The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  Ashley swats at any flies that come near him.

  The flies must irritate him. Every swat comes with a frustrated growl and a narrow-eyed wince.

  The inside of the cabin is destroyed. As if by axe or hammer. The console is mostly shattered. The windows, boarded up.

  “Your mother’s below deck,” he says. “Resting. You ought to rest, too–”

  “Mom!” she cries out, but he grabs her face and squeezes hard enough to shut her up.

  “No,” he says. “No speaking to her. Your time with her is done. She’s unconscious anyway and gagged so that she cannot speak to you. Don’t make me gag you, too.” He again relaxes. “Tomorrow is a very big day.”

  “It is.” Tomorrow’s the day I kill you. But she doesn’t know how. And she’s not even sure she believes it anymore. Every move she makes, he knows it. Big and small.

  He wheels the stool through a dried puddle of blood – the blood of Bob, or Carla, or her own mother, she doesn’t know – and heads to the console, where he starts the boat. The engine growls. Beneath them, a propeller churns the dark, glassy waters and they begin to slide away from the marina, from the shore, from the land Miriam knows and trusts.

  His back is to her.

  While he’s facing away, she begins to look for a weapon.

  She looks for something – anything – to use against him. A screwdriver. A piece of window glass. A long splinter. Nothing.

  Goddamnit.

  She’ll use her hands. Her feet. Her teeth.

  No. Then she sees it.

  The leg. The prosthetic leg. I’m going to beat you to death with your own leg, you motherfucker.

  But even as that thought lands, even as she plans her first strike–

  He turns his head toward her. The front of him is facing forward, his elbow casually resting on the wheel like he’s out here ready for a fun day of fishing with his half-dead family. He rests his chin on his own shoulder and makes a pouty face. “You’re thinking of hurting me, Miriam. And while I guess it’s understandable, it damn sure isn’t very nice.”

  “I… I wasn’t.”

  That wolfish grin. “You were. They told me you were. I saw the words drift across the wheel as I turned it. A warning from my friends.”

  “Is that what they are? Your friends?”

  “They’ve done me a lot of good. Given me a lot of purpose. They’re my bosses. My masters. My parents. But they’re also my friends. Because they take care of me. Like good friends should.”

  “I took care of you that day in the SUV. With Ingersoll. I got you free. They would’ve cut more of you away. I did you a favor that day.”

  “You should have never left me.” He clearly doesn’t want to talk about that because all he says next is, “You’re welcome to try to hurt me again but it will only bring you more pain. It’s like that old Pee-Wee Herman playground taunt: I’m rubber and you’re glue. Whatever you do to me bounces off and sticks to you. And right now I bet you’re in a lot of pain. You look like shit, if I’m being honest.”

  A lone, betraying tear crawls down her cheek. She swiftly wipes it away with the back of her hand and tries to scowl past it.

  They stare at each other like that, not saying a thing. Him smirking. Her glowering, hoping she can hold back her tears – hoping she can figure out how to kill him with just her look.

  Eventually, he winks and turns back to piloting the boat.

  He steers it out into open water.

  The fishing boat chugs along.

  Outside, the squawks of gulls. The occasional thump above their heads. He looks up. “Fisher birds like gulls and gannets. They follow after boats. Looking for bait. Looking for the catch. We’re all just looking for the catch, I guess, right?” He shrugs. “It’s good you’re giving up,” he says. “Giving in. This thing you do has just brought you a lot of suck, hasn’t it? A big old misery sandwich.” He swats at his neck. “God. These fucking flies. I should’ve sprayed or something.”

  Guess you’re not so psychic after all.

  “I just want to say, it’s nice to be with you again.” He suddenly wheels the stool back around to face her. “You know, I was a real fuck-up, and I never actually managed to apologize to you. When we met I was a… I was a man without a purpose. I think that’s what weakens us as people, when we drift through life without any kind of meaning. Idle hands, am I right? I was just some shitty two-bit con artist who thought he was the craftiest little trilobite the ocean floor ever did see. But real fish swam above my head. Sharks and barracuda. I had no idea. Then I saw you down there with me and I drew you in – I thought, Jesus, here’s a girl just like me, somebody smart but without purpose – so I did what I always did. I was a user. I used you like I used everybody. Then I starting using drugs and…” He whistles. “Ugly times. But us meeting was powerful. It was like… it was volcanic. Boom. Shook both of us up. Showed us both the way, but to fix something you have to break it first, so we had to lose things before we could begin.” He snaps his fingers. “It’s like losing your virginity. Right? Girl busts that cherry–” He thrusts his finger into his mouth and makes a cork-popping sound. “And there’s pain and blood but then a kind of clarity. And eventually, even pleasure. I have my clarity. And this is my pleasure. But when we met each other I didn’t have those things and so I am very, very sorry.”

  She has nothing to say to any of that. To her, it’s all just noise.

  Instead she asks, “The windows are boarded. How do you know where you’re going?”

  He smiles. “I just do. You do, too. In a way.”

  “The cops are going to find us. You killed people.”

  “I did. And they won’t. I killed everybody there. Nobody to ID me. Nobody to even call the police. Too early for there to be other fishermen out at the boats. Eventually they’ll come looking. And I’ll be one step ahead. We’ll be gone. Your mother will be dead.”

  “Will I?”

  He laughs. “No, I’m not going to kill you. Not yet, anyway. I don’t even know if that’s on the menu. Depends on what They–” He points up toward the cabin ceiling. “Have to say about it. That’s their call. Not mine. I’m just their man on the ground.”

  “You’re their little bitch.”

  “Such a dirty mouth. You reduce everything to its components. You’re like the maggots these flies make. Breaking it all down to its basest, most… disgusting bits.” He’s angry. Good. Let him be angry. “I’m not their bitch. I’m their avatar. Gods used to have avatars. Krishna. Jesus. Human beings acting as the hand of the divine there in the dirt, here on the water.”

  She sniffs and blinks her bleary, wet eyes. “That who you think you work for? God?”

  “The gods. Plural. The gods of order. The gods of fate and destiny.”

  “And who do I work for?”

  He lowers his voice. “The other ones. The gods below. Gods of chaos and disorder. Free will. Free will.” He suddenly wheels close to her, thrusts his finger in her face. “See, you think that’s a good thing. Free will. Like you’re one of those patriot assholes who think it’s all about individual freedom. The freedom to carry a gun or not wear a helmet on a motorcycle or the freedom to just be an asshole. I used to think that way. But see, that’s the trick. Nobody uses that freedom to do good things. It’s just another way to say, I want the excuse to be a self-interested, self-absorbed monster. Fate is about keeping things in line. About marching us toward a destination. See? Destiny. Destination.” He laughs so hard his cheeks turn red. “It’s in there. The one word nested in the other.”

  “Fate is nested in fatal, too,” she says quietly.

  “It is at that. Because sometimes fate is about people dying whether you like it or not. But you wouldn’t understand that. You come along and you fuck things up. The people who are supposed to die – you save them from the edge of the pit. And the others standing there watching – you kick them into the darkness. You keep people in the pattern who aren’t supposed to be there anymore an
d you put others in their place. You’re damaging things. You can’t… you can’t go around doing that.”

  “Like you said, we all have to find our purpose.”

  That straight-razor smile flashes. “We do. And mine is to show you how wrong yours is. One day you’ll see. One day you’ll see because darkness is rolling toward us like a sky full of locusts. The death will be a great cloud of wings and teeth and it will rob from this world so many. People starving. People sick. People killing each other. The world goes through these transitional periods. Some worse than others, but people always die – and that’s necessary for the pattern. For all of the people to keep going, some of the people – sometimes a lot of the people – have to die. You misunderstand that now. You won’t, one day. Maybe one day soon you’ll see how necessary it is. You’ll see that sometimes to fix something, you first have to break it.”

  “Maybe I’m the one doing the breaking,” she says.

  He backhands her.

  It rocks her head. She tastes blood.

  A moment of chaos.

  She seizes it. She launches herself toward him.

  He grabs her as they fall backward.

  Ashley uses her momentum and slams her forward into the console. Wood paneling shatters. He scrambles to stand and pistons a punch into her midsection – a boulder dropped in a lake, ripples of agony.

  “You still have that fight in you,” he says, panting, licking his lips as he stands up and over her. “But we’ll squeeze those last drops out by morning. For now, I have a boat to captain, and this game is tiring.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  I FEAR THEE AND THY GLITTERING EYE

  The hours pass.

  Miriam’s time is punctuated by fits of rebellion.

  And Ashley quieting her efforts.

  She tries to go to the door – fling it open, leap into the sea – but even as she’s getting up he’s already on her. Her neck in the crook of his arm. Blood pounding. Legs kicking. He brings her to the very edge of unconsciousness, then drops her.

  She tries to attack him. Each time he meets her efforts like she handed him stage directions. He seems to expend no effort at all putting her back on the floor. Eventually, as soon as the thought crosses her mind he stands up like a swift storm rolling in and walks over to punch her in the gut. Or kick her in the side. Or slap her in the face again and again.

  None of it hard enough to do any long-term damage. But all of it erosive. Corrosive. Like it’s whittling away at her in a way far deeper than how he threatened to whittle away her mother.

  As to her mother – she hears her sometimes. Down there in the cabin. Whimpering. Crying out past the gag. Miriam tries to call to her, and Ashley storms over again, fist up.

  But then he laughs. Tells her it’s OK. Tells her she can call to her.

  So she does.

  She calls down to her mother. Tells her she loves her.

  And that she’s sorry.

  She tells her this ten times.

  Twenty times.

  Fifty.

  Until the words sound like gibberish in her ears, and maybe they are gibberish – words slurred and garbled beneath the great gasping sobs that come out of her.

  And when she’s done, Ashley comes over and slaps her again.

  Outside, the gulls and gannets swoop and squall.

  SIXTY-TWO

  AS A SLAVE BEFORE THE LORD

  Mother gently strokes her hair.

  “It’s OK,” she whispers. Miriam moans. Tries to stand. But everything hurts. Like all that she is has been drained out of her and only ache and anguish have been allowed to fill the void. “It’s OK.”

  “Mom. Please. Go. Run.”

  “It’s OK.”

  Then Mother kisses her brow and Miriam feels her mouth open and grave-worms slide out in a slurry of wet sand and river silt–

  She gasps and jerks her head up.

  Nobody’s here.

  She’s in the boat cabin, alone with two dead bodies caught in what little sunlight streams in through the porthole and around the faint margins of the boarded-up windows.

  Her hands are bound in front of her with tape. She struggles. Cries out for her mother. She crawls over to the bodies – the carpet of flies ripples and takes to the air. She yells down into the dark of the cabin. “Mom! Please.”

  She sees an opportunity – a grotesque one, but there’s no time to do differently. Since there’s no serrated guardrail this time, she thrusts her wrists forward and works the tape into the mouth of the dead Bob Taylor, a man’s whose cheeks are darkened with striations of purple, whose eyes are swollen grapes in his head, whose decaying musk gags her and almost makes her throw up, whose teeth are perfectly white. She saws the tape back and forth on those beautiful chompers until it wears through and the tape splits–

  She realizes she’s going to have to climb down past them.

  Into the dark.

  But then–

  Tink tink tink tink.

  Something at the porthole window.

  Her stomach sinks.

  She stands. Each step draining.

  Ashley stands there. Smiling big and broad like he just got straight A’s on a report card. He’s got a hunting knife – the hunting knife – in his hand, and that’s what he’s using to tap on the glass.

  “It’s time,” he says.

  She slams herself against the door to stare out.

  The sun is up over the nearby trees and the water. She has no idea where they are. In the distance, mangroves prop themselves up on roots of stilt and peg. Little birds flit from branch to branch. Gulls swoop overhead.

  Mother sits bound to a folding chair – the same chair Miriam had been sitting in – and to the deck railing behind it. Her nose is busted, streaming twin swallowtails of blood. Her lips are stretched around a tennis ball duct-taped into her mouth – the skin cracking, splitting, bleeding. And Miriam can see now that both feet are swaddled in newspaper and duct tape. Newspaper darkened with blood.

  Miriam pounds on the glass.

  She leaves bloody streaks behind–

  She cut herself. On Bob Taylor’s teeth.

  She didn’t even know it.

  Oh no, no no no–

  It’s all happening, happening like in the vision–

  Except this time it’s not Louis in a lighthouse, it’s her mother, her mother. And this time she’s not charging up the spiral stairs at the last minute with a gun in her hand. She’s trapped behind a door. With a window that she’s trying to break but won’t, a window too small to crawl through even if she wanted to.

  And she starts to realize, she fell into this. She failed by giving herself over to it. Letting herself be swept along by the river.

  Instead of breaking its current.

  Again Ashley taps on the glass with the knife.

  Tink tink tink tink.

  Then he steps back and begins his speech.

  “A tale of two Miriams,” he says. “This is for you, the Miriam that’s here.” He sweeps his arms across the sky. “And this is for you, the Miriam who’s touching her mother and seeing her death. You came for a show, so I sure don’t want to disappoint!”

  It’s strange. To be in two places at once in a way. To be the Miriam witnessing up close the show she’s already seen.

  And to be able to do nothing about it.

  Suddenly, Ashley stops and stoops his head. Conferring, she thinks, with his “friends.” She wonders if he ever sees them as she sees hers. But his are not Trespassers. He invites them in.

  He laughs.

  “You know what they did?” he asks. Each word is laced with vibration – shot through with a panicked but giddy frequency. “They went to my mother. I don’t know if you knew that. That’s how they found us. They went to her and I’d sent a postcard to her and that was how they knew where to start looking. You know what they did to my mother? They shot her. Set one of the burners on the stove. Then turned up the nozzle on her oxygen tank.” He claps his ha
nds. “Whoosh. My mother was a hoarder. Lot of junk in that house. Tinder for the biggest campfire the town of Maker’s Bell ever did see.”

  Miriam pounds on the glass. She screams herself hoarse. Thinks to bite the glass. Slam her head against it. Something. Anything.

  He takes the knife, sticks the point up under Evelyn Black’s chin. Mother’s eyes shine with fear. Not with resolution or peace. Not with the comfort of God and all his angels. But unmitigated fear, raw and pure and horrible. The fear of what comes next.

  Mother knows what comes next, Miriam can see it in the woman’s eyes.

  “I’m going to take your mother from you, and you’re thinking, but why? And I’m saying to you, it’s because of a thing you already know. Don’t you? An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Your mother for my mother. And I hear your screams from behind that window and I know we’ve already had this conversation but we’re going to have it again for the benefit of–” Once more he addresses the invisible witness Miriam with the knife before sticking it back under Mother’s chin. “And I want you to know that I blame you for my mother dying. I put a lot of faith in you. It was because of you that I was even in the Ass-Crack of Nowhere, North Carolina. With all the Waffle Houses and rebel flags and fixin’s and y’alls. I went to you because I thought you were the one for me. A partner. A real partner. And you fucked me, then you fucked me over, and they fucked me up. Fuckity-fuck-fucked. My mother died and what did I get out of it? You fawning over that bull-headed trucker. Me losing my leg and getting dumped on the road.”

  They pass close to an outcropping of mangroves. The little birds shake the branches. The gulls swoop and cry.

  Miriam’s shrieks are dulled by the glass.

  She bashes her elbow against it. Fulfilling the promise of what she did in the vision but she does it anyway like she’s caught on a muddy hill, the ground slipping beneath her, carrying her ineluctably downward…

  The glass begins to crack.

  Ashley shouts. He shouts, “But now I have my own gift, you dumb cunt. Now I have a machine gun too, ho ho ho. And now I’m going to take what’s owed to me.”