Had Agnes even a dash of Heather’s temperament, the corporate restructuring might have gone more smoothly. Perhaps the episode wouldn’t have marked her so; maybe she wouldn’t now find herself overwhelmed by lassitude.
‘You’re changing already,’ Heather mumbles, sponging her lips with a gleaming hand. ‘You’re learning not to worry so much.’
The trust Agnes was coming to feel for her fellow guest is shaken. Heather leans forward. From her neck, a brackish smell, mud and chlorine. Outside, visibility is next to none; it’s a chaos of water and forest and air, all jumbled together in the storm.
‘Now you’re ready for the end of the world,’ the young woman says gravely.
Increasingly powerful rain pummels the windows with the fury of disoriented birds. Heather’s bizarre eyes, twin sloughs on the hinterland of her face, do not blink.
Agnes’s heart leaps.
Across from her, a hearty clanging laugh runs off its rails.
‘You should see yourself. You’re a nervous wreck!’
Agnes hesitates a moment, then lets a relieved laugh escape her lips. The tension in her shoulders falls away. Tonight, no matter what apocalyptic jokes and dreams of aquatic peril visit her, she wants to believe in her power to throw off not just this burden weighing down her shoulders but sensation altogether. She finishes her drink in one swig.
‘Let’s go to your room,’ says Heather, waving a second bottle of red.
The rain soaks them so swiftly and fully that, once inside Agnes’s cabin, they have no choice but to strip off their clothes and put on robes. The cloth clings to their skin. The humidity is inescapable. Little streams of water drip from their hair and down their backs. Inside, even the walls seem to sweat.
It might be the late hour or the intimate surroundings or fatigue, but Heather’s irrepressible joy seems to have ebbed. She sits with Agnes on the floor. They drink their wine in silence. Outside, the rain keeps hammering down and the wind makes off with anything not firmly rooted to the ground.
‘You look so sweet. I can hardly imagine you laying off all those people.’
The words come as Agnes is approaching total relaxation. But at the slightest mention of her work, she feels her fist clench and unclench, clench and unclench. It’s as if her rebellious nervous system were performing her therapist’s relaxation exercises, against her will. She closes her eyes. Her heartbeats can be felt in every part of her body, all the way down to the tips of her toes.
‘You need something to take your mind off it,’ says Heather, coming over.
Soon Agnes feels the faint touch of two wet lips on her skin, just in front of her ear. She starts, tenses up. But she lets Heather’s hand slide across her stomach, into the folds of her robe, and come to rest on her thigh. The young woman kisses Agnes up and down her throat and jaw, then slowly works her way to her mouth. She tastes of alcohol and seaweed. Agnes’s breathing quickens. Despite herself she feels her shoulders fall back and her chest rise up, untensed and weightless.
Heather straddles her thighs and holds them down in place, spreads the wings of Agnes’s robe and runs her tongue along her breasts.
‘Stop … Stop…’ Agnes mumbles weakly.
Heather doesn’t seem to hear, and presses her hand between Agnes’s legs. ‘You’re already wet.’
Those eyes stare at her ravenously: two voids ready to swallow her whole. Heather doesn’t stop; her fingers glide along Agnes’s wet lips, seeking a way in, though she must be able to read the nausea on her face, sense the refusal in legs suddenly leaden. Heather seems oblivious to Agnes’s unwillingness, or sees it as a challenge, like everything else. She smiles as she takes off her robe, and her eyes cloud over as her pubis inches toward Agnes’s. She kisses her harder and harder, cinches her like a harness, urges her on with words that are drowned out by the storm.
Agnes is petrified, stilled by a deep torpor. She feels Heather not just leaning over her body but entering her veins, flowing through her bloodstream. She has no strength left to fight off this unchecked desire swallowing her whole. Soon not one particle of her will be left unpenetrated by this moist, avid being whose sweat and saliva and other fluids are spreading all over and inside her body.
When Heather orders her to lie down, Agnes complies despite herself. Her mind is already elsewhere, swept away by the rain hammering the cabin windows. A grey curtain obstructs the view; a dark aurora borealis descends over Shivering Heights.
The cracks in the ceiling drink in their moans.
Agnes wakes to the weight of damp sheets on numb limbs. Her tongue seems stuck to the roof of her mouth, and when she tries to get up a wave of nausea hits.
She gropes the floor around her and finds she is indeed alone.
The room spins. Despite her heavy head, unresponsive legs, and flesh that seems somehow drained of blood, she manages to get to her feet. A single purpose drives her: find her keys and get out of this place. Flee to the Border, and beyond. This lucid thought is not enough to chase the knot from her stomach, the nausea that has her reeling. The keys aren’t on her dresser, or in her suitcase. Her coat pockets are empty.
Agnes vomits.
She flings on her clothes and opens the cabin door.
The flood surges in like the sea breaching a sinking ship. Agnes stands knee-deep in cold, dark, slimy water.
Outside, the storm has died down, the rain calmed. A grey sun crouches on the horizon. Somewhere in the forest a raven caws, but its sharp cry only emphasizes the deafening force of the torrent, the incessant raindrops on the floodwaters. The spa is underwater; the cedar cabins nearest the river submerged. Agnes fights her way to the welcome centre, which appears to float on the water’s surface.
While she wades over, a cramp cleaves her stomach in two. Agnes can see that her car is no longer in the lot. She fights through water strewn with flotsam, surrounded by chips of wood and other debris swept up by the flood. She has lost all sense of which way to go.
Then Agnes sees Heather showering in the rain. She’s naked, dripping dark streams, her body offered up to the elements. Her legs are stuck in mud as the rain cleanses her of sludge. She leans into the water to splash her arms, shoulders, and stomach. Her voice rises as she turns around; it is by turns husky and reedy. She is singing a tune whose finer points are lost to the wind.
A broad smile twists Heather’s lips when she sees Agnes. She slowly waves a hand, illuminated in a spectral white that makes it seem almost transparent. Heather holds up a shiny object, then tosses it into the water.
A set of keys.
Agnes sinks into panic, spins around in its eddy. As she is swept back toward the spa, toward the most heavily flooded areas, she feels her heart rising in her throat. She is running, then swimming, until she once again reaches the river whose current, fed by torrential rains, has grown more powerful than ever.
The surge sweeps her away.
She is surrounded by the river’s detritus, tonnes of dead leaves and branches, chaise longues and fence posts – all things accustomed, like Agnes, to resting on terra firma. Sharp objects slash her thighs, pieces of wood smack her from all sides, but only one thing matters. Get away. Get far away from Heather’s voracious eyes, far away from the spa and the office, far away from all of it.
The waves upend Agnes and spin her around. Then, while raindrops harrow her stomach, while the world is swept away as the waters form a mighty river, a lake, an inland sea, her eardrums are pierced by the long shrieks that