“Effy,” said Preston gravely, rising to his feet. “Please. Sit down. You look pale.”
Too numb and too queasy to refuse, she let him lead her to the chaise. He sat down beside her. They were not touching, not quite, but she was close enough to feel the heat of his body, and see those two little grooves that his glasses carved into the bridge of his nose. She still wanted to ask him if they hurt. Or if they had hurt once, but he’d grown so inured to the pain that he didn’t even notice it anymore.
“I’m sorry,” she said meekly. “I’m—I’m fine. I just haven’t eaten in a while.”
A mad girl, like the doctor had said. Like her mother had always believed, like the other students whispered in the halls. She tried to catch her breath, gulping down huge mouthfuls of air. Preston sat tensed next to her, fingers curling and uncurling in his lap. As if he wanted to reach out and touch her but didn’t quite dare.
At last, Effy lifted her head. Stop it, she told herself again firmly. It’s not real. None of it is real.
“You said you got the photographs?” she managed finally.
Preston hesitated, still looking very worried. “Yes. And something else occurred to me. If the pictures were indeed taken on this chair, then it means that Blackmar’s daughter was here at some point, at Hiraeth. Which means that the affair went on for more than just a year. Blackmar said that Myrddin didn’t move here until after Angharad was published.”
Effy frowned. She felt dizzy, unsafe in her own skin. “So that diary entry of Myrddin’s where he mentions Blackmar dropping off the manuscript—that was just to his apartment in Syfaddon?”
“It must have been. Part of me began to think, well, maybe it’s something as simple as Blackmar doing some light editing of the manuscript and then bringing it back to Myrddin to send to Greenebough? There’s nothing exceptional about that. But then why is Blackmar so uncomfortable at any mention of Angharad and his daughter? He was sweating when you asked Marlowe about it. I keep running it all over in my mind, paging through Myrddin’s diary, but there’s something we’re missing, something—”
“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.