He led them to a rusty ladder bolted to the side of the concrete pier, then up the pier and into a warren of ramshackle buildings, all clustered and leaning together as if for warmth. Some of the buildings were houses made of weathered grey planks, most with porches sagging under mounds of snow. Others were brick warehouses or wharves, garages with indecipherable graffiti spray-painted onto their doors and walls. Blake led them to a corner beneath a stuttering, buzzing streetlamp, where a tiny pub thumped with a dull bass beat and a rabble of loud voices. Neon signs glowed from its tiny windows, advertising brands and logos James had never heard of.
He gulped but forced himself to follow with no hesitation as Blake led them to the plain wooden door, which was covered in peeling paint the color of dried blood. He heaved it open, and a roar of heat and noise and laughter barreled out over the slushy footpath. The smell of cigarettes and beer was so strong he could nearly taste it.
“Millie here calls this ‘slumming’,” Blake said, leaning toward James as they edged inside. “But for you and me, it’s not slumming if it’s the world we come home to every night, eh?”
“I guess not,” James nodded, trying to take in every corner of the tiny pub at once. Along the rear was a crowded bar backed by rows of bottles and a cloudy wall-length mirror. A television flashed blue over the bar, presiding over the scene with its bright, blaring eye. Elsewhere, a billiard table clacked and knocked, glowing red beneath its own dedicated stained-glass lamp. A jukebox thumped and pulsed. People danced on a postage-stamp sized dance floor. The crowd was dense but strangely faceless, mere gyrating silhouettes in the pooling, smoky darkness. “I don’t live like Millie,” James said, raising his voice carefully so that only Blake would hear him, “but this isn’t the sort of neighborhood I go home to every night.”
“Thank your lucky stars,” Blake said, nudging James jovially.
The next hour and a half went by in a blur of thumping music, clattering bottles and glasses on a cracked wooden booth table (James tried a beer called Old Speckled Hen, which he nursed throughout the night but never developed much of a taste for) and trying awkwardly to dance amongst the constant bump of elbows and knees on the diminutive dance floor.
Millie seemed to love every minute of it. She smiled showing all of her teeth—something she hadn’t done since arriving at her parents’ home—and sipped a ridiculous pink cocktail that the bartender had happily provided when she’d requested “the girliest drink in the house”.
James had an idea that if they had not been accompanied by Blake, who seemed to be a very familiar face in the neighborhood, he and Millie might not have been served quite so readily, and surely not without any identification to prove their age, at the very least. In Blake’s presence, they were dismissed as simply two more affectionate hooligans out for a night of harmless debauchery.
By the time they stepped back out into the blowing cold and dark of the street, James’ ears felt like they were packed with cotton batting from the noise inside. Millie was giggling and reeling slightly from her drink, holding onto James as they followed Blake back down the street toward the docks.
“It’s a good thing James here is driving,” she said rather too loudly, her voice strained with laughter as she patted him on the shoulder with one hand, gripped his elbow with the other.
James’ mood alternated between relief that the night was nearly over, annoyance at Millie for her cavalier attitude about getting into trouble, and cautious satisfaction that he seemed to have held his own against the seemingly far more dashing and mysterious Blake.
Without any more conversation, they shuffled down the pier, climbed to the waiting snowmobiles on the ice below, and started them up again. Within minutes, they were traversing the cold blue numb of the bay again, Millie once more gripping James tight around the waist, James following the speeding dark shape of Blake ahead.
The moon had come out, sheathing the world in preternatural blue light. It shone off the snow and ice so brightly that it made its own ghostly daylight, surreal beneath the sharp glitter of the stars above. The ice blurred beneath the snowmobile’s skids, laced with ribbons of white against deep, cloudy grey.
The peninsula of Blackbrier Quoit hove into view, scratching at the low sky with its impenetrable dome of trees. James marveled at it.
From the outside, the peninsula appeared as nothing more than a strip of wilderness, dense with birches and snow-laden pines, allowing no hint of the manor or grounds within. Even the stone boathouse at its tip was so overshadowed by trees that it was virtually invisible unless one knew exactly where to look.
Blake slowed and swung toward the structure, sliding into the shadows beneath. James followed, squeezing the brake lever with a modicum of confidence now, and cut the engine before Blake could come back and do it for him.
Millie clambered off the seat behind him and slipped on the ice, grabbing a nearby wooden piling for support and giggling again. Blake reached to steady her as James dismounted. He pried the helmet from his head, dropped it to the snowmobile seat, and stepped out from beneath the boathouse with a sigh, glad to be shut of the noisy Muggle machine. The expanse of the bay shone like polished stone in the moon glow, like blue-grey marble threaded with white. He breathed in the icy air, listening to Millie’s and Blake’s whispered words and laughter behind him.
“So, are we still a go for tomorrow night?” Blake asked in a hushed voice. Millie shushed him before he could finish his question.
“What…?” James began to ask, a flicker of jealousy flaring once again in his chest, but something caught his eye far out on the ice, distracting him even as he began to turn around.
It was a figure, but so distant, so fogged by blowing phantoms of snow that James couldn’t tell if it was real or a statue. It didn’t appear to be moving, only standing straight, alert, as if watching from the dead centre of the frozen sea.
Behind James, he could still hear Millie and Blake whispering.
He glanced back over his shoulder as they made their way deeper into the shadow of the boathouse.
“Do you either of you see—?” he began, turning back to the mysterious shape, but a gasp of shock cut off his words. The figure was standing directly in front of him now, having traversed the vast, icy distance as if it were a mere footstep. James recognized the tall, lithe figure immediately. The strength fell out of his legs and he only remained standing because his knees had locked.
“She’s a very pretty girl, James,” Judith said in a low, confiding voice, a voice that was somehow both warm and brittle with cold. Her words made puffs of vapour from beneath a black cowl. Her face would have been hidden completely if not for the moonlight that reflected up from the ice. “I’m glad you’ve finally gotten over Petra. She was no good for you. For either of us.”
James took a single, halting step backward. He tried to call out to Millie and Blake, but the breath seemed locked in his chest. All he could produce was a sort of huffing exhalation, stifled with sudden shivers.