A clap of thunder tore through the night. In the room beside the library nook, her father’s eyes flew open. He knew. He felt regret before he felt fear. Shame was heavy in his belly, but he ran. He cried out his daughter’s name as he darted down the hall to where the little girl was meant to be sleeping.
Her bedroom was empty.
He charged back through the cottage to the little library.
The grimoire, pattered with blood and broken window glass, lay open on the floor. In blew an unearthly breeze and the fading ring of wind chimes and children’s chanting. The room smelled of woodsmoke, incense, gunpowder and lilac.
The little girl was gone.
CHAPTERONE
Dorothy Louise Walcott was twenty-three years old and still felt like a child. She stood on the pier, chewed fingernails clasping the handrail, watching the grey warbling waves. Salty wind bit at her skin and the gulls cawed periodically, their songs ghostly, almost swallowed by the sea.
She should have died when she was fourteen.
She should have drowned right here by the pier.
She hadn’t.
The aftermath of that event echoed in every recess of her, in every languid step and stifled laugh. Though she was taller than average, Dot held herself at such diminutive angles that people often believed she was shorter than she was. Every moment, an apology. Clutching each wrist, her shoulders a little hunched, drawing herself inward, always, like a whirlpool collapsing into nothing. She did it now, alone and shivering in her waitress’s dress, one hand holding her wool hat against the wind.
‘I suppose you’veforgottenhow to read the time.’
Her brother’s words smacked her.
‘Willard,’ said Dot, whirling around. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Is it late?’
‘Is it late?’ Willard let out a hollow laugh. Their mother had sent him to fetch her, she was sure.
Dot glanced about. The sun had set. How long had she been staring at the water, exhausted from her day of washing plates and cleaning tables at the Divers’ Café? She was cursed, she thought, to return to this spot where the wind shrieked like dying girls. It was an atonement, perhaps. Or, perhaps, there was simply nothing else to do in Seafarthing.
‘Hurry up,’ said Willard.
Despite his quarter of a century, her brother still looked boyish. His curly blond hair, the same as hers, rolled back and forth in the wind like sea foam. He had a factory worker’s build with thick arms, which he had used for swatting, pinching and hitting in all their childhood games. Dot still had fractured veins upon her arm from where he had smacked her after a game of checkers. She had been twelve, then. The welt had left behind a starburst of ugly purple vessels, thin and jagged like the tentacles of a jellyfish.
Her brother stomped back down the jetty. She followed.
Willard knew better than most the constraints of Dot’s illness and yet he walked too briskly, leaving her lagging as she trod on every third slat of wood. She did not ask him to slow. She knew he would not.
In that way, they wandered through the gloomy village of Seafarthing. It was a morose little fishing town constructed of white cottages and crab nets beside the jetty, the air reeking of dead fish and brine. The roads were gravel and hard sand, for only a handful of the residents owned motor cars.
She looked out at the cove.
The year the Prohibition began, Dot found an anglerfish washed up on that beach. A grim, monstrous thing, all teeth and faded scales with its odd little light gone out. And though she had been barely out of babyhood, she had felt a kinship with that slimy, dark creature which she could not explain. Almost two decades later, asshe trotted after her brother through their dank town – the lamps flickering on, illuminating the wind-beaten cottages from within – she was reminded of that anglerfish: once deep in the belly of the ocean, ugly, cold, alone, trying in earnest to hold up its own small light against the enveloping darkness.
At last, they arrived. Theirs was the cottage at the end of the lane beside the river mouth. Crickets chirruped. The neighbour’s spaniel barked. Dot was breathless from the walk. She grabbed the windowsill beside the front door, bulbs of darkness swelling in her vision.
‘You’re fine,’ said Willard without looking at her. He let the door slam behind him.
Dot did not blame him for his bitterness. He was her brother. That meant he loved her. After all, he had been hurt more than she had that day – the one when she was fourteen. Dot opened the door.
Her mother stuck her head into the hall. ‘We were meant to start dinner thirty minutes ago, Dorothy Louise.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Dot said, skirting past her mother and into her bedroom. She shut the door and as she did the floor swam up to greet her, hitting her full in the face and chest as she collapsed. Dot groaned as quietly as she could, lying against the comforting stability of the cold slate.
With some effort, Dot rolled over and looked up. Her eyes trailed over the crack in her ceiling; the swirling woodgrain of her wardrobe; an illustration of Saint Penelope’s Cathedral stuck to her wall; and beside it, pride of place, a picture she had purchased two years earlier from a carpet seller on the main street. It was a photograph of a tea shop.
‘Dottie?’ Her little sister Celia’s voice was sharp through the door. ‘Grandad left the potatoes in the oven so they’d be warm for you and now they’re burning.’
