by Andy Marino
“How does she know that’s the Lady of the Lake?” Nancy asked.
“She always knows things I don’t know,” Hannah said. She tugged on the old woman’s arm. “Belinda, don’t do this.” Hannah was thinking about Albert, and how he disappeared after calling up the storm that freed her from the cell. The memories he had taken with him, the holes in her thoughts.
“Hannah, I want you to promise me something,” the old woman said.
The statue’s eyes snapped open. Solid white eyeballs began scanning Belinda.
“Get away from there!” Hannah pulled harder on Belinda’s arm, but the old woman was rooted to the grass.
As the statue’s eyes moved down Belinda’s face, they turned her skin to pixels. “Hannah,” said the old woman’s digitized mouth. “I want you to promise me that you’ll —”
— Fold your clothes before you throw them in your dresser. Honestly, you’re too old to be so careless.
Hannah sat on her bed, surrounded by piles of clean laundry. Her mother had washed and dried; Hannah’s task was to fold. Instead, she had been tossing her shirts across the room, trying to land them in the middle dresser drawer, which she’d opened all the way so that it tilted slightly downward.
Hannah knew that Belinda was going to badger her relentlessly. She savored the creaking and settling of Cliff House, the smell of clean linen, the rag dolls on the wallpaper doing chores of their own. She picked up a flannel shirt and walked it to her closet, where she hung it on a hanger.
“Please don’t leave me,” Hannah said. Street noise and throbbing music washed over her. On the edge of the lake, Belinda was half-dissolved by the statue’s scanning eyes. Only her legs appeared solid and real. Stefan was hugging Nancy; she’d buried her face in his sweater. Charlemagne oozed in an oily smear where the water met the grass.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Belinda assured her. “It’s actually quite wonderful to be of some use. I’m sorry to have been so fussy all the time, but it really is important for you to —”
— Match your socks! Unless you want to go rummaging around every morning to find their mates. Seems silly to me.
Hannah took the rolled-up mess of socks and spread it out on the floor of her room. She matched sporty white socks and thick winter knits. Once, she had hated Belinda for making her do this. It had all seemed like pointless extra work. But now she wanted to cling to her bedpost, claw her nails into the cracks in the floorboards — anything to remain in her bedroom at Cliff House.
On the shore of the lake, Belinda was a mere projection of herself, swarming with digital noise. Hannah’s fingers passed through the old woman’s transparent arm. With a twitchy expression of contentment, Belinda smiled.
“And for the last time, don’t forget to —”
— Set aside anything that looks especially wrinkled to iron before you put it away.
With her socks matched and her clothes folded, Hannah was left with a small pile of wrinkly shirts. It was actually nice to have everything neatly put away. As irritating as Belinda could be, she was probably right about folding clothes. Hannah looked around her room, taking inventory, hoarding little images like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter.
The lamp on her dresser with the ceramic merry-go-round at its base.
The beat-up old armchair in the corner, piled high with books.
The alcove with its window looking out onto the lighthouse.
It felt like someone else’s life. She took hold of a pair of socks and held them to her face.
The tearing-away was sharp and quick.
Cliff House was gone.
* * *
The statue’s eyes were closed, its head bowed once again. Belinda had vanished. Nancy’s voice was muffled by Stefan’s sweater. “Is it over?”
“I think so,” he said.
Nancy stood up straight and blinked. She looked at Hannah as if she didn’t recognize her. Hannah wondered what she was feeling — when they had arrived in the city, Nancy had been one of three. Now she was one of one.
Stefan was inspecting the grass where Belinda had been. In a movie, Hannah thought, Belinda’s shoes would be stuck to the ground, wreathed in smoke. But there was nothing to indicate that Belinda had ever existed at all. For that matter, had she existed at all? Even Belinda had seemed unsure. Hannah supposed it would be difficult to suddenly appear when you were already an old woman. She addressed the statue.
“Okay, Lady of the Lake, or whatever you are. Do something.”
In her pocket, the argument raging within the handbook grew heated. When she pulled it out, the book tried to shake her off, practically flinging itself to the ground. She gripped the cover tightly and wrenched it open to a page that said, in huge block letters, CLOSE ME!
What a worthless thing, she thought, jamming it down into her pocket, which she buttoned shut.
Hannah glanced at the statue, silent and still. Then she turned to Nancy. “Maybe we should say a few words, or something.”
“Go ahead,” Nancy said miserably.
“Belinda was …” The monorail picked that moment to drown her out with the thrum of its high-speed burn. Cars inched along the highways. Engines belched; horns blared. The city went about its business of being a city. Already, the smell of clean socks, the softness of freshly laundered flannel, were distant, vague things. “She was …”
The lake rippled. Hannah took a step back from the waterline. Green phosphorescent bits scattered like frightened minnows as the tip of a fin sluiced through the dark water. The rest of the fin revealed itself as it approached the shore, and Hannah could see hints of something big surfacing. It was headed straight for her. She took another step back and bumped into the supposed Lady of the Lake. Digital fuzz danced around her.
The surfacing creature’s bulk glimmered darkly as it thrust itself out of the lake to rest its head on the grass. It was a sleek and polished fish with scales of brushed, blackened steel. Like everything in Su-Ankyo, the fish looked expensive. It even gave off a faint whiff of new-car smell.
“We’re all out of cauliflower!” Nancy screamed at it. “Go home!”
Hannah was more frightened of the attention they were attracting than the fish itself. There must have been thousands of bored commuters sitting in traffic, looking out their windows at the remarkable sight at the edge of the lake. The fish opened its jaws. Lips peeled back horribly to reveal a mouth full of glass — flat and vertical, like the wall of ivory that whales had in place of teeth.
There’s a special name for that thing, Hannah thought. Belinda would know.
“It probably can’t follow us on land, right?” Stefan said.
“If you’re going to be on the run,” Hannah reminded him, “you’ll have to get used to stuff like this.”
There was a smooth mechanical whirring sound. The glass wall lifted like a garage door. The fish was inviting them into its sparkling interior.
“I think this is our ride,” Hannah said, gathering her courage and stepping up onto the fish’s spongy lower lip.
“Chalkdust,” Nancy said. “Good thing Belinda’s not here to see this.”
Compared to the subway train, the fish was a five-star hotel. Just inside the glass, a row of plush leather armchairs offered a panoramic underwater view. Lamps built into the richly paneled walls cast a buttery glow, while decorations were sparse but tasteful. There were no advertisements. This was very much a fish intended for selective, private use. The only sound was a low throbbing rhythm, which Hannah figured must be some kind of engine.
“Hey, you gotta come check this out,” Nancy said. Hannah was glad to have an excuse to leave her armchair. The endless, sightless void of the lake was creepy. And it seemed to be bottomless — the fish had been diving steadily for some time. She left Stefan to enjoy the murky view with Charlemagne, who blobbed on a footrest.
At the back of the hushed room was a door. Nancy paused. “You ready for this?”
“Open it,” Hannah said.
“Is that supposed to be for us?” Hannah asked, noting that the engine was louder in here.
“They taste kind of like rye bread.”
“You ate one?”
Nancy giggled. “Calm down — who else could they be for? There’s nobody else here. Try one.”
Hannah leaned in for a closer look. She imagined a tiny mirrored seed sprouting stems of glass, growing reflective skins. “It’s probably not the best idea to eat random stuff we find.”
“It’s not random,” Nancy said. “I wanted to show you because that fruit is officially the first thing I’ve eaten since I became the way I am now. Out here” — she indicated the room — “instead of in there.” She pointed to Hannah’s head. “It’s the first thing I’ve ever tasted that wasn’t something you wanted to eat.”
“Oh.” Hannah didn’t know what to say. Nancy seemed to want some kind of congratulations. “So how was it?”
“Delicious,” she said, a little too forcefully.
Hannah sensed that her twin was talking about something other than food. “What do you want to do, Nancy? Do you want to run away and live your life, or whatever it is that you have?” Hannah made a shooing motion with her hands. “I release you. Go.”
“Ugghhh!” Nancy clenched her fists at her sides. “Nineteen! Thirty-eight! Four thousand sixty-two!”
“Salamander, what are you doing?”
She stalked past Hannah. “You really have no idea what I’m going through.”
“Then tell me!” Hannah said. Nancy stopped in the doorway.
“I don’t want to end up like Belinda and Albert,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about it. Where do we go when we vanish like that? I mean, you have Ascension to look forward to, eventually. But what’s next for somebody like me? Where are Belinda and Albert right now? Are they just … gone?” She looked straight at Hannah. “I want to stay. But I don’t want to end up as a great big nothing, helping you find somebody you can’t even remember.” She turned her back. “No offense.” Then she left the room.
Hannah picked up a fruit. It reflected her face like a fun-house mirror, made it look squished. She would have to describe her mother for Nancy, paint a portrait with words. Like Stefan’s artwork it would have to be both layered and real. Better than real. She had to prove to Nancy — and herself — that she could regain control over her memories. Then Nancy would understand why this was all worth it. Hannah sniffed the fruit, then tossed it back on the tray. Her heart was pounding.
Remember.
* * *
Whistling her mother’s favorite tune seemed like a nice way to begin — a musical road to the past. But what was that song called? Hannah concentrated hard, tensing her muscles, then tried to relax. Memories should be free and easy things. For a while, she drifted. And drew a blank.
Moving on.
Start with the way she looks.
She closed her eyes. A woman’s face appeared in her mind. The edges were hazy, but Hannah felt like she was off to a good start. The face had a warty nose. A pointy hat appeared. Her mother must have dressed as a witch for Halloween. All Hannah had to do was picture her mother without the mask. But the witch just cackled and disappeared, replaced by a lighthouse on a lonely cliff. Hannah thought the lighthouse might belong to her family.
Zoom in.
A storm made it difficult to see. There was something on the ground, a gray lump on the path. She forced herself to zoom in even more. That was her mother, crumpled in her nightgown! This had happened, this was real. A sweeping surge of relief cut through her terror. She hadn’t forgotten what had happened to her mother, how could she ever forget that? Now there was just the simple matter of putting her mother’s face back into her mind so she could transfer that image to Nancy. She reached out and turned her mother over, gently …
… and screamed. The woman in the nightgown had no face, just a smooth, featureless expanse where the face should be.
Hannah opened her eyes and collapsed into a stiff-backed chair. There she sat, waiting for the face to fill itself in, for the person her mother had been to come back to her. After a while she found herself staring at her reflection in the pile of fruit, multiplied like a bug’s eye: two dozen Hannahs, all of them crying.
* * *
“Prince of Knuckles!” Stefan said, triumphantly slapping a playing card down on the arm of his chair. They had discovered a standard deck of seventy-three octagons in a drawer, and Stefan was teaching Nancy to play a few dead city games.
Nancy smirked, placing a card to either side of Stefan’s. “Pincer attack!”
“The Scabby Twins again? Cheater.”
He swept the cards away with mock anger, and they plunked against the glass wall. Hannah was curled silently in her chair, staring into the depths, which hadn’t changed much since they’d begun their descent. When the first hints of the shipwreck appeared, they were dreamy shapes that barely registered. But soon there was no mistaking the hull of a freighter, half-buried in lake-sludge, lit by a starry field of lights that flickered like underwater fireflies. Nancy and Stefan abandoned their game. No one spoke as the fish glided over the wreckage. It was as if they were passing through a graveyard.
“There’s another one,” Hannah whispered, as if a raised voice would somehow wake the ship.
Beyond the freighter, a massive schooner had settled into the bottom of the lake at an angle that left its bow pointing haughtily upward. Layers of wreckage rolled into view as more lights twinkled on. When the entire scene finally came into focus, every corner of the viewing glass was filled with dead ships. There was the flat deck of an aircraft carrier, the rusted tube of a submarine jammed straight down into the lake bed, the skeletal rigging of a once-proud sailboat. Forests of seaweed shivered like prairie grass.
The engine of the fish began throbbing faster.
“Something’s coming,” Stefan whispered.
Hannah felt the presence before she saw it; a change in the current, a great unseen thing looming — and then a transport fish identical to their own pulled ahead of them, so close she could have touched it if not for the glass. Gracefully, the second fish circled around the nose of a ruined yacht and headed straight for a giant steamship that had come to rest on its side.
“It’s going to hit that boat!” Nancy said.
“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “I think it’s going there on purpose.”
The fish aimed straight for one of the steamer’s massive smokestacks and swam into the opening at the top. Its fishtail wriggled as it forced itself halfway inside, then stopped, plugging the hole.
“I’m really not a lake person,” Stefan said as their own fish navigated an alley of boats glued together with sludge and barnacles, angling toward the neighboring smokestack. Here, Hannah caught glimpses of a hidden world behind the portholes and windows of the wreckage. This graveyard had been colonized, and the colony was drawing them in.
The mouth of the smokestack was a black hole, dead ahead. The engine thumped fiercely — it wasn’t an engine at all, Hannah realized, but a heartbeat. The fish was excited to be home. Its armored scales scraped against the inside of the smokestack with a piercing shriek, and they were plunged into darkness.
The fish docked, wedged in tightly. Its heartbeat slowed to a contented pace.
Gradually, the darkness lifted. Hannah stared into a hallway filled from top to bottom with lake water. In front of her, an albino stingray attached itself to the glass with dozens of suckers and began to pulsate. It looked like it wanted to get in. Charlemagne waddled happily up the glass to meet it.
“Look who made a friend,” Nancy said, peering over the back of her armchair.
A sudden noise like the grinding of gears gave Hannah a start. Wiry tentacles with crystal tips e
merged from the walls of the smokestack and wavered like long pieces of seaweed in the water.
The transport fish’s mouth slid open. Hannah braced herself for a torrent of lake water. Instead, the tips of the tentacles flared, and with an electric hum the water surged backward, churning frothily. The crystals flared again and the water behaved as if it had been scolded, carving out a pocket of air that began in front of the fish’s mouth and raced down the length of the smokestack. A final flare-up and the water halted, forming walls that quivered like gelatin. Minnows leapt through the empty air from one side of the hallway to the other.
“I should not have eaten that fruit,” Nancy said, rubbing her eyes.
“It’s okay, I see it, too,” Hannah said. She stuck her hand into the space carved out by the retreating water. The air was cool and clammy.
Stefan gave a dismissive snort. “Am I supposed to be impressed? In the Painters Guild there’s this old lady, Hilda, who does way crazier things with watercolors.”
Hannah stepped out of the transport fish’s mouth. The floor beneath her was a flat, condensed surface of water. Her toes sank in, but it held her weight. She turned back to find Nancy and Stefan standing in the mouth, watching her.
She said, “What were you saying about Hilda?”
Nancy took Stefan’s hand and together they joined Hannah. Charlemagne made himself into a hockey puck and careened from one side of the hall to the other, shedding globs of paint that misted away.
Stefan took hesitant steps. “Think about all that water above us,” he said.
Up ahead was a round steel door with a wheel for a handle, like a bank vault. Hannah wondered if it was locked. What would happen if the walls suddenly collapsed on them? When they were near the end of the hall, the wheel spun and the door opened. A man and a woman stepped forward to meet them, smiling cheerfully.
The man wore a uniform the same color as Stefan’s army jacket. On his head was a helmet in the shape of a bowler hat with a very thin brim. His face was acne-scarred, with the scratchy hint of a mustache. Next to him was a tall woman in a radiant sari and beaded leather sandals. A single jewel was set into the middle of her forehead. They were both wearing wristwatches with square faces the size of credit cards.
