A tropical island full of secrets. Two Victorian ghosts, trapped for eternity. And a seventeen-year-old girl determined not to be next.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Nicole Lesperance’s The Depths, which is out now.
Eulalie Island should be a paradise, but to Addie Spencer, it’s more like a prison.
Forced to tag along to the remote island on her mother’s honeymoon, Addie isn’t thrilled about being trapped there for two weeks. The island is stunning, with its secluded beaches and forests full of white flowers. But there’s something eerie and unsettling about the place.
After Addie meets an enigmatic boy on the beach, all the flowers start turning pink. The island loves you, he tells her. But she can’t stop sleepwalking at night, the birds keep calling her name, and there’s a strange little girl in the woods who wants to play hide-and-seek. When Addie learns about two sisters who died on the island centuries ago, she wonders if there’s more to this place, things only she can see.
Beneath its gorgeous surface, Eulalie Island is hiding dark, tangled secrets. And if Addie doesn’t unravel them soon, the island might never let her go.
Leaving Billy outside, I step into the ruins. The temperature drops, and the musty air makes me cough. As I wipe the bloody flecks onto the leg of my shorts, a vine slithers out from a crack in the foundation, and I stomp on it, crushing the leaves and stem before it can blossom. It’s unbearable that those flowers are growing from my blood. The island is taking pieces of me and making them part of itself. As gorgeous as it is, I don’t want to be part of this island.
“You okay in there?” asks Billy.
“Fine.” I grind my heel into the vine and keep moving.
Lenora’s harp lies in the same position, and I feel slightly guilty for having broken its last surviving string. There’s nothing else in the room, but Lenora’s presence lingers, just barely perceptible, like the traces of someone’s perfume.
It’s hard to get the half-rotten harp upright with a tree growing through its center, but I manage to get it diagonal, and then I sit on the ground and slide my shoulder underneath. Time and nature have taken their toll on the instrument, but it’s somehow even more lovely with the real vines intertwined with the carved roses. I’ve got no idea how to actually play it, so I’ll just pretend. As my fingers drag across the invisible strings, I feel a shuddery vibration go through the harp, through the ground, through the walls and the trees and even the humid air around me.
“Whoa,” whispers Billy outside.
Aa-dee-dee-dee, call the birds, like they want me to play again, but something about it feels wrong. Like I’m summoning things I shouldn’t be.
“What’s that near the bottom of the harp?” Billy pokes his head through a former window. “It looks like writing.”
Gently, I set the instrument down, then find a stick to clear away the leaves and dirt. Twining among the roses is a line of hand-carved text.
J, may this music bring me your love.
I read the words out loud.
“Nope, I don’t like that,” says Billy.
“J has to be Jonah, right?” I say.
“I hope you didn’t just summon his ghost by pretend-playing the harp,” says Billy.
It’s obviously a joke, but I grit my teeth because I just had the same thought about summoning.
My chest clenches up suddenly, and then I’m coughing so hard I have to hold on to the mossy black wall of Lenora’s house to stay upright.
In seconds, vines sprout from the earth, spiraling in a semicircle around me, trapping me against the wall, and all I can manage is a half-hearted kick to get them away, but more take their place. Still I cough, my lungs on fire and my head spinning, as tendrils slither like snakes over my arms, my shoulders. Flowers bud and blossom, their petals turning from white to pink. They yawn open like they’re breathing me in, like they want to eat me, and I’m coughing too hard to pull them off.
Billy rushes into the room and stomps a vine with his bare foot, then yelps in pain. He starts ripping away the plants, whose flowers are deepening to red, then purple as they spiral higher around me, crowding in closer, closer as I gasp for breath.
“Don’t move,” he says, as if I could do anything else. Finally, I manage to draw in a full breath of air, then another, and I yank the rest of the vines off my torso, my legs, my neck. My gaze snags on something sticking out of a crack in the mossy wall.
“Come on!” Billy pulls me through a path he’s cleared, but I lunge back and shove my hand into the crack. A narrow object tumbles out, and I barely manage to catch it before it falls into the swarming vines. We race out of the house and up the dirt path, not slowing until we’re far from the valley.
“Stop,” I gasp, crouching and breathing as shallowly as possible. I will not cough again. I cannot.
“You’re okay,” says Billy, panting. “Everything’s okay. Look, no more vines.” He’s wide-eyed, his face pale, and if he’s anything like me, his heart is almost beating out of his chest.
“What . . . was that?” I gasp.
“I have no clue,” says Billy. “Hold still.” He pulls something from my hair. A tiny, perfect flower the color of blood. We both stare at it for a long moment, and then he throws it into the bushes.
Aa-dee-dee-dee, trill the birds.
