Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “So long, girl,” the thing in the tank sighs, its voice rolling, tumbling, rushing through the tent like breakers before an incoming tide. “So very, very long have I waited for this night, hauled across time and these death-dry lands, through arid wilderness and the smoldering, unseeing cities of men.”

  “No,” Cala says, but the word is not meant as a response, only as a personal statement of her disbelief, spoken aloud for her own benefit. There is still no reason, beyond the coincidence of her recurring dream, to suppose the thing in the tank is not a hoax, and that its voice does not originate, for instance, from a woman sequestered somewhere behind the tank. Probably, she speaks into a small brass horn attached to a length of tubing, and her voice emerges from the mechanized rubber lips of the melusine.

  “They said that you would be the Skeptic,” the thing responds, not knowing that Cala was not speaking to it (for what sane woman talks to an automaton).

  “They,” Cala says, repeating what the thing has said, though still not speaking to it.

  “My dear sisters,” it replies, “Palatyne and Melior. They each, in turn, warned that, in the end, all my searching would yield only so much dubiety and fleer.”

  “I have seen many a clever puppet show,” Cala says, and this time she realizes that she is answering the thing in the tank. “I did not always see the strings or the puppeteers, but I never doubted the performers were only marionettes.”

  “You do not strike me as the sort to attend a puppet show,” the melusine replies. “Which is a shame, I think.”

  Cala Weatherall glances uneasily back the way she’s come, and there’s the curtain of glass beads, still swaying slightly, softly clicking and clacking against each other. She looks back at the aquarium tank, still clinging as ferociously to her disbelief as any caterwauling Baptist minister ever clung to his King James Bible. The thing in the tank has the appearance of a very pale and beautiful woman from the hips up. Its skin has a disquieting iridescent quality, almost opalescent in this light. Its perfectly wrought hands have no nails, but end in sharp, recurved, and chitinous claws at the tip of each long finger, and its eyes are the yellow of the yolk from a chicken’s egg. Its small breasts are shamelessly bare, though Cala notes that it has no visible nipples, and so she wonders, absently, at the utility of breasts so ill-equipped for nursing. A sculptor’s fancy or accidental imperfection, and likely nothing more. She dares to take one step nearer, seeking other flaws in the design. The melusine’s long straight hair hangs in sodden strands about its mother-of-pearl shoulders, black as a freshly-exposed vein of coal. Only, on closer inspection, there are what appear to be dozens of fleshy tendrils writhing within those sable tresses, no bigger around than a lead pencil. Its sharp teeth flash when it mimics speech, and they are almost identical to those of certain lamniform sharks known to ichthyologists as sand tigers, row upon row anchored in gums the bruised colour of ripening elderberries.

  “I know your lonely nights, Cala,” the melusine tells her. “I have watched you, at your window, envying the couples passing by.”

  “Enough,” Cala replies angrily, for there are limits to what any woman must endure, even in well-meaning jest, and this jest has long since transcended the boundaries of propriety. “I do not know how you people learned my name,” she says, not speaking to the thing in the tank, but to whatever unseen actress speaks its lines. “Though I doubt it was so very difficult. You must have numerous marks each time you enter a new town.”

  “And we know your dreams?” the melusine asks, as its scaly, serpentine tails coil and uncoil beneath that human torso. It cocks its head to one side, waiting for an answer, and the small flukes at the ends of its tails slap the surface of the water. “Pray thee, tell how it is we might accomplish that feat?”

  For the span of several heartbeats, Cala does not reply, transfixed not only by the power of the thing’s question, but by the rhythmic, almost hypnotic, smack of those silvery-green flukes. Yes, she thinks. Hypnosis, mesmerism, autosuggestion, these must be part of the deception. Turning my own mind against me to achieve this effect.

  “Yes,” the melusine says. “Hypnosis, mesmerism, autosuggestion, these must be part of the deception. Turning your own mind against you to achieve this effect.”

  Cala Weatherall gasps, and takes another step towards the tank. “It cannot be,” she says. “It’s impossible.”

  “Why?” asks the thing in the tank. “Because you have not been taught that it is so? I have not come so far, across gulfs of time and space, merely to deceive a lonely, dissatisfied woman. What bitter daemon has taken hold of the world of men that it no longer trusts its own eyes and its own ears?”

  “Ours is an enlightened age,” Cala says, but her voice is hardly audible now, a half whisper as she steps still nearer to the aquarium tank. “Not an age of ignorance and superstition. Not an age of sirens and mermaids and sea monsters.”

  “And neither is it an age in which a woman who is brilliant and enterprising, but whose heart does not seek a man, can hope for the balm of love or even of a soul mate’s companionship? Did you also sell your heart, Cala Weatherall, when you sold off your imagination? Is there remaining now no way ever that I may comfort thee?”

  “It simply is not possible,” Cala whispers, meaning only the existence of this creature and not to answer its question. And she realizes, if only distantly, that she has begun to weep, and, whether from sympathy or mockery, the melusine has begun to weep as well.

  “It says, you must be brilliant, indeed, if your mind contains a catalog of all those things possible and all those things that are not.”

  “They were dreams. Only dreams. I have never even dared to hope.”

  “A mighty daemon, indeed, that it leads a woman to fear even the meager solace of hope.”

  Now Cala is standing so near the tank that she might easily extend a hand to reach out and touch the melusine’s strange, restless hair and pearly skin. And she sees, for the first time, a small and tarnished brass plaque bolted to the tank, which reads simply Le Fontaine de Soif.

  “It is so, is it not?” the melusine asks, seeing that Cala’s read the plaque on the aquarium. “You are so terribly thirsty, like a woman lost and wandering in an endless desert.” And then the creature ventures the faintest of smiles, and one glistening arm slides out over the rim of the tank towards her.

  “It is so,” Cala confesses to the beast. “I am so alone. I am so lost, so terribly alone. And you…you are more beautiful times ten than anything I have ever looked upon with waking eyes.” She starts to take the melusine’s hand, recalling again details of her vivid dreams – the wordless embraces in lightless, submerged halls formed of coral and the carved ribs of leviathans. Already, she knows the taste of the melusine’s thin pink lips, the feel of those vicious teeth upon her skin, the unspeakable pleasure of the faerie’s mouth and hands and those appendages for which men have not ever devised names moving upon her and probing deeply within her.

  “It is such a small thing, belief,” the melusine tells her. “It is no more than taking my hand.”

  And then, in the last fraction of an instant before Cala does accept that proffered hand, there is a violent hissing, and a loud pop, and all at once the smell of ozone and hot metal, of stripped gears and melting polymers fills the air inside the tent, pushing back the salty, primordial smells of the ocean and of birth and death and love. The thing in the tank shudders and then goes limp, and steam begins to rise from the water in the aquarium. Somewhere nearby, she hears a woman, a woman with a voice like the melusine’s, cursing, and a man begins to shout. Cala lets her arm drop to her side, and her eyes linger only a few seconds longer on the ruined automaton, before she turns and silently makes her way out of the tent and back out into the muggy summer night and the hullabaloo of Othniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels. The next day, after a few hours of fitful sleep, she will discover the jimmied lock on her dresser drawer and the missing diary wherein she recorded all her secret
thoughts and desires and dreams. And there will remain unanswered questions, but she will not ever ask them. There is too much work to be done, a job that fifty men, fifty men easy, would be happy to take if she were to fail. There are calculations to make and orders to be filled, and if in the empty stretches of her nights, she sometimes finds herself far below the churning surface of the sea, beloved and belonging in those sunken corridors, these are things she keeps forever to herself and never again commits to the fickle confidences of ink and paper.

  THE MELUSINE (1898)

  It will be obvious to anyone who’s read my story “Postcards from the King of Tides” that there’s significant reworking going on here, although I wasn’t aware I’d done it until years later. I suppose this story could be said to be a rationalist response to “Postcards from the King of Tides,” but, if so, it was my rational subconscious responding, which is odd as I tend to suspect my subconscious mind of being embarrassingly superstitious. Of my five Cherry Creek stories, this is my second favorite, after “The Steam Dancer (1896)”.

  As Red as Red

  1.

  “So, you believe in vampires?” she asks, then takes another sip of her coffee and looks out at the rain pelting Thames Street beyond the café window. It’s been pissing rain for almost an hour, a cold, stinging shower on an overcast afternoon near the end of March, a bitter Newport afternoon that would have been equally at home in January or February. But at least it’s not pissing snow.

  I put my own cup down – tea, not coffee – and stare across the booth at her for a moment or two before answering. “No,” I tell Abby Gladding. “But, quite clearly, those people in Exeter who saw to it that Mercy Brown’s body was exhumed, the ones who cut out her heart and burned it, clearly they believed in vampires. And that’s what I’m studying, the psychology behind that hysteria, behind the superstitions.”

  “It was so long ago,” she replies and smiles. There’s no foreshadowing in that smile, not even in hindsight. It surely isn’t a predatory smile. There’s nothing malevolent, or hungry, or feral in the expression. She just watches the rain and smiles, as though something I’ve said amuses her.

  “Not really,” I say, glancing down at my steaming cup. “Not so long ago as people might like to think. The Mercy Brown incident, that was in 1892, and the most recent case of purported vampirism in the Northeast I’ve been able to pin down dates from sometime in 1898, a mere hundred and eleven years ago.”

  Her smile lingers, and she traces a circle in the condensation on the plate-glass window, then traces another circle inside it.

  “We’re not so far removed from the villagers with their torches and pitchforks, from old Cotton Mather and his bunch. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “Well, not exactly, but…” and when I trail off, she turns her head towards me, and her blue-grey eyes seem as cold as the low-slung sky above Newport. You could almost freeze to death in eyes like those, I think, and I take another sip of my lukewarm Earl Grey with lemon. Her eyes seem somehow brighter than they should in the dim light of the coffeehouse, so there’s your foreshadowing, I suppose, if you’re the sort who needs it.

  “You’re pretty far from Exeter, Ms. Howard,” she says and takes another sip of her coffee. And me, I’m sitting here wishing we were talking about almost anything but Rhode Island vampires and the madness of crowds, tuberculosis and the Master’s thesis I’ll be defending at the end of May. It has been months since I’ve had anything even resembling a date, and I don’t want to squander the next half hour or so talking shop.

  “I think I’ve turned up something interesting,” I tell her, because I can’t think of any subtle way to steer the conversation in another direction. “A case no one’s documented before, right here in Newport.”

  She smiles that smile again.

  “I got a tip from a folklorist up at Brown,” I say. “Seems like maybe there was an incident here in 1785 or thereabouts. If it checks out, I might be onto the oldest case of suspected vampirism resulting in an exhumation anywhere in New England. So, now I’m trying to verify the rumors. But there’s precious little to go on. Chasing vampires, it’s not like studying the Salem witch trials, where you have all those court records, the indictments and depositions and what have you. Instead, it’s necessary to spend a lot of time sifting and sorting fact from fiction, and, usually, there’s not much of either to work with.”

  She nods, then glances back towards the big window and the rain. “Be a feather in your cap, though. If it’s not just a rumor, I mean.”

  “Yes,” I reply. “Yes, it certainly would.”

  And here, there’s an unsettling wave of not-quite déjà vu, something closer to dissociation, perhaps, and for a few dizzying seconds I feel as if I’m watching this conversation, a voyeur listening in, or as if I’m only remembering it, but in no way actually, presently, taking part in it. And, too, the coffeehouse and our talk and the rain outside seem no more concrete – no more here and now – than does the morning before. One day that might as well be the next, and it’s raining, either way.

  I’m standing alone on Bowen’s Warf, staring out past the masts crowded into the marina at sleek white sailboats skimming over the glittering water, and there’s the silhouette of Goat Island, half hidden in the fog. I’m about to turn and walk back up the hill to Washington Square and the library, about to leave the gaudy Disney World concessions catering to the tastes of tourists and return to the comforting maze of ancient gabled houses lining winding, narrow streets. And that’s when I see her for the first time. She’s standing alone near the “seal safari” kiosk, staring at a faded sign, at black-and-white photographs of harbor seals with eyes like the puppies and little girls from those hideous Margaret Keane paintings. She’s wearing an old pea coat and shiny green galoshes that look new, but there’s nothing on her head, and she doesn’t have an umbrella. Her long black hair hangs wet and limp, and when she looks at me, it frames her pale face.

  Then it passes, the blip or glitch in my psyche, and I’ve snapped back, into myself, into this present. I’m sitting across the booth from her once more, and the air smells almost oppressively of freshly roasted and freshly ground coffee beans.

  “I’m sure it has a lot of secrets, this town,” she says, fixing me again with those blue-grey eyes and smiling that irreproachable smile of hers.

  “Can’t swing a dead cat,” I say, and she laughs.

  “Well, did it ever work?” Abby asks. “I mean, digging up the dead, desecrating their mortal remains to appease the living. Did it tend to do the trick?”

  “No,” I reply. “Of course not. But that’s beside the point. People do strange things when they’re scared.”

  And there’s more, mostly more questions from her about Colonial-era vampirism, Newport’s urban legends, and my research as a folklorist. I’m grateful that she’s kind or polite enough not to ask the usual “you mean people get paid to do this sort of thing” questions. Instead, she tells me a werewolf story dating back to the 1800’s, a local priest supposedly locked away in the Portsmouth Poor Asylum after he committed a particularly gruesome murder, how he was spared the gallows because people believed he was a werewolf and so not in control of his actions. She even tells me about seeing his nameless grave in a cemetery up in Middletown, his tombstone bearing the head of a wolf. And I’m polite enough not to tell her that I’ve heard this one before.

  Finally, I notice that it’s stopped raining.

  “I really ought to get back to work,” I say, and she nods and suggests that we should have dinner sometime soon. I agree, but we don’t set a date. She has my number, after all, so we can figure that out later. She also mentions a movie playing at Jane Pickens that she hasn’t seen and thinks I might enjoy. I leave her sitting there in the booth, in her pea coat and green galoshes, and she orders another cup of coffee as I’m exiting the café. On the way back to the library, I see a tree filled with noisy, cawing crows, and for some reason it reminds me of Abby Gladding
.

  2.

  That was Monday, and there’s nothing the least bit remarkable about Tuesday. I make the commute from Providence to Newport, crossing the West Passage of Narragansett Bay to Conanicut Island, and then the East Passage to Aquidneck Island and Newport. Most of the day is spent at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum on Bellevue, shut away with my newspaper clippings and microfiche, with frail yellowed books that were printed before the Revolutionary War. I wear the white cotton gloves they give me for handling archival materials and make several pages of handwritten notes, pertaining primarily to the treatment of cases of consumption in Newport during the first two decades of the Eighteenth Century.

  The library is open late on Tuesdays, and I don’t leave until sometime after seven p.m. But nothing I find gets me any nearer to confirming that a corpse believed to have belonged to a vampire was exhumed from the Common Burying Ground in 1785. On the long drive home, I try not to think about the fact that she hasn’t called, or my growing suspicion that she likely never will. I have a can of ravioli and a beer for dinner. I half watch something forgettable on television. I take a hot shower and brush my teeth. If there are any dreams – good, bad, or otherwise – they’re nothing I recall upon waking. The day is sunny, and not quite as cold, and I do my best to summon a few shoddy scraps of optimism, enough to get me out the door and into the car.