The Fires Beneath the Sea (A Novel)

Chapter 6

6.

“OK. So that was not a Peeping Tom,” said Hayley emphatically.

It was about two in the morning and they were home and warm. The three of them—Cara, Hayley and Jax—sat in their dad’s study by lamplight with blankets pulled around them, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. The library part of the study, behind the big desk with its jar full of milkbones for Rufus, had two overstuffed armchairs, a fireplace with a marble mantelpiece and lion heads at both ends, and dusty old bookshelves on two of the walls. Cara had always thought it was a nice room. Beyond the chairs was a bay window that looked out over the water—or would if they didn’t have the deep-red drapes pulled shut.

Max had insisted on driving back to the park and keeping vigil from the car with his friends, though Jax had made them promise not to go near the tent till dawn. Max had never seen the pouring man—the so-called dead soldier—which was why, Cara thought, he didn’t take her story too seriously.

Though he hadn’t said so, maybe he even thought she was imagining things.

“There’s no way you’re gonna convince me that thing coming out of the mirror was just some weirdo who likes spying on girls,” went on Hayley.

“Not so much,” admitted Jax.

He sat cross-legged on a thick rug on the floor and was eating sugary cereal from the box with his fingers. That was his habit when he was trying to think something through.

“I haven’t been a hundred percent honest with you,” said Cara to Hayley sheepishly.

“Yeah. No kidding.”

“I’m sorry,” Cara told her, and meant it.

Before this whole thing she’d always thought of herself as pretty truthful, aside from the rare white lie to save someone’s feelings. She wanted to have integrity.

“So what the hell was it?” asked Hayley. “I mean there was that—face thing in the mirror—and the hands were stretching out longer than any hands could ever be, like they were groping for us….”

“You said he was in the tapwater?” said Jax, turning to Cara.

Cara kept her own hands cupped around her mug of cocoa, alternating between sipping and blowing on it. She’d toweled off so she wasn’t still soaking, but both she and Hayley were wearing bathrobes and thick socks—Hayley had brought puffy pink bedroom slippers in her overnight bag—and had their hair wrapped up in soft towels.

“That was how he got in,” she said to Jax, nodding. “Through the pipes. Not the door.”

“Yeah, um, pipes? I’m not getting it,” said Hayley.

“He travels through water,” explained Cara. “He has to have water to travel. And he likes the nighttime, too. Maybe there was enough wetness in the pipes that he could move through them? But then he turned to steam when he came out, because it was too bright or dry in the bathroom for him to, you know, materialize all the way….”

“Before that,” said Jax, “you said he took the shape of Hayley?”

“He did,” said Cara. “He really did! Jax, I swear. I was inside the tent and she’d gone out across the parking lot to the bathroom and I thought it was her. I heard these hands scratching and scrabbling, you know, trying to undo the zipper on the flap in the dark? And I turned my flashlight on them and they were her hands. Her fingers! They looked just like them! So I told her to come in.”