Undine Page 14

  “So, I knew it. Well I didn’t know it. I didn’t want to believe…but part of me knew. Prospero.”

  Trout raised his eyebrows. “Like The Tempest? That’s why he…”

  “What?” Lou asked sharply.

  “I think he’s been…communicating with her.”

  Lou smiled, thin-lipped. “I’ll bet he has.”

  They were circling around the topic of magic; neither was prepared to say it out loud. Trout wondered how much Lou knew. She was certainly behaving strangely. On the one hand she had been to see him twice now, anxious in her search for Undine, who had, he pointed out to himself, only been gone a day and a night. Not even a full day. And yet Lou hadn’t called the police, or gone looking for the less-than-dead father she had been lying about all these years. What was she so afraid of? What did she think she might find? Was it Prospero or Undine herself that Lou feared?

  Trout believed Lou was genuinely concerned for Undine, but he still wasn’t entirely sure he trusted her. After all, telling her daughter that her father was dead when he wasn’t was a pretty awful thing to do in anybody’s book. And there was that thing, that part of her he was sure he detected, a sneaky, private part, which maybe didn’t care about Undine at all.

  He sat watching Jasper fit more circles inside circles, and tried distractedly to think of an excuse to make Lou leave. But when Grunt rang the doorbell, Lou was still there.

  Trout answered the door and went outside to talk to Grunt. Trout was shy of Grunt. He always felt childish and awkward around his brothers’ friends, especially ones like Grunt: fit, healthy, active—all the things Trout wasn’t.

  “We can’t go straightaway,” he told him. “Lou, Undine’s mum, is inside.”

  “She must be worried sick,” Grunt said, and started in through the door. Trout grabbed his arm.

  “Well, yeah.…But I don’t think we should tell her where Undine is. Not yet, anyway.”

  “So she doesn’t know, then? About Undine?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Grunt looked hard at him. “You know. You know what she is, what she can do. I can see it in your face.”

  God, Undine, Trout shouted at her in his head. Did you put out a press release yet? Don’t you know how much danger you could be in? Is there anyone who doesn’t know?

  “So Richard knows too?” Trout asked bitterly.

  “Richard hasn’t seen her. Remember Lucy?” Trout nodded. Richard and Lucy had been on again, off again since high school. “Well, guess who’s on the archaeology dig.”

  “On again?”

  Grunt nodded grimly.

  Back inside the house, Trout made the introductions quickly, using Grunt’s real name, hoping Lou wouldn’t recall that it was Grunt’s mobile that Mrs. M had rung to track down Richard. She didn’t seem to, though she looked intently at Grunt for a prolonged moment.

  Jasper said, “Did you go swimming?”

  Grunt smiled. “Not today.”

  Jasper showed him his drawing. “I’m drawing pictures for Undine.”

  “Are you, mate?” He leaned carefully over Jasper’s shoulder and studied the drawing. Trout watched his eyes flicker, as though Grunt was seeing something extra in the drawing that Trout couldn’t see. “That’s a really good drawing. I bet Undine would like it very much.”

  Jasper gave it to him. “You can give it to Undine, if you like,” he said.

  Grunt laughed nervously. “Yes,” he said, winking at Lou to make it seem as if he was playing along. “Of course I’ll give it to her. If I see her.”

  Lou smiled, without meaning it.

  Grunt looked again at the drawing in his hand.

  Trout said, “Lou, I don’t mean to be rude, but Alastair’s here to give me a lift to…” Trout was not a good liar. He could not think of anything off the top of his head and, panicked, he looked at Grunt, who was still examining the picture in his hand, oblivious to Trout’s discomfort.

  “Of course,” Lou said easily, letting Trout off the hook. “Ring me, won’t you, if you hear anything?”

  “Yes,” Trout said uncomfortably.

  Jasper gathered up his markers. “Bye, Trout,” he said. “Bye, Grunt.”

  After they’d left, Grunt murmured, “That’s weird.”

  “What’s weird?” Trout asked, picking up his house key and leaving a suitably vague note for his mother.

  “That kid. You introduced me as Alastair. So how did he know that my nickname is Grunt?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Prospero nodded at the sea.

  “Look at it,” he said. “The power of it. The unruly drama of it. The weight.”

  The waves were over a meter high.

  “It’s amazing,” agreed Undine, and she confessed: “I think…I think it’s in me.”

  Prospero took two giant, bouncing steps into the water, steps that should have been impossible for his aged body. “I’m in the sea and the sea’s in me!” he cried joyfully, hands raised above his head.

  Undine laughed despite herself. She felt energy rushing through her again.

  Suddenly Prospero was back on the beach beside her and he whispered beguilingly in her ear, “You know what would be fun? Test it. Be in it. Be in the sea. Let it sing, Undine. Undine Marine.”

  Undine hesitated. The newly risen sun was warm on her back. The sea shouted and roared, but underneath it whispered and hummed. She thought she knew what Prospero was asking her to do. He had said that the Bay had magic of its own, and her own magic that had been dormant for so long had accelerated with such velocity since she’d come here. Swimming here, in this sea, in the Bay where magic lived, who knew what might happen to her? But it called her. She wanted it.

  She wanted to be annihilated by the waves, to be reborn into something wholly magical, into something that bore no consequences. For just a moment, she wanted that.

  Grunt drove as fast as he could within the speed limit. Trout was surprised at how the Fiat flew.

  “Why are you helping me?” Trout asked Grunt.

  “She’s in trouble.”

  “Her father…?”

  “Prospero?” Grunt tipped his head for a moment, thinking. “I dunno. He seemed all right to me.”

  “But Undine?”

  “She’s not handling it.”

  Trout didn’t know how to put it into words. “The…the…?”

  “Yep.” Grunt was quiet for a minute. “I don’t think I’ve seen that much in my life. You know? Pretty sheltered existence. I knew there would be things out there, out in the world, things that would shake me up. Challenge my beliefs. But I never thought…I mean, how can she do those things?”

  “It’s pretty unbelievable, isn’t it?”

  “What’s unbelievable is that I believe it. Like, it’s just…Yep. It happens. Stuff happens.”

  Trout looked out the window. They drove past a dead seagull; it lay intact and serene by the side of the road.

  “Stuff happens,” Trout agreed. “Stuff sure happens.”

  A moment was long enough.

  Before she could change her mind, Undine waded in up to her waist, the undertow dragging at her clothes. She turned to look at Prospero, who was eager but also something else. Afraid, she thought. He’s afraid. Of me. Her throat seized up and suddenly she was afraid of herself.

  She turned around, desperate now to reverse her choice. She struggled against the undertow, but a wave struck her from behind and forced her down. The sea swallowed her whole.

  Under the water she was confused. She swam what she thought was upward until she struck the unyielding sea floor. She panicked as the force of the undertow made the water churn around her. She resisted the chaos, pushing, pushing, wearing herself out, still unable to break through the surface of the sea.

  She swallowed water, the strong brine burning her throat, and she began to cough, still submerged. Her chest spasmed, and by instinct she inhaled, and choked.

  Undine felt as if she were free-falling. Or as
if she were a spent wave, now part of the undertow, being pulled out to sea. Part of the Bay. She was Undine and yet she was not. She was who she would be if she had no need of skin, flesh. It was a surprisingly pleasurable sensation.

  Huge swathes of kelp grew from the seabed. The light glinted green through the weeds. Fish schooled around her, rosy pink and silver. A shark with a cold eye silently pursued them.

  Here the world was slow and functioned not by wit or thought but by instinct and survival. She began to understand the nature of the magic—not intellectual, or emotional, but composed of the same base elements. It was fueled by its own will to survive. It was animal, primal and instinctual. Blind, dumb, soundless, lethal.

  The sea rushed through her.

  She was the sea, she was Undine. Undine Marine, of the waves.

  She disappeared, she vanished. For a moment she was truly and completely gone.

  She reappeared.

  She was born.

  After what seemed like a lifetime, Undine crashed upward through the water’s surface. She gasped, coughing and spluttering. She swam toward the shore, exhausted but desperate to get back to land. Finally her feet touched the bottom, and she was able to drag herself, walking, through the water and onto the sand.

  Just before she collapsed she saw circles: wobbly circles inside wobbly circles, expanding from one central point into a giant circumference on the sand.

  Behind her eyes, Undine started to spin. She sat up and was overcome by dizziness. She knew Prospero was talking to her, but she couldn’t understand a thing he was saying.

  “The circles,” she said crossly. “What do they mean?”

  She didn’t hear Prospero’s reply. She collapsed again, and lay, pallid and still, as if she were dead.

  Undine came to in her room. She had no memory of how she came to be there.

  She became aware that someone was with her. She couldn’t see clearly, but it was a man, standing against the bright window, so she could only make out his silhouette. Tall, light-footed, sturdy, and spry, like the long, lean, flexing branch of a young tree.

  Feeling defenseless, she pulled herself up, her head still reeling. She blinked, trying to clear her mind, her vision bleary from looking straight out the window into the brightness of the day.

  The young man turned around. It was Prospero.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  There was no shifting now, no gradual transformation. This wasn’t a trick of the light, an illusion. He was a much younger man. Had he appeared like this when Undine first met him she would have assumed he was younger than Lou. He came closer and she could see his face clearly. It was like being in the company of a stranger.

  She pulled away, frightened by the change in him.

  “You passed out on the beach. Do you remember?” he said.

  “You’re so young!”

  “Do you know what it’s like to grow old? To feel yourself diminishing day by day? To feel your spine coiling and your bones turn brittle?” His voice was rising to a high squeal. “To be old and forgotten, and splintered from the world?” He struggled to soften his voice—to soothe her, to beguile. “It’s you, Undine. Your magic. You’re doing this.”

  “No,” said Undine. “This isn’t me. I can feel it. It’s different, like it’s being pulled out of me. It’s my magic, but I’m not doing it.”

  “This place,” Prospero continued desperately, as if Undine hadn’t spoken, “it’s old too. Old and worn out with sadness. Shipwrecks. Hearts wrecked. It wants to go, to finish and be finished with. It’s been forgotten so long, it just wants to disappear, to break off and become an island, a place that can’t be left or traveled to….”

  “No,” said Undine, reaching out with her mind, searching the magic around her, remembering what it was like when she was in the sea, when she fleetingly understood her power. “It’s not the Bay that’s doing this….”

  “Help me—help me tear a chunk off the world. Just the Bay. No one will miss it.…I’ll give you everything,” Prospero pleaded. “Immortality. You could have the world, you could nestle it in the palm of your hand. You could make a whole cosmos spiral out of an empty shell.” He squeezed her wrist for emphasis.

  But he was too desperate. Realization was dawning on Undine. “It’s not yours to give,” she said, marveling at this new idea. “It’s mine. All the magic, all the power. You’re using it, but it’s mine.”

  “No,” said Prospero, and she could hear a hint of his old, weak self coming from this younger body. “I called you. Magic attracts magic. This is your true home.”

  “You didn’t call me,” Undine said, working it out. “Not you. It was the Bay. The fish. The seaweed smell. You didn’t send it. It was the Bay calling me. You don’t have any magic. Somehow you have access to my magic, but you’re just…you’re a leech, a parasite.”

  Prospero seized Undine’s fine, light hands in his large ones, clenching both her hands and his into fists. They burned where he pinched the skin, and she felt as if her bones might splinter in his crushing grasp.

  It was a battle and the magic was the prize. He pulled and slashed and ripped and tore at it. She pulled back, tried to control it, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t find a way to shut him out.

  His hands gripped hers tighter and tighter; her wrists were going to twist right off.

  “Okay,” she said finally, slumping her shoulders. “Okay. Don’t squeeze so hard.”

  Prospero relaxed his grip and Undine took her chance.

  “You’re not strong,” she said. “You’re weak. You’re weak.” And she wrenched herself from his grasp.

  When she ran, she ran to the sea. The sea had changed her, she had been stronger there. She needed to get back to it, to reclaim her magic from Prospero. It was a risk, because Prospero knew the sea, knew how to draw magic from it. That must have been how he had gained access to Undine’s magic in the first place. This is why Prospero had wanted her, she thought, choking back a dry, angry sob. He didn’t love her. He didn’t want a daughter. He simply wanted her power, to possess her magic. Well, she wasn’t going to let him have it. It was hers and she would protect it. Instinct. Survival.

  The tide was coming in. She stood with the sea up to her knees. It was instant, the rush, the power she felt. It was like being in the eye of the storm. A storm, that was something she knew about. She was the eye. She saw everything.

  In the garden the lemon tree shivered slightly, as if stung by a cold breeze. The roses swayed and the grass began to roll and swell crazily.

  Around the boundaries of the garden, Undine made a storm. It was nothing like the cloudburst she’d created in Hobart. That was merely a pale shadow of a storm. Surrounding the garden now was a squalling wall of wind, pounding the air. It was like being inside a cyclone. Standing on the beach, she could see the same wall of wind hauling up a barrier of water. In this way she began to seal off the bay, creating a boundary that Prospero could not cross. By the time she sealed him up inside she would be gone, far out to sea.

  When they pulled up in front of the house, Grunt and Trout were unable to fathom what they saw. They sat in the car, speechless, staring at the wild wall of weather.

  Grunt shook himself. “We have to find Undine,” he said. He pushed open the door, only to have it almost ripped off the car by the force of the wind generated by the event occurring in the Bay. The sound was unbearably loud. Both Trout and Grunt automatically covered their ears.

  Trout was sickened. He had witnessed that first event, that other storm, but it had meant nothing to him. It was just science—chaos, disorder, and patterns of order emerging from disorder. But this…This was powerful and strange. This was dangerous, deadly. This belonged outside science. He was scared for Undine, and suddenly, he was scared of Undine.

  “What has she done?” he gasped. He turned to Grunt, who was ready to launch himself through the wall.

  “No! We don’t know what’s going to happen to us in there!” Trout yelled.
>
  “There’s only one way to find out,” Grunt shouted back. “I’ll take the house. You check the beach. We have to find her!”

  Trout ran toward the water, punching his body through the wind, stumbling often, falling once, and hauling himself back onto his feet. He found his way to the path and down to the beach, where the wind died down, and he was able to straighten up and run normally. He half jogged, half ran, shouting out her name: “Undine! Undine!”

  There she was, thigh-deep in the water, her red hair distinctive against the wash of sea and sky.

  “Undine!” he screamed. “Undine!”

  He ran out into the water, jumping and waving, desperately trying to get her attention.

  She turned. He hardly recognized her. She was changing constantly; seasons passed through her and whole planets formed and died in her eyes.

  “No, Trout! Go back! Go away. You don’t belong here!”

  “Undine? What’s going on? What are you doing?” He couldn’t keep the horror out of his voice. “Stop, for god’s sake.”

  “What would you know? What would you know about anything?” And then she looked at him again. “You’re scared of me,” she said, and she laughed.

  Trout could hardly see in this creature the girl he knew. She was changing into something half-ocean.

  “Undine,” he said softly. “What happened to you?” He reached out to touch her.

  “I grew strong,” she answered. “You’re weak.”

  And she plunged into the water, striking out against the powerful current.

  “Undine!” His voice cracked. He pulled off his shoes, threw them back in the direction of the beach, and ran deep enough to dive into the water.

  Trout was no athlete; nevertheless he’d done swimming for his asthma since he was very small and was a capable swimmer. Grim and determined, he swam toward her, concentrating on powerful, even strokes and keeping his breathing steady.

  He didn’t see the wave coming. It struck him, and it felt as if he had been hit by a wall of rock. Momentarily he was aware of a strange pulling sensation, the water rushing noisily around his head; then there was silence—bitter, cold silence—and everything went black.