Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Okay,” Ptolema says, when she’s sure she isn’t interrupting the redhead. Yeah, she has orders to kill her. But she doesn’t want it to come to that, not with an informant that could still prove valuable down the line. Not just yet. This could, of course, change in a matter of seconds. “We have a former high-profile psychiatric wiz using these two twins for fuck only knows what. The X have Ivoire – reluctant soldier – convinced her sister will be killed unless she follows orders, and, as added insurance, extra control, they’ve infected or poisoned her and have her dependent upon them for painkillers. Have you considered she might only think she’s sick?”

  “I have,” the redhead replies. “But pain is pain.”

  “Her twin,” Ptolema continues, “with whom she’s been involved in an incestuous relationship for seven years, since the two were thirteen, not only has no problem with this, she’s helping out.” Ptolema is suddenly, and, she thinks, unaccountably seized with a need to lean over the rail and vomit her dinner and all that beer into the river.

  “Sorry,” the redhead says. “The nausea will pass. Probably. My focus has never been spot on. Chaos can be goddamn chaotic and all.”

  “Fuck you,” Ptolema mutters and tries to concentrate, but she can taste bile. “After your confab with these two sweethearts, did either of them say they’d be in touch again?”

  “Nope. She did not.”

  “She?”

  “Doc Twisby. Got hostile there at the end. I ought to mention that. Stopped just short of making full-on, out-and-out threats. But close enough the hairs on the back of my neck were prickling. Sufficient tension in the air I was wondering if I could reach the Glock in my shoulder holster before she pulled some sort of telekinetic nonsense or what have you. Pyro- or cryokinesis. Quantum tunneling. Doesn’t matter if you wind up on the wrong end of the stick, now does it?”

  “She’s TK?”

  “That’s the vibe I got. Same with Thing Number Two, and, I’d bet a hundred large, same with Ivy.”

  Ptolema pinches the bridge of her nose, hard enough her eyes water, because sometimes that helps when she’s motion-sick. And whatever inadvertent energy has sloughed off the redhead and onto her feels more like motion sickness than anything else.

  “But she didn’t do shit. Little staring match there between me and the Doc, and Bête doing some sort of origami shit with a bar napkin. Oh, hey, I haven’t mentioned that, have I. See, the twin, she kept making an origami swan. They looked top notch to me, but every time Twisby would nod her head and Bête would get all hangdog and start over. Fuck me in the ear if I know what that was all about. By the way, Miss P, is it true the twins are some sort of prodigies? Geology, some sort of something of the sort?”

  “Evolutionary biology,” Ptolema replies. The nose-pinching remedy has done no good whatsoever, and her stomach rolls. “Paleontology. They were both grad students before this began.”

  “So we’ve a crop of brainiacs all round, don’t we. Yeah, Ivy dropped hints to that effect. But I don’t always know what’s crap and what’s for true. But, here’s what I still don’t get. Why is it you lot are chasing after this Twisby and her pale riders? Or is that need-to-know?”

  Ptolema shuts her eyes, then opens them again. She truly is going to puke. And it comes to her this isn’t an accident. This is the redhead’s safety net, just in case the meeting went sideways and she needed an exit strategy. “You heard the recording,” she says quietly and swallows.

  “Black Queen white, White Queen black,” says the redhead, sounding amused. “You don’t look so hot there, Miss P. Gone a little green around the gills. But, the recording. Gotta admit, don’t see how it hooks up with the twins.”

  “Then you’re dumber than I’ve given you credit for. Think. Ivoire and Bête?”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “Ivory beast,” says Ptolema. It’s only seconds now until she loses it.

  “Damn, yeah. Dude, how did I not see that? White queen. Two white queens. Dangerous white queens. So, you’re thinkin’ the message refers to those two? You know, if the gods send worms, that would be kind, if we were robins.”

  “And just what does that – ” But Ptolema doesn’t finish. Instead, she rushes to the railing and hurls into the Liffey. And when the cramps and dry heaves finally pass, there’s no sign whatsoever of the redhead. She may as well have been a ghost. An hallucination. A false memory.

  5.

  How Ghosts Affect Relationships

  (1/1/2001; 12:01:01 a.m.)

  It is everything but an understatement to call this room white. It is white in so absolute a sense that it is almost impossible for the eye to detect the intersection of angles where the four walls meet ceiling, where ceiling meets walls, where walls meet floor, to pick out each individual object placed within the room, for all of these are completely white, as well. The furnishings are few and plain: a bed, a nightstand, a white lamp with a white lampshade, a blank white canvas within a white frame, a white table and two white chairs – one placed at the north end of the table and one at the south. On the southern wall, there is a window, one window with white drapes. Outside, snow is falling so hard the land and sky blur together, whiteout conditions. The white door with its white marble knob is set into the eastern wall. However, any sense of direction would be lost as soon as one were to dare enter the white room. Indeed, even the ability to tell up from down would be jeopardized. That is how achromatic is this room.

  Though Lizbeth Margeride has no recollection of ever once having entered the room, she has been here many, many times, and, in its way, each time has been different. But always her awareness of being here begins with her seated in the white chair at the southern end of the table, facing her sister, Elle, who sits at the northern end, facing her. Both of them are wearing nothing but white camiknickers that would have been fashionable in the 1930’s, with matching white stockings and Mary Janes. There is a chessboard on the table between them, and it, too, is entirely white, every one of the sixty-four squares precisely identical, and yet unmistakably distinct.

  The first violation of the room’s immaculateness are the sixteen and sixteen chess pieces themselves, as there are both white and black pieces. The black pieces are arranged before Lizbeth, and the white before Elle. It is appropriate, Lizbeth thinks, as Lizbeth always thinks, that her sister will make the opening move, as is ever the privilege of white, in keeping with the color scheme of the white room.

  The second violation is the sisters themselves. Though their hair and eyebrows are almost as pale as the room, their milky skin seems just shy of pink in this place, and their blue eyes are as radiant as star sapphires. Their twenty fingernails have been polished crimson.

  White.

  This is the illusion of a single “color” perceived by the three sorts of cone cells present in the human eye when confronted simultaneously with all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum at once. White isn’t the absence of color, as many mistakenly believe. It is, rather, the perfect reflection and perception of all colors, therefore the antithesis of black – black being perfect absorption, which is the perception of the absence of color.

  Elle moves her Queen’s white knight ahead two spaces and one space west.

  Lizbeth studies the move. It may seem hours before she counters.

  One must move with the utmost care.

  Too much is always at stake.

  Always.

  Sometimes, even the gods themselves are merely pieces in a higher game, and the players of this game, in turn, are merely pieces in an endless hierarchy of larger chessboards.

  “My move,” Lizbeth says.

  “Take all the time you need, love,” answers Elle, as she always does. “What matter if you take a hundred years?”

  She speaks with neither malice nor restlessness.

  “A slow sort of country,” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at
least twice as fast as that.”

  Beyond the white door lies an endless white hallway. Lizbeth knows this instinctually, though she has never once stood, crossed the room, and dared to open the door. There is a soft horror in all this white that would be increased a hundredfold, she suspects, if the door were ever opened.

  I don’t think it’s a hallway at all.

  It’s a maze.

  The white hands of the white clock on the white wall count off the seconds, minutes, and hours. There is too much time here, and there is no time at all. In all this white, Lizbeth’s thoughts inevitably begin to blur, which is unfair, as one needs clarity for chess, and her sister always gets the first move, being always white, and so still has clarity before the onset of the blur. This room is, Lizbeth thinks, a cathedral to…

  To what? Closed systems where entropy prevails? A permutation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Quantum mechanical zero-point energy? Dissolution? The Nernst heat theorem?

  Insanity?

  Faultless sanity?

  “If you’re cold, love,” Elle says to her, “you may open the window.”

  I may, yes. No one and nothing is stopping me.

  Then comes the third violation. Her name is not Twisby, but that’s the only name she has ever provided the twins. Or, not Thisby. There is sometimes contention between the sisters on this point, but the woman has never offered a definitive answer, no matter how many times they’ve inquired. She is someone we will meet. Lizbeth knows that, just as she knows that her first move will involve a pawn, no matter how much she wishes otherwise. She knows that the woman is threat and shelter, peril and deliverance. A future catalyst. When the woman speaks, the air shimmers and the twins turn towards her in unison. The legs of their white chairs scrape, in unison, as a single sound, against the white floor.

  “There is but one evil,” the woman named Twisby (or Thisby) tells them. “Only a single sin. It is waste. Were it not for me and what I will teach you when you are ready, you would be wasted. I cannot abide that. I will come to light the fuse. To provide the push that will be necessary to begin the – ” She pauses. “To begin the cascade.”

  The woman opens her hands. Her left palm has been painted as red as the twin’s fingernails. Her right is the color of Lizbeth’s chess pieces, which is to say all colors.

  “Quietness is wholeness at the center of stillness,” says Twisby (or Thisby). “But this is only your cocoon, Lizbeth. This is only your cocoon, Elle. Such a metamorphosis awaits you. You will see. There will be no waste. No sin. No evil.”

  And then she’s gone.

  “Your move,” says Elle.

  “Yes,” replies Lizbeth. “My move.”

  When at last she wakes from the dream of the white room, Lizbeth Margeride lies very still, smelling her own sweat on the damp sheets, and she keeps her eyes trained on her sister, still fast asleep in her own bed. She watches Elle until dreams come again.

  6.

  The Way Out Is Through

  (9/30/2012)

  It was almost an hour past dark by the time we made it back to the attic. I can only be sure of the transition by recourse to my watch. In its current condition, the sky is hardly a help. But so late in the day, we shouldn’t have been that far from the attic, not so far as the docks at the end of Seabreeze Avenue. But we needed food. I’m sick as a sick dog today. The pain has been a hammer pounding my entire body, glass and razors in my joints and lungs and belly, but I didn’t dare fix until we got back here. The dope is as good as any toxin out there in the turmoil at the end of the world. Sixty Six hates when I call this that, the End of the World. She never says so, but she makes the face she makes whenever she disapproves of something I’ve said. I think of it as her Disapproving Face. Anyway, I fixed almost an hour ago, and now there’s only the music of Hell seeping in through the walls and the open window. Never mind the season, tonight it is too warm to shut the window. Still, despite the heat, Sixty Six keeps her hoodie on. I’ve stripped down to my bra and panties, and I’m still sweating. Drips of me, of my internal ocean, splashing against the dusty floor as I write this. My ocean is clear, though, not the sloshing putrescence of the bay, of all the sea surrounding Deer Isle. We found a tidy cache of food in the harbormaster’s office – cans of meat and vegetables, mostly. We filled our packs, and it should keep us fed a week, at least. If we live another week. Sixty Six seems indifferent to survival, and, at times, fuck but I wish I were, too. Then there would only be the monotonous rhythm of pain and the freedom from pain the dope brings, the heroin’s euphoria, our days on the street hunting down the demons (I do not mean this word in any conventional sense; no other seems to fit, that’s all), gun fire, the hilt of my khukuri in my hand, slashing the air, slashing flesh that isn’t flesh. Matter, protoplasm, Urschleim, but not flesh. The stink of ozone when I have no choice but to resort to those intangible weapons folded up inside me. The howling, capering abominations. But we’re “home” again, “home” again. Me and taciturn Sixty Six. There’s a crooked stack of books beside her mattress. She reads. She reads as much as I did, before. We found the public library our first week here, not long after we found each other, and it was one of the few instances when she’s seemed happy. She used a shopping cart to haul away dozens of books. Now, I think they keep her company much more than I do. They are her solace. I want to talk about what we saw down there this afternoon, how we found ourselves hemmed in and almost did not make it back. But that is the one subject I can rest assured Sixty Six will never discuss: whatever’s happening here. The sea is the color of semen. The sea is the consistency of jizz. The scrotumtightening sea. It smells like sewage. It steams and disgorges demons. “Demons.” All but shapeless shapes that burst when shot or cut, their constituent molecules thereafter slithering back into the semen sea to reassemble and gather themselves for a new assault. Sixty Six calls them shoggoths, a word she’s taken from old horror stories, turns out. I don’t care what the fuck they are. They pop and slither off. There’s a pretty picture drawn nice as nice can be, isn’t it, Bête? I spend my days hoping you are safe, that they are doing you no harm. I spend my days in slaughter, in a charade meant to convince the few survivors in Stonington that we have their irrelevant interests at stake. That we are more than two lost souls, refugees ourselves, sent here to topple the dominoes just so, perpetuating calculated chaos, perhaps for no other reason than because curious men and women desire to see the pretty fractals that will follow from our efforts. Last night, Sixty Six was reading The House at Pooh Corner, and since she doesn’t seem to mind my talking while she reads, so long as I don’t expect replies, I rattled on for a while about Tuscaloosa and mine and your time at the university. Oh, she did find it odd that we chose to go to school in Alabama, when she knows (I do not know how) that we might have had our pick of Ivy Leagues. Anyway, yes, I talked about blastoids – how we were the first to find Granatocrinus granulatus in the Fort Payne Chert; how, as undergraduates, we named Selmasaurus russelli, a new genus and species of plioplatecarpine mosasaur; the papers we delivered together on mosasaur biostratigraphy at annual meetings of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (Ottawa, Austin, Cleveland, then Bristol and our first trip to England); taking part in the dig that produced the tyrannosauroid Appalachiosaurus, our small role in some of the preliminary examination of the skeleton while it was still in the matrix and plaster field jackets; the mess with FHSM VP-13910, how we prepared it and first saw it for what it was, a second species of Selmasaurus, but the credit going to others and our work unacknowledged; collecting Oligocene fossils in the White River badlands of Nebraska; standing in the wooded gully at Haddonfield, New Jersey, where, in 1858, the first dinosaur described from America was discovered; how we were the first to happen upon and describe the remains of a velociraptorine theropod from the Gulf Coast (even if it was only one tooth). I went on and on like that – Ditomopyge, Little Stave Creek, Globidens alabamaensis, the Pierre Shale and Pottsville Formation, that skull of Megalonyx jeffe
rsoni we prepared but were afraid we’d screw up and so didn’t finish (one of many failures, I admitted), freezing strip mines in the winter and blistering quarries and chalk washes in July…and on and on and on. She heard, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t listen to a word of it. She is a master of compartmentalization. Anyhow, I don’t care what William Faulkner said, Bête. I think the past is the past, for us, and we can recall those days, but we’ll never go back to that life we cherished. Will we. No. Science and reason are being demolished around me. Paradigms are being reduced to matchsticks, to splinters. Topsy-turvy. I hope you are safe, sister, and that they are keeping their promises. I’m doing everything I’m told. To the letter. I am obedient. But that’s always come easily to me. Not like you, sweet Bête. But I know even if I do not die here, if we ever are reunited, there is no going back. Now, returning to the matter of the Semen Sea, here is what we think we know, pieced together from hearsay, frightened confessions, newspaper and other local periodical accounts printed in the weeks before it began (Commercial Fisheries News, Compass Classifieds, The Deer Isle Chronicle, Island Ad-Vantages, et al.) from captains’ logs we’ve recovered off derelict fishing boats: on the night of August 20th, a chartreuse light fell screaming from the sky. It is agreed the light did scream, or whatever cast the light screamed, as it fell into the bay somewhere beyond Burnt Cove. But the sun and the stars were still visible until the 27th, when the visibility zero-zero began rolling in from the east, so not from the direction of Burnt Cove. Empty boats, dead fishermen found floating or washed up to make a feast for crabs and gulls and maggots. The greasy rains and the sickness that came after them, the plague that killed 78%+ of Deer Isle’s population before we arrived, the whatever it was the CDC couldn’t even slow down before it claimed most of their team, too. The stars coming back…wrong; unrecognizable, alien constellations spinning overhead. Yes, I do sound like a mad woman, and I don’t expect any of this will ever be made public. If it is contained, if it ever ends – The Event – they’ll be sure no one talks, I think, even if it means murdering everyone who survives. There will be a mock-rational explanation. Mock science everyone will want to believe, because believing the truth – even were it not concealed – would be intolerable. But enough for now. Sixty Six has dog-eared a page and put her book away. She wants me to turn off the Coleman lantern. I need the sleep. Tomorrow will be at least as bad as today, as bad as yesterday, as bad as day after tomorrow. Or worse. Night, sister. Sweet dreams.