Undine Read online

  Behind the primary school he stopped where three boys crouched by the side of the rivulet, launching gumleaf boats. The boys ran along the rivulet to watch them race and Trout followed them, his long legs carrying him up the path on the water’s edge. The vessels sailed splendidly until they hit a hidden eddy. Overcome, they spun wildly and then sank below the water’s surface and were lost.

  Not for the first time that day, Trout thought of Max and squirmed uneasily. Trout was still having second thoughts about having confided in Max. He’d felt safe at first, protected by the anonymity of the Internet. Or had he wanted to feel safe, because he had wanted information about Undine? To help her? Protect her? That’s what he’d told himself. But deep down, Trout knew that his motives were less pure. He was driven, at least in part, by desire. Not just his feelings for Undine, but a scientist’s passion for knowledge. And in attempting to satisfy that desire, he had put Undine at risk.

  It wasn’t Max he was scared of, not specifically. It was more…what? A world that knew about Undine. Worse, a world that could track her, locate her. Trout now realized that Undine’s magic was the biggest secret both he and Undine would ever have. No one else could know about it.

  The boys launched a new set of gumleaf boats from the same spot as before. This time only two of them drowned. Valiantly, the third struggled, submerged, and surfaced again. It pulled free and continued on the current. The boys followed its progress, pushing themselves through the long reedy grass on the bank of the rivulet, but Trout turned on the soft toe of his sandshoe and headed for home.

  Outside, Undine inspected the site of the peppercorn tree. She found to her surprise that it was not gone, that she hadn’t obliterated it entirely. Instead, in its place, planted unhappily in the ground, was a long and lumpy, largish frog, struggling to free itself. She dug the dirt away from around its elegant webbed toes which spread like roots in the soil. She tried not to touch it; it disgusted her a little, though it was not ugly, merely freakish.

  A feathery cluster of leaves sprouted from a couple of bony protuberances on its back, as though the transformation was not quite complete.

  Why a frog? she wondered. It was like something from a dream, strange and unlikely, but it still made sense, in a weird kind of way. Perhaps the magic came from the place where dreams come from, and spoke with its own coherent language. Or perhaps it was simply random.

  The frog struggled free of the earth and sprang away, jumping rather comically over the ground and then disappearing into the bushy scrub that bordered the garden. It was disquieting to Undine that it should now be out in the world, free to breed with native frogs or be discovered by a curious eight-year-old frog-collector or even eaten by a kookaburra. But by the time Undine thought to catch it, or, she thought uneasily, kill it, the frog was gone, well camouflaged in the bracken and ferns of the forest’s understory.

  She looked up and thought she saw Prospero at the kitchen window. She shielded her eyes from the sun and stepped closer. But there was no one there, just the beaded cord from the window shade, swinging to and fro.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Undine, who had always had a mother and no father, felt as if she were becoming a girl with a father and no mother—her Lou was becoming a distant thing, transparent and insubstantial. The past Lou, the one who had lived here with Prospero, was a stranger to Undine, yet she overshadowed the relatively ordinary Lou who had been Undine’s mother up until now.

  Undine herself was changing, as surely as the peppercorn tree had changed. The magic was a metamorphosis and as Lou was becoming less her mother, Undine was becoming less and less Lou’s daughter.

  Lying in bed thinking about this, Undine remembered the poem. Where was it? She’d tucked it in the pocket of her jacket, which she’d left in the living room.

  The house was still, dim, and quiet, and she moved stealthily down the hallway. Prospero’s door was closed. The curtains in the living room were open and the moonlight shone in, casting an unearthly greenish glow. She crept over to retrieve her jacket from the couch where she had left it.

  The stillness was broken by a scream.

  Undine dropped her jacket in fright and whirled around. A second scream cut the night air, and this time Undine realized it was coming from the bird’s cage.

  “Shut up,” she hissed, but this only riled the bird more. He bobbed fretfully and swore profusely.

  Undine fled back to her room.

  Prospero’s room was still quiet and dark, but now the door was ajar.

  As she passed, Undine had the creeping sensation that he was there, watching her.

  The dial-up tone rang through the modem. Trout clicked the link to the Chaosphere and opened up his own log-in details. In his hurry to sign up the other day, he had left nearly every heading blank, so the only thing other members could know about him was his username.

  He located the button to cancel his membership, and hovered over it with the cursor, his finger resting lightly on the mousepad. For a moment he was almost tempted to stay. This was the only place he found he could explore Undine’s magic, begin to understand it. He felt suddenly consumed by his scientific curiosity. Max had seemed smart; Trout could learn a lot from him. Maybe together they could…

  No, he thought. That was exactly what he was afraid of for Undine. Knowledge was a powerful and dangerous thing. If anyone found out about Undine she wouldn’t be safe.

  He clicked the button and waited. The faint drone of the computer, and the eerie blue light of the screen in the otherwise dark silent house, were starting to freak Trout out a bit. The screen flashed up a confirmation message.

  At the same time, a faint pinging noise emanated from the computer, quiet but unexpected enough to make Trout jump. Down in the bottom right corner next to the computer’s clock, a little icon started flashing. It was the warning system for the antivirus software. It happened all the time, but tonight it scared the hell out of Trout. He didn’t think to disconnect from the Web, or start the computer’s shutdown sequence. He leaned over and unplugged the computer. The screen went black and Trout was plunged into darkness.

  Undine dreamed of Richard.

  She could smell his hair and the soil under his fingertips; taste salt on his lips. They were kissing. She wanted it. Her hands were tangled in his hair. Shampoo and spice. She kissed his mouth hard, and her own mouth felt bruised and swollen, as if stung.

  He gasped and she realized that as she kissed him she was drawing his breath from him, dragging oxygen up from his lungs. But she couldn’t stop and neither could he, even when his ribs collapsed. She kissed him and his chest buckled and he gasped and choked and kissed her and his body twitched like a landed fish and then he was quite, quite still.

  In a trance, Undine leaned over and inserted her fingers into his mouth, pulling it open. Leaning forward and speaking right into his mouth she whispered in a voice that was not her own: “Will darkness or light be born?”

  In the tent he shared with Grunt, Richard twitched violently. Grunt woke up to the sound of Richard’s breath, gasping and labored. It quickened and he began to wheeze, heaving in great mouthfuls of air, yet choking it out as if the mechanisms in his throat and lungs that permitted the passage of air were somehow faulty.

  Grunt leaned over and shook Richard, shook him to wake him, but Richard twitched again and then lay distressingly still.

  Grunt panicked and shook him harder, trying to shake the breath back into him.

  “Richard!” he shouted. “Richard!”

  And Richard coughed, breathed, keeled over, and slept: tranquil and ordinary.

  In her dream, Undine pulled back, and it was not Richard who lay there, still, quiet, gray, dead. It was Trout.

  Trout woke, his lungs seized up like a fist. He wheezed, trying to exhale.

  He reached for the inhaler he kept by the bed, but it wasn’t there. He panicked, fumbling to switch on his bedside lamp, which teetered perilously and fell with a crash to the floor.


  The dream was still fresh, resonating like a clear bell in his mind. He could taste the salt water of Undine’s mouth. He could even smell the dream: a mixed hazy scent of Undine, Richard’s spicy after-shave, and something else, a faint waft of the sea. And he could hear that voice, not Undine’s but as if a stranger were speaking through her.

  He squeezed the air out of his lungs and gasped it in. His heart raced.

  The overhead light came on, and his mother stood over him. She handed him his inhaler and sat on the chair beside his bed, waiting as Trout shook it with a rattle and breathed in the Ventolin.

  “Again,” his mother said.

  Trout frowned. “I know,” he tried to say, but he couldn’t speak.

  “Don’t try to speak,” his mother said.

  Sometimes Trout suspected she liked him better during an attack, when she could say what she liked and he couldn’t answer back.

  “All right?”

  Trout nodded. His breathing was much easier. He used the puffer again.

  Mrs. M picked up the fallen lamp. “No damage done,” she said cheerfully.

  She kissed him, and pulled the duvet up under his chin, as if he were a small child. She switched off the light and closed the door quietly behind her.

  Trout lay awake in the dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Undine woke suddenly. The magic from the day before had wiped her out. She still felt heavy from the aftereffects: limbs leaden, bones weak. The faint rosy light of predawn filtered through the diaphanous curtains. She rolled over and closed her eyes but she knew she wouldn’t sleep again.

  She thought about her dream. Richard. Did she even care, really, that he was not hers? She had known him for years in a peripheral sort of way. It had only been the last few days that he had been anything other than Trout’s older brother. She had wanted him. She had wanted him to want her. But deep down, there was nothing. She was numb.

  In the hallway she tried to keep her step light. But she needn’t have bothered. Prospero was in the kitchen, spreading toast with butter as yellow as dandelions. “We’ve about quarter of an hour before the sun rises,” he told her cheerfully.

  “Oh.”

  “You did want to see the angels?”

  “Mmm.”

  Undine chewed on a thick crust of sourdough toast.

  In the garden Prospero pointed to the blank space where the tree had been. “What did you do to my peppercorn tree?” he grumbled, but she could hear joy and pride overflowing in his voice.

  “Um,” said Undine flatly, still tired and wrung out from her dream-filled sleep, “I turned it into a frog.”

  Prospero laughed. Perhaps he thought she was joking.

  As they walked over the spot where the tree had been, Undine heard, and felt, some of the buzz of the magic, residual in the air. She remembered with a rush the power, the magnitude of it. How dangerous could she be? How dangerous did she want to be? And what, she whispered to herself, did she have to lose? Hadn’t she already lost everything? Richard. Lou. Mim. Trout. Grunt. Had she lost herself? Had Undine, the girl of light, gone? Was Undine, the girl of darkness, her real, true self? She was so muddled by it all, she couldn’t think clearly.

  They walked down the beach path together. The air was still and cold. Undine took deep breaths of it. The sky was beginning to lighten the tufty, grassy dunes. Undine’s father stopped just before the path dropped down to the beach.

  “This is the best spot to see the sun rise. We’ll wait here. We can walk out after, if you’d like.”

  At low tide the beach looked quite different. The half-moon shape was punctuated by jagged rocks at either end that, still wet, glistened blackly in the early morning light. They looked like teeth.

  The sunrise, when it came, was amazing. At first it was just a point of light in the sky, growing, until a large round globe hung suspended over the horizon. The orange light from the sun hit the reddish brown rocks, and their haloes glowed pink, living every bit up to their names. She tried to relax, to be lulled by the beauty of it.

  “Your mother loved it down here.”

  Undine looked quickly at Prospero. “Really?”

  He nodded and smiled at her. “Oh yes. We used to come down here every morning when she was pregnant with you and swim in the sea. I loved to watch her, floating on her back, this huge buoyant belly bobbing up out of the water.”

  Undine wanted very badly to believe in a time when Lou and Prospero had been in love. It was like a safety net. No. It was like she was making a deal with herself…if Lou loved Prospero then she was born of love, of light. It was an unreliable shred of a thought. She tried to hang on to it, but the magic buzzed and droned and she found she couldn’t concentrate on anything with the noise of the sea inside her.

  “Shall we walk out?” Undine asked.

  “Come on then.” Prospero offered his hand and she took it.

  Again, Undine was struck by an unexpected impression of youthfulness in Prospero. He seemed to be visibly younger. His left eye, which had been almost dead in its socket only two days before, now moved about with ease. His features were smoother, his face less worn. His body was suppler and strong.

  The flashes of youth that had appeared before in him had passed quickly. This time, however, the youthfulness lingered.

  Hand in hand they walked out toward the angels.

  Trout was sick of jumping at every small noise. Bravely he had checked the computer. The antivirus software had done its job, and there was no sign in the stats that the attack had been anything more…sinister than usual.

  But his dream was as present to him as his breakfast—he could taste it with every mouthful. He knew Undine was becoming lost. If he didn’t find her soon, it might be too late.

  He watched his mother and Dan leave with Mr. M. Dan jangled the car keys, ready for a driving lesson; Trout’s mother twittered nervously. It was her day with Grandma, which made her edgy at the best of times. Certain doom with Dan at the wheel did nothing to improve her mood. Trout didn’t mean to, but he found himself practically pushing them out the door.

  “All right, already!” said Dan, annoyed.

  “Quite,” said Mrs. M. “What are you boys trying to do, drive me to an early grave?”

  “No pun intended,” grinned Dan, waving the car keys.

  “Ha ha,” said Trout, and shut the door behind them.

  As soon as he heard the car engine start, and stall, and start again, he picked up the phone. He found his mother’s address book and flicked through it, till his fingers settled on Grunt’s mobile number.

  “Hello?”

  Trout didn’t even identify himself. Fear for Undine made him bold. “Where is she?”

  “Is this Trout?”

  “I have to find her.” Clipped, precise movie dialogue, no wasted words.

  “Are you home by yourself?”

  “Yep.”

  “When’s your mum due back?”

  “Not for hours.”

  “Good,” said Grunt. “Wait there. I’m coming to get you.”

  When the doorbell rang, Trout was swift to answer it. But it wasn’t Grunt; it was Lou and Jasper. The boy was clutching a fistful of colored markers.

  “Jasper’s going to sit nicely and draw while we talk. Is that okay?”

  “I’m going to sit nicely,” Jasper agreed. Trout suspected he’d been coached on the way.

  “Um, yeah,” said Trout, glancing at the clock. “That’s fine.”

  He got Jasper some paper and settled him at the coffee table while he and Lou sat on the squishy leather sofa. From experience he knew to perch on the edge. Lou sat back and almost disappeared into the leather’s luxurious folds. She pulled herself out and sat nervously as Trout sat, poised as if for flight.

  “Trout, I came to apologize for the other day. I frightened you.”

  Trout was reluctant to admit he’d been frightened.

  Lou went on. “It’s just…I must know where she is.”
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  “What about…what about Undine’s father?”

  “He died before she was born,” Lou said, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was reciting, like an amateur actor who knew her part but couldn’t get into the role. She shook her head. “Undine believes he’s dead. She always has.” Despite her brave tone, Trout detected a faltering note.

  “But he’s not, is he? How could you?” Trout blurted out. “How could you tell Undine her father is dead?”

  Lou’s eyes glittered and narrowed with anger, but then she shook herself, and it was as if her face were a white sheet and she was shaking out the creases, for after, her face was placid and carefully neutral.

  “Is he dangerous? Is she in danger?”

  Lou hesitated, and Trout wondered if she planned to keep telling her lie. For a moment he wondered if Lou thought that by sticking so steadfastly to her story she could will Undine safely home. But—out of sympathy for Trout, perhaps, or maybe to reassure herself by saying the words out loud—she said finally, “He won’t hurt her, if that’s what you mean. I doubt he could, even if he wanted to. But is he dangerous?” Lou shrugged. “It depends what you mean by dangerous.”

  They were interrupted by Jasper. He was still sitting, drawing, apparently oblivious to Trout and Lou’s conversation. He held up his picture: wobbly circles inside wobbly circles.

  “I’m drawing a picture for Undine,” he said cheerfully. “She’s going swimming.”

  Trout felt a twinge of sadness for Jasper. “He doesn’t know she’s missing?” he asked Lou in a low voice.

  “I tried to explain,” she said hopelessly. “But that was what he thought I was saying. He has this idea that she’s having a lovely time at the beach. It seemed cruel to keep insisting anything else.”

  Jasper said, “Aren’t I sitting nicely?”

  Trout nodded weakly as Lou stood up and began to pace around the room.