The House of Discarded Dreams

Chapter 7

The next morning they were still at sea; the waves were more restless than ever before—they reared up and flung their foam-topped crests against the walls of the house and expired in salty sprays. Vimbai ran from one window to the next, clearing away either meat or succulent green tendrils that always grew across the panes when she was not watching, anxious for any sign of motion. But the waves masked whatever trail the house had been leaving, and she feared that they had stalled or the ropes had torn or the crabs had died. The memory of her man-fish dream came back, and she imagined the scavenger fish crawling onto the nets, squeezing into the crab and eel traps to devour the gruesome bait left for them by the fishermen.

She imagined her horseshoe crabs now, dead on the cold pebbled bottom of the ocean, devoured by the wily fish—and, she thought, those fish would devour Vimbai’s soul as well. If the crabs followed her because they had some connection to her, then, Vimbai reasoned, a fish could potentially get to Vimbai. More and more she relied on her grandmother’s way of thinking, and with every passing minute the urge to check on the crabs grew stronger, almost physical, in her chest.

And yet, they had warned her. There were fairytales and forebodings, there was fear. Vimbai felt just like she did when she was little, when her mother left her by the supermarket’s entrance and told her to wait. Vimbai waited until the thoughts swarmed: what if mother left without her? What if she forgot about Vimbai? What if she fell and needed help? She knew that she should wait, but anxiety would get the better of her every time and she would go looking, and then they would spend a good half-hour looking for each other along the endless rows of shelves that seemed to house everything except whatever one was looking for at the moment.

Before the memory finished flashing through her mind, Vimbai knew that she would have to check on the horseshoe crabs—whatever fairytale punishment was reserved for her would surely be better than the agony of not knowing and yet driving herself desperate with anxious imaginings, just like her mother’s yelling at Vimbai for not staying put was far better than waiting in one spot.

She headed down the hallway but found that the steps leading downstairs had been overgrown by a particularly prickly variety of barberry bushes. She tried to struggle down the stairs, but the thorns left painful scratches on her arms and legs. Vimbai wished she had the machete they kept in the kitchen, behind the stove. She called for Maya or Felix, but no help or even answer came.

She tried to push through the prickly bushes but they pushed right back, gouging deep marks into her shoulders, tearing at her jeans like angry claws. She retreated and the bushes followed, pushing her into her room with unseemly glee. She backed away until her room was overgrown by barberry and a particularly nasty medicinal smell, and her back was pressed against the windowsill and thorny branches studded with bright red berries waved in her face. Only then she realized that the vegetation inside the house was rarely so aggressive, and felt the first prickling of fear and sting of her sweat in the new scratches on her forehead.

Vimbai had no other recourse but to open the window. It was close enough to the surface of water, Vimbai reasoned, and she could easily swim to the porch—despite the cold, she felt confident that the distance was short enough to cover with two or three long strokes. Plus, it would give her an excuse to sneak a look at the crabs, and then she would get the machete and deal with the insolent vegetation. She drew in a deep breath and pushed through the window, dangling ungracefully for a moment and then plunging, head first.

She did not expect the cold to be so cutting—the embrace of steel-cold water tightened around her chest, and Vimbai sucked in a breath and reached for the porch. It bobbed farther away than she expected, and with the resignation of someone in a bad dream she realized that the house was moving away. She tried to swim, but her lungs felt frozen and heavy, and her legs and arms weighed her down with useless bone and cramped muscle.

She called for help then, her voice too small to be heard in the house. Her legs kicked hard as she tried not to let panic set in, and she called for the crabs, for her grandmother, for anyone to come and help her. Her legs leaden, her arms useless, she felt herself slipping, sinking under the surface, and with no grandmother to keep her warm to guide her vision, there was only murky water; it poured into her mouth and filled her stomach, heavy like a brick.

And then, a hand—several hands, several arms, as many as an octopus, lifting her, pulling her head above the water. Several legs kicking by her, various in size, but all strong. Vimbai recognized Peb. She was too muddled and cold to feel real surprise, just extreme gratitude. So there was a reason why the silly thing was attaching every phantom limb it could find to itself.

And then, the porch swam into her field of vision, and she reached out her hand—clawed, unfeeling—to hook it on the edge. Peb helped her up, dragging her out of the water, and held her, protective and sympathetic, as she retched what felt like gallons of seawater. Her teeth would not stop chattering.

Maya and Vimbai’s grandmother came out of the kitchen and hustled her inside, to sit close to the stove they turned on for just that purpose, and to be rubbed by large fluffy towels. Vimbai was too muddled to make sense of their exclamations, and only felt vague irritation when they persistently shook her by the shoulder and kept asking if she was okay and if she could feel her feet and fingers.

“Hypothermia,” Maya kept repeating. “This ain’t good.”

The ghost brought blankets and warmed them by the open oven, and Peb hovered nearby. Vimbai closed her eyes—all the movement and noise distracted her from something nagging at the back of her mind, persistently enough to distract her from the fact that she had nearly drowned.

And like a photograph in a vat of developer, the image appeared in the black background of her eyelids. It was a palimpsest of the image she had seen underwater but was too frightened to absorb at the time. Now, it stood before her with a steady clarity.

She saw the ropes stretched taut and the horseshoe crabs festooned along them all the way from the bottom to the foundation. They did not pull but were carried—and Vimbai cried out and opened her eyes once she discerned the beasts that did all the pulling.

“She’s in shock,” Maya said to the ghosts, and patted Vimbai’s hand. “Hang in there, sweetheart. You’ll be fine, you just have to warm up a little.”

Vimbai just shivered in response, thinking of the monsters—giant, ancient—pulling the house along. Monsters that left deep gouges in the sand, barnacles on their cracked carapaces, their eyes rotted out, their tails broken. They moved on clawed legs covered in cracked exoskeleton, exposing rotting bits of their flesh. Hagfish followed them, occasionally swimming up and ripping out chunks of putrid flesh, and still they moved—gigantic, undead horseshoe crabs, animated by some ancient and unknown will.

The vadzimu took Vimbai’s hands into hers. “What have you seen, granddaughter?”

Vimbai shook her head and looked away, afraid that the terrible vision would leak from her eyes into her grandmother’s. She did not want to share, not just yet—sometimes one had to be alone with knowledge to absorb the enormity of it. Sure, a burden shared was lighter, but sometimes one needed to appreciate the entire weight so that the future relief would seem all the more precious. So Vimbai swallowed and stared out of the window, feeling blood pulsing in her lips, warming them.

The kettle blew a sharp whistle, and Maya hurried to make her a cup of tea. Vimbai swallowed the scalding fluid, not caring that the skin in her mouth peeled, her stomach filling with warmth—filling with life, and the sensation was enough to chase away the terrible image crowding her mind.

She tried to make sense of it, as she always did—when she was little, she was taught that any problem had a solution, and if one just jiggled the pieces a little and squinted, looked at them sideways, then the general pattern would become apparent and everything would fit, suddenly, in a flash.

When she became older, she learned that some problems resisted such treatment—they were solved not by a flash of inspiration and sudden insight but by tedious, boring work—and too often, one did not truly solve them, just demonstrated enough of the ability to think to earn a passing grade, but the solution of the problem remained unknown.

But neither inspirational nor incremental approaches helped her to deal with the undead crabs. She was willing to accept that the house and the three housemates plus assorted ghosts fit together, that the horseshoe crabs were their allies and the fishes who devoured souls were enemies; she could live with her ability to control the crabs, just like she could forgive Maya her half-foxes and Felix his desiccated heads. But she could not move past the simple acceptance and start finding answers to why and how and who and for what purpose. She could only shiver in front of the stove and drink tea.

The two worldviews were at an impasse again, and there was not much Vimbai could do besides trying to incorporate them both; pinning them against each other so that either one would yield answers seemed far beyond her capabilities.

“Why did you jump into the water?” Maya asked, apparently judging Vimbai to have recovered enough.