Summerland

“Wait!” Ethan said, as the drivers, angry now, swerved around Mr. Brown’s car and took off one after the other down the hill. “Isn’t there anything we can do—I can do—to stop it?”

“You doesn’t know magic. You doesn’t know baseball.” Mr. Brown looked at Jennifer T. “You knows a little about both of them, I reckon, but not much besides. “He shook his head. “Plus, you children. Tell me how you going to stop Ragged Rock?”

Ethan and Jennifer T. had no reply to this. Mr. Brown rolled his window all the way and drove off. Ethan and Jennifer T. started the long walk back to her house, which was closer to Southend than Ethan’s. For a long time they didn’t say anything. What can you say, after all, about the end of the world? Ethan was deeply disturbed by the memory of the ruined Birchwood, and by the thought of all those ferishers carted off to be made into horrible little grey bat things. And every time he closed his eyes, he saw the tip of a little red tail, disappearing into a world of shadows. But he could not help being cheered by the fact that when asked, Mr. Brown had not said, There is nothing to be done. Merely that he didn’t think there was anything Ethan and Jennifer T. could do.

Ethan tried to imagine how the conversation would go when he tried to explain to his father about the ferishers, and Ragged Rock. Few things made Mr. Feld truly angry, but one thing that did was when people insisted that there was more to the world than what you could see, hear, touch, or otherwise investigate with tools and your five good senses. That there was a world behind the world, or beyond it. An afterlife, say. Mr. Feld felt that people who believed in other worlds were simply not paying enough attention to this one. He had been insistent with Ethan that Dr. Feld was gone forever, that all of her, everything that had made her so uniquely and wonderfully her, was in the ground, where it would all return to the elements and minerals it was made of. This satisfied Mr. Feld, or so he said. He would not look kindly on tales of fairies and skrikers and shadows that could come to life and carry off werefoxes into the sky. And yet Ethan could think of no one else to go to for help. He decided he was going to have to tell his father some version of the truth. And then Mr. Feld would call Nan Finkel, the therapist that Ethan had been seeing on and off since their arrival on Clam Island, and Nan Finkel, with her two thick braids that were so long she could sit on them, would have him put in a hospital for disturbed children, and that would be that.

“Jennifer T.,” he said. They had been walking for half an hour in silence, and were nearly to the Rideout place. “Nobody is going to believe us.”

“I was thinking that.”

“You know it’s true, right?”

“Everything is true.” Jennifer T. spat on the ground. Her spitting was as professional in quality as the rest of her game. “That’s what Albert always says.”

“I know. I’ve heard him say it.”

They had reached the gap in the trees where a teetering old mailbox, perforated with bullet and BB holes, was painted with Jennifer T.’s last name. One of the dogs came tearing towards them, a big black mutt with his pink tongue flying like a flag. There was a little green parakeet riding on his shoulder.

“We can tell the old ladies,” Jennifer T. said. “They believe a lot of even crazier stuff than this.”

THE HOUSE WHERE Jennifer T. lived had two bedrooms. In one slept Jennifer T. and the little twins, Darrin and Dirk. In the other slept Gran Billy Ann and her sisters, Beatrice and Shambleau. The toilet was attached to the house and had a roof over it, but it was outside. You had to go out the back door to get to it. There were seven to nine dogs, and from time to time the cats became an island scandal. You came in through the living room, where there were three immense reclining chairs, so large that they left barely enough room for a small television set. One chair was red plaid, one was green plaid, and one was white leather. They vibrated when you pushed a certain button. The old ladies sat around vibrating and reading romance novels. They were big ladies, and they needed big chairs. They had a collection of over seven thousand five hundred romance novels. They had every novel Barbara Cartland ever wrote, all of the Harlequin romances, all the Silhouette and Zebra and HeartQuest books. The paperbacks were piled in stacks that reached almost to the ceiling. They blocked windows and killed houseplants and regularly collapsed on visitors. Island people who knew of the Rideout girls’ taste in fiction would come by in the dead of night and dump grocery bags and liquor boxes full of romances in the driveway. The old ladies despised other people’s charity, but the free books they seemed to accept as a tribute: they were the oldest women on Clam Island, and entitled to a certain amount of respect. They happily read the abandoned books. If they had already read them before, they read them again. If there was one thing in life that didn’t trouble them, it was having heard the same story before.

“The Little Tribe,” said Gran Billy Ann. She was sprawled in her chair, the red plaid one, her feet up in a pair of big black orthopaedic shoes, vibrating away. “How about that! I remember Pap had stories about them. One time when he was a boy they stole a silver pin right out of his sister’s hair. Over at Hotel Beach that was. Before it was a hotel there. But I never heard of this Ragged Rock thing.” Gran Billy Ann lit a cigarette. She was not supposed to smoke. She was not supposed to drink, either, but she was drinking a can of Olympia beer. That kind of thing was all right if you were one of the three oldest women on Clam Island. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Ragged Rock,” Aunt Beatrice said. “Ragged Rock. I don’t remember Pap having anything to say on that score.”

“I saw one of them, once,” said Aunt Shambleau, in a low voice, almost to herself. “It was in the summertime. A beautiful little man. Naked as a fish. He was lying on his back in the sun.”

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