The White Oak Read Free

now,” she said, as the music of the ghosts surrounded us.
    “We’ve been orphans since mother left,” I said. “But now it’s official.”
    Cora stared intently into the grave. “It feels like we’ve always been on our own,” she said. I squeezed her shoulder and wondered why I wasn’t sad, or angry, or scared—shouldn’t I be? The lonely song of the spirits drifted through the air, but instead of loss I felt a sense of anticipation.



Crossing Asphodel
    When I come to, I’m lying on a black gravel beach. Water pools next to my cheek. I wonder if I can move. Maybe my neck has snapped and I’m paralyzed, or maybe I’m dead. I stare, unblinking, across the sharp gravel. How did I get here? When my head hit the rock, I lost consciousness, so how did I survive the waterfall? How did I make it to the shore? I’m barefoot, soaked to the skin, cut, bruised, and dazed from the impact, but miraculously I’m still alive. I flex my cold, stiff fingers, relieved that I can move.
    This is the underground river Lucas and I heard but never found when we explored the caves. I think back on our adventures; in each cavern we heard rushing water. At times it sounded so loud and so near that we were sure the tunnel would flood at any moment, but we never found the river. It was as though we were crawling through the ever-narrowing twists of a nautilus shell in which the memory of the ocean echoes through the empty chambers.
    “Cora, get up,” I hear the voice whisper. “You must move to higher ground.” I lift my head and try to sit up; pain shoots through my battered, half-frozen body. Groggy and shaken, I try to stand as the voice continues to encourage me. “Cora, stand up,” it whispers. I close my eyes to feel its soothing effect, but the image that appears is Lucas buried alive in the sinkhole. I squeeze my eyes shut tighter as if to banish the sight. He can’t be dead, I tell myself.
    Water spills onto the shore. “Stand up!” The voice is suddenly yelling. I’ve never heard it yell before. “Get up, Cora. Get off the ground. Get away from the river!” I struggle to stand. Every muscle is stiff; movement is painful. When I try to walk, the weight of my numb, unresponsive limbs makes me stumble. The river is rushing by in a torrent.
    “Run!” the voice screams. Alarmed by its panic, I stumble forward as best I can, making my way upstream along the riverbank. “Not that way,” it scolds, “away from the river—get away from the river!” Turning quickly, I make my way inland, as the water splashes over the banks and washes up behind me. “Don’t look back,” the voice warns, “and don’t slow down.” I run carefully across the sharp gravel, trying to minimize the damage to my feet. Up ahead is a wall of rock and mortar about twenty feet high. It looks as if it was built to hold the water back. “Climb the levee,” the voice insists. “You have to get off the floodplain. The water is coming after you.”
    I stumble a bit when I hear this last warning. “What do you the mean, the water is coming after me?” I ask. As if in answer, the dark river curls around my feet and tugs at my ankles in an eerily deliberate way. I run to the levee and start to climb.
    It’s easy for me to scale the levee because it’s built of large boulders that are dry and free of mold. There’s no evidence that the river has ever reached this height, so I wonder why there is a levee at all. When I’ve climbed halfway up, I turn around to get a look at the river. It’s been rising, but as I watch, it suddenly recedes, and the floodplain empties out.
    Thinking the danger is over, I slacken my pace. Then I hear the voice begging, “Quickly, Cora—you must get to the top now or be drowned.” I hear a roar and look back over my shoulder. “Don’t look!” the voice warns, but it’s too late. I am frozen in place and cannot stop staring at the tsunami that has gathered up out of the river and is coming toward me.