The Waters & the Wild by Francesca Lia Block Read Free Book Online

glamour must still be at work. She tiptoed over the carpet and down the steps into a room with high windows and lushly upholstered sofas. The color scheme was garnet and emerald. There were sconces on the wall, and the candlelightmade the room seem haunted. She realized that the ghost haunting it was probably herself. Someone had left out a tray with a wine bottle and a glass, and a plate of fudge and strawberries. She poured herself a glass of wine and drank it. Immediately her head felt as if it was going to detach from her body and float away, so she stopped and ate a bit of chocolate instead. She realized then that she wasn’t sick anymore. The symptoms she’d experienced in the hospital were gone. This was when she wondered if she was dead.
    She vibrated with a chill and dropped a strawberry from her hand, then hurried out of the chateau and back out onto the boulevard. The night lifted her again, swirling her into the air like a leaf, and carried her farther east, and then north again into Laurel Canyon.
    This was where she knew she was supposedto be. The road was narrow, and the hills sloped up at a sharp angle on either side. Here were the eucalyptus of her dreams, the sleeping primroses. She flew farther into the canyon world until she came to a strange structure on the side of a hill.
    It was a brick wall and stone balustrades—the remains of a grand stairway. Squat palms and jacarandas grew all around. She remembered her mother showing her this place before, and the queer chill she felt then, as a little girl, staring out of the car window.
    â€œThat’s Houdini’s mansion. The magician. It burned down in the fifties,” Deena had said.
    â€œNineteen fifty-eight. His wife, Bess, said he came back to her during a séance,” Lew had added. “And people see an apparition of a coach driven by white horses at Lookout Mountain Avenue.”
    â€œI knew he’d bring up ghosts,” Deena said, in that eye-rolling way.
    Lew just shrugged.
    What would he think of his girlfriend’s daughter now? At least he’d probably believe it, as opposed to Deena, who never would. Bee knew she should be missing them, but somehow she didn’t. Was this what it felt like to be dead? She missed Sarah, though, and Haze. She remembered Haze sitting at her bedside in the hospital. Was that Haze? He’d only stammered once, and where were his glasses? He hadn’t smiled—he was too worried—but she wished she had seen his smile one more time. Why couldn’t her friends have come with her? The missing was an aching feeling in her chest, but dull, like when a part of your body goes to sleep. She realized the ache was in the exact spacewhere her heart might have been beating. Maybe ghosts had to have longing or they wouldn’t be ghosts; they’d just go away for good.
    But there was another feeling inside her now as well. A sense that she had begun to love the world, finally, this alien world into which she had been thrown. Yes, she loved the world, with its Haze and its Sarah. It was no longer lonely. It was beautiful in its way, with its oceans and roses and light. But there was also the feeling that now, having met her friends, she had accomplished something, the thing, perhaps, she had come for: to touch their lives, to bring them together. Now she could go back to the place where she belonged. The balance had to be restored.
    The bench. The one in her dream. Sheknelt and ran her hands over the cool stone, the thick leonine legs wrapped with ivy.
    Then she saw the opening in the side of the hill and she knew she was home.

progeny
    the fairy queen knows these things
    she has had long days and nights
    indistinguishable
    under the earth brooding about the
    state of the world above
    once she stood in a meadow and wept
    because her revels had been interrupted
    because of fire and flood
    disease and death
    still she had no idea how prophetic
    were her words
    the strange