Across the Far Sea

A sweet melody seeped into the garden, which had brightened a little. From the old phonograph in the living room, its gilt horn mottled here and there with rust, a low thread of song spilled out.

What followed the gentle piano prelude was a timbre so bewitching it seized the ear at once. The tune and the words were familiar—he had heard them somewhere—yet the singer’s voice was wholly strange to him, for he had never once heard the original.

Listening to a voice he was meeting for the first time in his life, Elliot stepped into the basin brimming with laundry.

His feet shifted, little by little, with the voice that climbed and fell through the measure. Splash, splash. Ripple after ripple drew itself across the water. Between the clothes crushed under his soles, white soap-froth welled up, soft and bubbling.

He trod the wash with mechanical steps, and a drowsy haze came over him by degrees. Was it the singer’s voice, winding again and again about his ear? Or the melody itself, calling up some tender memory? He let his eyes fall shut upon a past that could no longer be recovered, as if those old days might live again if only he did—the days when he had been happy without even knowing he was. One by one he reached after the beloved faces that rose, wavering, before him. Even that was interrupted. Some presence slipped in between the smooth measures of the song.

Anna, of course.

He had thought her long asleep, yet there she stood in the middle of the living room, a cardigan thrown over a thin nightgown. Her gaze, unusually level, was fixed fast upon the phonograph. That wretched curiosity toward anything unfamiliar had bloomed in her once again.

“It’s a phonograph.”

Anna turned slowly to look at him, where he was doing the wash beyond the window.

“You see the black disc, spinning round and round? That’s a record. It stores the music.”

She listened to the careful explanation and nodded without a word. Elliot was about to turn his attention back to the laundry when a thought rose unbidden, and he clicked his tongue.

“Did the music wake you?”

“No.”

Anna closed her mouth after the short reply. Elliot, who had been watching her a moment, soon looked away as well.

Before he knew it, the sweet singing was all that filled the air around them. He listened to the song repeat and kept his legs moving without rest. His body, driven to the edge of exhaustion, felt as if a heavy weight hung from every fingertip and every toe. He forced his closing eyes wide and hauled upright a body that kept trying to sink toward the ground.

“It’s going to rain soon.”

A thin voice drifted suddenly against his ear. Anna, whom he had thought gone back to her room, stood leaning at an angle against the living-room window, her large eyes fixed clearly on him.

Elliot met that gaze for a long moment, then tipped his head sharply back. In the night sky, steeped in deep indigo, there was not a cloud to be found.

“It’s clear.”

This time, too, Anna was the first to fall silent.

Could she not sleep? He considered offering a few words, then gave up when nothing suitable came to mind. He had lived with solitude for company, and silence was by far the more familiar of the two.

Then, all at once, a strange sense of movement reached him.

“What are you doing!”

He was aghast to see Anna hooking one leg over the windowsill. At the sudden shout, Anna—eyes gone round as a rabbit’s—only looked puzzled in return.

“I was going to come over that way.”

“You could just use the front door. Why would you—”

Anna strained a little on the sill, then soon set her foot down in the garden. She dusted the skirt of her crumpled nightgown with a few brisk pats and looked at him boldly. And Elliot had grown familiar enough with her to read, at least, the meaning in those eyes.

“…The water’s cold.”

The words were all he had after fierce deliberation, yet Anna did not so much as stir. He murmured, looking nearly resigned, though he had not quite let go of his last thread of hope.

“You might catch a cold…”

“I dressed warmly.”

She answered at once, as if she had been waiting for it. Who was ever going to talk down a stubbornness like that? When he at last surrendered and nodded, helpless, Anna’s face lit, and she came running at once.

Afraid he might try to stop her again, she quickly pulled off her shoes and socks and thrust her feet into the basin first. She swayed with the hasty movement, and Elliot caught her by the shoulder.

“If you get cold, go inside.”

“I will.”

She answered readily enough, but he knew she would not go in until the washing was done. He had been about to snap something sharp; in a rush he swallowed the barbed words back down his throat. For an instant bewilderment came first, at the strange feeling rising from deep in his chest.

Perhaps it was because she looked so hopelessly clumsy, trampling the laundry in imitation of him. The soaked clothes wavering in the water, the soap bubbles rising white—he could not for the life of him see what was so amusing. And yet that flushed face, that purity of someone utterly lost in a thing: in what long-gone year had he last seen anything like it?

The sweet melody went on without end. The voice that tugged at the ear played along the beat, and at certain moments gave a resonance deeper than anything he could set beside it. Elliot found he rather liked that curious sensation, the one he could not name. Perhaps it was because the grain of the singing, spreading through the clear night air, kept changing its variation from one moment to the next.

People say the moon holds a peculiar magic. Perhaps a song holds a magic much the same. Lifted by an odd buoyancy he had scarcely felt in all his life, he thought so—and, bewitched by the singing, impulsively let slip words he would never ordinarily have spoken.

“Have you ever danced?”

Anna, who had been playing like a child and popping the soap bubbles under her feet, lifted her head. In the eyes that met his at once, a new curiosity was taking root.

“Dance with me?”

Elliot offered his hand with a faint smile. Anna, who had been gazing quietly into his face, slowly took it. The warmth that touched his fingertips raced in an instant to his heart.

“With that hand, hold my shoulder.”

Guiding her hand—hovering awkwardly in the empty air—up to his shoulder, he set his own hand at her waist.

“And after that…”

He had been explaining as smoothly as flowing water when he broke into a soft laugh.

“You just sway.”

“Sway?”

“Yes. To the music.”

The explanation, cut off so abruptly, did not seem to make ready sense to her, but he pretended not to notice and stepped lightly into the dance. Drawn along, Anna began to move her feet before she quite knew what she was doing.

Through the quiet melody came the soft, unbroken sound of shallow water underfoot. Anna, stiff as a block of wood at first, soon found the rhythm and let her feet move with ease. The first dance of her life must have seemed a wonder: a bright sparkle gathered in those vivid blue eyes, which lost none of their light even in the dead of night.

“Is it fun?”

Anna nodded with all her strength, as if she had already forgotten the cake’s filling entirely.

“This is the first time I’ve done anything like this.”

“I thought as much.”

“It seems like there’s nothing you can’t do, Elliot. You cook well, you mend things well, you dance well…”

Anna chattered on like a bird, her face thoroughly flushed. At praise coming for the first time from a mouth that had always held some spite in it, Elliot burst out laughing before he could help himself.

“If my colleagues heard you say that just now, they’d laugh themselves sick.”

“Why?”

“Well…”

Choosing his words with care, he pressed his lips shut against another laugh that threatened to break free. Anna looked at him as if he were strange, but she did not press. Even without words passing between them, the singing that filled the air was truly sweet to the ear.

A tender tune flowed, slow and swaying, over the hill. The moonlit night of a beautiful spring day only deepened.

Crash!

A pale sheet of lightning surged over the bed set against the window. Elliot simply stared blankly up at the light staining the dark ceiling. It took him a long while to understand that it had been a dream.

He had thought he had forgotten, by now.

He let out a long breath and slowly pushed himself upright. The nightmares that had come so often in childhood—the tender years when tears shed in his sleep soaked the pillowcase were long past, and still the nightmares that clung on, barely, showed no intention of leaving him.

Beyond the window the storm raged. The window, rocking uneasily in the fierce wind off the sea, creaked on and on like a scream. He had been gazing blankly into the dark when he suddenly remembered the laundry he had hung in the garden the night before.

Sleep seemed unlikely to return, so he got out of bed. A little cold. Rubbing the nape of his neck where the chill air touched it, he crossed the room with heavy steps. All at once he craved a cup of warm tea. If he warmed himself, it seemed he might sleep clear through until morning, for the first time in a very long while.

But at the far end of the corridor, a thin thread of light lay through a door left slightly ajar.

That was Anna’s room.

Blinking blankly, Elliot turned his steps that way. The soft sound of his feet was swallowed by the driving rain and wind. Before he knew it he stood before the door, and he stole a glance through the unusually bright crack.

The room was brilliantly lit.

The thought that she might have turned on a lamp vanished the instant he saw the room sink dark again. The clear brightness had been lightning, filling the great window entire. How it came on, surging in like wave after wave.

The hand that had been about to ease the door shut stopped at the flash that rolled in once more.

In the room gone white with light, Elliot saw Anna from behind, seated on the bed. Silver hair spilled long over her shoulders and down her back. She, who had been still as a stone statue, slowly turned her head.

For an instant his eyes flew wide.

Crash!

A tremendous peal of thunder swallowed the flash in a heartbeat. The room, dark once more, shuddered with the roar.

Bang! Crash!

And in the darkness where nothing at all could be seen—golden eyes, pouring forth a light as fierce as a beast’s.

“…”

Elliot dragged in a ragged breath. He wanted to move, and could not so much as twitch a finger. As if his whole body had been bound, some force whose nature he could not name was pressing him down.

A holy, sublime power, such as no mere human could ever reach. There.

The door began to close, slowly. The golden eyes staring straight through him vanished into the crack, one, and then the other.

The door shut.

He stared blankly at the door that had come right up before his face. Just now—what in the world had happened? He was struggling to force his jumbled thoughts into order when the memory of a certain night surged up to the surface.

Elliot quietly pressed a hand over his mouth.

Those words had been a warning about Anna.