vi.
As she left the house early that morning, Holly felt a surge of relief, as if going to the office would prove a distraction to the weirdness of the past few days. The timebomb in her head, the jangled nerves. Priests and ghosts and haunted ships, the voices in the night. She was glad of the mundane pleasures of the job during Christmas week. It was quiet there, and she was alone except for Becker at the front desk, but even boredom has its limits. At three o’clock, she decided to go home, dawdled on the Internet, searching for ghost ships. The afternoon was nearly over when she packed her briefcase and stepped out into the deserted street.
Wind pushed around her car, and she had to lean forward and keep both hands on the steering wheel to maintain control. The sky was gray and thick with low clouds, and the sea had turned a dull pewter. In the wooden belly of the Porthleven, Fred and Nell saw the water breach the seams between the boards. At first, the leak spread slowly, a dribble through the cracks, and then one by one jets sprang free and sprayed the room. Then like a burst dam, a huge hole opened and in gushed the ocean, soaking the floor, and they began to panic, wading through the cold dark water, rising quickly to their ankles, over their knees. Serves her right, for seducing Tim and nearly ruining her marriage. And poor, poor Fred. But Nell and Fred were not out there. They were on the decks of some mammoth cruise ship, basking in sunshine, sipping brightly colored cocktails with tiny paper umbrellas. Away from it all—what Holly wouldn’t give to be away from it all.
The infernal dream house loomed as she turned the corner. She parked in the driveway and waited, resting her head against the top of the steering wheel and closing her eyes for just a minute. Her pulse beat as steady as a clock. If the wind had not been buffeting the car, she might have catnapped, but as it was, a chill slipped in, and she was soon too frozen for one more stolen moment.
Stepping inside, she thought at first that nobody was home, and the place was an icebox, as though the boys had left open a window again. Hidden beside the Christmas tree, Tim slept sitting up in his easy chair. She leaned over and touched his knee. Tim’s eyes popped open in terror, and he cowered under the blanket.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
Her husband was still blinking and searching for his bearings as the boys came charging down the stairs. They were soaking. Jack Peter’s hair was plastered against his scalp and Nick was as wet as a drowned kitten. Their shirtsleeves were damp to the elbows and their trousers were sodden from their socks to their knees. “Tim, what happened to the boys?”
“What happened, what happened?”
“The house is freezing, and the boys probably have pneumonia.” Holly went to the coat closet and fetched a pair of blankets. “C’mere, honey,” she said to Nick. “How did you get so wet?”
He trembled. “The walls.”
“What walls?” Tim asked.
“It’s like they were bleeding water. The walls in Jack Peter’s room.”
For a man half-awake, Tim raced quickly up the stairs, trailing a string of curses.
“Let’s get you out of these clothes,” Holly said, and then turned her back to give them the blush of privacy.
The boys struggled free of their shirts and pants, the wet fabric sticking to their skin. Both were pale and thin, shoulder blades sharp as fins. They wrapped blankets across their shoulders, marching up the steps ahead of her. Grousing about the cold, they entered Jack Peter’s bedroom and found Tim standing in front of the wall, dumbfounded by what he had discovered.
There was no flood on the second floor, no puddles of standing water, and no broken pipes from the bathroom down the hall that had leaked into the bedrooms. At first, Holly could not discern any difference at all in the room, except for its irrefutable coldness. The boys hopped to the relative warmth of the bed and rolled themselves under the quilt. Holly blew out clouds of her breath, which vanished in thin wisps. Ice had formed on the inside of the windows, fractal patterns etched on the glass. With her thumbnail, she scratched the surface to gauge the thickness of the frost, as deep as glazing on a cake. Scanning the room, she could not find any opening for the cold, and the iced window reminded her of her childhood home and the winters there in the unheated upstairs bedrooms. Overnight anything damp would freeze over until Daddy got the woodstove going in the kitchen. But in all the years they had lived in the dream house, she had never seen ice form on the inside of the windows.