his ear, and my eyes strained to see what was ahead.
I could just make out a distant rise on the ocean floor.
My brain kept returning to the night at the morgue, and like a kid waking from a nightmare and calling for their Mommy, I realized I was wishing Doug was here.
Doug, who always had my back. Who mightn’t tell me much but didn’t tell me lies.
I shook my head to dispel the stray thought.
I couldn’t see much, but I could hear even less. It was more than silence, it was a total absence of sound. It reminded me of something I once read about this concentration camp. An account by a survivor who went back years later and found that no animals would go near the site, long after it had been rehabilitated. No birds would fly over. It was a place of death, and agony, and all that drew breath knew it.
My senses were straining so hard, trying to work out what was wrong, that I almost didn’t notice that Carragheen had pushed forward toward the green-grey mound. I struck out, but it was hard to see. I could just make out the soles of his feet.
And then, like a punch to the solar plexus, my sight went black.
This time the vision was very clear. I saw her, Imogen. And I could also feel the warm, live presence of her somewhere deep inside myself. Like she had possessed me.
She was trapped. I could see her perfectly, her eyes light blue and wide. I couldn’t see where she was but it was very dark. And cold. She was trying to cry out but for some reason she couldn’t. Was her mouth bound? She was alive, but why wasn’t she calling out? It was hard, like trying to direct the lens in a dream, but I could feel the jagged bite of her fear.
And then I realized that she was afraid for me. She was trying to warn me. I could feel the message pulsing from her into me, into the very heart of me.
Go, go, go. Swim, Rania, swim away.
Then, quickly as the vision came it was gone, and I was groggy and lolling on the seabed, still a good hundred yards or so from the mound that I now assumed to be some kind of cave. My head felt heavy, lifting it seemed impossible. My arms and legs were fuzzy, like the worst case of pins and needles you ever had.
These things really take it out of you.
I gathered together the loose pieces of my wits and tried to move, but it took long seconds. I still tasted the terror of the vision in my mouth. My limbs felt dead, like I’d been laying on them in the wrong position for too long. My brain was full of cotton wool, seaweed. My eyes, which had been starting to adjust to the deep, were having a hard time focusing in it again after the other blackness of the vision. Panic filled my brain, saturating my responses, making me helpless.
I felt rather than heard the sound, like a song’s first, long note. High, perfect.
It was familiar, and I shook my head and tried to recall where I had heard it.
A crippling swathe of pain exploded in my head, in all my senses. It was like before, the first time, at the morgue. But worse. I was sure I was melting. As soon as it struck, plunging into me with an unseen, vicious fist, I knew I could endure this for a few seconds only before my head shattered under the shocking, electric edge of the pain. My stomach convulsed as nausea flooded me. In the few seconds before it completely annihilated me, left me sick and ruined on the ocean floor, I could see the end of everything.
My life, such as it was.
My dreams, although I wasn’t sure what they are.
The end of any chance at love. The end of brownies with Mom.
The Seer was wrong, the end is now.
And then I looked up and saw Mom’s face, and I knew I really was dying.
She was hovering above me, a golden vision, singing into my face and looking just as she did singing at the wedding. Heavenly and untouchable. Except that she was touching me. Picking me up in her strong arms, and swimming with me.
As I fell into the blackness that I assumed was the end of it all, I registered brief surprise that this was how the end