Tidepool

by Nicole Willson

  They left the ruins of Tidepool and settled several miles away in Burnham, another coastal town plagued by an uncontrolled rising of the ancient ones. As before, Ada was able to demonstrate to the town’s elders that she could stop the relentless attacks at the cost of an occasional life.

  The town elders didn’t believe her at first, but they accepted her story rather quickly when the bloody deaths in the town ceased. Ada explained to Quentin that the Great War made people more inclined to believe what she told them. She had the power to bargain with death itself, or so it seemed. Sacrificing one person on occasion to ensure that many more lived no longer seemed like the terrible choice it once had.

  The Lords Below sent Ada another daughter to take the place of the late Lucy. Ada, wanting Quentin to get along with his new niece better than he had with the previous one, offered him the chance to name her. Quentin didn’t want to, but Ada insisted, and so he named the creature Sally. If Ada made the connection with Sorrow, she said nothing about it.

  Perhaps because of Quentin’s liking for the name, Sally seemed less threatening to him than Lucy had. She mostly left him alone, which suited him fine.

  They moved to a small town named Copper Beach on the shores of Virginia in the late 1930s so that Ada could quell another rising, and it was there that Quentin found out what had become of Sorrow Hamilton.

  Copper Beach had a bookstore, the first one Quentin had seen since his long-past boyhood. He savored the smell of new books, and he spent hours looking around the place, trying to choose which new world to lose himself in.

  He was on such a mission on the rainy afternoon when he spotted a small gray book with its title and author embossed on the side in black lettering. The book had been written by Sorrow H. Walker.

  He blinked several times. A tiny shiver ran up his spine.

  There couldn’t be that many people out there with that name, could there?

  He slid the book off the shelf and examined it: Tide of Blood, published in 1925. Another chill went through him. He opened the book to see if there was any information about the author inside. And on the end pages of the book, he found it:

  “Sorrow Hamilton Walker grew up in Baltimore before moving to Tucson, Arizona, where she lives with her husband Gabriel and son Henry Charles. This is her first novel.”

  Quentin clutched the book to his chest as if he were embracing his long-lost friend. It took him a moment to recognize the soaring sensation within his body as joy.

  She had escaped Tidepool. She still lived. Was she happy out there in Arizona with her family? He hoped so.

  He carried his treasure to the front register, where the clerk examined the book.

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” the white-haired man said, smiling at Quentin. “Gave me quite a scare. She certainly didn’t leave anything to the imagination.”

  “Has she written anything else?”

  “I believe so,” the clerk said, scratching his forehead. “Her work is a bit hard to find out here. But I could try to track more of it down for you, if you like.”

  “Please do,” Quentin said. “Anything you can find by her.”

  “You like her books, eh?” the clerk said.

  “She … she was my friend.”

  She had been his friend, hadn’t she? Unlike many others in Tidepool and elsewhere throughout his long life, Sorrow hadn’t shooed him away or looked annoyed when he talked to her. She had told him he could call her Sally, and he knew she didn’t like it when others did that. And she had stayed with him when he died the second time.

  Yes. She had been his friend, one of the only ones he’d ever had.

  “You don’t say?” the clerk said, smiling at Quentin.

  “I didn’t know where she was until now. I thought that perhaps she had … died. I was very happy to find this.”

  “Well, I’ll get to work on finding her other books for you, young man. Is there a number I can call to let you know when they’re in?”

  Ada didn’t like the telephone and had never had one installed in the house where they now lived with Sally.

  “No. But I’ll check back here.”

  “Very well then.” The clerk rung up Quentin’s purchase, and Quentin all but ran home. He hurried upstairs to his bedroom, still clutching the novel to his chest.

  Within a few pages he knew he wasn’t reading a work of fiction, but rather Sorrow’s story of what had happened to her and her brother and friend in Tidepool, even if she renamed everyone and everything. It was all there, or at least as much of it as Sorrow could have known about. Ada was there. Sorrow’s brother and her friend Charlie were there. The Coopers were there. Even he was there, renamed Roger, and the main character described his face as accurately as if Sorrow had had a photograph of him sitting in front of her. Maybe she missed him too.

  The heroine survived the onslaught of sea monsters, barely escaped the doomed town, and moved to a part of the US where she would be well away from large bodies of water. And yet on some nights she still heard the sounds of the creatures emerging from the dark water, or saw someone from a distance who reminded her of the terrifying woman in black who had controlled the denizens of the ocean.

  Was this what Sorrow’s real life was like now? Had her fear of Tidepool pursued her all the way to Tucson? Quentin feared that it had.

  He bought Sorrow’s other novels from the bookstore and felt certain that he saw aspects of himself and Ada in her stories, even the ones that weren’t obvious retellings of her own experience in Tidepool.

  After talking with the bookstore clerk about how to keep up with authors whose works he enjoyed, Quentin started visiting libraries to read newspapers and other periodicals. And it was there that he found an occasional interview with Sorrow, and on one exciting afternoon, a photograph. The picture quality was not the best, but Quentin felt a vaulting thrill to be looking on the face of Sorrow Hamilton after all this time. Her hair was much shorter now. A distinct scar, the remnant of her final battle with Lucy, traversed her face; it was visible even in the grainy photo. He noticed that her eyes no longer held the openness or warmth he remembered from Tidepool; she regarded the photographer with a dark and wary expression.

  Her name actually suits her now. That thought sat heavy as a stone in his chest.

  After what she had survived, Quentin could understand. But he missed the open and friendly face of the radiant young woman he’d known.

  Sorrow’s writing output appeared to dry up in the 1940s; he could find no more new books, nor did he turn up any interviews with her. Most of the newspapers he read were completely devoted to coverage of the Second World War.

  And then, in 1952, he found the news he had never wanted to read about her. She had died in Tucson after a long, undisclosed illness. There was no word given of her family.

  Without speaking to Ada, he left the house and made his way to the sandy shore that stretched along one edge of Copper Beach. He stared out at the water, feeling as if something vital had been removed from his body.

  She had only been a part of his life for a few days, and he knew it was a miracle that she had even lived to tell the tales of what happened to her in Tidepool. And it had been years, decades, since he had seen her. And yet he felt as if someone very important had been taken away from him. He stood out on the beach until well after dark.

  He did not have much time to mourn, for Ada was summoned to yet another coastal town soon afterwards and took Quentin and Sally to Delaware, where they settled in a town much larger than any they had lived in since their time as children in Virginia.

  Quentin wasn’t quite sure when it became unnecessary for Ada to strike bargains with a town’s elders before carrying out her work. More and more people were murdered by unknown assailants all over the country. Or they just disappeared, never to be seen again. As towns grew larger and more densely populated, some of their citizens fell by the wayside, and it was much easier to do away with those more anonymous residents.

  Quen
tin, who continued his habit of reading newspapers even after he no longer needed to search for news about Sorrow Hamilton, began to notice the term “serial killer” appearing in stories about people who did exactly what his sister did, as far as he could tell. They preyed on the vulnerable, the unprotected, or the ones who would be least likely to be missed.

  He supposed that her purpose was more noble than the vile self-gratification that motivated the anonymous murders he read about in the papers, but other than that, he saw little difference between his sister’s actions and what some of these serial killers did to their victims.

  Then again, he sensed that people like this had been around for quite a long time. He had heard tales of Jack the Ripper in London from as far back as his Tidepool days, and that man had never been caught. Perhaps, then as now, it was easier to escape notice for such ghastly deeds in larger cities.

  And as the towns they traveled to became large, heavily populated cities rather than remote places like Tidepool, it was easy for Ada and Quentin to disappear in the throngs of people, and for Ada to avoid disclosing her true purpose. He thought sometimes that his sister missed the deference with which she had been treated in places like Tidepool, where everyone knew and understood what she did for them.

  But Quentin didn’t miss the stares, the condescension. He greatly enjoyed the ability to blend in.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  CITY OF ANGELS

  Natalie Lloyd

  Now

  * * *

  Tuesday afternoons always dragged at the hotel where Natalie Lloyd tended bar, and she wasn’t surprised. Although she herself loved the Woodmore’s cheesy 1970s sensibility with its color schemes of mustard yellow, blood red, and avocado, most travelers found it outdated and said as much on places like Yelp and TripAdvisor. There were definitely far more glamorous places to stay in Los Angeles, and the majority of tourists chose to do so. There was nothing to do about it but hope that kitsch would make a comeback.

  CNN played on the flat screen television over the bar, and Natalie broke off from wiping out a glass to stare up at the news that the year had just claimed yet another celebrity she’d really liked.

  “This is getting ridiculous,” she muttered. “Is there an actual curse on this year or something?”

  “What?” One of her few customers that afternoon had been slouching over an iPhone at the bar, but the word “curse” made him glance up in alarm. The young man, who showed up at the Woodmore’s bar every few weeks, had messy black hair poking out of his hoodie and thick glasses with dark lenses. He rarely spoke except to ask Natalie for a pint of stout, which he’d take the entire afternoon to drink.

  While Natalie wasn’t a particular fan of people taking up seats for hours and not spending an appropriate amount of money, the young man was quiet and polite and tipped well, and so she let him slide.

  “Don’t mind me, sweetie,” she said, sweeping her long red hair back from her face. “Just another good one gone. It’s like this year isn’t going to be happy until it’s taken all the really great people away, you know?”

  The young man stared at her impassively for a moment.

  “Oh,” he said. And then he resumed staring at his phone. Natalie sometimes wondered if he was getting dispatches from his home planet on that thing; he seemed that weird to her. Weird, but harmless. What was his name again? He’d mumbled it to her once when she’d asked.

  Ah, right. Quentin. “Like the director!” she’d said, earning herself another one of the young man’s blank looks. That only added fuel to Natalie’s theory about him being from another planet. Who in LA didn’t know who Quentin Tarantino was?

  A group of businessmen swept into the bar, disrupting her thoughts. Natalie heard them coming before she saw them, and she instinctively tensed up. After years of bartending, she had a sixth sense for when a group of people were going to be trouble, and these guys set off that sense in a big way. Natalie sighed. It hadn’t been a bad afternoon up until now. Quiet, but not bad.

  The men clustered at one of the round tables near the bar and discussed whatever meeting they’d just been at, with loads of fucks and bullshits thrown into the discussion. Quentin raised his head from his phone and glared over his shoulder at them, and Natalie wondered if the guys would annoy the quiet young man right out of the place.

  Finally, one of the businessmen, a young blond man in a sharp blue suit, approached the bar.

  “So, um… ma’am? Sir?” he said to her, a smirk spreading across his face.

  I could just refuse to serve them, Natalie thought. I could.

  “It’s ma’am,” she said instead. The Woodmore couldn’t really afford to have its bartender chasing out people who had the potential to drop a lot of money in the place.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just hard to tell these days, you know? Am I right, bro?” He elbowed Quentin, shooting him a knowing glance. Quentin scowled for a moment and shrank away from the idiot before going back to his phone.

  Natalie’s ears burned. She was trans, but she wasn’t about to give this asshole that bit of information.

  “What can I get for you?” she said, giving her voice a faint chill.

  The guy, who’d poured on so much Acqua di Parma that Natalie could actually taste it, ordered pitchers of their cheapest beer and a plate of appetizers, and grumbled that the Woodmore’s happy hour pricing hadn’t kicked in yet. And then he returned to his table, where he said something that provoked raucous, echoing laughter from his friends.

  Natalie rolled her eyes. If the guys were like this before they’d even started drinking, she was in for a very long afternoon. Dammit. It really hadn’t been a bad day until now.

  Quentin raised his head and shot them another look.

  “Don’t mind them,” she said to him quietly. “Sometimes you get people like that in here. They’ll get bored and move on to some other bar soon enough.” She dearly hoped she was right.

  “Balt Cooper used to get people like that. The fishermen,” Quentin said. “They were always loud. And very rude.”

  That was probably the most he’d ever said to Natalie, and none of it made any sense whatsoever. He seemed to be on her side about the table full of douchebags, in any event.

  “I know, right? Some people’s kids.” She impulsively pulled another pint of Guinness and put it down in front of Quentin, who looked very alarmed by the friendly gesture.

  “But I didn’t order that.”

  “Relax. It’s from me to you. Because you’re not an ass.”

  “Oh. Well. Thank you.”

  He returned to perusing his phone. More updates from the home planet, perhaps.

  The idiots at the round table stared over at a woman sitting in the corner of the bar nearest the grand piano, which few people bothered to play. The management used to hire a player for weekend evenings but had to stop when business began to fall off, and now the piano was only used by drunks playing out-of-tune renditions of “Chopsticks.”

  The woman was another one of Natalie’s regulars, and she always accompanied Quentin. Natalie, who’d heard Quentin call the woman Ada, had no idea what their deal was, what they were to each other. They came in together but always sat apart, Ada over by the piano and Quentin at the bar.

  Were they related? They had the same black hair and pale skin. They didn’t look far enough apart in age to be mother and son, but the woman carried herself with a confidence that Quentin didn’t have, something that made her seem far older than him.

  Was she a prostitute? Quite possibly; Natalie had seen her strike up conversations with various men and sometimes leave the Woodmore with them.

  Was Quentin her … pimp? Natalie couldn’t even entertain that theory without wanting to crack up laughing. That woman seemed far too assertive, and Quentin way too shy and withdrawn.

  Ada always wore black, and Natalie had never seen her in anything other than dresses. Today, she was in a fitted dress with long lace sleeves. Her black ha
ir was done up in a French twist. Natalie liked her look, finding it very film noir. All the woman needed was a cigarette in a long holder, which, of course, she couldn’t have in the Woodmore.

  Much like her companion, the woman rarely said much to Natalie other than a drink order—she favored white wine—followed by please and then thank you. Ada was polite but reserved, and Natalie almost never attempted small talk with her unless it had been an extremely slow day.

  But the strange woman was one of Natalie’s favorite customers. Even as quiet as she was, Natalie found her so much more interesting than the obnoxious businessmen and boring tourists who usually landed at the Woodmore. Aside from the fact that the woman styled herself like a classic movie star, she actually sounded old-fashioned. In their brief conversations, she spoke quite formally, never using slang or cursing.

  An old-fashioned lady for an old-fashioned hotel, Natalie thought.

  Ada also tipped well and never gave Natalie a moment of trouble, and so she decided not to worry about what the woman’s deal was with Quentin. Or anyone else. She really hoped the tableful of idiots would just leave Ada alone.

  But her hopes were in vain; the blond guy in the blue suit got up and strolled over to Natalie again.

  “Excuse me, miss.” Another smirk. “I’d like to buy that woman over in the corner there a drink. Get her another one of whatever she’s having.”

  I’m sure she’ll barely be able to contain her excitement, Natalie thought.

  “Very well.” Natalie poured another glass of the house white and carried it over to the woman’s table.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” she said. “That… gentleman…over at that table wanted me to send this over to you.”

  The woman looked up, a dark eyebrow arched.

  “Do I detect a note of sarcasm, Natalie?”