Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Outside the shanty, the wind howls like the son of Poseidon, and, for the moment, there’s no more talk of the Ivory Coast or dreams or sailing gaily away into the sunset aboard the Silver Star.

  Much of what I’ve secretly scribbled there in my notebook concerns that terrible storm that she claims rose up from the sea to steal away the little park and the bandshell, the diner and the jail and the dress shops, the two churches, one Presbyterian and the other Catholic. From what she’s said, it must have happened sometime in September of ’57 or ’58, but I’ve spent long afternoons in the small public library, carefully poring over old newspapers and magazines. I can find no evidence of such a tempest making landfall in the autumn of either of those years. What I can verify is that the village once extended down the hill, past the marshes and dunes to the bay, and there was a lively, prosperous waterfront. There was trade with Gloucester and Boston, Nantucket and Newport, and the bay was renowned for its lobsters, fat black sea bass, and teeming shoals of haddock. Then, abruptly, the waterfront was all but abandoned sometime before 1960. In print, I’ve found hardly more than scant and unsubstantiated speculations to account for it, that exodus, that strange desertion. Talk of overfishing, for instance, and passing comparisons with Cannery Row in faraway California and the collapse of the Monterey Bay sardine canning industry back in the 1950’s. I write down everything I find, no matter how unconvincing, but I permit myself to believe only a very little of it.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” she says, then shuts her eyes again.

  “You haven’t got a penny,” I reply, trying to ignore the raw, hungry sound of the wind and the constant noise at the window.

  “I most certainly do,” she tells me and pretends to scowl and look offended. “I have a few dollars, tucked away. I’m not an indigent.”

  “Fine, then. I was thinking of Africa,” I lie. “I was thinking of palm trees and parrots.”

  “I don’t remember any palm trees in the travel brochure,” she says. “But I expect there must be quite a lot of them, regardless.”

  “Undoubtedly,” I agree. I don’t say anything else, though, because I think I hear voices coming from somewhere outside her shack – urgent, muttering voices that reach me despite the wind and the flapping plastic. I can’t make out the words, no matter how hard I try. It ought to scare me more than it does. Like I said, one of these nights, they’ll do murder against me. One of them alone, or all of them together. Maybe they won’t even wait for the conspiring cover of nightfall. Maybe they’ll come for me in broad daylight. I begin to suspect my murder would not even be deemed a crime by the people who live in those brightly painted houses up the hill, back beyond the dunes. On the contrary, they might consider it a necessary sacrifice, something to placate the flotsam and jetsam huddling in the ruins along the shore, an oblation of blood and flesh to buy them time.

  Seems more likely than not.

  “They shouldn’t come so near,” she says, acknowledging that she too hears the whispering voices. “I’ll have a word with them later. They ought to know better.”

  “They’ve more business being here than I do,” I reply, and she silently watches me for a moment or two. In the last month, her grey eyes have gone almost entirely black, and I can no longer distinguish the irises from the pupils.

  “They ought to know better,” she says again, and this time her tone leaves me no room for argument.

  There are tales that I’ve heard, and bits of dreams I sometimes think I’ve borrowed -– from her or one of her apostles – that I find somewhat more convincing than either newspaper accounts of depleted fish stocks or rumors of a cataclysmic hurricane. There are the spook stories I’ve overheard, passed between children. There are yarns traded by the half dozen or so grizzled old men who sit outside the filling station near the widow’s boardinghouse, who seem possessed of no greater ambition than checkers and hand-rolled cigarettes, cheap gin and gossip. I have begun to believe the truth is not something that was entrusted to the press, but, instead, an ignominy the town has struggled, purposefully, to forget, and which is now recalled dimly or not at all. There is remaining no consensus to be had, but there are common threads from which I have woven rough speculation.

  Late one night, very near the end of summer or towards the beginning of fall, there was an unusually high tide. It quickly swallowed the granite jetty and the shingle, then broke across the seawall and flooded the streets of the harbor. There was a full moon that night, hanging low and ripe on the eastern horizon, and by its wicked reddish glow men and women saw the things that came slithering and creeping and lurching out of those angry waves. The invaders cast no shadow, or the moonlight shone straight through them, but was somehow oddly distorted. Or, perhaps, what came out of the sea that night glimmered faintly with an eerie phosphorescence of its own.

  I know that I’m choosing lurid, loaded words here – wicked, lurching, hungry, eerie – hoping, I suppose, to discredit all the cock and bull I’ve heard, trying to neuter those schoolyard demons. But, in my defense, the children and the old men whom I’ve overheard were quite a bit less discreet. They have little use, and even less concern, for the sensibilities of people who aren’t going to believe them, anyway. In some respects, they’re almost as removed as she, as distant and disconnected as the shanty dwellers here in the rubble at the edge of the bay.

  “I would be sorry,” she says, “if you were to sail away to Africa.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. There isn’t anywhere I want to go. There isn’t anywhere I’d rather be.”

  She smiles again, and this time I don’t allow myself to look away. She has teeth like those of a very small shark, and they glint wet and dark in healthy pink gums. I have often wondered how she manages not to cut her lips or tongue on those teeth, why there are not always trickles of drying blood at the corners of her thin lips. She’s bitten into me enough times now. I have ugly crescent scars across my shoulders and chest and upper arms to prove that we are lovers, stigmata to make her apostles hate me that much more.

  “It’s silly of you to waste good money on a room,” she says, changing the course of our conversation. “You could stay here with me. I hate the nights when you’re in the village, and I’m alone.”

  “Or you could go back with me,” I reply. It’s a familiar sort of futility, this exchange, and we both know our lines by heart, just as we both know the outcome.

  “No,” she says, her shark’s smile fading. “You know that I can’t. You know they’d never have me up there,” and she nods in the general direction of the town.

  And yes, I do know that, but I’ve never yet told her that I do.

  The tide rose up beneath a low red moon and washed across the waterfront. The sturdy wharf was shattered like matchsticks, and boats of various shapes and sizes – dories and jiggers, trollers and Bermuda-rigged schooners – were torn free of their moorings and tossed onto the shivered docks. But there was no storm, no wind, no lashing rain. No thunder and lightning and white spray off the breakers. The air was hot and still that night, and the cloudless sky blazed with the countless pin-prick stars that shine brazenly through the punctured dome of Heaven.

  “They say the witch what brought the trouble came from someplace up Amesbury way,” I heard one of the old men tell the others, months and months ago. None of his companions replied, neither nodding their heads in agreement, nor voicing dissent. “I heard she made offerings every month, on the night of the new moon, and I heard she had herself a daughter, though I never learned the girl’s name. Don’t guess it matters, though. And the name of her father, well, ain’t nothing I’ll ever say aloud.”

  That night, the cobbled streets and alleyways were fully submerged for long hours. Buildings and houses were lifted clear of their foundations and dashed one against the other. What with no warning of the freakish tide, only a handful of the waterfront’s inhabitants managed to escape the deluge and gain the safety of higher ground. More than two hundred souls perished, a
nd for weeks afterwards the corpses of the drowned continued to wash ashore. Many of the bodies were so badly mangled that they could never be placed with a name or a face and went unclaimed, to be buried in unmarked graves in the village beyond the dunes.

  I can no longer hear the whisperers through the thin walls of her shack, so I’ll assume that they’ve gone or have simply had their say and subsequently fallen silent. Possibly, they’re leaning now with their ears pressed close to the corrugated aluminum and rotting clapboard, listening in, hanging on her every syllable, even as my own voice fills them with loathing and jealous spite.

  “I’ll have a word with them,” she tells me for the third time. “You should feel as welcome here as any of us.”

  The sea swept across the land, and, by the light of that swollen, sanguine moon, grim approximations of humanity moved freely, unimpeded, through the flooded thoroughfares. Sometimes they swam, and sometimes they went about deftly on all fours, and sometimes they shambled clumsily along, as though walking were new to them and not entirely comfortable.

  “They weren’t men,” I overheard a boy explaining to his friends. The boy had ginger-colored hair, and he was nine, maybe ten years old at the most. The children were sitting together at the edge of the weedy vacant lot where a traveling carnival sets up three or four times a year.

  “Then were they women?” one of the others asked him.

  The boy frowned and gravely shook his head. “No. You’re not listening. They weren’t women, neither. They weren’t anything human. But, what I heard said, if you were to take all the stuff gets pulled up in trawler nets – all the hauls of cod and flounder and eel, the dogfish and the skates, the squids and jellyfish and crabs, all of it and whatever else you can conjure – if you took those things, still alive and wriggling, and could mush them up together into the shapes of men and women, that’s exactly what walked out of the bay that night.”

  “That’s not true,” a girl said indignantly, and the others stared at her. “That’s not true at all. God wouldn’t let things like that run loose.”

  The ginger-haired boy shook his head again. “They got different gods than us, gods no one even knows the names for, and that’s who the Amesbury witch was worshipping. Those gods from the bottom of the ocean.”

  “Well, I think you’re a liar,” the girl told him. “I think you’re a blasphemer and a liar, and, also, I think you’re just making this up to scare us.” And then she stood and stalked away across the weedy lot, leaving the others behind. They all watched her go, and then the ginger-haired boy resumed his tale.

  “It gets worse,” he said.

  A cold rain has started to fall, and the drops hitting the tin roof sound almost exactly like bacon frying in a skillet. She’s moved away from me and is sitting naked at the edge of the bed, her long legs dangling over the side, her right shoulder braced against the rusted iron headboard. I’m still lying on the damp sheets, staring up at the leaky ceiling, waiting for the water tumbling from the sky to find its way inside. She’ll set jars and cooking pots beneath the worst of the leaks, but there are far too many to bother with them all.

  “I can’t stay here forever,” she says. It’s not the first time, but, I admit, those words always take me by surprise. “It’s getting harder being here. Every day, it gets harder on me. I’m so awfully tired, all the time.”

  I look away from the ceiling, at her throat and the peculiar welts just below the line of her chin. The swellings first appeared a few weeks back, and the skin there has turned dry and scaly, and has taken on a sickly greyish-yellow hue. Sometimes, there are boils or seeping blisters. When she goes out among the others, she wears the silk scarf I gave her, tied about her neck so that they won’t have to see. So they won’t ask questions she doesn’t want to answer.

  “I don’t have to go alone,” she says, but doesn’t turn her head to look at me. “I don’t want to leave you here.”

  “I can’t,” I say.

  “I know,” she replies.

  And this is how it almost always is. I come down from the village, and we make love, and she tells me her dreams, here in this ramshackle cabin out past the dunes and dog roses and the gale-stunted trees. In her dreams, I am always leaving her behind, buying tickets on tramp steamers or signing on with freighters, sailing away to the Ivory Coast or Portugal or Singapore. I can’t begin to recall all the faraway places she’s dreamt me leaving her for. Her nightmares have sent me round and round the globe. But the truth is, she’s the one who’s leaving, and soon, before the first snows come.

  I know it (though I play her games of transference), and all her apostles know it, too. The ones who have come down from the village and never gone back up the hill again. The vagrants and squatters and winos, the lunatics and true believers, who have turned their backs on the world, but only after it turned its back on them. Destitute and cast away, they found the daughter of the sea, each of them, and the shanty town is dotted with their tawdry, makeshift altars and shrines. She knows precisely what she is to them, even if she won’t admit it. She knows that these lost souls have been blinded by the trials and tribulations of their various, sordid lives, and she is the soothing darkness they’ve found. She is the only genuine balm they’ve ever known against the cruel glare of the sun and the moon, which are the unblinking eyes of the gods of all mankind.

  She sits there, at the edge of the bed. She is always alone, no matter how near we are, no matter how many apostles crowd around and eavesdrop and plot my demise. She stares at the flapping sheet of plastic tacked up where the windowpane used to be, and I go back to watching the ceiling. A single drop of rainwater gets through the layers of tin and tarpaper shingles and lands on my exposed belly.

  She laughs softly. She doesn’t laugh very often anymore, and I shut my eyes and listen to the rain.

  “You can really have no notion how delightful it will be, when they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea,” she whispers, and then laughs again.

  I take the bait, because I almost always take the bait.

  “But the snail replied ‘Too far, too far!’ and gave a look askance,” I say, quoting Lewis Carroll, and she doesn’t laugh. She starts to scratch at the welts below her chin, then stops herself.

  “In the halls of my mother,” she says, “there is such silence, such absolute and immemorial peace. In that hallowed place, the mind can be still. There is serenity, finally, and an end to all sickness and fear.” She pauses and looks at the floor, at the careless scatter of empty tin cans and empty bottles and bones picked clean. “But,” she continues, “it will be lonely down there, without you. It will be something even worse than lonely.”

  I don’t reply, and in a moment, she gets to her feet and goes to stand by the door.

  FISH BRIDE (1970)

  Readers and reviewers have considered this an Innsmouth story, and I suppose that’s reasonable. It even appeared in Steve Jones’ Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth (2013). However, I would argue that the greater inspiration was Lovecraft’s 1936 “collaboration” with R. H. Barlow, “The Night Ocean.” In the end, though, it’s a love story for Panthalassa’s changelings, and I dedicate it to everyone who was unable to follow me down.

  The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean

  The building’s elevator is busted, and so I’ve had to drag my ass up twelve flights of stairs. Her apartment is smaller and more tawdry than I expected, but I’m not entirely sure I could say what I thought I’d find at the top of all those stairs. I don’t know this part of Manhattan very well, this ugly wedge of buildings one block over from South Street and Roosevelt Drive and the ferry terminal. She keeps reminding me that if I look out the window (there’s only one), I can see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems a great source of pride, that she has a view of the bridge and the East River. The apartment is too hot, filled with soggy heat pouring off the radiators, and there are so many unpleasant odors competing for my attention that I’d be hard pressed to assign any one of them pri
ority over the rest. Mildew. Dust. Stale cigarette smoke. Better I say the apartment smells shut away, and leave it at that. The place is crammed wall to wall with threadbare, dust-skimmed antiques, the tattered refuse of Victorian and Edwardian bygones. I have trouble imagining how she navigates the clutter in her wheelchair, which is something of an antique itself. I compliment the Tiffany lamps, all of which appear not to be reproductions and are in considerably better shape than most of the other furnishings. She smiles, revealing dentures stained by nicotine and neglect. At least, I assume they’re dentures. She switches on one of the table lamps, its shade a circlet of stained-glass dragonflies, and tells me it was a Christmas gift from a playwright. He’s dead now, she says. She tells me his name, but it’s no one I’ve ever heard of, and I admit this to her. Her yellow-brown smile doesn’t waver.

  “Nobody remembers him. He was very avant-garde,” she says. “No one understood what he was trying to say. But obscurity was precious to him. It pained him terribly, that so few ever understood that about his work.”

  I nod, once or twice or three times, I don’t know, and it hardly matters. Her thin fingers glide across the lampshade, leaving furrows in the accumulated dust, and now I can see that the dragonflies have wings the color of amber, and their abdomens and thoraces are a deep cobalt blue. They all have eyes like poisonous crimson berries. She asks me to please have a seat and apologizes for not having offered one sooner. She motions to an armchair near the lamp, and also to a chaise lounge a few feet farther away. Both are upholstered with the same faded floral brocade. I choose the armchair and am hardly surprised to discover that all the springs are shot. I sink several inches into the chair, and my knees jut upwards, towards the water-stained plaster ceiling.