The Pond That Wasn't There

Chapter Two

The next day it rained. And rained hard.

            It rushed from the grey, brooding skies and ran in hissing song, tapping against the windows with little, beady fingers, as if knocking. Bailey woke to the knocking, the steady tapping, and suddenly remembered, his eyes gone wide and his heart gone skipping.

            Immediately, he sprung from his bed and checked the window, pulled back the curtain, and looked out across the grey, wet lawn. Rainwater had begun to puddle over the ground and the dark soil had grown to stark brown mud, all mushy and nasty. The pond was nowhere to be seen.

            Bailey kept his eyes fixed upon the lawn in wherever direction he thought he'd seen the pond the day before, as though that would bring it back, as if waiting for it to return. It didn't.

            The rain, he soon found, had not only washed away what was the hiding pond, but also his parent's lively, sparkly, bright smiles of the day before. As is most common with rain, their faces went stony and grey and drear, much like the weather. Their tempers were short and their eyes held a sort of evil glint that only adults can possess. Bailey didn't know how they did it, but they did, and he thought it scary.

            He had been eating the cold, lumpy porridge without any sugar or jam overtop it, the one that his mother made for the family, when it happened. It was a working day and Bailey's father could be heard down the hall, searching for his shoes, hounding around the room, looking frantically for everything he'd misplaced. His father blasted out from the hallway sweating, his tie thrown loosely about his neck and his shirt wrinkled and unbuttoned in places and appeared utterly disastrous and unkempt. Bailey caught the glint in his eyes and saw it before it happened.

            "I've lost my belt, darling," he said, loud.

            Bailey's mother was cooking at the small stove, her lumpy porridge getting lumpier as the bubbles popped and sighed. "Did you check the closet?" she asked.

            "Yes," said Bailey's father, ringing the tie around his neck and tightening it with clumsy hands. "I've checked every inch of our room..." he trailed off and Bailey caught his eyes wandering towards the clock. "Good heavens! Shit! Why didn't you fucking tell me the time!"

            "I was cooking," said his mother, and Bailey slowly reclined into the couch, and stopped eating.

            "Well, isn't this just bloody brilliant!" His father was wailing his arms now, and walking in circles and then stopped in the front hall and put his hands on his hips. "Brilliant, this. I'll be late. I'll be fired."

            "They won't fire you for being late," said his mother.

            "It's fucking nine! I needed to be at work at eight! It's been a mother fucking hour!"

            Then Bailey's mother whipped the wooden spoon from the porridge and pointed it directly at her husband, bits of lumpy porridge flying through the air to slap his father in the face.

            "Leave, now," said Bailey's mother, quietly at first, anger boiling. "And never use that language around my children again." Bailey's brother was sucking on his spoon and had stopped, and the house had gone silent.

            Bailey could hear his father muttering and curse as he stalked out of the house, and shut the red door with a thunderous clap, start up the car, and drive away down the little lane into the rain.

            Bailey left his mother standing there, her hand to her head, leaning over the stove. He didn't want his father to come home. He would never be able to see him, look him in the eyes without seeing that anger, that glint within his pupils. He would always be scared of his father, always.

            Upstairs in his room, Bailey cried softly with the rain on the glass window. The pond was still not there.

            Hours afterward, the rain lessened to a gentle misting. Bailey remained in his room. Although, he struggled to call it his room so quickly after arriving. It didn't feel like his yet. It didn't look like his yet. It didn't smell the same. That was the biggest thing, Bailey found, the smell was weird.

            Smells can tell you a lot about a place. They are heavily undervalued. Bailey's room smelled like burnt toast, something he was all too familiar with, and salt. Not the salt of the ocean, rank with the stench of fish, but a crisp kind of salt, the kind you use in cooking. The kind his mother used earlier this morning.

            That thought made Bailey sad again. He didn't cry though, he had gotten over that bit, gotten past the part where he felt a stranger to his father, felt a distance between them. He had constructed a wall up there in his room, his small, circular, wooden room. Up there he was free to think of things, he found. He liked that about the room. That was it.

            Then, as he was playing with some of his metal little knights he'd gotten back when the family had taken a trip to Germany, the knights battling each other as the rain rolled past along the window, he dropped one, and it landed in a sprinkling of salt. The little, miniature granules tiptoed across the wooden floor and piled up by the corner of the room, beneath a large chest, which had been covered with a large pall. Bailey had never seen the chest before, never knew the room housed it. It reminded him of the pond.

            The way it suddenly sprung out of seemingly nothing, when one moment there was nothing, and the next, the pond, or the chest in this instance. Bailey threw off the pall in fierce curiosity.

            The chest was old, older than anything Bailey had ever seen. Really old. The black metal hinges had begun to rust and turn a sickly orange and the wood had begun to decay, slowly crumbling and splitting apart, the tendrils of wood slipping from each others grasp. There was a small lock over the front of the chest, but there was no key. Bailey frowned and felt his heart droop with his shoulders. His lower lip thickened and he put a finger to the iron lock. Before he could blink, the lock had disappeared and the chest had cracked open, like a door does with a slight wind. Bailey helped the chest open, pushing it back and back and back, its hinges creaking and moaning and whining.

            When the chest was fully ajar, Bailey leaned, half on his knees, half on his toes, overtop the lip of the chest. Inside, deep within the dark depths, there was a blank page of paper, a ring of salt encircling it. Bailey put his hand down into the chest, reaching for the paper, but just as he did so, a loud crack shattered outside his window, followed closely by a blinding lance of white light. There was a silence, and then there was a pop, and a snap, and thud, which shook the ground and trembled up through the house and into Bailey's feet. He darted to the window, threw open the curtains and the screen, felt the wet wind on his face, as though he were standing at the shore break at the breach, and the wind was whipping the salty water at him.

            He looked out, and saw the tree-limb, snapped clean off the trunk, lying deadly cold upon the lawn.

            Then Bailey noticed the pond. It had returned, just behind the fallen branch, glimmering silver, as it did the night before. There was girl standing over it, as though floating over the surface, but she wasn't. She was standing on the water, just standing. Her flaming red hair did not even look wet, nor even her clothes, a buttoned dress of blue and white.

            She was looking at Bailey, her eyes grey and distant, old-looking, as though they had seen many things, old things. Then she started to dip below the pond's surface, and as she fell, her feet submerged, then her legs, the pond shrunk, until the pond had closed just over her fiery head and there was nothing, except the broken branch.

            When Bailey finally peeled his eyes from the lawn, he turned, slowly at first, then quick, remembering the chest, but the chest had vanished like smoke, as though it were never there. Was he dreaming this? Bailey pinched himself, light at first, hesitant, then hard. It hurt. No, he thought. He wasn't dreaming.

            He wasn't dreaming. The pond that had been there was gone. The chest that had been there was gone.

            Where did they come from? Where did they go? Why?

            He wasn't dreaming.

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