I shuddered as we pulled to a stop by the abandoned waterfront market. So long as we’d pressed through the weather, it had been easy to tell myself all would be resolved once we arrived: that I’d be able to hand over the burden. But we got out, and still I felt the confluence around me, at once both cloak and weight. Still I felt slender threads stretching between me and Sally—and suspected my grandfather would not hesitate to cut them himself and relegate her to the cold.
We scraped snow from a collapsed stall with gloved hands, and found a few boards beneath the top layer still dry. These we dragged over the dunes, and Spector and Caleb went back for additional tinder as Dawson and I stacked the foundation of a small bonfire. The tide was going out—not normally a propitious time for summoning, but surging waves kept the ocean close. As they retreated, they left a flat damp area up against the dunes. Here a fire might be tended and ritual diagrams maintained for a few hours.
Caleb struck a match and touched it around the edges of the interwoven boards. When they were crackling he held a cigarette to the flame, and lifted it to his lips. Then he shook his head and ground it in the sand. “It still hurts. Even after all this time. I’m not going to do that to you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “If it hurts, why do it?”
He shrugged. “I thought I was dying. Why avoid the pain? After that … punishing yourself gets to be a habit. And besides, it annoyed Trumbull—the Yith, I mean.”
The summoning diagram hurt to draw. Not only physically, as the wet sand shocked me with unaccustomed cold. But the twining, pulsing equations of Mary’s spell intruded into my thoughts. Again and again, I checked my work for infection by those strange forms. I feared that instead of calling my elders for aid, I would draw in some other thing that waited eagerly for the access so recently denied. Or worse, I would call both together.
“Check my work?” I begged Charlie. He put an arm around me and I swallowed tears. He looked over the spellwork, pronounced it good. I swallowed the irrational conviction that my oversight had bled into him through the confluence.
Our fire leapt into the newborn winter night, and snow surrendered its form to enter the circle of warmth. A gust threw the flame sideways. I stumbled back; the borderland was thin between burning and freezing.
Still, my bones warmed for the first time that day, and I pulled off my gloves. I couldn’t imagine shedding my coat, but I could face the night with more equanimity. Perhaps we humans were all creatures of flame, having gathered together around it long before we separated into our kinds.
I took the bowl, brought from Trumbull’s house, and left the fire’s respite. Snow whirled against me, and the waves growled above the sound of the storm. I could just catch the glint of their whitecaps: ever-changing tendrils of a thing the storm barely touched. I knelt at the water’s edge, dipped the bowl during a lull between waves. The water sang to my blood, but its cold stirred the unearthly thing that pulsed there. Frigid filaments stretched eagerly into my damp fingers. Defiant, I licked my knuckles before retreating and tasted not the plain table salt from Trumbull’s kitchen, but the complex medley of minerals and shed life found only here.
I spilled a little water on the diagram, passed it around so that we might cleanse ourselves. This I had not done at our first summoning, but today I needed it. Then the knife, and blood in the sigils. There was just enough, this time, to show faintly on the wet sand. I threw a pinch of blood-touched sand on the fire, bringing it with us into the calling. I felt the warmth pierce a little deeper.
We chanted, weaving our voices around wind and wave and snow. The summoning rose, tasted us and knew us, passed on into the depths. And then we fell silent, and it was time for the hardest part of the ritual. We waited.
Back at Miskatonic, Barlow paced and read aloud, glaring every time Mary interrupted with a question. Sally still took notes, now joined by Jesse, who caught what she missed when hearing faded. Peters read to himself, a scowl on his face. The cold seeped back in.
“It’s your turn to tell a story,” I said to Audrey.
She looked up, eyes dark in the firelight. “Now?”
“Trum—the Yith was right. It’s an old tradition, and it helps. Besides, would you rather sit here in silence wondering how long they’re going to take?” I could have asked any of my companions, but I hoped the request would distract her, perhaps even help her hold against the things that fought to consume her.
“All right, fine.” She rearranged herself, brushing sand off her skirt. She took a minute, but at last settled with her chin propped on her fists. “Once upon a time … do you guys say that? Or is it too easy to find someone who remembers the time?”
“We say ‘It is written in the Archives.’”
“That’s the same thing the Yith said.”
“Yes,” I said, “but when they say ‘It is written in the Archives,’ they mean ‘I read this a while back.’ When we say ‘It is written in the Archives,’ we mean ‘Once upon a time.’”
“Well. Once upon a time,” she repeated. Then: “No, I can’t. Not tonight. I’m sorry.” She pulled herself to her feet and ran away from the fire, down the beach. I shared a quick, startled glance with the others before going after her.
The snow closed in quickly, though I could still feel a scrap of flame where I’d spread our mingled blood. Audrey hadn’t gone far—I found her a little way along the sandbar where the dunes pressed forward to meet the storm surge. She stood shivering, clutching herself tightly, letting the edge of the surge crash over her leather boots. She gasped frigid air, held the breath behind gritted teeth, released it and waited long for the next as if suffering some mortification. I touched her forehead, still bare despite all her layers. She winced, but leaned into my touch and after a moment began breathing more evenly, if a bit too quickly.
“All the stories I know are lies,” she said. “And I can feel it in me, growing stronger. I’ve been able to feel it all day, the dark thing, whispering and shouting and trying to change me and it’s doing it, I can feel it. And I can feel the cold thing too, and it’s winning, I can feel it winning—I don’t even know how much of me will be left by the time it takes over.”
My heart sped to pace her rising panic. I found some corner of calm I hadn’t known I still possessed, and pushed it at her. “You can do this. I know you can. I’ve seen you keep Trumbull out, for the gods’ sakes.”
“Trumbull was different. She’s … slippery. Meant to move from body to body without catching on anything. These things are inside me; the dark thing is a part of me. It’s them, it’s the Mad Ones trying to make me one of them.”
“Trumbull said the madness wasn’t heritable.”