The Hollow Year

Ten years ago. Underwater. There is no sound. A six-year-old girl in a yellow swimsuit drifts at the bottom of a public swimming pool, arms floating upward as if she's waving at someone. Above her, the surface is a wobbling sheet of white light. Shapes smear across it: kicking legs, a lifeguard's whistle, a woman screaming in slow motion. The girl's eyes are open. Her lips are going blue. One last bubble leaves her mouth and climbs toward the light. Two minutes pass. Then something happens that no lifeguard will ever see and no camera will ever record. The water around her goes perfectly still. The light stops wobbling. And from somewhere deep beneath the tiles, in a hundred voices at once, a crowd of strangers begins to whisper. Not her. Not yet. Send her back. The girl's fingers twitch. Then the surface shatters, and a pair of arms hauls her up into noise. Alder Lane. Tuesday, 4:17 p.m. Rain on a terraced street. Wet slate roofs, identical doors, one hedge clipped into the shape of a swan. A kettle whistles behind a window. Somewhere a radio plays something cheerful and out of tune. In an upstairs bedroom, a sixteen-year-old girl with a black braid and a flat expression sits at a desk, pretending to do chemistry. Mara Voss knew three things for certain about the dead. They were loud. They were rude. And they stayed dead. I was only reaching for the marmalade. Her pencil stopped. The voice came through the bedroom wall, thin and crackling, like a radio between stations. Plummy accent. Seventy-nine years old. Deeply offended. Top shelf. Nobody warned me about the top shelf. "Oh, come on," Mara muttered. "What was that?" Aunt Verity called from the kitchen. "Nothing. Mr. Pemberton just died." A pause. A spoon clinked against a mug. "Don't say things like that, Mara." "I'm not being funny. He's complaining about marmalade." Aunt Verity said nothing. She never did when Mara talked about the voices. She simply turned the radio up, and that was how Mara knew she believed her. It had been ten years since the pool. Mara had learned to live with the whispering the way you learn to live with a leaky tap. The dead on Alder Lane gossiped, complained, and recited recipes. Mrs. Abernathy from number nine, deceased since March, held fierce opinions about everyone's bins. Mara nodded politely and let it wash over her. But the dead never left without a fight. They argued. They bargained. They demanded to speak to a manager. Mr. Pemberton had gone quiet. That was the first wrong thing. Next door. The spare key lived under the garden gnome. Mara knew this because Mrs. Abernathy had announced it daily for six months, as though it were a matter of national security. The cottage door swung open on a hallway that smelled of boiled cabbage and lemon polish. A grandfather clock ticked. Mara's footsteps sounded too loud. In the kitchen, a stepladder lay on its side. At its foot lay Mr. Pemberton, one slipper on and one slipper missing, his eyes fixed on the ceiling with a glassy blankness Mara had never gotten used to. She waited for his voice. The muddled ones always talked. The ones who didn't understand talked loudest. Nothing came. The silence was worse than any voice. It wasn't peaceful. It was a missing step in the dark, a tooth that was suddenly gone. Mr. Pemberton hadn't lingered. He had simply left, and Mara, who could hear every restless soul within fifty feet, hadn't even gotten to say goodbye. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "For what it's worth, I thought the swan was very good." Cold. Mara went rigid. The voice was small and scraped-out and very close. It wasn't coming from the walls. It was coming from his chest. She stepped around the stepladder. Sitting on Mr. Pemberton's cardigan, with a rose petal stuck to one ear and wet dirt matted through her orange fur, was Duchess. Mara stopped breathing. Duchess had been dead for three days. Mara had watched Mr. Pemberton bury her. He'd lowered her into the ground in a biscuit tin under the rosebush, sniffling into a tea towel, while Mara stood at her bedroom window feeling guilty about not going down to help. The cat's eyes were open. They were not the eyes of anything alive. Cold, the tiny voice said. So cold. Please. "No," Mara said. "Absolutely not. I don't do that. Nobody does that. That is not a thing." Please. It was the please that did it. The kitchen. Mara would think about this for months afterward, in the long dark, in very different rooms. It wasn't destiny that moved her. It wasn't magic, or some ancient hunger. It was one small voice asking for the one thing she'd never been able to give anyone. She knelt on the linoleum. She laid one hand on the cat's cold fur and, because she couldn't bear to leave him out, the other on Mr. Pemberton's cardigan. She didn't say any words. There weren't any. She just wanted, hard, the way you want a phone to ring. The grandfather clock in the hall stopped. Then, one by one, every window on Alder Lane fogged over from the inside. Outside, a hundred murmuring ghosts went silent at the same instant, like a hand clamped over a mouth. Mrs. Abernathy stopped mid-sentence about the bins. It was the loudest silence Mara had ever heard. The kitchen tap turned itself on. Water poured into the sink and spilled over the edge, gray and freezing, spreading across the floor toward her knees. It smelled like low tide. Mara stared at it with a slow, sick understanding. They were forty miles from the sea. "That's not good," she told the empty room. Duchess sneezed. It was a perfectly ordinary sneeze, and that was the horror of it. The cat staggered upright, shook herself like a wet dog, and shot Mara a look of such profound personal outrage that she nearly laughed. Then Duchess hopped down, stalked to her bowl, and began to eat like someone who had missed three meals and would be taking it up with management. "Okay," Mara breathed. "Okay. That's a cat. Cats are fine. Cats are extremely fine." Her hands were shaking. She noticed it from far away, the way you notice weather. She lifted one to her mouth without thinking, and tasted salt. Beneath her other palm, Mr. Pemberton's chest rose. She snatched her hand back so fast she cracked her elbow on the cabinet. He drew a long, rattling breath, like a man surfacing from the bottom of a lake, and his eyes snapped open. They weren't glassy anymore. They were sharp and wet and fixed on her face with a terror so total she felt it in her teeth. "It's wet down there," Mr. Pemberton rasped. "Did you know that? Nobody tells you it's wet." "I'm so sorry," Mara said. Her voice came out high and ridiculous. "I didn't mean to. The cat said please." "The cat." He blinked at Duchess, who ignored him. "Well. She always was persuasive." Then his gaze dropped to the water pooling around his hands, and the humor drained out of his face. "There's a list, you know," he whispered. "They check it when someone comes up who shouldn't." He lifted his eyes to hers, and that was the worst thing yet, because they were kind. "Whose name did you use, love?" "I didn't use a name! I didn't say anything!" "Then they'll go looking," said Mr. Pemberton gently. "And they'll find out whose you didn't." Mara opened her mouth and discovered she had no idea what was going to come out of it. Behind her, the front door creaked. The hallway. She turned. Aunt Verity stood in the doorway with her coat already buttoned and her car keys clenched in her fist. Rain dripped from her hair. She wasn't looking at the cat. She wasn't looking at the flooded floor, or at the man who had been dead ten minutes ago and was now politely trying to sit up and apologize for the mess. She was looking at Mara. And there was no shock on her face. Only grief and, underneath it, horribly, relief. "Verity!" Mr. Pemberton called, brightening. "Lovely to see you. I'd offer tea, but I appear to be damp." Aunt Verity didn't answer him. "Why are you wearing your coat?" Mara asked slowly. "Because the car's running." "Why is the car running?" Her aunt stepped aside. On the doormat, in the gray rain-light, sat a battered leather suitcase. Mara's suitcase. Already packed. A cream-colored tag hung from the handle, and on it, in handwriting Mara had never seen, were three words: Ravenmoor Academy. Arriving. Mara looked at the suitcase. Then at her aunt. Then at the suitcase again. "You packed," she said. Her voice sounded very far away. "Before I did anything. You packed before." Outside, the engine idled. The rain fell. And in the cottage kitchen, as the water crept toward the doorway and the last window on Alder Lane went white, the grandfather clock began to tick again, a beat too slow, as if it were counting down to something. "I'm so sorry, darling," said Aunt Verity quietly. "I'd hoped we had until spring."