by S. T. Joshi
Despite a gap for ventilation between roof and wall, the stench was overpowering. In the murky light, scarcely a single tiled surface appeared devoid of filth. With a handkerchief to my nose, I first secured some newsprint-like paper squares from the communal box near the entrance, then picked my way carefully across the slimy floor down the row to the last, gaping stall of a size to accommodate a large farm animal.
I precariously perched myself on the little pedestal platform above the stinking hole, then dropped my pants. As I squatted in relief, I heard a bubbling, slopping sound nearby, followed by some slobbery grunting.
Then, just as I was about to tug up my shorts, a vile, fishy odor cut through the pervasive cloacal smell. It was all I could do to repress my gag reflex. Then I felt something clammy on my calf—almost as if a hand had reached up from the noisome pit below and grabbed me. It squeezed, I shrieked, I struggled, and in the moment before I fainted, I got a glimpse, as it slipped back into the liquid muck, of a greenish-blue, iridescent, webbed paw.
8.
WHEN I CAME TO, JAN WAS HOLDING MY HAND. OUT the bus’s front window, I could see the towering new buildings of Wuhan looming on the horizon. Jan murmured in my ear that I had Fred to thank for rescuing me. Apparently, he had just finished his business in another stall down the line when he heard my screams and ran to see what was wrong. He had hauled me unconscious away from the stall and carried me outside. I looked closely at Jan and realized that, however sympathetic, she could never understand. If I tried to tell her what had really happened in that ghastly roadside convenience, she too would dismiss my tale as a delusion or hallucination brought on by the heat, lack of sleep, and repellent but otherwise quite natural sights and smells.
In a state of numbness I got through the late lunch at our Wuhan hotel, our final group meal. I nearly fainted again, though, when Fred casually mentioned, as we said goodbye to him and Jean, that he had felt a bit of inexplicable resistance when he pulled me from the brink—as if my feet were stuck in quicksand or, he quipped, quick shit. After lunch, I took a bath in our room, fell into bed, and didn’t awake until the next morning, despite being assailed by hideous dreams.
Our final day in China, in the company of our Wuhan guide, Tony, I somehow sleepwalked through a series of tourist sites, notably Mao’s summer villa, with the indoor pool his minions built as a present but he never once used (besides hating everything Western, Mao preferred to swim in natural settings like the Yangtze River).
Tony was by far the most engaging of our guides, a personable fellow with a sense of humor, who teased us about not having the plane tickets he was supposed to supply for our flight home—which caused me in particular a moment of panic. We deeply regretted that we had almost run out of dollars and had to tip him mostly in soft-currency yuan before catching our connecting plane to Beijing.
In the months since returning to San Francisco, things have been tense between me and Jan. More and more often as we argue she gives me that staring, bug-eyed look of hers that so unnerves me. She’s certain that we should adopt from China. She hears such happy reports from Jean and Fred of their new baby girl. Just the other day an article in the Chronicle said that it was now easier to obtain Chinese boys. If being limited to a girl was my problem, I no longer had that excuse… But still I resist, feebly suggesting a Russian boy as an alternative. I dare not confide in Jan my worst fears, for us, for any baby we adopt, and for the Chinese people, who may soon be facing the worst crisis in the long and continuous history of their magnificent civilization.
Meanwhile, I am keeping my promise to Kim, the travel agent, not to publish anything ill of her government, but in the event of my sudden death or disappearance, I leave it to the discretion of my executors whether to go public with an account that some, who don’t know what I know, will surely dismiss as a work of uninspired, unconvincing fiction.
Necrotic Cove
LOIS GRESH
Lois Gresh is a New York Times best-selling author (six times), Publishers Weekly best-selling paperback author, and Publishers Weekly best-selling paperback children’s author of 27 books and 50 short stories. Her books have been published in approximately 20 languages. Recent books are the dark short story collection Eldritch Evolutions (Chaosium, 2011) and the anthology Dark Fusions (PS Publishing, 2013), as well as The Hunger Games Companion (St. Martin’s Press, 2011). Gresh has received Bram Stoker Award, Nebula Award, Theodore Sturgeon Award, and International Horror Guild Award nominations for her work.
THE SUN HANGS LOW AND DROOLS LAVA ACROSS A sea the color of stillborn baby. A dead branch whisks my cheek as I step from the trail onto the beach, and blood trickles into my mouth. The air reminds me of cantaloupes left on the counter too long. Insect wings brush my neck, a sting, and my skin swells and itches. None of this bothers me. I’m here, at long last, I’m here.
I stand transfixed as the emptiness inside me fills with emotions I don’t understand.
Necrotic Cove, where we come to be cleansed and purified.
Tatania says, “Can we leave now? You’ve seen it, isn’t this enough?”
I mouth the word no, but I don’t think I say it. It’s as if I’ve always been locked outside of the universe, looking in but never fitting in until this very moment.
I gaze to my left and right, where cliffs reflect the sun. The sand spreads like a fan stained by cyanosis, and the water is comatose. This is a place of death, and yet I feel something flickering to life within me.
Tatania grasps my elbow. “Watch it, you’re going to fall,” she says, and yes, I find that I’m tottering, and I’m so weak that even an old woman’s claws bruise me. I squint at her. My best friend since childhood, she’ll do anything for me, won’t she? Even leave the comforts of her widow’s lair to follow me here. Anything to please pathetic Cassandra before my spine finally snaps and the cancer finally eats what’s left of my ulcerated insides. I clasp Tatania’s waist and steady myself. I say, “My dying wish, and you granted it.”
“You’re not dead yet, Cassandra. Stop saying that.” She drops to the sand beneath the brown entrails of a palm. Leans against the trunk, stretches her legs, flinches as the sand burns her thighs. “Sit beside me, dear,” she says.
I do as she asks. I always do what Tatania wants.
“Four hours we hiked, and through a path so narrow a squirrel couldn’t make it through.” Tatania removes her hat and fans her face. Sweat glues her dyed black hair to her scalp. I have no idea why she bothers to dye her hair, it’s so obviously fake at our age. She wipes her forehead with the back of a hand and scratches an insect bite. Her rings flash the sun into my eyes, and I shift my view back to the cliffs, their coppery sheen far more beautiful than her diamonds.
“I’m not surprised that nobody comes here.” Her laugh breaks into a cough. “The beach smells like a sewer, and the insects are horrible.”
I can’t explain the allure of this place to someone like Tatania. She’s never been empty and alone like me. She’s always belonged. Married three times, always to wealthy men, she never had to work, never did much of anything other than make it to her tennis lessons on time, pamper herself with fine food and wine, subject herself to botox, and let the doctors carve her up with plastic surgery. Light blue contacts on her navy eyes. Tatania looks like a parody of her younger self, but she doesn’t realize it. She’s more comfortable at thousand-dollar-a-plate parties and vodka lunches at Chez Grande. But she’s always up for a wild time, and I don’t know why, but I needed her to come with me.
“Listen,” I say, “I’ll cool down in the water, and then we can head back, okay?”
Her face tightens into the mock-grimace of the surgically preserved. This is her way of issuing a slight smile of agreement. As she stretches onto a towel, I peel off my T-shirt and shorts, pull my gray hair into a ponytail, and slip off my sandals. My feet are tired from the long walk, my calves ache, but the sand scorches so I hurry to the water, and as only the chronically ill know how to do, I ignore
the pain shooting down my legs.
The water quickly sucks me in and coats me with muck. I see nothing through the bruise of the surface, but I feel the fish, their silken gills fluttering like butterfly wings on my legs. I flip to my back and float. Amniotic water cradles me, and the whisper of a breeze, like an angel’s touch, caresses my face. My heart surges as if to the other side of the air. And the pain leeches from my back and legs into the water.
My esophagus and stomach, my intestines: all such a mess, riddled with holes, I can hardly eat or even drink water without the pressure in my ribs and the squeezing of pain through my torso into my back. Constant falls have fragmented my back, the bones so thin they don’t register on medical equipment, the bones like shrapnel on my nerves.
The peace here is beyond anything I’ve known. This must be what it’s like when people find Jesus or whatever other gods they worship. Must be what it’s like when men orgasm, when women feel beautiful, when cats catch mice.
Wide-winged birds float past, and my ears buzz as their notes fall into harmony with my breathing. I pant, and the notes intensify in pitch and go up an octave. I almost smile, I’m so content, but I don’t know how to smile, not really. I hold my breath until my lungs hurt, and the birds stop singing.
I’m one with the water and all it contains, one with the air and everything in it.
The locals claim that boats never make it to this cove, that the sea rises and swallows them at the horizon. The locals fear this place and are happy enough to stay away. Me, an outsider, just an old woman with nothing to lose, well, what’s left to fear when you don’t care if you die?
Back on shore is Tatania, rolled to one side, belly protruding, eyes riveted to a paperback rather than the beautiful sea.
My breath spills into the heat of the noonday sun.
My heart pounds in rhythm to the wings of birds and to the gills of the fish.
I doggy-paddle toward the jagged rock towering over the right side of the cove. Peek again at Tatania, sleeping now, her body heaving up and down, and she must be snoring in her “feminine way,” as she likes to put it.
The cliffs call to me through the harmonies of the birds and the fish. The rhythms form words I don’t know,
F’ai throdog uaaah
and
ogthrod ai-f geb’l-ee’h
I’m not crazy, never been crazy. Even with all the medicine, I’m not the type to let my mind drift into the stupors of drugs or self-pity. I simply stopped caring long ago whether I was dead or alive, which in my case is a form of death anyway. And the stories of this place, the Necrotic Cove, I could not ignore. It is said, by the people who fear this place, that it can devour your soul and lay you to rest. And this is what I want. I don’t want to die in a hospital, a nursing home. I want to die on a beach or in waters that tranquilize and numb me, I want to die beneath copper cliffs and a molten sun. Had I told this to Tatania, she would have found a way to prevent me from coming here.
I paddle toward shore, then drag myself to the beach and press my palms against the cliff. The rhythms pound,
F’ai throdog uaaah
ogthrod ai-f geb’l-ee’h
over and over again.
I lift my hands and look at the palms, the dust of a thousand sunsets on them. I rest my cheek against the rock, let it flush my senses. Did Tatania feel this ecstasy, this merging of dizziness and excitement, when she married for the first time, when she had sex with all those men between the marriages, when she got drunk and snorted coke and popped pills, when she partied all night, when the most handsome men wanted her, when she caught the eyes of the bad boys? I’ve always been alone, not even one man wanted me, so I don’t know how it feels to be loved with the type of passion that Tatania has always known. Always scorned, insulted, rejected, and only Tatania has stood by me as a friend. But this place and I, this, this is intense. This ecstasy, like my head’s in the clouds and all I can do is ride the tidal waves crashing down my body. This place and I, we merge as lovers, or maybe as conjoined twins.
Eventually, I pull back, and the removal of flesh from rock jolts me, and sadness floods the space of me that only moments before brimmed with ecstasy. My fingertip grazes the rock, so soft now like velvet, and joy brightens the edges of my darkness. My cheek back upon the rock, and ecstasy thrums through my body again—and I gasp, all the pain vanishing, for the first time in decades, there is no pain.
I pull back again, testing, and blackness envelops me as if I’ve left my first love.
I must get Tatania, bring her to the cliff, press her against the rock, let her feel for herself why I had to come to Necrotic Cove. Then she’ll understand the allure. My oldest and only friend, Tatania, who sheltered me when kids made fun of me in kindergarten and beat me up in third grade, who didn’t waver in my teens when boys taunted me as uglier than any dude, who filched money from her husbands for me when I lost job after job as the illnesses took root and spread. Dearest Tatania, you must feel my ecstasy now, for if not for you, I would have died long ago.
And so I race to her. My arms and legs flash before me, skinny tubes of flesh bruised blue from the sea and streaked copper from the cliffs.
I crouch, ignore the burning sand, and I shake her. “Wake up, Tatania! You must wake up!”
“Have you lost your mind?” Her eyes slowly open and focus on me, then abruptly, she shoves me off. “Are you insane? Let me rest before we have to hike four hours back to that damn village.” Mascara and eyeliner blotched by humidity and heat. Pancake makeup washed away by sweat, her face mottled by liver spots. The bristles of gray stubble on her chin, the lone hair curling from the middle of her neck.
I love Tatania.
Twins, she and I, joined almost since birth. Her husbands, and all the other men who came and went, mean nothing. They didn’t last. Only Tatania and I lasted, only Tatania and I remain together,
and isn’t that so,
isn’t it?
She drifts back to sleep, as I notice the bumps popping up all over my skin. They’re the size of goosebumps but not distributed in any pattern I recognize. Purple, each one, with a speck of glitter in the center. Perhaps bug bites or an irritation from the strange water?
The bumps are kind of pretty, I think, as if I’m laced in jewels.
Shadows ripple across the sand, and I look up to see black clouds scuttle like giant insects across the sun, streaming from one cliff to the other, then disappearing into the rock.
The breeze is no longer an angel’s touch. It’s rougher now, and the clouds coalesce, and the sky is a blood clot that rips open and weeps, the tears viscous and dark. Could it be that the angels cry for me, for Cassandra, who never believed in god and angels in the first place?
“CASSANDRA.” MY NAME SLITHERED FROM HIS MOUTH, the monster in a jeans jacket with the cigarette dangling from his teeth. “The Deformed,” and a laugh when he shoved me against the cement wall. I cowered as he jabbed me with tobacco-stained fingers, and I whispered “No no no” over and over again in the most pathetic way, but he didn’t listen to my pleas, they just made him bolder.
And suddenly, Tatania was there in prissy skirt and shirt with her latest boyfriend, Cole somebody-or-other, tall and muscular with angular cheekbones and the smug confidence of boys born with it all. I didn’t like Cole. He always got in the way of me and Tat.
“Stop it!” she demanded of the monster, this jerk who picked on me because I was so weak. I was easy prey. He stepped back, cocky grin, smoke rushing from his mouth, stinging my eyes, making my throat clench. Coughing, I slid along the concrete toward Tat and Cole, thinking that their names together sounded like a brand of Dollar Store thread. Fancy name to hide something febrile and weak that I didn’t think would last.
“Come here, Cassy dear,” and Tat hugged me close, and I settled my cheek against her perfectly ironed shirt, pink and smelling like flowers. Her breasts swelled, her heart beat softly against me, and I held back tears and wrapped my arms around her waist an
d clutched her tight. I never cried. I never laughed. I never showed emotion. Except when I begged the monster not to beat me up.
Cole grabbed the monster’s jacket and shook him, but all Cole got for his trouble was smoke in his face and a hard shove against cement. With all his football muscle, Cole was no match for the monster, street lean, mangy, the type who enjoyed a fight more than anything else.
Fast-forward three years, and I found myself at their wedding. Cole, her first husband fresh out of high school. His worshipping eyes, his adoration, “Oh Tatania, so kind, so sweet, the most wonderful girl in the world, how can I be so lucky?” he gushed.
“No, I’m the lucky one, dearest…”
Ooze. Ooze.
Ooze ooze ooze ooze
Would they never shut up?
I didn’t see her for a while, he was so high on her due to her beauty and the constant kindness she’d shown to me all those years.
Me.
I was responsible for bringing Tat and Cole together.
When they divorced and she got half of his fortune, quite substantial, she came back to me.
As she always did.
LIGHTNING FLASHES, BLOOD CLOT SKY, SUN NO longer molten. Thunder like 9/11 and the towers falling, a sand storm whisking grit into my eyes. Tatania jerks awake and shrieks, “What’s going on, Cass?” She uses my pet name from long ago. “What’s wrong with my skin? My god, what’s wrong with you?”
Tatania’s skin glitters with bumps just like mine, except they’re sparse on her and littered across me. I hold up an arm, and the wind whips it back against my shoulder socket. Ninety-degree angle to my shoulder—in the wrong direction—but my arm doesn’t break. The bumps have congealed into gelatinous mounds all over my arm. Mounds that are like muscles, glistening purple and twinkling dots. Mesmerizing twinkle. Mesmerizing…
