A Study in Drowning(75)

“Preston,” she cut in. “We need to get into the basement.”

She had been thinking of Ianto, of course, which made her think of the key, which made her remember that dark locked door, the wood rotting and speckled white with barnacles. She remembered the water, shifting and seething, so black that it had seemed impenetrable, that it had seemed like a floor she could have walked on, like something she would have to break in order to slip through.

And then she had been thinking of her own theory, her mind turning on in the silence like a record player in an empty room, though it still felt too fragile to speak aloud. She was thinking of the girl in the photographs. Effy had once thought her gaze empty, but now she realized that the girl had simply escaped her own body, her spirit wandering elsewhere while Myrddin’s camera flashed over her naked breasts.

Effy knew that trick well. It was almost like magic. If you tried hard enough, you could believe yourself out of the cold and banal world.

The color drained from Preston’s face. “We can’t go down there—it’s all submerged, and we don’t even know if there’s anything of use . . .”

“We have to try,” Effy urged. “What else can we do? The storm is coming, and we’re out of options.”

Preston drew a breath. “Even if we can get the key—and that’s quite an if—what are we meant to do? Swim through the dark until our hands happen to touch something? Something that could be too heavy, something that could drag us down? That seems like an awfully good way to drown.”

His voice was wavering like it never had before, and his hands were fisted so tightly on his lap that his knuckles had turned white.

Effy frowned. “Are you scared?”

“Of drowning? Of the dark? Yes. Those are very reasonable things to be scared of,” Preston said tersely.

Hydrocephalus. Water on the brain. How could she blame him for being afraid?

“Then I’ll do it,” she said. “You can just hold the flashlight.”

“Effy, this is all mad. We don’t even have the key.”

“I can get it,” she said. And even though a part of her wished she didn’t, Effy felt quite sure of that. “I promise you I can. And then I’ll swim. I’m not afraid of drowning.”

She meant it. Well, in some primal way, maybe she would be afraid once she was under, her lungs throbbing and burning, the light slowly waning overhead. But in an abstract sense, drowning didn’t scare her.

She wasn’t afraid of dying, not really. It was the ultimate act of flight, an escape artist’s tour de force. Drowning did not seem like a particularly easy way to go, if Ianto was to be believed, but it wouldn’t matter once she’d already taken the plunge. Fear and pain could be endured if you knew that eventually, they would end.

“Stop it,” Preston snapped. “Just—just stop being so reckless. That’s the one terrible thing about you, you know. You jump out of moving cars and dive into dark water.”

He sounded as angry as he had when they’d confronted Marlowe at the party, and it shocked her. But his anger had a different edge now, something tense. Something desperate.

Effy was silent for a moment, letting his words settle over her and then slip off, as if they were that dark water itself.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “You weren’t there in that car with Ianto. When I jumped out I wasn’t doing it to be reckless—I was saving myself. What you think of as recklessness, I think of as survival. Sometimes it’s not very pretty. Skinned knees and a bloody nose and whatever else. You told me I don’t see myself clearly, but I do. I know what I am. I know that, deep down, there’s not much else to me but surviving. Everything I think, everything I do, everything I am—it’s just one escape act after another.”

Believing Myrddin’s stories had become an escape act, too, her greatest and most enduring one. But it had made her unstable, untrustworthy, a fragile, flighty thing. That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.

Effy held Preston’s gaze, undaunted, challenging him to reply. Her chest was heaving. She heard herself swallow hard.

“You couldn’t be more wrong about that,” Preston said. His throat was pulsing. His eyes, once pale brown, had somehow turned dark. “You’re not just one thing. Survival is something you do, not something you are. You’re brave and brilliant. You’re the most real, full person I’ve ever met.”

Effy’s breath caught, and when she tried to speak, she found that no words would come. She wanted to say I don’t believe you. She wanted to say thank you. She wanted to say tell me more about who I am because I don’t know anymore.

If Myrddin had not written Angharad, if he really had just been some lecherous old man, if there was no Fairy King, then who was she? Just a mad girl, thrashing about in black water. A part of her only wanted to cry.

She didn’t do or say any of that. Instead, in one swift, decisive maneuver, she swung her leg over Preston’s hips, straddling him, and bore him down onto the chaise. She pinned him there, their faces closer than they had ever been before, noses near enough to touch. Where their chests were pressed together, she could feel their hearts pounding in frenzied tandem.

For a long, long moment, neither of them moved or spoke.