Page 28 of The Dead of Summer

Elisa only lets us get halfway up the stairs before grabbing my hand and spinning me to face her.

“Did Pfaff give you that recorder?” She barely attempts a whisper.

“It’s not what it looks like. She …” I lower my voice. “She doesn’t trust Willy.”

“But you trust her? After everything?”

I pull Elisa up the stairs, to the kids’ reading corner. Most people either linger downstairs or have returned to the stacks to go back to bed. Among the tiny chairs and strewn blocks of the kids’ corner, we have at least a little privacy.

“Of course I don’t,” I say to Elisa. “The only reason I took the recorder was because Pfaff said she was trying to gather data that might help figure out what the hell is happening outside, and why.”

“You can’t trust her, Ollie.”

“Whatever she’d done, she’s still a scientist—”

“And you can’t trust her science, either!” Elisa pushes her hands up through the hair frizzing at her temples. “She’s probably the whole reason we’re in this mess!”

Normally, I let Elisa tinker around in her grudge against Pfaff, but I can’t anymore.

Too much has happened and too much is about to happen.

Challenging her trauma doesn’t make me a good friend, but if I were to let her get colonized by a flesh-eating coral, that’s not being a very good friend, either.

“Look, Elisa. I don’t trust Pfaff, but there is way more to what’s happening than just one marine biologist. You said it yourself; whatever has been happening on this island goes back years and years and years .

Pfaff is old, but she’s not that old. If we want to figure this out, we’ve got to dig deeper than just our personal grudges. All the adults are hiding something.”

“So you do want to spy on Willy?”

I try to tamp down her voice with my hands. “I want to know the truth. I want to figure out what’s going on, and why, and how to stop it. And I want to save …”

I think of Sam. His memory has the halting regret of a song cut off mid-crescendo, right before it resolves into something beautiful.

He was supposed to survive. He was one of us.

The splinter of guilt I first felt standing in the rain has spread into something wild and uncontrollable.

Me eating me, like a cancer of my own subconscious.

I pull my thoughts away from it, toward the memory of the glowing window at Singing House.

I might have failed Sam, but there’s someone else out there who needs me, who I can’t afford to fail again.

“I want to find my mom,” I blurt out.

This knocks Elisa back a few inches. Her eyes soften, but just a little. There’s an opportunity to say more and, for once, I decide to take it.

“You already know about the fight with Gracie in front of everyone. I bet half the island knew about it, before all hell broke loose. But Gracie and I never got a chance to make up, and I can’t help but feel like if we didn’t go to bed angry, she’d be here, now.

” I imagine losing her again and I don’t know if it would be harder or easier.

What I know is that I will not be finding out, because she’s okay.

She’s at Singing House, waiting for me to come home, and she’s okay.

“Is it childish of me to think she might be fine?” I ask Elisa.

“So many people on this island know her and would take her in, right? But I don’t know.

I keep dreaming about her drowning, like the weepers.

And tonight, the light was definitely on in Singing House.

What if she’s home? Right now? Waiting for me? ”

I don’t know where all this is coming from, and I’m sure Elisa is annoyed at me derailing our argument, but somehow she’s holding my hand and letting me say what I need to say.

“We’ll find her, Ollie,” Elisa says. The judgment is gone from her voice.

“And we’ll figure out how to stop this and save everyone.

It’s not childish to have hope. And you’re right.

This is bigger than my grudge against Imogen Pfaff.

We’ve got to explore everything, before it’s all gone and it’s too late. It’s our island, after all.”

“Yeah. It’s our island.”

Elisa squeezes my hand. I squeeze back.

Eventually, when enough silence has passed, she asks, “So, what do you think is in that storage unit?”

There she is , I think.

“My theory? Guns or something. Willy was in the military. He has Bash’s grandma’s gun. When I got here, he confiscated my harpoon gun. I bet it’s all in there.”

“Wow, Velty, you sound excited. I didn’t take you for a fighter.”

The word fighter makes me think of Gracie again.

She got called that a lot when she was being treated, but she never felt it fit.

If it’s a fight, there’s a winner and a loser , she would say to the nurses.

No one really responded, probably because it was so clear she was losing.

That was her point, I think. I always wanted to fight with her, somehow. Or for her.

Now I feel like I can, in a way.

“After the shit we pulled, I doubt Willy is going to let us out of his sight,” Elisa says.

I sit up straight, realizing it’s not Willy we should be evading. I point at my watch. “Riddle me this, Elisa: What is the one hour a day we know Willy is occupied?”

“It’s Wendy Pretendy’s Bendy Hour! Let’s get those sharks a’shaking!”

The kids put their hands up, matching the drag queen, and bite the air with their little palms. Wendy uses a toy mallet on the chimes she keeps in the common room, to mark the start and finish of her iconic hour of dancing, reading, sing-alongs, and of course a final lullaby to usher the kids off to bed.

She can’t do the sing-along since her show has to be conducted at a stage whisper, but the rest of the show is surprisingly consistent.

Tonight, we sit at the back, near the door.

Looking at the heads of all the parents and kids circled close to Wendy’s lantern, I feel bursts of nostalgia needled with despair.

Wendy’s been putting on her Bendy Hour forever, but I am hyperaware that this is one of the last read-alongs this library will ever see.

We can’t stay here forever. Either someone saves us or we save ourselves.

I think of a bit of Gracie wisdom that never made much sense to me but suddenly shines with understanding.

Some secrets are kept, and some secrets keep.

Anchor’s Mercy is, I realize, an island full of people being kept by their secrets.

Now that Pfaff is telling us where one such secret hides, I can barely stop myself from running right at it.

There isn’t time to do anything else but run.

The world is ending, has maybe already ended, and I won’t be kept down by more secrets. Not mine and not someone else’s.

“Come on,” I whisper to Bash and Elisa. We exit quietly, without anyone noticing.

We tiptoe around the stacks, to the lobby.

The lights are on in Dr. Pfaff’s office, but I’m not worried about her catching us.

I’m not worried about anyone else, either.

Willy has posted adults at both the back and side doors, leaving us with only one very stupid yet foolproof option for sneaking out.

The front door.

The barnacle door.

The front hall of the library was sealed almost immediately after the outbreak, and none have dared to venture back since.

I guess no one else is dumb enough. I can both see and smell why.

The air in here is damp and cold, tingling with salt and rot in my nose.

Darkly, through the glass, there is a faint sense of squirming, and I swear I look right into a swirling eyeball.

I shiver, reminding myself that beneath the mass of fused barnacles there is a layer of flesh.

If you don’t look, you won’t scream. That’s our rule.

I keep my eyes on Bash as we bypass the main door for a small side door, hidden behind a rolling corkboard cluttered with flyers for town meetings, odd jobs, book clubs, and the charity drive. Bash takes a deep breath, puts his shoulder against the door, twists the old lock, and shoves.

It pops right open. Nothing slithers in or spits at us. We let the door creak wider, and Bash places his book at the base to keep it from locking us out again.

Outside, I expect to see the lawn, but we stand within an alien tunnel.

The barnacles have grown up the front door, across the pillars, and down the opposing walls.

They carpet the ground, fusing together in mounds with black, gaping holes for heads, wide enough and deep enough to reach my entire arm into.

I shudder, imagining what I would find inside.

Elisa pokes my back. I’m stalling. I hold my breath and step carefully so I don’t crush even a tiny barnacle.

Even so, I sense the creature sensing me.

The thorny growths bristle, and a few open like sleeping lips.

One of them—protruding from the wall upon what I think might be a person’s shoulder—opens wide enough for a feathered tongue to flick the air.

I catch Bash just in time. It lashes inches from his nose.

We hold still, waiting for it to retract.

Looking around, I can see patches of smoothness amid the riot of texture, and I realize what I am seeing is skin.

Buried humans. The half-moon of a woman’s face shines down at us.

Her skin is pale, her lone eye a milky orb frozen wide.

I can see her pupils darting around, like she’s still alive.

No, like she’s dreaming.

When the barnacles around us squint shut, Bash starts moving again.

I rush after, pulling Elisa for the final few steps until we’re safely beyond the alien corridor.

Weepers still wait for us on the lawn, but with the lights out they barely take interest in us as we turn the corner and rush along the bushes, to the back lot.

There, the storage containers await. There are two, both padlocked shut, but it’s clear only one is being used.

A soft white light leaks out through the cracks.

“Shine time,” Bash whispers to himself. When Elisa and I asked him about the lock, he recited the code without hesitation.

He was in and out of this storage container often in his volunteer days.

He said it was used to store furniture, mostly, and occasionally books, but as the door creaks open, we appear to be looking into a cramped living room.

There are, in fact, several guns. They line one wall, propped up and ready to be grabbed at a moment’s notice. My harpoon gun is among them.

A curtain has been hung up, blocking our view of the farthest depths of the container, but that’s where the light is coming from. The air is utterly still.

Across the parking lot, a weeper hiccups.

We rush into the container, pulling the door shut behind us.

I listen to make sure the weeper passes, but instead I hear a familiar, haunting hum from within the container.

The next step I take, something crunches beneath my shoe, and I trace a powdery web of coral growing right through the carpet.

“Guys—”

I’m too late. Bash rips back the curtain, and the light gushes over us as he unveils a weeper huddled in a small cot, it’s upper half infested with growths. I squeeze my eyes shut, ready for the monster to flood our bodies with fog and jelly. Instead, it speaks.

“Finally, some friendly faces.”

I crack an eye open.

Beneath the horror, a human looks back at us.

She’s been propped up in her cot and swaddled in blankets.

Horns of coral grow from her skin, faintly pulsing with buttery light, but unlike any weeper before, her eyes seem to really see us.

She reaches for Bashar’s hand, and I have to stop him from reaching back.

“Please, don’t run. I don’t have much time,” she croaks. “And I should very much like a few final words. Bashar, don’t tell me you can’t recognize your own grandma. Do you know who I am?”

Bash just stares.

I finally take a breath and stand up straight, because we are in the presence of a local legend.

“It’s nice to see you, Scary Mary.”