“I wouldn’t be doing my job as your mother,” she went on. “At a certain point I have to let you sink or swim.”
Effy’s cheeks were slippery with tears. The phone kept almost sliding out of her grip. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to wake Grandfather. I just don’t know what to do.”
“First you have to calm down,” her mother said briskly. “I can’t talk to you when you’re behaving like this. When you’re having one of your episodes. Are you seeing things?”
“No,” Effy said. Outside, the darkness pulsed and seethed.
“Do you have your medication?”
“Yes.”
“Then take it. All right? Call me when you’ve calmed down.”
Effy nodded, even though she knew her mother couldn’t see. But she held on to the phone until there was a soft click on the other end and her mother’s breathing was gone.
She let the phone slide out of her grasp, dangling on its cord. She pried open her purse and dug for the small glass bottle, uncapped it and poured out a single pill. It was the rosy color of an unopened flower bud, dead before it would ever bloom.
Effy clapped a hand over her lips and swallowed it, dry-mouthed.
It took several minutes for the furious drag of her pulse to slow. She’d gone through bottle after bottle of these pills since she was ten years old. It was inside the doctor’s office that she’d first learned to call these moments of panic, these slippings, episodes.
The doctor had held the bottle of pink pills in one hand and wagged a finger at her with the other, as if he were admonishing her for something she hadn’t even done yet.
“You have to be careful with these,” he said. “Only take them when you really need them. When you start seeing things that aren’t real. Do you understand, missy?”
She was ten, and already she’d given up trying to explain that what she saw was real, even if no one believed her.
Effy had looked instead at the tuft of silver hair curling out of the doctor’s left ear. “I understand.”
“Good,” he said, and gave her a stiff, clinical pat on the head. Her mother had bundled the pills into her purse. They had left his office, walking into a damp spring morning, and under a flowering pear tree, her mother had stopped to blow her nose into a handkerchief. Allergies, she’d said. But her mother’s eyes had been rimmed with red and when they got home, she had shut herself in her room for hours. She didn’t want to have a crazy daughter any more than Effy wanted to be one.
Now her surroundings returned to her in pieces: the dark road, the puddle of lamplight, the houses with their shut windows and locked doors. Effy stepped out of the booth, dragging her trunk behind her, and inhaled the salt smell. The rush of waves bathing the rocky shoreline was loud again, oppressive.
She hadn’t been outside for more than a minute before a swath of light beamed down the gravel lane. As it grew closer, the single beam of light cleaved in two, and a black car crunched to a halt in front of her.
The driver’s-side window rolled down. “Effy Sayre?”
At once she was flooded with a staggering, breathless relief. “Yes?”
“I’m Thomas Wetherell, barrister for the Myrddin estate. I was instructed to pick you up at the station.”
“Yes,” she said again, the word pluming white in the cold air. “Yes. Thank you.”
Wetherell frowned at her. He had slicked-back gray hair and an extremely clean-shaven face. “Let me help you with your trunk.”
Once she was inside the car, Effy felt her body go stiff again, her short-lived relief curdling into fear. There were, suddenly, a hundred new worries in her mind. Mainly that she’d made an abysmal first impression.
In the bleary, rain-spattered window, Effy saw a muddled version of herself: nose pink, eyes puffy, cheeks still damp and shiny. She scrubbed at her face with the sleeve of her sweater but only succeeded in reddening her face further. The car clattered down the dark road, and a particularly nasty lurch sent her jolting forward, knees jamming up against the glove box.
Effy bit her lip on a curse. She didn’t want Wetherell to think her a squeamish city girl, even though that was exactly what she was.
“How far to Hiraeth?” Effy asked, as they passed Saltney’s handful of buildings. A pub, a small church, a fish-and-chip shop—in the Bottom Hundred, that was enough to constitute a town.
Wetherell frowned again. Effy had the sense that she would be seeing that frown quite a lot. “Half an hour, maybe more. Depends on the state of the road.”
Effy’s stomach churned. And then the car began to slant sharply upward.
Instinctively she grabbed the handle on the door. “Is that normal?”
“Yes,” Wetherell said, looking at her with sympathetic disdain, something almost approaching pity. “We’re going up the cliffs.”
It was only then that she realized Hiraeth Manor would not be in Saltney at all. Even that flyspeck of civilization was nothing she could count on. Effy’s heart sank further as the car jostled up the cliffside.
She was almost too afraid to look out the window. The moon seemed to keep pace with the car, painting the road and the moldering cliffs in a pallid light. They were white, ribboned with bands of erosion, grown over with moss and lichen and speckled with salt. They looked beautiful against the black enormity of the sea, its titanic waves striking the pale rock over and over again.
Effy was halfway to admiring them when the car jerked to a halt. In front of it, where the road curled up the cliffside, the road was suddenly awash with foam and dark water. She looked to Wetherell in horror, but he scarcely reacted at all. When the tide receded again, he drove on, tires sloshing through the newly wet dirt.
It was another long moment before Effy found her voice. “Is that normal?”
“Yes,” Wetherell said. “We usually wait until low tide to drive into town, but the timing of your arrival was . . . unfortunate.”
That was putting it mildly. As the car climbed farther up the hill, the roar of the waves grew dimmer, but a thick mist descended, shrouding the trees in white cloaks. The road narrowed, fog closing in on all sides. Effy’s throat tightened.
“How much further?” she asked.
“Not very far now.”
And then something burst from the tree line and the mist and out in front of the car. Effy saw only a flash of it. There was dark hair, tangled and wet, moving as fluidly as water. Where the headlights caught it, she also saw a pale yellow curve of bone.
“Mr. Wetherell.” She gasped as it disappeared into the mist again. He hadn’t even let up on the gas. “What was that?”
If she hadn’t just swallowed one of her pills, she wouldn’t have asked at all. But Wetherell must have seen it, too. She couldn’t have imagined it: the pink pills were for obliterating her imagination.
“Most certainly a deer,” Wetherell said, in an offhanded way that seemed almost too offhanded. “The deer in the South have developed some peculiar adaptations. Webbed feet and scaled bellies. Biologists have speculated that it’s evolutionary preparation for the second Drowning.”
But Effy had seen no scales. She had seen a wild knot of hair, a crown of bone. She scrubbed at her face again. What would the doctor have said? Was it possible for two people to have the same hallucination?
The car made a strenuous, halting turn, and the mist seemed to cleave apart in front of it. Wetherell stopped right beside an enormous oak tree. Its branches heaved and bowed with the weight of dangling moss. He reached over and opened the glove box, removing a small flashlight. Wordlessly he clicked it on and stepped out of the car, even though Effy could not see a house rising out of the mist.
She heard him begin to drag out her trunk. Effy opened the door and followed him around to the back of the car. “Are we here?”