57 pages • 1 hour read
Mary Downing HahnDeep and Dark and Dangerous
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
In the time following Dulcie and Emma’s return to New York, Claire spends even more time gardening than usual, working until her knuckles are bleeding. She is in a foul mood for weeks and avoids giving Ali babysitting advice, talking about the lake, or even taking her shopping for summer clothes. She also refuses to drive Ali to the lake, stubbornly insisting Dulcie can pick her up and take her, and she rejects Pete’s idea to spend a few days at the lake, claiming the plants will wither without her attention. This behavior puts a strain on Claire’s relationships with her husband and daughter, resulting in a nasty argument with Ali.
The day of Ali’s departure, Claire stays in bed, blaming an intense migraine for not seeing her daughter off. They said their farewells in the bedroom, and Claire tells Ali she can leave the lake at any time, adding, “if anything scares you or worries you, call us” (20). Ali promises everything will be fine, but her mother, unwilling to be reassured, says, “You don’t know the terrible things that can happen, how quickly one’s life can change” (20). This comment confuses Ali, but Claire does not elaborate. Ali promises to be careful and leaves.
After a long drive, they arrive at the cottage. Inside, the old appliances have been replaced with newer ones, and the house is clean, bright, and welcoming. However, many things from Dulcie’s childhood remain in the house. Emma and Dulcie have rooms downstairs, and Ali is assigned the room that Claire and Dulcie shared as children. Ali asks why they never went back to the cottage, wondering if something happened to stop them. Dulcie mocks Claire’s anxiety, saying everything scares her. While exploring, Emma finds a teddy bear that used to belong to Claire, which reminds her of a character, Mr. Bear, from the Lonely Doll series. Ali takes another tattered bear, which belonged to Dulcie. It is Rufus M., named after the youngest child in the Moffat family from The Moffats, a children’s book series by Eleanor Estes.
Chapter 5 Summary
Emma sits with Ali as she packs her things away and asks if the reason Claire never saw them off was because Ali is upset with her mother. Saying no, Ali explains that it was because Claire was feeling unwell. Emma, pensive, notes that Claire does not like the lake. Ali tries to help Emma understand that her mother fears water, recalling that even when Ali was a young child her mother stayed out of the water during Ali’s swimming classes. Emma thinks this is because Claire does not want to drown and have “her bones come out” (25). Emma says, “When we die [our bones] come out, and then we’re ghosts” (26). She got the idea from her mother’s drawings of skeletons. Ali tells her, “There’s no such thing as ghosts” (26). Emma says she has seen a miserable and lonely ghost in her dreams who can’t go home because she is “deep, deep, deep in the water” and no one can find her (26). This reminds her of her own dreams of “T.”
They go downstairs to a spaghetti dinner with Dulcie followed by roasted marshmallows and hot chocolate by the fireplace. Shortly after, Dulcie and Ali put Emma and Mr. Bear to bed. Again, Emma wants to read The Lonely Doll, and Dulcie obliges, but the darkness outside the window soon distracts Emma—she misses the lights, cars, and activity of New York City life. She asks them to pull the shades to avoid seeing the dark and any ghosts outside seeing her. Ali also notices the intensity and quietness of the darkness, which is only lightly disturbed by the sounds of the lake and the wind in the trees. Eventually, Emma drifts off, and Ali and Dulcie go to their rooms. Ali reads a little but soon closes her eyes to sleep. Bright moonlight and night sounds make sleep difficult, and Ali’s thoughts drift to her mother’s and aunt’s lives when they shared the bed she now sleeps in. She wishes Rufus M. could tell her, but like the adults, he is excellent at keeping secrets.
Chapter 6 Summary
The cottagers awaken to find the heavy rain from the night has continued into the morning. Following breakfast, they go to a building by the dock that Dulcie is using as her art studio. There, Dulcie shares the theme of her new work with Ali, telling her it is “a series based on the lake and its moods” (32). She hopes to capture the lake as it captures her, and perhaps in doing so “free” herself. Emma has artwork of her own to share and produces a folder of colorful images depicting happy stick figures, birds, flowers, and other vibrant elements of nature. Dulcie gives each girl an easel and a canvas, and the three of them spend the afternoon painting the rainy scenery. Emma’s painting includes a “skeleton ghost” floating in the water. She says she added it because of the bones in the water that come out and chase her in her dreams. This statement disturbs both Ali and Dulcie. Dulcie asks her to draw something like her other, cheerier artworks, but Emma is uninterested.
Later that afternoon, back in the cottage, Dulcie tells Ali she worries being without children her own age has had a negative effect on Emma. They also talk about Dulcie and Claire’s upbringing, and Dulcie is again critical of her sister, believing she plays up her sickness for attention. Ali, surprised by her aunt’s unkindness, defends her mother. Dulcie apologizes for overstepping.
In the night, Dulcie and Ali are awoken by Emma’s screams. Crying, Emma says, “The bones came out of the lake” (36), and she is terrified they are going to get her. Ali, who was also having a nightmare about “T,” begins to feel like there is someone else with them, but looking around her she sees nothing. Dulcie soothes Emma, taking her to sleep in her room, and Ali goes back to hers. She struggles to fall asleep as Emma’s words echo in her mind. Terrified, she pictures skeletons coming out of the water towards the cottage. This fear is made worse by the creaking of the house and the sounds of the wind outside.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Although she does not verbalize her feelings, Claire’s change in behavior indicates she is upset about the decision to allow Ali to spend the summer at the cottage. She is toiling in the garden obsessively, to the point of self-harm. This behavior, along with the frequent headaches and emotional sensitivity, point to her having challenges with her physical and mental health. Ali registers her mother’s behavior as avoidance of her, but it is perhaps equally an avoidance of confronting this unknown experience from the past. If she doesn’t discuss Gull Cottage, perhaps she can avoid thinking about the place altogether. When Claire finally gives her daughter advice, it is more warning than reassurance, foreshadowing danger in Ali’s future.
On her way out, Ali feels guilty about her impact on her mother’s condition, which shows she is compassionate and capable of introspection. These same traits make her quick to defend her mother from her aunt’s mocking, even though she often feels frustrated with her mother as well.
At Gull Cottage, Dulcie finds that numerous items from her childhood remain. Considering the family had not visited in decades, this is an ominous sign—one that Ali perceptively notes. Whatever occurred at the lake in that final summer was likely so significant that they made the choice to abandon their things. Two of the remaining items are teddy bears, the state of which indicates Claire and Dulcie’s opposing personalities—one bear, Claire’s, is in excellent condition, while the other, Dulcie’s, is tattered.
Emma also displays keen skills in emotional intuition in these chapters. She deduces that Claire was upset when they left and wonders if she may be to blame. In explaining Claire’s fear, Hahn opens an avenue for readers to better understand Claire’s history with water. This bit of exposition adds credibility to the theory that there was an event that traumatized her and created this negative association with water. As a four-year-old, Emma has a limited understanding of why Claire would feel this way and attributes her aunt’s feelings to a fear of death. This perception provides insight into her own understanding of death. The line, “bones come out” draws on the “creepy child” horror trope (25), which has a similar kind of unsettling effect as the line “I see dead people” from the film The Sixth Sense. She is also having nightmarish dreams that are like Ali’s. The overlap of this girl seeming to haunt both their dreams suggests the figure has a deeper meaning.
Ali’s awareness of the cottage at night, and the strangeness of life outside the city, adds to the growing sense of fear in the story. Unusual sounds in the dark can conjure monsters in the imagination. For Emma, the darkness contains ghosts that could peep through her window. Emma’s casualness is particularly creepy; she seems nonchalant about possibly seeing ghosts.
Chapter 6 expands the physical setting for action at the Gull Cottage property by introducing Dulcie’s converted art studio. In talking about her art, Dulcie adds another breadcrumb on the trail towards understanding the mystery of the sisters’ childhood at the cottage. She also alludes to a need to “free” herself from the lake, which suggests a possible haunting of her own. This is a sign that Dulcie also fixates on water, although her fixation is not as obviously negative as Claire’s. This comment builds more curiosity about the sisters’ relationship with water while also stoking a sense of foreboding about the lake.
Emma’s latest artwork is unsettling because it is a departure from the themes some of her earlier work. By painting the skeleton that chases her in her dreams, she expresses to her cousin and mother the nature of her nightmares and gives them context for understanding her nighttime screaming in the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 6. Ironically, Ali wakes from her own nightmare to soothe Emma from hers, only to end up feeling even more afraid herself. To add to the sense of terror, Hahn uses the sounds of the house and the wind to create the feeling that there could really be someone or something moving around in the night.
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By Mary Downing Hahn
