When I reached the canal she was already there, standing on the road bridge looking down into the water. Unaware of my approach, she appeared to be staring with almost murderous intensity at a moorhen and her chicks.
“What did they ever do to you?” I joked.
She snapped her head round and her smile of recognition took a moment to arrive. She pecked me on the lips and we headed in a north-easterly direction, ending up walking through the market. I had previously seen the lock-up shops down there only after the end of trading, all the units hidden away behind roller shutters covered in vivid graffiti. Every other business, it seemed, was an African butcher’s, their trestle tables practically lowing under stacks of cows’ hooves.
“Look at these,” she said, pointing to yet more hooves hanging from lethal meat-hooks just above eye-level. She took hold of my hand for the first time during the walk, intertwining her long fingers with mine. I looked down involuntarily and was aware of her turning to look at me, so I met her gaze. There was a strange half-smile on her lips that didn’t quite meet her eyes. She looked back at the meat-hooks. The butcher approached from the shadows, asking if he could help us, but she turned away without answering him and we walked on.
When we reached the main road, she asked if I was hungry and without waiting for an answer headed for the first of several Turkish restaurants that lined the high street.
She tore at a shish kebab with her teeth as I tried to keep pace, then we bought some beers from the off-licence across the road and took them back to hers, where we drank them slouched on the sofa in front of the television. Without warning, she stood up and put out her hand. I let her pull me to my feet and followed her into the bedroom, where she quickly undressed and got into bed. I looked down at her, becoming aware of the Observer’s Book of Birds on her bedside table.
“I just need to go to the bathroom,” I said.
As I passed through the kitchen I looked at the two doors on the left. My eye was drawn to the stained door, which in the light from the window appeared a dark rusty red. For the first time since I had been coming to the flat, this door had a key in its lock.
I walked on into the bathroom, where I emptied my bladder and quickly cleaned my teeth before going back through the kitchen and on to the landing, where the loose floorboard creaked beneath my feet.
As soon as I got into bed, she sat up and knelt over me, then kissed me. I felt her teeth pressing behind her lips. I kept thinking about the book that was within arm’s reach, plus my stomach had started to ache, presumably from the meat-heavy meal. We soon finished and she got up to go to the bathroom while I reached over and picked up the book. The cover flap had been moved forward about ten pages.
I glanced at the nightingale on the left-hand page, then turned to the red-backed shrike on the right. I read: This summer visitor from Africa is well named “Butcher Bird”, as it butchers birds, mice and insects, and impales them on thorns and spikes, known as its “larder”. I heard the creak of the loose floorboard and quickly closed the book and put it back.
She went to sleep within minutes of getting back into bed, whereas I lay awake for what seemed like hours, unable to relax.
The pain in my gut woke me in the night. I thought at first it was serious, but as I came fully awake I realised it had not got any worse. I could hear her breathing, low and regular.
I got out of bed and walked softly out of the room. I stepped around the loose floorboard and entered the kitchen. I went into the bathroom but failed to make anything happen that might have eased my stomach ache. Instead I returned to the kitchen and stared at the door to the larder. I looked at the key in the lock. The next thing I knew I was holding the rough-textured key between my finger and thumb, turning it, then twisting the door-handle.
As I started opening the door I heard a noise—not the squeak of a hinge that needed oiling, but the familiar creak of the loose floorboard on the landing.
LYNDA E. RUCKER
THE SEVENTH WAVE
LYNDA E. RUCKER grew up in a house in the woods full of books, cats and typewriters, so naturally, she had little choice but to become a writer.
She has sold more than two dozen short stories to various magazines and anthologies, won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story, and is a regular columnist for Black Static magazine. Her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released by Karōshi Books in 2013, and Swan River Press published her second, You’ll Know When you Get There, three years later. She has appeared multiple times in Best New Horror and in other “Year’s Best” anthologies, and her forthcoming projects include a monograph from Electric Dreamhouse Press on the film Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, and a novella from Horrific Tales.
“I was flattered when Paul Finch asked me to contribute a story his Terror Tales series,” Rucker explains, “and eagerly accepted the opportunity to write about the ocean—and, as it turned out, I wrote it while I was by the sea as well, on England’s south-east coast.
“My feelings about the sea actually mirror the feeling I get from many of my favourite horror stories—a mix of awe and terror. I knew from the start, however, that this would not be a cosmic type of horror tale but a more human one, for as soon as I began thinking about the story, the narrator strode in with her strong voice and recited the opening lines for me.
“In addition to its more visceral terrors, it’s also a story about another profound and pervasive horror: the hypocrisies conventionally expected of women around such sacred institutions as marriage and motherhood.”
I
DO YOU KNOW the story about the girl who walked into the sea? Did she drown?
No, she didn’t drown. They pulled her out.
That’s good.
No it’s not. It was the worst thing in the world they could have done.
I want to begin this story in this way: I have always loved the sea. But then I stop and I think: which sea? There are so many of them. There is the sea of my childhood: the flat blue glass of Florida’s Gulf Coast, the dirty ocean off Galveston Island in Texas. There are the seas of my later years, the freezing Atlantic smashing against the shores of western Ireland, the windswept grey waters of the Oregon coast outside my home right now. And there are the seas of my imagination, the seas I read about in books and never saw, or saw and was disappointed by so that the sea remains forever extant only in my memory. There is the sea of the Greek isles, a sea I somehow always thought would indeed be wine-dark, and it was not. There is what I think of as the Gothic sea: it is somewhere off an English coast, surrounded by cliffs and moors and castles with family secrets and brooding men lurking about. This sea, too, does not exist except in my mind. Then we have the metaphorical sea: we can be all at sea, which is bad, or in a sea of love, which is good, I guess.
But my story is about the sea, and about love, and it is not a good story at all. Or rather, the story itself is a good one, I suppose, if you are not in the story, because the things that happen in it are very bad indeed.
Because I am old, and because tonight I feel old, and because it is forty years to the day from another, terrible night, I am going to set down here the story of myself and the sea, and all that it took from me.
Every thing and every person that I ever loved taken from me.
II
Do you know the story about the girl who walked into the sea?
Women and men have been throwing themselves at death on account of love for as long as there have been humans and some concept of love, or maybe for longer: when I was a child, I had a dog who mourned the passing of its mate by refusing food for so long it nearly died itself. Before our not-yet-human ancestors were capable of the kind of planning that hastening death requires, they probably still starved themselves, or lay out in the elements, or let themselves get eaten by sabre-toothed tigers rather than bother trying to carry on.
Anyone who isn’t terrified of love is either a fool or has no idea what it means. For myself, I’d sooner be flayed a
live than fall in love again. You might say there is little chance of either of those things happening. At four score and five I am supposed to be preparing to die, but not from love, and certainly not from la petite mort—just from ordinary decay. At my age, the capacity for that quickening of the heart and the spirit and the loins is supposed to be long gone. And yet it happens. It happens to those my age and even those older than me, the ninety-year-olds, the hundred-year-olds.
The human heart is never too old for passion. It is the very young who believe otherwise, but then, the very young believe everything is for them and them alone. There is the old, true adage that every generation believes it has discovered sex for the first time: and yet there is no act, no position, no method of penetration or manner of stimulation or path to ecstasy or perversion that men and women have not been doing to one another in various combinations for at least as long as they have been dying for love.
I find this extraordinarily heartening. I wonder how different humans might be if we wrote history as a chronicle of significant orgasms rather than political intrigues, poisonings, betrayals, battles won and lost. I take a wicked pleasure in saying this sometimes to people because it shocks them. “Abigail!“ they tut, or “Mrs. Brennan!“ if they are on less familiar terms with me, clearly believing I am one of those elderly people who has taken leave of my senses and is now just saying any old thing that pops into my head.
And none are ever so shocked as the young. For all their posturing, the young really are terribly conservative, because they are so young, and so hopeful, and so they’ve yet to figure out that nothing at all ever really matters much in the end.
But where was I? I am old, you see, and I digress so readily. Ah, yes. The sea. The ghost story. Lost love. And the girl who walked into the sea, the girl they pulled back out again.
You may or may not have surmised by now that the girl was me, and if so, you are correct. Had they not pulled me out again, I might have been the ghost in this story. And a terrifying, vengeful ghost I would have been as well. I’d have smashed ships against rocks, rent sailors limb to limb, drowned swimming lovers. I was so consumed with sorrow and pain on that day that I walked into the sea. Those things would have felt almost like an act of mercy to me, as though I were doing those people a favour, showing them the true face of the world, and that at the end of it all there is only suffering and fear. Sparing them one more single agonising second of living.
Despite all this, it would, as I said, have been better had they left me there to drown.
I am certain as well that you do not need to be told why I walked into the sea that day: for love, of course. For the sake of a man. I was twenty-five years old, a late bloomer, as they say, but then I was possessed of a lethal combination of being both intelligent and unattractive.
These days a woman can buy permission to be smart or talented or successful with good looks for as long as she remains young, at least; in my day, being pretty meant you couldn’t possibly be bright while plainness was just an affront to everyone. By everyone, of course, I mean men.
I must have been almost unfathomably easy prey for Philip, the married man at the office where I worked who set his sights on me. (Philip, how funny to think of him now! He is either very old or, more likely, very dead. I cannot imagine encountering him now, doddering and senile.) In those days, for me, both virginal and naïve, he was the height of dashing sophistication. I had never even kissed a man, had presumed I would be a spinster my entire life, and as for sex, that was something I gave little thought to, and never in connection with myself.
The result of all this was that a man I later came to understand was very ordinary was able to seduce me and convince me that without him, my life was worthless. After two months of surreptitious rendezvous in his car, twice in the office, once in a hotel room (I told myself then he must really love me), he informed me that he had no intention of leaving his wife; two weeks later it was clear he’d taken up with the nineteen-year-old secretary hired a week before he dumped me.
I was, as I said, naïve. I had imagined that there was something extraordinary in what passed between us, in the pleasures of sex, that anything that seemed so intimate must surely be intimate. I was in love, though not with him—people say in love with love, and that’s wrong too. I was in love with the man I thought he was, and in those short two months, I believed I was the best version of myself I have ever been although in fact I was alternately neurotic, terrified, giddy, hopeless, and consumed. Love can do that to you. And then it ends.
When it became clear to me that I had been no more than a passing fancy that he quickly tired of, I resolved to kill myself, both to send him a message and because I truly did feel that I would not be able to live with my pain. Better that he had cut me open and literally torn my heart from my body than this agony of drawing breath after breath. I did not yet understand how the most appalling pain can recede over time even if it never goes away. Time doesn’t heal, but enough of it and it begins to tell us lies that let us live in the present, if we allow it.
If the past does not come to you. Did you hear about the girl who walked into the sea? Did you hear what became of her children?
The story of my suicide that wasn’t is routine and not very interesting. I did very little planning. In those days, I lived in Savannah, Georgia, where my family had moved to in my teens, and so I drove to Tybee Island, and found what I mistakenly believed to be a deserted bit of shoreline. Fully clothed in a skirt and a sweater and heavy shoes, I walked out into the ocean. Had I put more thought into it, I would have chosen a more reliably empty beach; I would have weighted my pockets to ensure I did not bob to the surface. I would have forced myself to drink the salt water into my lungs. That I did none of those things, however, was no indication that my suicide attempt was merely a cry for help. I was serious; but with suicide as with sex, I was a complete novice.
Novice that I was, I was spotted, and saved by a nearby fisherman. I spent two nights in the hospital, and I believed that Philip would come to me there, having seen the error of his ways. When he did not, I understood at last that I had been a very silly girl, and that I was no different from many very silly girls who had come before me. I quit my job and found a new one and resolved to stay far away from men for the rest of my days.
I told myself that I had survived not because of my rescuer, but because as I loved the sea, the sea loved me back.
I have, you understand, been mistaken about love throughout my life.
Do you hear that? Some would say it is only the howling of the wind and the crashing of the waves, but I know the sound of my children’s cries. I must move along and finish my story for you before they come for me.
III
I had sworn to stay away from men, but the revolving door of dull office jobs that were available to no-longer-so-young women in the 1950s eventually brought me into the path of an even duller man named Bernard. He was everything Philip had not been; where Philip had been charming and smooth, Bernard was awkward and fastidious. But he had other qualities. He was steady and dependable. And we did have one thing in common: Bernard loved the sea as well. The first time he took me sailing, I thought this was a man who would never betray me as Philip had, because there was no room in his life for another love.
And so it was that almost five years to the day after they pulled me from the sea, I walked down the aisle with Bernard. No one could say that I had not done well for myself. In those days, I was considered an old bride, and fortunate to snag such a reliable man.
Bernard’s boring nature extended to the bedroom. I told myself I didn’t care; with Philip, I had seen what passion got you. Having said that, it seems surprising to me to this day that we managed to conceive three children. I told myself I was content, and I settled into an unremarkable domestic life that was exactly the same as the content and unremarkable domestic life that most of my peers had as well. I no longer had to work or worry about the future.
But appear
ances deceive, do they not? Because then I met Clive, and of all the dull, content, settled people around us, I would have said that Clive was the dullest of them all. Not that I am making myself out to have been a remarkable specimen myself: my oldest child, Deborah, was twelve, and I had long since passed from young and unattractive into ageing and matronly, or so I felt.
Clive said that was not the case; he said I kept myself trim enough to pass for at least ten years younger and that any man who could not see the unkindled fires banked in me must be blind. But he would say that, wouldn’t he? He said a lot of other things, too, things married men say in affairs, but I believed they were true: that Stella, his wife, was frigid and moreover didn’t love him. I couldn’t have been more different from her, he said, and what he meant was there was almost nothing I wouldn’t do for him, and he was right.
He even begged me to leave Bernard. And I might have; I told myself that Bernard, preoccupied with sailing and his accounting work, would hardly notice my absence. We no longer lived as husband and wife; we hadn’t slept together since before our third child, Joann, now six, had been born. We even had separate bedrooms. Because I had long ago proved myself to be a poor first mate, too dreamy by far, he hadn’t taken me sailing with him in years.
It was just as well. I was content to sit on the shore or wade into the shallows with the children. The truth is, I liked the sea less with the children along. There seemed so many more hazards with these tiny, vulnerable people at my side: stinging things, and big waves, and tropical storms and hurricanes, and the sea itself, always pulling away from shore, too eager to take everything with it. The idea of its unfathomable depths, which had once exhilarated me, had come to terrify me instead. I suppose you could say that motherhood made me dull but I would argue instead that motherhood made me aware. The world was so full of danger. It was a wonder any of us managed to navigate it for any time at all.
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