by Various
He did, however, have to periodically check his dive computer. Three minutes left on the safety stop—then two. Was it possible for a man to sweat underwater? He fought back the urge to cut short the decompress time and shoot for the surface early.
Only seconds left to go now...
He did not so much pop out of the water as breach. Flailing and kicking, he made it to the side of the ketch in minutes. Hands were waiting to take his weighted buoyancy compensator and tank and haul him out after them. Gasping for air, he collapsed on the warm, worn teak deck. Then it occurred to him: what if the monster came up after the boat itself? Though he had not seen its body, judging from the length of those monstrous tentacles alone it was more than big enough to drag the ketch down to its doom, like some lost, forlorn ship in an ancient Spanish woodcut.
Rushing to the side, he peered hesitantly over the gunwale just in time to see emerging from the water right where he had come up—the Captain, and his deckhand. Of the monster there was no sign.
He was there when the crew helped Santos onto the deck. Sucking in fresh, uncompressed air, the Captain looked perfectly unfazed. A bewildered Rontgern found himself wondering if they really had encountered anything more substantial down there other than a trick of light and water.
“Did you see it?” he stammered. “Did either of you see it?”
“Of course we saw it.” With the help of a crewman Santos started to peel himself out of his wetsuit. “What do you think I was pointing out to you?”
So perfunctory was this response that Rontgern found himself momentarily at a loss for words. “You mean, you saw that monster and you deliberately swam toward it? And beckoned for me to join you?”
Santos was stepping out of the suit now and left standing in his Speedos. When a crewmember offered a towel, the Captain waved it off. The sun would dry him.
“Beautiful, wasn’t He?”
“Beautiful?” A stunned Rontgern could only gape. “I don’t know, I didn’t see more than the arms, and I didn’t hang around long enough to...” He paused in mid-sentence. His brow creased. “What do you mean, ‘he’?”
“The Great Old One. He who waits dreaming. Only when rarely disturbed does He rise, and then usually only for a few precious moments.” The Captain’s eyes glittered. “You should have followed. You would have been privy to a sight accorded so very few. I have to thank you, Mr. Rontgern. It is expensive to bring my people here to pay homage. We would have come another time anyway, but you have paid for that and more, and for that I thank you.”
“Visit? Your ‘people’? What the hell are you blithering on about?”
“We come here sometimes,” Santos told him. “To pray. Others have come before us, and others will come after us.” He gestured over the side. “They are down there, believers and unbelievers together. Sacrifices to Him who is Lord of the sunken city. No one else comes here. Few ships pass over this part of the southern ocean. There is no oil. There is no tuna. He is safe there in His House, dreaming the dead, until the time comes when He shall rise again.”
The Captain ceased the drivel. But though no more words emerged from his mouth, his lips continued to move in and out, in and out, as they had on one or two previous occasions. The curious
habit reminded a suddenly startled Rontgern of a breathing fish. He started to back away. But there was nowhere to back away to, there on the deck of the sunstruck ketch in the middle of the great empty southern ocean.
“If you were coming anyway,” he stammered, “then why did you want to risk bringing me along? I’m not part of your stupid cult, whatever it is. Not that I care. I’m only interested in the ships that are down there and their contents. You can worship your big squid god or whatever it is all you want. I’ll even contribute an appropriate offering, if that will make you feel better about working on this site.”
“A further offering on your part is not necessary,” Santos burbled softly. “That is for His disciples to provide, at a later and appropriate time. But we are glad you are with us nonetheless.”
The rest of the crew was closing in now, Rontgern saw. So quietly that he hadn’t noticed. Like a shoal of sharks. Their lips began to pulse in and out, in and out, in a whispered, concerted, croaking chant, forming words in a language he did not recognize. For the first time in his adult life he was suddenly very, very scared. If only he had not been so confident in his own abilities to dominate others, if only he had taken more time to check out the credentials of the ship and its crew.
If only someone had bothered to tell him that repera means “leper” in the Tahitian language.
“If you don’t want me to make an offering and you’re not going to make one yourselves, then why do you care that I’m here with you?” he mumbled.
One of the crew, streaked and sweaty, was very close to him now. It struck Rontgern forcefully that the man smelled strongly of fish. No, that wasn’t quite right. He corrected himself. The man smelled fishy.
Santos was smiling at him again. A wide smile. Too wide, in fact, for a face that Rontgern could now see was not entirely human.
“As you know, it a long way here from Mangareva, and a long way back, and we all of us get so very, very tired of whole trip eat nothing but seafood.”
Copping Squid
by Michael Sea (2009)
Ricky Deuce, twenty-eight and three years sober, was the night clerk at Mahmoud’s Mom and Pop Market. He was a small, leanly muscled guy, and as he sat there, the darkness outside deepening toward midnight, his tight little Irish face looked pleased with where he was. Behind Ricky on his stool, the whole wall was bottles of every kind of Hard known to man.
This job was easy money—a sit-down after his day forklifting at the ware-house. He already owned an awesomely restored sixty-four Mustang, and had near ten K saved, and by rights he ought to be casting around for where he might take off to next. But the fact was, he got a kick out of clerking here till two am each night.
A kick that was not powder nor pill nor smoke nor booze, that was not needing any of them, especially not booze, which could shine and glint in its bottles and surround him all night long, and he not give a shit. He never got tired of sitting here immune, savoring the unadorned adventure of being alive.
Not that the job lacked irritants. There were obnoxious clientele, and these preponderated toward the deep of night.
Ricky thought he heard one even now.
Single cars shushed past outside, long silences falling between, and a scuffy tread advanced along the sidewalk. A purposeful tread that nonetheless staggered now and then. It reminded Ricky that he was It, the only island of comfort and light for a half a mile in all directions, in a big city, in the dead of night.
Then, there in Mahmoud’s Mom and Pop Market’s entryway, stood a big gaunt black guy. Youngish, but with a strange, outdated look, his hair growing weedily out towards a ’fro. His torso and half his legs were engulfed in an oversize nylon athletic jacket that looked like it might have slept in an alley or two, and which revealed the chest of a dark T-shirt that said something indecipherable RULES. The man had a drugged look, but he also had wide-arched, inquiring brows. His glossy black eyes checked you out, as if maybe the real him was somewhere back in there, smarter than he looked.
But then, as he lurched inside the store, and into the light, he just looked drunk.
“Evening,” Ricky said smiling. He always opened by giving all his clientele the benefit of the doubt.
The man came and planted his hands of the counter, not aggressively, it seemed, but in the manner of someone tipsily presenting a formal proposition.
“Hi. I’m Andre. I need your money, man.”
Ricky couldn’t help laughing. “What a coincidence! So do I!”
“Okay, Bro,” Andre said calmly, agreeably. As if he was shaping a counter-proposal, he straightened and stepped back from the counter. “Then I’ma cut your fuckin ass to ribbons till you give me your fuckin money!”
The odd pictu
re this plan of action presented almost made Ricky laugh again, but then the guy whipped out and flipped open—with great expertise—a very large gravity knife, which he then swept around by way of threat, though still out of striking range. Ricky was so startled that he half fell off his stool.
Getting his legs under him, furious at having been galvanized like that, Ricky shrieked, “A knife? You’re gonna to rob me with a fucking knife? I’ve got a fucking knife!”
And he unpocketed his lock-back Buck knife, and snapped it open. All this while he found himself once again trying to decipher the big, uncouthly lettered word on the guy’s T-shirt above the word RULES.
Andre didn’t seem drunk at all now. He swept a slash over the counter at Ricky’s head, which Ricky had to recoil from right smartly.
“You shit! You do that again and I’m gonna slice your—”
Here came the gravity knife again, as quick as a shark, and, snapping his head back out of the way, Ricky counter-slashed at the sweeping arm, and felt the rubbery tug of flesh unzipped by the tip of his Buck’s steel.
Andre abruptly stepped back and relaxed. He put his knife away, and held up his arm. It had a nice bloody slash across the inner forearm. He stood there letting it bleed for Ricky. Ricky had seen himself and others bleed, but not a black man. On black skin, he found, blood looked more opulent, a richer red, and so did the meat underneath the skin. That cut would take at least a dozen stitches. They both watched the blood soak the elastic cuff of Andre’s jacket.
“So here’s what it is,” said Andre, and dipped his free hand in the jacket and pulled out a teensy, elegant little silver cellphone. “Ima call the oinkers, and say I need an ambulance because this mad whacked white shrimp—that’s you—slashed me when I just axed him for some spare change, and then Ima ditch the shit outta this knife before they show up, and it won’t matter if they believe me or not, when they see me bleedin like this they gonna take us both down for questioning and statements. How’s your rap sheet, Chief, hey? So look. Just give me a little money and I’m totally outta your face. It don’t have to be much. Ten dollars would do it!”
This took Ricky aback. “Ten dollars? You make me cut you for ten dollars?”
“You wanna give me a hundred, give me a hundred! Ten’s all you gotta give me—and a ride. A short ride, over to the Hood.”
“You want money and a ride! You think I’m outta my mind? You wanna ride to your connection to score, and when we get there, you’re gonna try an get more money out of me. And that’s the best case scenario.” Ricky was dismayed to hear a hint of negotiation in his own words. It was true, he’d had a number of contacts with the San Francisco Police Department, as the result of alcohol-enhanced conflicts here and there. But also, he felt intrigued by the guy. Something fascinating burned in this Andre whack. Intensity came off him in waves, along with his faint scent of street-funk. The man was consumed by a passion. In the deformed letters on his T-shirt, Ricky thought he could make out a T-H-U.
“What could I be coppin for ten bucks?” crowed Andre. “I’m not out to harm you! This just has to do with me. See, it’s required. I have to get these two things from someone else, the money and the ride.”
“Explain that. Explain why you have to get these two things from someone else.”
Andre didn’t answer for a moment. He stared and stared, not exactly at Ricky, but at something he seemed to see in Ricky. He seemed to be weighing this thing he detected. He had eyes like black opals, and strange slow thoughts seemed to move within their shiny hemispheres . . .
“The reason is,” he said at last, “that’s the procedure. There are these particular rules for seeing the one I want to see.”
“And who is that?”
“I can’t tell you. I’m not allowed.”
It was almost time to close up anyway. Ricky became aware of a powerful tug of curiosity, and aware of the fact that Andre saw it in his eyes. This put Ricky’s back up.
“No. You gotta give me something. You gotta tell me at least—“
“Thassit! Fuck you!” And Andre flipped open the cellphone. His big spatulate fingertips made quick dainty movements on the minute keys. Ricky heard the bleep, minuscule but crystal clear, of the digits, and then a micro-voice saying, “Nine-one-one emergency.”
“I been stabbed by a punk in a liquor store! I been stabbed!”
Ricky violently shook his head, and held up his hands in surrender. With a bleep, Andre clicked off. “Believe me! You’re not makin a mistake. It’s something I can’t talk about, but you can see it. You can see it yourself. But the thing is, it’s got to be now. We can’t hem an haw. And Ima tell you now, now that you’re in, that there’s something in it for you, something good as gold. Trust me, you’ll see. Help me with this knot,” he said, pulling a surprisingly clean looking handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He folded it—rather expertly, Ricky thought—into a bandage. Ricky wrapped it round the wound, and tied the ends in a neat, tight squareknot, feeling as his fingers pressed against flesh that he was forming a bond with this whack by stanching his blood. He was accepting a dangerous complicity with his whack aims, whatever they might be . . .
Bandaged, Andre held out his hand. Ricky put a ten in it.
“Thanks,” said Andre. “So. Where’s your ride?”
The blue Mustang boomed down Sixteenth through the Mission. All the signals were on blink. Here and there under the streetlights, there was a wino or two, or someone walking fast, shoulders hunched against the emptiness, but mostly the Mustang rolled through pure naked City, a vacant concrete stage.
Ricky liked driving around at this hour, and often did it on his own for fun. When he was a kid, he’d always felt sorcery in the midnight streets, in the mosaic of their lights, and he’d never lost the sense of unearthly shapes stirring beneath their web, stirring till they almost cohered, as the stars did for the ancients into constellations. Tonight, with mad, bleeding Andre riding shotgun, the lights glittered wilder possibilities, and a sinister grandeur seemed to lurk in them.
They passed under the freeway, and down to the Bayside, hanging south on Third. After long blocks of big blank buildings, Third took a snaky turn, and they were rolling through the Hood.
Pawn shops and thrift stores and liquor stores. A whiff of Mad Dog hung over it, Mad Dog with every other drug laced through it. The Hood was lit, was like a long jewel. The signals were working here.
The signals stretched out of sight ahead, like a python with scales of red and green, their radiance haloed in a light fog that was drifting in off the Bay. And people were out, little knots of them near the corners. They formed isolated clots of gaudy life, like tide pools, all of them dressed in baggy clothes of bright-colored nylon, paneled and logo-ed with surreal pastels under the emerald-and-ruby signal glare. And as they stood and talked together, they moved in a way both fitful and languid, like sealife bannering in a restless sea.
The signals changed in pattern to a slow tidal rhythm. It seemed a rhythm meant to accommodate rush-hour traffic. You got a green for two blocks max, and then you got a red. A long, long red. Ricky’s blue Mustang was almost the only car on the road in this phantom rush-hour, creeping down the long bright python two blocks at a time, and then idling, idling interminably, while the sealife on the corners seemed astir with interest and attention.
Ricky had no qualms about running red lights on deserted streets, but here it seemed dangerous, a declaration of unease.
“Fuck this!” he said at their fourth red light, and slipped the brake, and rolled forward. At a stroll though, under twenty. The Mustang lounged along, taking green and red alike, as if upon a scenic country road. The bright languid people on the corners threw laughter at them now, a shout or two, and it seemed as if the whole great submarine python stirred to quicker currents. Ricky felt a ripple of hallucination, and saw here, for just a moment, a vast inked mural, the ink not dry, themselves and all around them still half-liquid entities billowing in an aqueous universe . . .
Out of nowhere, for the first time in three years, Ricky had the thought that he would like a drink. He was amazed at this thought. He was frightened. Then he was angry.
“I’m not drivin much farther, Andre. Spit out where we’re going, and it better be nearby, or you can call nine-one-one and I’ll take my chances. I’ll bet you got a longer past with the SFPD than I do.”
“Damn you! Whip in here, then.”
This cross street was mostly houses—some abandoned—with a liquor store on the next corner, and a lot of sealife lounging out in front of it. “Pull up into some light where you can see this.”
They idled at the curb. The people on the main drag were two-thirds of a block behind them, the liquor store tide pool much closer ahead of them. Andre leaned his fanatic’s face close to Ricky. The intensity of the man was an almost tactile experience; Ricky seemed to feel the muffled crackling of his will through the inches of air that separated them. “Here,” hissed Andre. “I’m gonna give you this, just to drive me another coupla miles up into these hills. Look at it. Count it. Take it.” He shoved a thick roll of bills into Ricky’s ribs.
It was in twenties and fifties and hundreds . . . It was over five thousand dollars.
“You’re . . . you’re batshit, Andre! You make me cut you to get ten bucks, and now you—“
“Just listen.” Some people from the liquor store tide pool were drifting their way, and Ricky saw similar movement from Third Street in his rearview mirror. “What I needed,” said Andre, “was money that blood was spilt for—it didn’t matter how much blood, it didn’t matter how much money. Your ten-spot? It’s worth that much to me there in your hand. Your ten-spot and another couple miles in your car.”
The locals were flowing closer to the Mustang at both ends. Ricky fingered the money. The gist of it was, he decided, that if he didn’t follow this waking dream to its end, he would never forgive himself. “Okay,” he said.
