Winter Tides by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

without it. When they had remembered and run back for it, the coat had been gone. Somebody had walked off with it. Elinor had felt bad for her sister, who had been absolutely crushed by losing the coat, and simply
couldn’t
have told their uncle and aunt.
    Anne had kept silent about the lie. Countless times since, she had wondered why. Perhaps it was fear that her mother would think that
she
was lying and that Elinor was telling the truth. Perhaps it was fear of Elinor. It had been one of a hundred exasperating lies that Anne had put up with in order to coexist with her sister. Her mother, as usual, had believed Elinor entirely. There was no reason she shouldn’t have. Elinor’s story made sense. Elinor had been brilliant at making up hateful stories that made good sense. If Anne had told her mother the truth, her mother wouldn’t have believed it. Later that same night, after Elinor had lied to their mother and Elinor and Anne had gone to bed, Elinor had explained to her in detail about killing the rat.
    Some time later, after Elinor was gone, Anne had looked for the things that Elinor had kept hidden. The dolls and the magazines were gone. Their mother, apparently, had found them, although in the years after, even when Annewas an adult, there was no mention of any of it. And it wasn’t until after her mother’s death that Anne found the boxes that contained the dolls, packed away with the half-dozen paintings that Elinor the prodigy had finished in the span of her short life.

1
    O VER THE YEARS THE DREAM REAPPEARED IN THE LATE winter, as if it were compelled by the irresistible force of the turning seasons. And ever since Dave had moved back to Huntington Beach, he dreamed even more often about the ocean. Sometimes, on particularly quiet nights, when there was heavy surf and an onshore wind, he could hear the distant breaking of the waves from his house near the park, and he had noticed that the closer he came to sleep, the louder and more insistent was the noise of the breaking waves, as if it were the waves themselves that swept away conscious thought, and submerged his mind beneath their silent green swell.
    Unlike most of his dreams, though, there was nothing strange about the logic of this dream, and nearly nothing had changed in it over the past fifteen years. It almost never involved him actually trying to save the girl from drowning. Instead, he was alone in the ocean, swimming over the tops of increasingly bigger waves. He would scan the empty winter beach with a feeling of growing dread, the sky clouded by smoke rising out of the sand as if from a subterranean chimney, the whole world utterly still and silent except for the moving ocean and the moving smoke. A wave would crest in front of him, and in sudden fear he would dive underwater and swim toward the ocean bottom, into the green darkness, listening for the noise of the wave’sbreaking and waiting for the inevitable shock when the turbulence hit him. What looked like swirling seaweed, like surge-washed eelgrass and kelp, would suddenly appear before him, and for one fleeting moment he would see the girl’s face in the weeds, ghost pale, her eyes open and staring, and he would feel her brush against him as the ocean dragged her downward to her death.
    Often he would wake up afraid to move, with the sound of the dream ocean sighing in his ears like the beating of a vast heart. He would lie there waiting, certain that something was pending, that something immensely terrible was about to be revealed. And then he would realize that it had already been revealed to him, whatever it was, that it lay waiting in some crevice of his mind, ready to germinate and bloom again like the seed of an alien flower.
    W HEN HE AWOKE ON THE FRONT PORCH, D AVE FOUND that he was gripping the cold metal arms of the front porch chair as if something had tried to yank him out of it. He relaxed his grip, leaning back, shrugging the stiffness out of his shoulders. There was the