Waking Storms (35 page)

21

Forgetting

The voices roiled over Luce’s head in a storm of outraged hissing. Tongues of air darted down to prod at her, squeal inside her ears, claw her lips. Luce curled on her side with her head on the shore, her lips pinched tight and her hands pressed over her ears, but even so threads of wind wormed their way between her fingers and up her nostrils until shrieking flowers seemed to blossom in the core of her brain. The voices were too angry to form words. They only yowled, the din they made gradually amplifying as it beat back and forth inside her skull. Her head ached with horrible seething pressure, and rip tides of shrill snarling whipped the inside of her skull. Frantically Luce thrashed her way under the water, trying to shake the voices out of her head, but it was no use. “Stop it!” Luce yelled at them. “Get out of me!”

To Luce’s surprise the voices calmed down a little, as if they were considering this. She lay squeezed against the pebbled seabed. A spindly gray crab stalked just in front of her eyes while above her the water rippled like a low ceiling of molten glass. Luce watched the surface boil as one voice oozed back out of her ear, followed by another, then another. The tearing pressure in her head began to ease a little, and Luce broke the surface again. She was determined to hold back the screams that seemed to snake inside her throat until she couldn’t be sure if they belonged to her or to the voices. She could feel whispering presences clinging around the edges of her face, nosing at her with hostile curiosity, but at least most of them were out of her head. There were just a few buzzing, muttering stragglers still wandering through her brain.

“Child of Proteus,”
the same weary voice she’d heard before groaned. It seemed to be flicking around the rim of her left ear. “We
do not want you here! You hurt the memories. You hurt the man.”
The tone became snappish, impatient, as if the voice felt terribly put out at having to explain something so obvious.
“Leave us.”

“What
are
you?” Luce demanded. She strained for selfcontrol, fought a mass of tangled impulses to shout and weep and beg for mercy all at once. “I’m not leaving, so just tell me what you are!”

“Leave!”
the voice retorted fretfully.
“Leave! With you here the man forgets sometimes to remember. With you here he thinks of the world he sees before him, of whether your face will appear in the water! We have the memories,”
it added, and this time it sounded almost plaintive.

Around Luce the other voices babbled in agreement. She couldn’t make out words, but she could feel a chorus of eager emotions, all nagging and wheedling with the urge to drive her away. Luce began to feel a little less frightened. There was something pitiful about the voices, sick and uncanny as they were.

“I’ve got as much right to be here as you do,” Luce snapped, then tried to think up some reason they would have to accept. There was one thing they definitely seemed to know about her. “Proteus gave his children the oceans. I have the right to stay wherever I want as long as I don’t leave the water!” Luce didn’t actually know if this was true or not, but the voices reacted instantly. She could hear them bubbling over with consternation, squeaking and hissing to one another like a litter of blind puppies that someone was poking with a stick. “You don’t want to make Proteus angry,” Luce added, then stopped abruptly, afraid she’d gone too far.

The voices had retreated a few feet up the beach, and suddenly Luce caught the thread of a different voice: not at all the gruff, crumbling voice that had spoken to her earlier, but a woman’s, relaxed and sweet and confident. Luce knew from the first instant that she’d heard it many times before, long ago but also perhaps more recently.
“If we get a little girl,”
the voice said clearly,
“what would you think about calling her Lucette? Carly told me it means ‘little light’ and that’s just what she’s going to be for us. Our own little light in a world that ... isn’t necessarily the brightest place.”

Luce felt a painful stillness seize hold of her heart, and all her efforts at self-control gave way as hot tears welled in her eyes. She understood at once what she was hearing. It was her mother. Actually, she realized, it was her father’s
memory
of her mother talking to him before Luce was even born. This was what her father meant when he’d said that the voices had been “feeding on his brains,” what the voices themselves meant when they told her that they had his memories ... Luce went stone still, yearning only to hear more, to forget the world around her completely.
“Oh, now, that’s real pretty,”
her father’s voice answered out of the invisible swarm.
“I’m not as crazy about Lucy, though. Had a probation officer called Lucy once, and she was a serious nutjob. So if were gonna call the little one something for short...”

“Luce,
” Alyssa Gray said, and Luce jumped with the longing to answer her. In the next instant, though, she realized that her mother wouldn’t hear her no matter how she called. The voice she’d heard was trapped in the past, but now the past was all Luce wanted. She waited in frozen silence for the conversation to continue, but it seemed to be breaking up, sinking back into senseless mutterings, scattered half-words. The whirl of voices was sliding closer to her again, but this time Luce was eager to let it come. Her lost mother was in there somewhere, the mother she barely remembered, sweet but also unexpectedly cynical. Even if Alyssa was no more than a memory, an empty wraith, Luce might finally get to know her in the only way she still could.

It wasn’t Alyssa’s voice that emerged from the swarm.
“Child of Proteus,”
the old, laborious voice hissed.
“Leave.
” Now its tone was high-pitched and questioning and maybe, Luce thought, just a little scared. It was begging her to go.

Luce wanted to scream from sheer disappointment. She wanted to yell,
Bring my mother back!
But there was some subtle impulse that restrained her, some insight that she couldn’t quite put words to. She knew only that asking the voices to repeat the past for her was the wrong thing to do. No matter how much she wanted to hear Alyssa again, it would be a terrible mistake.

It took a powerful effort of will for Luce to ignore her longing and concentrate on the present. If she was going to win her father back from the voices she had to understand them much better than she did now.

“Tell me what you
are,”
Luce insisted. “I want to know.”

The old voice moaned, and a dried leaf lying on the beach not far away abruptly crumpled as if crushed in an invisible fist. The other voices clacked with agitation, and bits of dead grass ripped with peculiarly sharp movements up and down the beach. The voices obviously thought she was being unreasonable, but apparently they couldn’t actually
force
her to go.

“We are your lost hopes,”
the voice explained at last. It sounded as if each word was something painfully carved from old bones. Luce suddenly understood how hard it was for the voices to do anything except repeat the past. Creating new sentences seemed to be a form of torture for them.
“We are the ring rolled away down the drain, the words you should have said, and should have said, but that you left instead under the water...”

The voice gave out, its final words trailing away in exhaustion. Luce was momentarily distracted by the mention of the ring. Someone had told her a story like that once. It had been an old wedding ring that rolled away, the only memento of someone’s grandmother ... Alyssa’s grandmother. Her father had dropped the ring as he and Alyssa were on their way to get married in Vegas, and Alyssa probably could have lunged and caught the ring in time if only she hadn’t been holding their new baby in her arms...

“Leave now?”
the voice breathed hopefully.

Once again Luce had to fight her way back to the present. What the voice had told her wasn’t enough, and she couldn’t afford to stop asking questions. “Why do you want the man?” Luce demanded. “Can he leave?”

That upset the voices again. They rushed at Luce, gabbling and tugging at her, but for some reason they seemed wary of actually forcing their way inside her head again. Instead they only lashed her cheeks with fronds of breath, squeaked and gibbered to her.
“And how ’bout for a boy?”
Luce suddenly heard her father’s voice asking, but it was immediately swallowed by the chaos of random whisperings.

A few seconds of choked, scrambled syllables followed, then Luce’s heart stopped as she heard her mother speak again.
“Oh, we’ll definitely call him Peter,”
Alyssa announced, deadpan, and there was a shocked pause before her father cracked up laughing.
“You think anybody but me knows what a sharp edge you’ve got behind that sweet face, babe? You know Peter’s nowhere close to being over you...”
The laughter spun around Luce’s head, ruffling her hair, before it fell apart into a series of disconnected bleating sounds. Again longing stabbed through Luce; she was consumed by desire to know exactly how her mother had replied. Her words would be playful but also acerbic. And smart, and quick, and full of life...

“The man,”
the crackling voice said then paused. It sounded wounded, as if Luce had deliberately said the cruelest thing possible.
“He has lost much.”
The words were becoming slurred. Luce realized that the voice wouldn’t be able to sustain the discussion much longer. It was sapped by the effort of forming new words, new thoughts.
“We have no need of you,’’
it added, but now its words were so drafty and misshapen that Luce could barely make them out. The snarl of speaking winds around her head was dissolving, leaking away up the beach.

Then she was left alone again in her narrow cove, stone walls rising on both sides of her, green waves cresting in at the opening. Clouds were pouring across the sky, blotting out the fresh golden sunlight she’d seen earlier that day, and the now-voiceless wind blew a few spatters of cold rain into her face.

Rain,
Luce realized after a second. Not snow.

Spring might be coming faster than she’d thought. And she wasn’t any closer to rescuing her father from this nightmare of an island, this place where all his sweetest and most heartbreaking memories were constantly dragged from his mind and then flung back at him. Where he had to lose everything—his wife and his daughter and his hopes—over and over again...

There was something important in what the gruff spirit-voice had told her, Luce realized. It hadn’t told her much, but somewhere in its jumbled words there was a hint, an unwitting clue to how she could finally get through to her father. If she could only put her finger on exactly what that hint had been, she’d know how to convince Andrew Korchak that she was real. The real, actual Luce and not just some haunting memory.

The daylight lasted for a long time.

In the days that followed things reverted to the way they’d been before, but with one important difference: Andrew Korchak still avoided his daughter, but now Luce did her best to keep out of his way, too. She hadn’t forgotten his threat to starve himself to death, and she didn’t want to do anything that might upset him before she figured out a plan. She slept in the most inaccessible crooks of the island and spent more of her time underwater.

A raft, Luce realized. They’d need a raft. The water would be much too cold for a human, especially once they were away from the volcanic vents that warmed certain areas around the island. A raft would help keep her father from getting hypothermia as long as he wasn’t swamped in a storm. Even with a solidly built raft their escape would be extremely risky. Luce wasn’t sure if she could swim all the way back to land, even by herself, without sinking from sheer exhaustion. Towing her father would just make it that much harder.

Still Luce began to collect likely-looking driftwood, especially planks, and heap them behind a rock on the beach where she’d first arrived. She was careful to do this work only at night. She didn’t want him to see her. As the sun arched higher in the sky each day, as the air warmed and the sustained dusk began to yield to occasional clear skies, Luce slowly managed to accumulate a fair amount of useful-looking wood, planks and strong straight logs. Some of the planks even had rusty nails sticking out of them, and Luce tugged the nails free and then carefully straightened them by banging with a rock. The mists were receding, and Luce stared into the distance in all directions, looking for that narrow ribbon of what she’d hoped was land. It seemed to have melted with the clouds.

Getting materials for the raft together helped to take her mind off her bigger problems. She still wasn’t sure how to persuade her father that she was the real Luce. And she couldn’t help noticing that there were fewer ice floes in the water now. Maybe back in her home territory the first cracks were appearing in the ice along the shore. Maybe Dorian was starting to walk down to their beach every evening and look for her...

It hurt her to think of how worried he would be, how long the days of waiting might become. But she just couldn’t help it.

***

Luce was sleeping in her little cove when the dream came to her.

Even as she slept she was faintly conscious of the rocking water, the stones beneath her head, and at the same time she was walking with her father through a ramshackle amusement park. The sky was dark and only a handful of colored lights still blinked randomly in odd locations. One of her father’s hands held hers and in the other he clutched a long strip of paper tickets, but no matter how far they walked they couldn’t find a single ride that was running. Everything was out of order, even disassembled into ungainly heaps of rusty metal parts, and Luce began to get the impression that everyone else had gone home long ago.

“Forget,” a barker called out to them. Luce looked over at her: a slim woman in a red and silver striped vest with her scarlet cap pulled down to hide her face. Long, dark hair trailed out at the sides. Her voice was peculiar, crumbling and wheezy like snarled winds. “Forget, forget. Forget right here!”