She lowered her shoulder and closed the distance between them, barreling into his chest and tumbling onto the ground with him under her. She reared up to drive her fist into his face, but he grabbed her arms. She was on top and should have had the upper hand, but she had never hit anything and she could tell from the way he never wasted a movement that he had been fighting his entire life. Helen felt him do something with his hips and then he was on top. Her arms were pinned above her head and her heels were left to scrape uselessly at the ground. She tried to bite his face, but he jerked his head away.
“Lie still or I will kill you,” Lucas warned through gritted teeth. He was panting, not because he was winded, but because he was trying to control himself.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, almost begging.
Helen stopped struggling and looked into his infuriating face. He had his eyes closed. He was trying the trick she had used in the alley, she realized. She shut her eyes as well, and felt a tiny bit better.
“I lied to the police. I didn’t tell them you were there tonight,” Helen grunted, the unbelievable weight of him pressing the air out of her. “You’re crushing me!”
“Good,” he said, but he shifted his weight, seeming to get lighter somehow so she could fill her lungs. “Do you have your eyes closed, too?” he asked, sounding more curious than angry.
“Yeah. It helps a little,” she replied quietly. “You see them, too, don’t you? The three women?”
“Of course I do,” he replied in a baffled voice.
“What are they?”
“TheErinyes. The Furies. You really don’t understand....” He stopped abruptly when a woman’s voice called his name from what Helen assumed was his house. “Damn it. They can’t find you here or you’re dead. Go!” he ordered. He rolled off of her and jumped up into a run.
As soon as she was free, Helen bolted and didn’t look back. She could almost feel the three sisters reaching out with their clammy white arms and bloody fingertips to touch the back of her neck. She ran in a panic for Kate’s car, dove behind the wheel, and drove away as fast as she dared.
After half a mile she had to pull over and take a few deep breaths, and as she did, she noticed that she could smell Lucas on her clothes. Disgusted, she took her shirt off and drove home in her bra. No one would see her, and if they did they would just think she was out for a dawn swim. At first she left her shirt on the passenger seat, but the scent of him kept wafting up, smelling of cut grass, baking bread, and snow. In a fit of frustration she screamed at the steering wheel and tossed her shirt out the window.
She was exhausted to the point of collapse when she got home, but she couldn’t lie down in her bed without taking a shower. She had to scrub Lucas off or his scent would chase her around in her dreams. She was filthy. Her elbows and back had grass stains on them and her feet were a black mess.
As she watched the dirt melt off her shins and ankles under the water she thought of the three sisters and their perpetual suffering. Lucas had called them the Furies, and no name could have suited them better. She vaguely recalled hearing Hergie saying the word at some point, but for the life of her, she couldn’t remember what story they were in. For some reason Helen was picturing armor and togas, but she couldn’t be sure.
She picked up a pumice stone and rubbed off every last speck of dirt before shutting off the taps. Afterward, she stayed in the steam to put on sweet-smelling lotion, letting it soak in, obliterating every last trace of Lucas. When she finally tumbled into bed, still wrapped in a damp towel, the sun was long up.
Helen was walking through the dry lands, hearing the dead grass crackle with each step she took. Little clouds of dust puffed up around her bare feet and clung to the moisture running down her legs, as if the dirt she walked on was so desperate for water it was trying to jump up off the ground to drink her sweat. Even the air was gritty. There were no insects buzzing around in the scrub, no animals of any kind. The sky was blazingly bright with a tinny blue light, but there was no sun. There was no wind and no clouds—just a rocky, blasted landscape as far as Helen could see. Her heart told her that somewhere close there was a river, so she walked and walked and walked.
Helen woke a few hours later with heavy limbs, a headache, and dirty feet. She flopped out of bed, rinsed off the increasingly familiar nocturnal grime, and threw on a sundress. Then she sat down at her computer to look up the Furies.
The first website she clicked on gave her chills. As soon as she opened it she saw a simple line drawing on the side of a pot. It was a perfect depiction of the three horrors that had been haunting her for days. As she read the text under the illustration it gave a nearly exact physical description of her sobbing sisters, but the rest confused her. In classical Greek mythology there were threeErinyes, or Furies, and they wept blood just as they did in Helen’s visions. But according to her research, the Furies’ job was to pursue and punish evildoers. They were the physical manifestation of the anger of the dead. Helen knew she wasn’t perfect, but she had never done anything really wrong, certainly not anything that would have earned her a visit from three mythological figures of vengeance.
As she read on, she learned that the Furies first appeared in theOresteia, a cycle of plays by Aeschylus. After two solid hours of untangling what had to have been the first—and bloodiest—soap opera in history, Helen finally got her head around the plot.
The gist of it was that this poor kid named Orestes was forced to kill his mother because his mother had killed his father, Agamemnon. But the mother killed the father because the father killed their daughter, Orestes’ beloved sister Iphigenia. To make it even more complicated, the father had killed the daughter because that’s what the gods asked for as a sacrifice to make the winds blow so the Greeks could get to Troy to fight the Trojan War. Poor Orestes was bound by the laws of justice to kill his mother, which he did, and forthatsin he got chased halfway across the earth by the Furies until he was nearly insane. The irony was that he never had a choice. Right from the start he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
After Helen got the tragedy straight, she still had no idea how it could relate to her own circumstances. The Furies wanted her to kill Lucas, that was clear, but if she did would they then chaseherfor having committed murder? It seemed to her that the Furies had no idea what justice was if they both demanded you commit murder and then punished you for doing it. It was a vicious cycle that didn’t seem to have any end, and Helen didn’t know how or why it had all started. The Furies had simply appeared in her life one day as if they’d moved to Nantucket with the Delos family.
She felt a shot of adrenaline rush into her bloodstream. Was it possible that the Deloses were murderers? Something in her didn’t quite buy it. Lucas had had several opportunities to kill her, but he hadn’t. He’d even fought someone else to save her. Helen had no doubt hewantedto kill her, but the fact remained that he’d never even raised his hand to her. If he’d hurt her at all, it was because he had been defending himself from her abuse.
Helen switched off her computer and went downstairs to look for her dad. When she couldn’t find him she went out to the car and grabbed her cell phone off the passenger seat. Jerry had left her a text saying that he was still at Kate’s. Helen looked at the time—it was 3:00 p.m. What could he possibly still be doing? A fantastic, although slightly nauseating, idea occurred to Helen.
It would make sense for the two of them to hook up, she reasoned. They made each other laugh, they worked well together, and they obviously cared about each other. Kate was a few years younger and could probably get anyguyshe wanted, but Helen didn’t think she’d ever find a bettermanthan her father.And Jerry definitely deserved a fresh start. He’d been treated horribly by Helen’s mother and he’d never gotten over her, which ticked Helen off to no end.
She rubbed the charm on her necklace. For the hundredth time she considered taking the wretched thing off, but she knew she wouldn’t. Every time she’d tried to go without wearing it she obsessed over it, unable to stop picturing it in her head. Eventually, she’d give in and put it back on in order to regain some mental peace and quiet. She realized that this probably meant she had some serious mommy issues, but compared to all the other things that were wrong with her, that was the least of her problems. An image of Lucas’s face hovering over hers in the dark, his eyes scrunched tight, popped into her head. She had to think up a task to distract herself before she started throwing things, so she decided to go grocery shopping.
Helen’s official term as kitchen slave—a system of alternating weeks that had started as soon as she was old enough to cook—began on Sunday morning, but there was nothing in the house for them to eat that night. She made a list, took the housekeeping cash out of the cookie-less cookie jar, and drove Kate’s car to the market. In the parking lot she saw a gigantic luxury SUV and shook her head disapprovingly at it. There were a lot of disgustingly rich people on the island who drove vehicles that were too big for the old cobblestone streets, but this SUV was especially annoying for some reason. It was a hybrid, so she couldn’t really get too wound up about the environment, but she felt herself getting irritated, anyway.
Helen pulled a shopping cart out of the stand and wheeled it into the store. As she waved at a few kids from school who worked at the registers, she started to hear the Furies whispering. She debated running out... but everyone at school already thought she was crazy. If she ran out of the grocery store now like she had seen a ghost, there would be even more gossip.
She made herself push the cart on, keeping her head down to avoid seeing the Furies—but there was nothing she could do to block out their voices. She would just have to move fast and get it over with as quickly as possible. She allowed herself a moment of self-pity for the injustice of her situation. She didn’t deserve to be haunted like this. It wasn’t fair. Helen walked briskly through the store, picking only the few things she would need to get through a day or two of cooking. Her frantic thoughts were interrupted by voices, real voices, coming from the next aisle over.
“She shouldn’t be here,” said a young but strangely seri-ous voice. Helen guessed it was Cassandra’s.
“I know,” said a male voice, possibly Jason’s? “We have to find a way to get to her soon. I don’t think Luke can take it much longer.”
