Seawitch

I needed a louder, longer tone before the phenomenon would hold steady.

“I guess I have to take it outside,” I said.

“Why?” Quinton asked.

“The bell seems to resist ringing indoors. At a guess, I’d say the ghosts are deliberately muffling it and all I can think of is to try it outside. Don’t know why they’d care but they do seem to.”

“It doesn’t have to be you who takes it,” he said. “You’re tired already and chances are good that a lot of whatever has to be done next will fall on your shoulders. So why don’t you sit down and I’ll do it?”

I didn’t get to reply. Solis cut me off. “I will take it. You and Zantree know the boat. Blaine needs rest. I have been almost useless so far.”

It looked as if Quinton would have argued but Zantree talked right over him.

“So long as you don’t go overboard again,” Zantree said. “If we’re as close as Harper thinks, I doubt we’ll be able to haul you back if those fish-tailed man snatchers drag you over this time. Get the harness on and clip in soon as you’re out the door. Or I’ll toss y’down below and lock you in till we’re heading home. Not having any more rescue drills on this cruise, damn it.”

Solis cocked one eyebrow but all he returned was a sardonic, “Aye, Captain.”

Quinton helped Solis with the safety harness and the flotation gear, giving him a funny look. “Not wearing a red shirt under there, are you?”

“What?”

“Star Trek—the red shirt guys always get the ax.”

“Ah. No.”

“You only need to ring it once,” I said. “I’ll know if it works.” I wanted to tell him to be careful but that seemed condescending. Instead I shut up and watched with a double flutter of anxiety—both mine and Quinton’s— in my chest as Solis stepped outside with the bronze bell clutched in his hands and secured to his life vest by a line and clip through the loop on top. I hoped it wouldn’t drag him down if he was again swept overboard.

Solis didn’t go all the way out to the bow as I’d half expected, but stopped at the side deck, attaching his safety line to the nearest rail. He didn’t need more room and it was foolish to go farther than he had to—a choice I mentally applauded. He didn’t take any chances with grabby monsters this time but hooked his left arm around the hand rail on the stairs he’d just descended. Then he held the bell out and let it swing from its loop until the clapper struck hard against the body.

A loud, round peal rolled out from the bell like the report from a cannon, visible in the Grey as a rushing wave that rippled the material of the world and spun a hollow bubble of ghost-stuff around us, encapsulating Mambo Moon in a sphere that was both Grey and normal at the same time. The walls of the overlapping worlds shimmered and wavered like the skin of a soap bubble riding a paranormal breeze.

In the distance a chorus of unearthly voices roared in fury and an answering clang, and a shriek, less musical but more forceful, shivered the air, pushing on our bubble. The thin skin of mist and darkness around the boat held together, but quivered and melded to the arriving shock front, leaving us with only the thinnest barrier of Grey against Grey to hold back whatever had generated the opposing force.

I watched this odd phenomenon—like two soap bubbles kissing and then creating a flat section where they met, the surfaces shivering with reflections and the sliding play of storm light on the curved surfaces—and paid scant attention to my companions in the pilothouse until I heard Quinton whisper, “Is this . . . what it’s like . . . ?”

I shook myself and turned my head to him, barely noticing the twitching of the chronometer on the navigation console.

“What it’s like? I don’t know. What do you see?” I asked, my voice low and uncomfortably rough in my throat.

Quinton stared out at the curved walls of our bubble and the sphere of the next pressing against it. “Beautiful and cold . . . like ice in the Arctic, colors buried in deep chill, running from the sky in ribbons like the aurora. . . .”

I felt the fleeting warmth and soaring sensation of his wonder but had to say, “Not to me. That’s not what I see.” And a colder feeling, born of memory and mist-touched terrors, dulled his reflected excitement and left me a little sad.

“I hate it,” Zantree growled. “Give me the plain blue sea over this . . . pea-soup nightmare anytime.”

So . . . like other aspects of the Grey, this one also reflected the viewer’s own expectation and memory. Quinton saw cold beauty while Zantree experienced a mist filled with dangers.

I looked out at Solis and saw the interface of the two Grey spheres bow toward him. I threw myself out the door as the glassy surface between them shattered under a rush of water as white as a bridal dress and deadly cold.

Solis turned his shoulder to the falling wave, bending his body over the bell and crouching against the deck as the wave crashed into him. I shot down the steps with a sharp pang, oblivious to my lack of safety gear, and snatched at his lifeline.

“Solis!” I yelled as I yanked him toward the steps, only to feel my feet swept out from under me. I landed hard on my hip, dazed and breathless with pain.

Something hard and cold banged into my shoulder and I found myself scooped up and shoved back up the steps and into the pilothouse. Solis came through, dripping, behind me and slammed the door shut against the collapsing wall of water as both bubbles of Grey popped and dissolved.

Mambo Moon rocked violently and then bobbed back up, settling into the water again as the shadow of Vancouver and Spieden islands dropped away and let us back into the golden light of a summer’s evening. The noise of the bells cut off as suddenly as the wave had receded and we bobbed again on a gently rolling sea of deep blue, Jones Island dead ahead and as large as Rushmore.

Solis coughed a little and pulled off his safety gear, untying the bell from his vest and laying it on the floor, mouth down. “Fifteen minutes,” he said.

“What was fifteen minutes?” I gasped, trying to sit up without wincing.

“The elapsed time since I rang the bell. I thought it would be useful to know. . . .”

I blinked as I caught my breath and got myself upright. I hadn’t thought of it and I supposed no one else had either, but it was helpful since the chronometer on the nav indicated a passage of only five minutes. The bell’s Grey state lasted three times longer than the passage of normal time. Or was it the other way around?

“Whatever it was, we’ve drifted up close on Jones,” Zantree observed. “I’ll have to steer hard to port to make the turn around the point safely, so hold on.”

The boat swayed as Zantree turned it away from the island, heading north, and then corrected back down in a few minutes to position us just outside the mouth of the cove. There he reversed the engines and brought Mambo Moon to a halt.

“Well,” he asked, “do we go on as we are or do we ring the doorbell first?”

“I think we’ll have to ring,” I replied.

This time I made Solis stay inside and went out to strike the bell myself, the dark silver storm front of the Grey chime this time expanding outward and away from us to enclose most of the tiny bay instead of the boat. The bubble didn’t grow evenly but seemed to cleave to some invisible edge, climbing the cliff on the west and leaving a crescent of untouched, normal water near the eastern shore while a fugue of mist and thrashing wavelets filled the space within the visible half of the sphere. Dead white things flashed below the churned surface and broached to reveal glimpses of glazed eyes and restless tentacles that trailed seaweed.

I swallowed hard, feeling my stomach flip over at the sight of the unsettled Grey waters. We waited but nothing gave any indication that we should advance or turn back.

Zantree looked at me. “What do we do now, commander?”

“I’m not sure. Can you make it to that clear stretch without entering the bubble?” I asked, pointing to the calm stretch of eastern water.

He studied the cove a moment, then nodded. “Yup. I can get her in there. But why do you want me to avoid the bubble, exactly? It didn’t do us any harm the last time.”

“We were alone inside last time. I don’t really want to be inside with those things just yet,” I said.

He nodded, brought the burbling engines back up just a little, and then put the big boat in forward gear, easing it around the flickering mist edge of the Grey boundary, keeping us in the normal and the things inside