“Well, thank the Saints,” her mother said. “I can’t handle any more trouble from you.”
“I know,” said Effy. “I’m sorry. I’m coming home now.”
The words shocked her the second she uttered them. A moment ago, she’d been missing Caer-Isel, but she realized now that even if it was familiar, it wasn’t safe. A beat of silence. Her mother inhaled sharply.
“Home? What about your studies?”
“I don’t want to go back to Caer-Isel.” The knot of tears rose in her throat so suddenly, it was painful to speak. “Something happened, Mother, and I can’t—”
She wanted to tell her mother about Master Corbenic, but any capacity for speech abandoned her. It still only came back to her in flashes; there was no narrative, no story with a beginning, middle, and end. There was only the haziness of dread, the dry-mouthed panic, the nightmares that sent her jolting awake at night.
And she knew exactly how much sympathy her mother had for her nightmares.
“Effy.” Her mother’s voice was so razor-edged, it made Effy’s stomach curdle. “I don’t want you to come home. You can’t. I have work and you’re an adult now. Whatever mess you’ve made, you need to sort it by yourself. Go back to school. Take your medication. Focus on your studies. Let me have my life. You are taking your pills, aren’t you?”
Effy wished, in that moment, that her senses would dull again. She wanted to go to that deep-water place, where she could hear only the churning of the waves above her.
But her mind wouldn’t carry her there. Instead she felt acutely the cold press of the telephone against her ear, and the tightening of her throat, and the panicked, off-kilter beat of her heart. She lifted her hand to rub at the knob of scar tissue where her ring finger should be.
“I’m taking them,” Effy said. “But that’s not—”
She cut herself off. She meant to say that’s not the problem, but wasn’t it? At any point when she’d been in Master Corbenic’s office, she could have run. That’s what the boys in her college whispered: that she’d wanted it. After all, why else would she have stayed? Why had she never pushed him away? Why had she never said that simple word, no?
Trying to articulate the inarticulable fear she’d felt as she sat in his green office chair would lead her down the same road it always had. It would end with her mother telling her there was no such thing as monsters. That there was nothing watching her from the corner of her room, no matter how many nights Effy could not sleep under its cold, unblinking gaze.
“Haven’t I done enough?” Her mother’s voice was trembling faintly, like a needle against a scratched record. “For eighteen years it was just you and me, and by the Saints, you didn’t make it easy . . .”
She considered reminding her mother that her grandparents had done just as much, that they had paid for her schooling, taken her on trips, helped with her homework, tended to her while her mother nursed her gin headaches or stayed in bed for days under a gloom of exhaustion. But Effy had listened to this record turn a thousand times. There was no use saying any of that, no use saying anything at all.
“I know,” was all she managed, in the end. “I’m sorry. I’ll go back to school now. Goodbye, Mother.”
She hung up before her mother could answer.
Effy stepped out of the phone booth, her boots crunching the wet gravel. She had expected to feel a tight cord of panic lace up her spine, but instead she felt oddly serene. It was the removal of choice that calmed her. There were only two roads ahead of her now, one of them well-trod and dark, the other half lit and waiting.
She had thought she could go down that dark road, but the more she thought of the whispers in the hall and Master Corbenic, the more she realized she could not bear it. That made her next decision easy. She knelt to roll up her wet pant leg and then stood and marched down the empty street, the train station blurring in her peripheral vision.
Effy hadn’t gone more than a dozen paces when she saw someone coming down the road toward her. He was an older man with a weather-beaten face and a shepherd’s crook, and there were a number of bleating sheep at his back. She couldn’t count how many until he grew closer.
It was city-bred instinct that had Effy clutching her purse against her body, but the man paused more than an arm’s length away from her, wizened fingers curled around the crook. His eyes were the color of sea glass, a matte and cloudy green.
“I know you aren’t from here,” he said, in a garbled Southern accent that Effy struggled to understand. “A pretty young girl alone on the cliffs up there—you haven’t been reading your fairy tales.”