—but the curtains stayed still. No movement gave away anything happening inside. I checked my phone for the time, but when I turned it on, Piers’s last message was there, staring me in my face.

  Talk later.

  Except we hadn’t talked, not really. The short, gruff conversation we’d had when I called him felt almost worse than silence would have. More real and more hopeless somehow.

  But if I was honest with myself, I’d known for a while this day had been coming. Ever since Piers had gone off to Vanderbilt instead of staying at one of the colleges around New Orleans, I’d been worried that he was really moving away from me. Maybe him being a couple of years older hadn’t mattered so much when we were younger, but more recently, the differences between us had already started to seem that much bigger and more insurmountable.

  And with Thisbe between us, I could feel the distance between us widening.

  I looked at the message again and thought of the hanged man card that I’d drawn a couple of days ago. It was all about sacrifice. Giving up your hold on something to gain a bigger view. Maybe I’d have to give up more than I thought. Maybe I’d have to give up Piers.

  Upstairs, the light went off.

  I clicked off the phone and pushed it into my back pocket. I couldn’t let myself think about that. Not yet, at least. It wouldn’t do anyone any good to get all upset about things I couldn’t change right this minute.

  By then, Lucy had been gone for about seven, maybe eight minutes. The house still stood silent, though, the doorway dark and still. I tried again to take a step forward, but again, my effort was met with pain in my chest and my feet feeling like lead.

  Another minute passed.

  Two.

  Any minute now she’d come on out of there and we could go. But that minute passed, and so did a fistful of minutes more, and I started to get a feeling that something wasn’t right.

  I pulled out my phone to call Mama Legba, cursing myself for letting Lucy talk me into doing something so stupid, but when I went to turn it on, the screen was dead. I shook it a little, like that was going to do anything, but of course it didn’t. I’d had plenty of battery a minute before, but no matter how long I held the power button, nothing happened. Not a flicker of energy, not any sign that the phone was anything but dead.

  Still, no Lucy.

  Maybe she’d left her phone in the car, I thought, knowing even as I hoped that it was a long shot. Still, I had to try.

  But I didn’t take but three steps back when the wind picked up. It was the kind of wind that rolls as it blows through, up from the ground and then around you like the beginnings of a storm. It was enough to make me stop dead in my tracks.

  I thought about the bottles breaking, and the light flickering at Odeana’s house, and the wind tearing through Mama Legba’s back rooms, and a feeling of dread started inching right down my spine. I had to force myself to calm down.

  But even when I got my breathing steady, this wind felt different, and it didn’t stop. The trees started to sway in the gusts, the wind whistling and whipping through them with
more and more force.

  I started for the car, but stopped again when I heard the buzzing—a metallic sound that started off slow and grew and grew, coming up from behind me. Coming from the house, I realized as I glanced over my shoulder. There, just beyond the roofline, the sky was dark, and the darkness was growing.

  No, not growing. Coming closer.

  I tried to take another step toward the car. I didn’t want to be out without anything protecting me, not with that dark cloud coming. Closer and closer. But I couldn’t make my feet move.

  The cloud grew and billowed—I could barely make out the roofline now, because the cloud had almost swallowed it. And the buzzing was getting louder and louder.

  That’s when I realized it wasn’t a cloud. It was a swarm.

  I tried to run again, but the minute I tried to lift up my foot, I found that I couldn’t. Magic stronger than my fear or my panic was pinning me there.

  The buzzing was heavy in the air and the house almost completely obscured by the dark swarm. My heart beat frantically in my chest, and I managed to take a step, maybe two, but then my feet wouldn’t budge. And then they were upon me. All around me thousands of legs and wings and tiny, hard bodies brushed against me, beat against me. I crouched low to the ground, trying to keep them off me, but still they swirled, a hurricane of living things, buzzing and angry and hungry.

  The swarm was so dense it felt like a solid wall. My arms stung where some of them scraped at me, and my throat burned from my screams.

  I am going to die here, I thought. Eaten alive by an army of bugs.

  But just when the cruelness and rightness of that thought was solid and firm in my chest, everything stopped. Everything—the wind stopped and the day went completely still. The insects froze in mid-flight, dropping from the sky and pelting me like hail.

  I stayed crouched down like that, afraid even to move in case something I did started it all up again, but instead of more of the swarm, I heard a new sound—a crackling noise as footsteps crushed the brittle bodies underfoot. Closer and closer. When the shadow fell over me, I finally looked up.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, ignoring Odane’s outstretched hand.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, still holding out his hand like he was waiting for something.

  “You’re telling me that you stopped all that?” The ground all around my momma’s property was covered with a thick blanket of the shiny, blue-black shells of the beetles.

  He nodded, his face tense. “For now. But we need to go.”

  “I can’t,” I said, finally taking his offered hand and letting him pull me up. I was afraid to move because I didn’t want to hear—or feel—the crunching of the hard little bodies littering the ground. “Lucy’s still inside.”

  “Inside there?” His brows flew almost clear to his hairline. “You’d have to be all kinds of crazy to go in there.”

  “It’s my house,” I said, suddenly and unaccountably angry with him for being there, for finding me so helpless and afraid. And most of all, I was angry for him being the one to save me when I wanted to be able to save myself.

  “You’re telling me you can’t feel what’s coming from that place?” he asked. “Black magic. Dark as anything I’ve ever felt.” He practically shuddered.

  I frowned. “I never did before, but I feel something now. I can’t even get as far as the door anymore,” I told him. “There’s some kind of spell to keep me out.”

  He shook his head, his eyes still trained on the house. It’s like he didn’t even see the mess of bugs laying all about—he only had eyes for the building itself. “No, it’s more than that. There are spells woven all through this place. They go deep into the land.” He looked at me then, suspicious-like. “You’re telling me you can’t feel any of it?”

  “I grew up here,” I said, like that was some sort of explanation, and maybe it was, because he didn’t ask me anything else.

  “Who’d you say is in there?”

  “Lucy. The girl who came with Mama Legba and me the other day. Red hair. Carries a camera everywhere?” I added when he didn’t seem to understand at first.

  He was still staring at the house, like he was trying to decide whether to go in or to leave Lucy to her fate.

  “I’m not going anywhere without her,” I said before he could suggest it. From the look on his face, it sure did look like he wanted to suggest it. “What are you doing here anyway?” It was my turn to be suspicious.

  “My mom saw something. She sent me over.”

  “Saw something?”

  He nodded, still staring at the house like he was getting up his nerve. “Sometimes she sees things, and in this case, she must have seen you.”

  “We need to get Lucy out of there,” I said. “She was supposed to come out a while ago, but I can’t go any farther than this.” My meaning was clear—he’d need to go in for me.

  He let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Fine. You go on and get in your car. If anything else happens, you’ll at least have something to protect you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, meaning it as I retreated. The windows of the house were still dark. Lucy either hadn’t heard all the commotion outside or something was wrong inside.

  Odane looked back once to make sure I was in the car before he made his way toward the house, but he didn’t look back again after that. Not when he made it to the top of the steps. Not when he disappeared inside.

  I sat, my hands shaking and my skin clammy despite the heat of the closed-up car. Waiting. Watching.

  After a few minutes, something shifted in the doorway, and a moment later, Odane stepped through carrying Lucy, unconscious in his arms. Not caring about the crunch of the bugs anymore, I jumped out of the car and ran as far as I could to meet them, my heart hammering in my chest and the guilt and horror of what I was seeing burning my eyes.

  Odane carried Lucy easy as if she were a child. Her head flopped back, bobbing a bit as he walked, the wind lifting her hair as it hung listlessly. She was completely limp, except for her arms, which were wrapped around something she was holding—a dark wooden box.

  Even unconscious, she was holding onto it like it was the only thing that mattered.

  Fifteen

  By the time we got to Mama Legba’s shop, Lucy still wasn’t quite coherent. We couldn’t take her through the front door like that without people noticing and asking questions we didn’t want to answer or calling the police on us, so we shuffled her in through the back.

  “Auntie O!” Odane shouted.

  Seconds later, Mama Legba appeared in the doorway. “Odane?” Then she saw Lucy, limp and still mostly unconscious in Odane’s arms, and her face flashed with confused worry. “What happened?”

  Odane looked at me as he set Lucy down onto the low couch and waited, like he was giving me a chance to explain. When Mama Legba realized he wasn’t going to talk, she looked at me, too.

  “We went to my house,” I told her, and before I could say anything more, she tore into me.

  “You went to what house?”

  “The house I grew up in. Lucy had this idea—”

  “Lucy did?” Mama Legba interrupted, glancing at Lucy’s still figure and then back at me. “Why would Lucy think about doing a thing like that? She heard you talking about the spell that kept you out the other day. She should have known better.”

  “It wasn’t exactly all her idea,” I said, backtracking a bit. “I was thinking about maybe going out to Thisbe’s cabin again—”

  “Thisbe’s cabin?” Mama Legba’s eyes narrowed even more, if that was possible.

  “Are you going to let me finish, or are you going to keep interrupting me?” I snapped, my temper finally starting to melt some of the fear that had paralyzed me most of the drive over.

  Mama Legba pursed her lips at my sass and then gave a wave of her hand to indicate that I should continue.

  “Like I was saying, I had this idea to go to Thisbe’s cabin, and before you say a word, I kno
w it was a stupid idea, but we have less than two days before that aloe mixture you made might open up something bad and … ” I felt the beginnings of a breeze sliding across my neck and my voice caught in my throat.

  “And what?” Mama Legba asked.

  I took a second and tried to settle myself down. I didn’t speak again until I was sure that no other wind was kicking up. I still wasn’t sure what had happened out there at the house. I didn’t think I’d called up those bugs, but I couldn’t be certain.

  Taking a final, steadying breath, I went on. “I asked Lucy to go with me to the cabin, but she had this idea that where we really needed to look was my house, because it was the last place my mother had lived.”

  “Actually, that wasn’t such a bad idea,” Odane said thoughtfully, like he was impressed we’d come up with it.

  I glanced over at him, unsure of how I felt about his comment. I didn’t need his approval, but even so, part of me was glad I had it.

  “So you went to your house,” Mama Legba said. She still didn’t sound none too happy. “Did you get yourself through the door this time?”

  I shook my head. “No, I still couldn’t even go as far as the front porch, but Lucy could. At first everything was fine, but then … ” I took a shuddering breath. Just thinking about it and I could almost feel that unnatural wind and the sharply buzzing wings of the insects that had come down from the sky like a plague.

  “Then everything wasn’t,” Odane finished for me. “I’ve never seen nothing like it, Auntie. When I got there, the whole place was covered in a swarm of bugs so dark you’d think night had fallen over that one little piece of land. Chloe was standing there like she couldn’t go nowhere else, right in the middle of it all.”

  I’d been doing pretty well holding myself together until that point. All the way back from my house to the Quarter, I’d focused on following Odane’s truck and I hadn’t let myself think about the bugs. But at his description it all came back—the sound of their demanding wings, the sting of their shiny black bodies pelting my skin like bullets. The way they’d surrounded me, almost swallowed me in their dark mass. I had to close my eyes and take a couple of deep breaths to ward off the nausea that rose up in my stomach.