The house is just a rift for water to pass through. No amount of bailing can keep it at bay.
“Sorry,” Abby whispers, touching Ripple’s slicker with one tentative hand. He flinches. She can’t rescue him from this. He never learned to swim. Now he’s going to drown.
Abby wanders alone toward the back of the mansion. The Hall of Ancestors is a crud grotto of blackened frames and canvases already mildewed from exposure. Abby picks up the portrait of Ripple, lying facedown on the spongy rug, and leans it against the wall. The oil paint is heat-blistered, sullied with ash, washed out from the damp. Wanderer Beneath the Sea of Smog.
—came back came back you came back!
Abby doesn’t have time to look up before the animal tackles her, pinning her to the ground and assaulting her face and hands with eager slurps.
—Hooli! I thought you were dead!
—waited and waited and waited and waited and you came back!
His whole body squirms and wriggles, carpeted joy alive to her touch. They hug.
—love! love! love!
—I love you too!
—ERROR. predator detected.
—Oh! Scavenger.
Abby sits up and pulls the lab rat out of her pocket. He smooths his fur furiously, disheveled from the encounter.
—Let me introduce you. Scavenger, Hooli. Hooli, Scavenger.
Hooligan waggles, sniffs the rat all over. Scavenger cowers.
—magic rat. play now.
Before he can pounce, Abby sternly pulls him back by the collar.
—Play gentle. You don’t want him to end up like Magic Bird.
—EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ENACTED.
Scavenger darts away, squeezes through a gap in what’s left of the wainscoting, and disappears.
—rat gone. sad now.
—Don’t worry, he’ll come back. Come on, let’s find Dunk! He’ll be so glad to see you.
As she and Hooligan meander through the Ripples’ disintegrating interiors, Abby thinks back to the circumstances of their parting.
—Where’s Swanny?
—left me. got in a street machine with a smelly man.
—What kind of smell?
—yucky. scary. bad dream. death.
Dunk appears around a corner, as stiff-limbed and shambling as a walking corpse.
“Look who I found!”
Hooligan makes the hang loose sign and tries to high-five his old buddy, but Ripple doesn’t even smile.
“He’s the only one?”
Hooligan circles around Ripple, nudging his head under Ripple’s hand.
—love! love! love?
“He came all the way back by himself. He’s been waiting for us.”
—love? love? why no love?
“Uncle Osmond?” Ripple calls, turning away from them. “Anybody?”
—sad. sad. nobody home.
—Are you sure?
—show you.
Hooligan bounds across the room. Near a staircase to nowhere that cranes hopelessly up into a second-floor chasm, he digs in the rubble, dislodging a mound of crumbled, smoke-stained plaster and melted insulation. He recovers a sticklike object, which he holds in his useful mouth as he returns on all fours to drop it at Abby’s feet. It reminds her of the Lady. It is a human femur, charred meatless.
—it’s the big one. but his bones don’t speak.
“Huh?” Ripple’s eyes widen. “Is that…” Without warning, he kicks Hooligan in the ribs. “Bad! Bad! Bad dog!”
—sorry sorrrrry sorrrrrrry.
“Stop it, you’re hurting him! He’s just trying to show you.”
“Show me what? That he can treat my dad’s leg like a pizzle stick?”
“He wants you to know what happened.”
“He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t know anything. He’s just a dog! And that rat—is just a rat! And you—it’s like you’re not even human. I mean—I mean—what the snuff, Abby? Who are you? When I took you back to civilization, I thought—I thought you’d catch on, start acting normal, you know? But—superpowers—and telling me it’s OK to murder people—and—and—you just get weirder all the time! I thought Swanny was scary—but this—I can’t handle this!”
His face is still so beautiful. That human face.
“Everything dies,” she whispers. “But it’s OK. Something survived. Love.”
She reaches for him, but he shakes her off.
“You just don’t get it, do you? I need somebody to talk to. I need my family.”
When Abby was just a girl, when she still played in the shallows and drank with the Lady from the small pink cup, when she was the simplest possible version of herself, she dreamt always of a friend—another child, a small grubby person unconcerned with the alchemy of food hygiene or the workings of the Lord, a playmate, a fellow architect of trash castles built to withstand the pummeling of the tides. She tries to conjure this figment now, to coax him into concrete detail.
The first inspiration for him, she realizes, was her own reflection.
“We’re your family. Hooli and me.”
“Go away and leave me alone,” he says.
* * *
It is still raining when Abby leaves the Ripple mansion for the second and final time. It is raining outside, and inside of Abby’s heart. She walks back down the sloping drive, listening with her mind, but although Hooligan follows at her heels with Scavenger riding on his back, the magic animals do not speak to her. They don’t know what to say. Neither does she. But before they enter the tunnel at the bottom of the hill, she addresses the dog.
—Hooli, you can go home. Stay with Dunk.
—stay with you.
—But he’s all alone.
—stay with you. keep you safe. love.
—You loved him first.
—love you more.
Abby can’t answer that, can’t reject it. She doesn’t want to. At least someone loves her most of all.
The tunnel yawns, as dark as the inside of Abby’s eyelids closed in the dead of night. But this time, she isn’t afraid. Even if something is waiting for her in that blackness, she can’t hurt more than she hurts already.
She will always be alone.
Abby thinks of her life on the Island before Dunk came. She thinks of the few, pleading fish that she tossed back out of her nets into the waves, and of the day she first met Cuyahoga pecking out the brains of a desiccated gull—the joy and relief she felt at finding other creatures capable of communication. But she learned then what she still knows now: an animal will never fully understand her. It isn’t their fault. They just can’t. No matter how many times Abby grinned or laughed at one of the vulture’s wry remarks, no matter how many dead mice or limp minnows she tossed into that beaky craw, Cuyahoga never gave her a smile in return. For that, Abby had to turn back to the teeth left in the Lady’s skull.
Yet, when Abby finally met Dunk, a creature with a body like hers—a human—there was still a link missing. They weren’t made of the same stuff.
—Hooli? Do I smell like other humans you’ve known?
—every human different.
—But is there anything special about me?
—nice smell. good smell. familiar.
—Familiar how?
—magic i guess.
Abby thinks this over as they exit the tunnel. Magic. Some animals can speak; most can’t. And she’s the only person she’s ever met who’s able to hear the magic ones’ voices. Even the Lady never could.