Tidepool

by Nicole Willson

  And then the girl began to drink in front of him, even though she knew he didn’t approve. Winslow partook of spirits on special occasions only and expected his children to abide by his rules while living under his roof.

  But he’d come home from work or from a meeting and find Sorrow in the parlor, clutching a snifter of brandy or a glass of port. He was appalled, but not enough to offer a reproach or snatch the drink from her. He knew that sometimes, alcohol had a way of loosening the tongue. And if intoxication was what it might take to make Sorrow open up to him at long last, he would allow it.

  One afternoon he came home to be greeted at the front door by a white-faced Nellie. Miss Hamilton had started yelling at someone, but when Nellie ran to investigate, she found the drunken girl raving at an empty room.

  His daughter’s shouts still sounded from the parlor. She upbraided someone who wasn’t there about stopping her and Charlie from leaving. He concealed himself behind a door, hoping to hear anything at all about his son or the Sherman boy.

  Where were they? And wherever they were, who had prevented them from coming home? The girl’s drunken ranting revealed no useful information.

  The Sherman family had hired their own team of detectives to send to Tidepool. And the report those two detectives brought back cleared up nothing; indeed, the news confounded the Shermans and Winslow even more.

  There was no Tidepool anymore, they’d said.

  Arthur Sherman, a heavyset and red-faced man, shook his head as he and Winslow spoke over a late lunch at Miller Brothers.

  “Said there was nothing but planks of wood and water where the place should have been. Lots of driftwood floating around, and the whole area smelled of death. The only thing still standing was this huge house up at the top of a hill, but it was abandoned. The rest of the town was underwater. Gone.” Arthur stared into his plate of oysters, refusing to meet Winslow’s eye.

  “A hurricane, then,” Winslow said.

  Arthur shrugged, still not looking up at Winslow. “Must have been.”

  But why would the girl not simply have told him about a storm? Had something else happened to her in Tidepool?

  The Shermans had little to say to Winslow after that. He sensed that they blamed him for Charlie’s disappearance, even though he too was missing a son who he suspected he would never see again.

  This all struck Winslow as enormously unfair. His son had disappeared on a routine business visit. And Winslow had told the girl not to go there, hadn’t he? She’d defied him, and the Sherman boy had volunteered to travel to that place to retrieve her. He himself had done nothing wrong.

  Or had he? He’d study his rapidly-aging face in the mirror some nights, wondering what, if anything, he could have done differently in the lead-up to these events. If he could have changed things.

  If he had told Hal not to bother with Tidepool.

  If he had guessed what Sorrow planned to do and stopped her.

  If he had pursued her to that place himself instead of allowing Charlie Sherman to go.

  If he had ever developed the kind of closeness with his daughter that might have made her listen when he warned her to stay home.

  If he had never heard of that town in the first place.

  If. He pressed his forehead against the cold mirror. If.

  That word lodged itself into his brain and wouldn’t let go. He wondered if joining his daughter in drink might banish it for even a moment.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  MANIA

  One night he came home from the office to find Sorrow in another drunken rage. As always, she vented her fury on someone Winslow couldn’t see, and when she was spent, she collapsed into the blue velvet armchair and sobbed, sounding more angry than sad.

  He stepped out from behind the parlor door and moved slowly towards her, wondering if he should put a hand on her shoulder.

  She broke off crying when she heard his approach. Her facial scar looked even redder and angrier as she stared up at him with bloodshot, watery eyes.

  “What do you want, Father?” The cloying scent of port hung heavy on her breath. Even in the gloom of the parlor, her teeth were clearly stained purple from the drink.

  Her ice cold tone stung him, though he suspected he deserved it. He had allowed Hal to look after the girl for most of her life; he shouldn’t have been surprised—or hurt—that she viewed him as little more than a stranger now.

  “This has gone on for far too long, Sorrow. They aren’t coming back, are they? Hal and Charlie? Or those detectives?”

  She choked back another sob.

  “No. They’re gone.”

  His stomach clenched and his pulse sped up. He had known this was the truth, had known it since the day the girl came home a mere shell of her former self. But hearing it still froze his blood, tore at his heart.

  “What on earth happened to them?”

  She sighed, swiping a hand over the back of her eyes.

  “Tidepool happened to them, Father.”

  “But how? I don’t understand.”

  “And you never will,” she shot back.

  He could not let that rest. He leaned over her, spoke gently to her.

  “Perhaps I have not always been the father to you that I should have been.” She let out a moist snort at that. “But I fear that you and I are all that is left of our family, and we have only each other to rely on now. I beg you: Tell me what happened.”

  But she wouldn’t, no matter how much he raised his voice or pressed her.

  There had to have been a hurricane; it was the only possible explanation for the devastation Arthur Sherman’s detectives had found. Perhaps Hal and Charlie and the other men had insisted that Sorrow flee Tidepool ahead of the storm, and she was wracked with guilt that she’d survived while they were lost.

  Winslow lay awake all that night, trying to make himself believe this version of events.

  He no longer knew what to do with Sorrow, or about her. He considered shipping her off for a stay at Spring Grove Hospital until her mania subsided and she was more like herself again. The thought of sending away his only remaining child chilled him, but he was helpless in the face of her torment. The lively girl he remembered had stolen away from their home to go to Tidepool, but hadn’t returned. She was still somewhere that he simply couldn’t reach.

  Tidepool happened to her, he thought.

  And then he passed the study one morning and found her sitting at his desk, bent over a sheet of paper, writing furiously. Several other sheets of paper covered in loopy handwriting sat stacked next to her writing hand.

  As she was neither drinking nor screaming, he backed away and left her to her work.

  She continued to write as the days progressed, and Winslow thought that perhaps his daughter was slowly coming back to herself, emerging at last from the place where she’d been ever since she’d escaped that hellhole on the shore. The color began to return to her face. She ate more. He was able to hold conversations with her about family friends he had seen recently. She sometimes made it through an entire day without becoming inebriated, and she no longer shattered the night with her screaming nightmares. Even her frightful scar seemed to heal a little faster.

  But he still couldn’t ask her about Tidepool, or she would grow instantly tense and distant again.

  One afternoon, he came home lugging a heavy parcel. He found his daughter in the study, intent on her writing work as usual.

  “I bought this for you,” he told Sorrow, setting the item down.

  She narrowed her eyes. “What’s that?”

  “A typewriter. I thought that perhaps it might make it easier for you to write such great volumes of material. And there’s paper for it.”

  She eyed the contraption suspiciously, and he feared that he might have put her off the one thing that seemed to be helping her.

  But later that night, he heard the clacking sounds of the machine. They were slow and tentative at first, but as his daughter learned about the mac
hine and figured out a system, the sounds became more rapid and rhythmic.

  And they did not stop. Whatever it was she was writing, it was voluminous indeed.

  She wrote so much he worried she’d replaced one mania for another.

  One afternoon, Nellie answered a knock at the door and ushered in Miss Edith Short, a friend of Sorrow’s from Goucher College. Miss Short, a plump and lively redhead wrapped in peach silk and lace, got straight to the point.

  “Where on earth is Sorrow, Mr. Hamilton?”

  “She … she’s writing, Miss Short.”

  Miss Short tossed her head. “She has not responded to any of my attempts to contact her. I feared she was ill.”

  “She has been through some extremely difficult times. As have I. Her brother is still missing, as is one of my employees.”

  Her brown eyes widened. “I had heard. And I’m very sorry. But I simply won’t be put off any longer, Mr. Hamilton. I must see her.”

  “Miss Short, I am not sure that—”

  But Miss Short did not wait for Winslow’s permission. She bustled up the stairs to Sorrow’s room.

  “Sorrow Hamilton. This has gone on entirely long enough,” she called as she moved up the steps. “You are coming to lunch with me right this instant. I warn you, I absolutely will not accept a refusal. I shall be quite offended if you snub me.”

  Winslow doubted the young woman would have any more luck reaching Sorrow than he had, but the sound of the typewriter stopped as Miss Short’s insistent chatter continued.

  “Your poor face!” he overheard. “Oh, oh my dear! Whatever happened?”

  He looked on in disbelief several minutes later as Miss Short swept Sorrow down the stairs. Sorrow looked sheepish, but she did not protest as Miss Short steered her out the front door.

  Winslow shook his head and sat down heavily in the living room, putting his head in his hands with a sigh. Perhaps all he had needed to do to help his daughter was to call on Sorrow’s old friends. Hal would have known that.

  But no more than an hour had passed before the front door banged open and footsteps ran across the wooden floor.

  Dear God. What is it now? He put down the copy of the Sun he’d been reading as Miss Short hurried into the foyer.

  “Sorrow? Sorrow! I am sorry. But it was only the Patapsco! We must have walked by it hundreds of times.” The young woman sounded desperate now, her usual determined tone gone.

  But Sorrow’s running steps shook the staircase, and a few seconds later, her bedroom door slammed.

  Miss Edith Short took her leave soon afterwards, looking quite embarrassed.

  “I am very sorry, Mr. Hamilton. I had thought a walk by the river would do her some good,” she murmured as she left.

  Sorrow did not emerge from her bedroom for hours, and when she did, she went straight to the bar in the dining room and poured herself a snifter of brandy. Winslow followed her.

  “What happened today, Sorrow?”

  She scowled and looked away from him as she drank.

  “Edith took me too close to the water.”

  He tilted his head. “But you’ve always liked the water.”

  She shivered at his words, wrapping her free arm around herself.

  “Not anymore.”

  And that was all she would give him. Sorrow drank herself into a stupor in the armchair in the parlor.

  And Winslow had an idea.

  He stole into the study and found the pile of typewritten papers his daughter had produced. He felt a pang of guilt as he turned on a lamp and settled in to read. But then again, she had never told him he couldn’t look at it.

  She’d mangled the spelling of some words and scratched those out, writing over them with pen. The awkward, messy corrections made the manuscript something of a challenge to read, but Winslow, believing the pages might be the key to understanding what had happened to her and to his son, persevered.

  But when he was finished, he backed away from his daughter’s pile of pages as though they contained a nest of hissing cobras. If only he had stayed away, left well enough alone. He wasn’t sure which prospect alarmed him more: that his daughter had gone completely mad, or that she was still quite sane.

  The tale she told in those pages, of frightening widows who sacrificed people to the ocean, of ancient sea creatures who rose from the water to kill, and of the innocents who traveled to Tidepool and found themselves entangled in this ungodly ritual, sounded like the stuff of the penny dreadfuls his English uncle had given him to read as a child.

  He took several deep breaths, calming himself.

  The girl was simply using fiction in an attempt to make sense of whatever misfortunes had befallen her and the others in Tidepool. Those sea monsters and that terrifying woman represented the storm that had destroyed an entire town and taken Sorrow’s brother and her friend away from her.

  There could be no other explanation.

  He did not tell his daughter that he had read her work.

  Little by little and bit by bit, Sorrow came back to herself, or at least a version of herself that somewhat resembled the lively young woman who had stolen out of the house before dawn to visit that doomed town on the shore.

  She would never have the easy familiarity with him that she had with Hal, and her eyes never again held the warmth and cheer they had before she had run away to that place. But she appeared aware that her father was now her closest relative in life and that they needed to look out for each other just as Hal had once looked out for her.

  Sorrow began selling pieces of fiction to the Baltimore Sun and other markets. Winslow no longer pushed her to find a husband. He didn’t feel that marriage was necessarily appropriate for her while she was still in a somewhat fragile mental state.

  And he rather liked having her around. He admitted to himself that he would be dreadfully lonely if she met some fellow and moved out.

  When Winslow developed a hacking cough in 1919, Sorrow was quite alarmed.

  “Father? Are you coughing up blood?”

  He was, but he would not tell her. He had no wish to frighten her.

  “I fear I’ve caught Nellie’s summer cold, my dear Sally. If I may call you that, now.”

  Something flickered across her face; Winslow was unsure if it was a smile. But she did not argue with him, and so he continued.

  “Just keep your distance for now, and wash your hands. I’ll be fine.”

  The cough did not go away. Sorrow, who wrote steadily during the daytime, stopped typing every time she heard him hacking and gasping for breath in between coughs.

  One night, after an especially alarming coughing fit, she approached him.

  “Perhaps a change of scenery would do us some good, Father.”

  Winslow drew a deep breath into his aching chest. “How so?”

  “We could go out West. The air there is much drier. Cleaner. It would do your lungs good.”

  He suspected this was not a random idea that had just crossed her mind. “And how are we to earn money out West?”

  “How much would we need?” she replied. “We could find a nice small town and live for much less than we do here. You could rest. I can write anywhere.”

  He sighed. “Did you have a place in mind?”

  “Arizona. Tucson, to be specific.”

  “Arizona? My word, Sally.”

  He wasn’t sure he’d be able to survive a lengthy journey to a place he’d never heard of and had no desire to go to. And he had been under the impression that Arizona was mostly desert. Why would the girl want to go there?

  “But Father, you aren’t getting better here. You still sound dreadful. The drier air out there could do you a world of good. It’s supposed to be wonderful for lung conditions.”

  He rested his head against the back of his lounge chair.

  “I shall think about it.”

  “Please do.” She left him to rest.

  He could think of nothing he would rather do less than uproot his entire li
fe and move almost all the way across the country, but he felt as if he had just gotten his daughter back. Indeed, he could say he had a truly amicable relationship with her for the first time in both their lives. Was she perhaps right? Would such a change do both of them good?

  Later, after a lengthy nap, he found his atlas of the United States and paged through it until he located Arizona, and Tucson.

  As he studied the map, he noticed something. Tucson didn’t sit near any major bodies of water.

  Winslow closed the atlas and thought again of Sorrow’s stories of ocean monsters.

  It couldn’t be true.

  It just couldn’t.

  Chapter Thirty

  SORROW WALKER

  Quentin Ramsay

  Afterwards

  * * *

  Quentin wondered for years if Sorrow Hamilton had made it out of Tidepool. He believed he had sent her on her way well before the ancient ones began to rise from the ocean. But he’d seen that detective go running off after her, and the man was certainly foolish enough to try to stop her, and stupid enough to refuse to see what was happening around him.

  He’d often find himself thinking about her reddish-blonde hair, the cheer in her blue eyes when he’d first met her on the beach and she’d asked him about Lucy’s jars of water. He knew she wasn’t making fun of him; she’d spoken kindly to him, as if he were any other resident of the town.

  He should have made her leave Tidepool right then, before anything could happen to her. Why hadn’t he?

  He asked Ada if she had any way of finding out the girl’s fate from the ones in the water. Had Sorrow been killed and dragged into the ocean to feed the appetites of the things that lived there?

  “Honestly, Quentin. Are you still mooning over that girl?” Ada had little patience for the subject of Sorrow Hamilton. “I have no way of knowing what became of her, and even if I could find out, what possible difference could it make? You’d have never known what to do with her if you’d caught her. Forget about her.”