“Was that too hard?”
“No. I’m fine. I’m okay,” she tells him, so he continues administering the salt water to her throat, dabbing carefully, and Elizabeth Haskings tries to concentrate on his fingertips, whenever they happen to brush against her. It never takes very long for the three red slits on each side of her throat to appear, and not much longer for them to open. They never open very far, not until later on. Just enough that she can see the barn-red gills behind the stiff, crescent-shaped flaps of skin that weren’t there only moments before. That never are there until the salt water. Here, she always loses her breath for a few seconds, and the flaps spasm, opening and closing, and she has to gasp several times to find a balance between the air being draw in through her nostrils and mouth, and the air flowing across the feathery red gill filaments. Sometimes her legs go weak, but Michael has never let her fall.
“Breathe,” he whispers. “Don’t panic. Take it slow and easy, Betsy. Just breathe.” The dizziness passes, the dark blotches that swim before her eyes, and she doesn’t need him to support her any longer. She stares at herself in the mirror, and by now her eyes have gone black. No irises, no pupils, no sclera. Just inky black where her hazel-green eyes used to be.
“I’m right here,” he says.
He doesn’t have to tell her that again. He’s always there, behind her or at her side.
Unconsciously, she tries to blink her eyes, but all trace of her lids have vanished, and she can only stare at those black, blank eyes. Later, when they begin to smart, Michael will have the eye drops at the ready.
“It’s getting harder,” she says. He doesn’t reply, because she says this almost every time. All his replies have been used up, Elizabeth thinks. No matter how much he might want to calm me or offer surcease, he’s already said it all a dozen times over.
Instead, he asks, “Keep going?”
She nods.
“We don’t have to, you know.”
“Yes we do. It’s bad if we do. It’s worse if we don’t. It hurts more if we don’t.” Of course, Michael knows this perfectly well, and there’s the briefest impatience that she has to remind him. Not anger, no, but an unmistakable flash of impatience, there and gone in the stingy space of a single heartbeat.
He dips the sponge into the saltwater again, not bothering to squeeze it out, because the more the better. The more, the easier. Water runs down his arm and drips to the hardwood floor. Before they’re finished, there will be a puddle about her bare feet and his shoes, too. Michael gingerly swabs both her hands with the sponge, and at once the vestigial webbing between her fingers, common to all men and women, begins to expand, pushing the digits farther away from one another.
Elizabeth watches, biting her lip against the discomfort, and watches. It doesn’t horrify her the same way that the appearance of the gills and the change to her eyes does, but it’s much more painful. Not nearly so much as the greater portion of her metamorphosis to come, but enough she does bite her lip (careful not to draw blood). Within five minutes, the webbing has grown enough that it’s attached at the uppermost joint between each finger, and is at least twice as thick as usual. And the texture of the skin on the backs of her hands and her palms is becoming smoother and faintly iridescent, more transparent, and gradually taking on the faintest tinge of turquoise. She used to think of the color as celeste opaco, because the Italian sounded prettier. But now she settles for turquoise. Not as lyrical, no, but it’s not opaque, and turquoise is somehow more honest. Monsters should be honest. Before half an hour has passed, most of her skin will have taken on variations of the same hue.
“Yesterday,” she says, “during nay lunch break, when I said I needed to go to the bank, I didn’t.”
There are a few seconds of quiet before he asks, “Where did you go, Elizabeth?”
“Choate Bridge,” she answers. “I just stood there a while, watching the river.” It’s the oldest stone-arch bridge anywhere in Massachusetts, built in 1764. There are two granite archways through which the river flows on its easterly course.
“Did it make you feel any better?”
“It made me want to swim. The river always makes me want to swim, Michael. You know that.”
“Yeah, Betsy. I know.”
She wants to add, Please don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to, but she doesn’t. It would be rude. He means well, and she’s never rude if she can help it. Especially not to Michael.
All evidence of her fingernails has completely vanished.
“It terrified me. It always fucking terrifies me.”
“Maybe one day it won’t. Maybe one day you’ll be able to look at the water without being frightened.”
“Maybe,” she whispers, hoping it isn’t true. Pretty sure what’ll happen if she ever stops being afraid of the river and the sea. I can’t drown. I can’t ever drown. How does a woman who can’t drown fear the water?
There are things in the water. Things that can hurt me. And places I never want to see awake.
Now he’s running the sponge down her back, beginning at the nape of her neck and ending at the cleft between her buttocks. This time, the pain is bad enough she wants to double over, wants to go down on her knees and vomit. But that would be weak, and she won’t be weak. Michael used to bring her pills to dull the pain, but she stopped taking them almost a year ago because she didn’t like the fogginess they brought, the way they caused her to feel detached from herself, as though these transformations were happening to someone else.
Monsters should be honest.
At once, the neural processes of her vertebrae begin to broaden and elongate. She’s made herself learn a lot about anatomy: human, anuran, chondrichthian, osteichthian, et al. Anything and everything that seems relevant to what happens to her on these nights. The devil you know, as her grandfather used to say. So, Elizabeth Haskings knows that the processes will grow the longest between her third and seventh thoracic vertebrae, and between her last lumbar, sacrals, and coccygeals (though less so than in the thoracic region), greatly accenting both the natural lumbar and curve of her back.
Musculature responds accordingly. She knows the Latin names of all those muscles, and if there were less pain, she could recite them for Michael. She imagines herself laughing like a madwoman and reciting the names of the shifting, straining tendons. In the end, there won’t quite be fins, sensu stricto. Almost, but not quite.
Aren’t I a madwoman? How can I possibly still be sane?
“Betsy, you don’t have to be so strong,” he tells her, and she hates the pity in his voice. “I know you think you do, but you don’t. Certainly not in front of me.” She takes the yellow sponge from him, her hands shaking so badly she spills most of the saltwater remaining in the bowl, but still manages to get the sponge sopping wet. Her gums have begun to ache, and she smiles at herself before wringing out the sponge with both her webbed hands so that the water runs down her belly and between her legs. In the mirror, she sees Michael turn away.
She drops the sponge to the floor at her feet (she doesn’t have to look to know her toes have begun to fuse one to the next), and gazes into her pitchy eyes until she’s sure the adjustments to her genitals are finished. When she does look down at herself, there’s a taut, flat place where the low mound of the mons pubis was, and the labia majora, labia minora, and clitoris—all the intricacies of her sex—have been reduced to the vertical slit of an oviduct where her vagina was moments before. On either side of the slit are tiny, triangular pelvic fins, no more than an inch high and three inches long.
“We should hurry now, Betsy,” Michael says. He’s right, of course. She has to reach the bathtub full of warm salty water while she can still walk. Once or twice before she’s waited to long, and he’s had to carry her, and that humiliation was almost worse than all the rest combined. In the tub, she curls almost fetal, and the flaps in front of Elizabeth’s gills open and close, pumping in and out again, extracting all the oxygen she’ll need until sunris
e. Michael will stay with her, guarding her, as he always does.
She can sleep without lids to shield her black eyes, and, when she sleeps, she dreams of the river flowing down to the mined seaport, to Essex Bay, and then out into the Atlantic due south of Plum island. She dreams of the craggy spine of Devil Reef rising a few feet above the waves and of those who crawl out onto the reef most nights to bask beneath the moon. Those like her. And, worst of all, she dreams of the abyss beyond the reef, and towers and halls of the city there, a city that has stood for eighty thousand years and will stand for eighty thousand more. On these nights, changed and slumbering, Elizabeth Haskings can’t lie to herself and pretend that her mother fled to Oregon, or even that her grandfather lies in his grave in Highland Cemetery. On these nights, she isn’t afraid of anything.
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
“The Call of Cthulhu” . H. P. Lovecraft (1928)
BLOOM
John Langan
“Is that—do you see—”
Already, Rick was braking, reaching for the hazards. Connie turned from the passenger-side window at whose streaky surface she had spent the last half hour staring. Eyes on something ahead, her husband was easing the steering wheel left, toward the meridian. Following the line of his gaze, she saw, next to the guardrail about ten yards in front of them, a smallish red and white container. “What?” she said. “The cooler?”
“It’s not a cooler,” Rick said, bringing the Forrester to a stop. His voice was still sharp with the edge of their argument.
“What do you—” She understood before she could complete her question. “Jesus—is that a—”
“A cooler,” Rick said, “albeit of a different sort.”
The car was in neutral, the parking brake on, Rick’s door open in the time it took her to arrive at her next sentence. “What’s it doing here?”
“I have no idea,” he said, and stepped out of the car. She leaned forward, watching him trot to the red and white plastic box with the red cross on it. It resembled nothing so much as the undersized cooler in which she and her roommates had stored their wine coolers during undergrad: the same peaked top that would slide back when you pressed the buttons on either side of it. Rick circled around it once clockwise, once counterclockwise, and squatted on his haunches beside it. He was wearing denim shorts and the faded green Mickey Mouse T-shirt that he refused to allow Connie to claim for the rag drawer, even though it had been washed so many times it was practically translucent. (It was the outfit he chose whenever they went to visit his father.) He appeared to be reading something on the lid. He stood, turning his head to squint up and down this stretch of the Thruway, empty in both directions. He blew out his breath and ran his hand through his hair—the way he did when he was pretending to debate a question he’d already decided—then bent, put his hands on the cooler, and picked it up. Apparently, it was lighter than he’d anticipated, because it practically leapt into the air. Almost race-walking, he carried the container towards the car.
Connie half expected him to hand it to her. Instead, he continued past her to the trunk. She tilted the rearview mirror to see him balancing the cooler against his hip and unlocking the trunk. When he thunked the lid down, his hands were empty.
The answer was so obvious she didn’t want to ask the question; nonetheless, once Rick was back behind the wheel, drawing his seatbelt across, she said, “What exactly are you doing?”
Without looking at her, he said, “We can’t just leave it there.”
“If the cell phone were charged, we could call 911.”
“Connie—”
“I’m just saying. You wanted to know why that kind of stuff was so important, well, here you are.”
“You—” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the highway was clear. As he accelerated onto it, he said, “You know what? You’re right. If I’d charged the cell phone last night like you asked me to, we could dial 911 and have a state trooper take this off our hands. That’s absolutely true. Since the phone is dead, however, we need another plan. We’re about forty, forty-five minutes from the house. I say we get home as quickly as we can and start calling around the local hospitals. Maybe this is for someone in one of them. In any event, I’m sure they’ll know who to call to find out where this is supposed to go.”
“Do they even do transplants in Wiltwyck?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I think Penrose might.”
“We could stop at the next state trooper barracks.”
“The nearest one is our exit, up 209. We’re as quick going to the house.”
“You’re sure there’s something in there?”
“I didn’t look, but when I lifted it, I heard ice moving inside.”
“It didn’t look that heavy.”
“It wasn’t. But I don’t know how much a heart, or a kidney, would weigh. Not too much, I think.”
“I don’t know, I just—” She glanced over her shoulder. “I mean, Jesus, how does something like that wind up in the middle of the Thruway? How does that happen?”
Rick shrugged. “They don’t always hire the most professional guys to transport these things. Maybe someone’s tail flap was down, or they swerved to avoid a deer in the road and the cooler went tumbling out.”
“Surely not.”
“Well, if you knew the answer to the question—”
For a second, their argument threatened to tighten its coils around them again. Connie said, “What about the lid? I thought you were reading something on it.”
“There’s a sticker on top that looks as if it had some kind of information, but the writing’s all blurred. Must have been that storm a little while ago.”
“So it’s been sitting here at least that long.”
“Seems likely. Maybe that was what happened—maybe the truck skidded and that caused the cooler to come loose.”
“Wouldn’t you stop and go back for something like that? Someone’s life could be on the line.”
“Could be the driver never noticed, was too busy trying to keep himself from crashing into the guardrail.”
The scenario sounded plausible enough—assuming, that is, you accepted Rick’s assertion about underqualified drivers employed to convey freshly harvested organs from donor to recipient. Which was, now that Connie thought about it, sufficiently venal and depressing likely to be the truth. “What if it’s supposed to be heading north, to Albany?”
“There’s probably still enough time, even if whoever it is has to drive back the way we came.”
“Maybe they could fly it wherever it needs to go. Doesn’t Penrose do that?”
“I think so.”
Already, she was buying into Rick’s plan. Would it make that much difference to call the hospitals from their house instead of the police station? Equipped with a fully charged cell phone, they could have been rushing whatever was packed in the cooler’s ice to the surgical team who at this moment must be in the midst of preparations to receive it. Connie could picture herself and Rick striding into the Emergency Room at Wiltwyck, the cooler under Rick’s arm, a green-garbed surgeon waiting with gloves outstretched. With the cell inert, though, home might be their next best option. Based on her experiences with them at an embarrassing number of stops for speeding, the Wiltwyck troopers would require more time than whoever was waiting for this cooler’s contents could spare for her and Rick to make clear to them the gravity of the situation.
That’s not true, she thought. You know that isn’t true. You’re just pissed because that guy wouldn’t agree to plead down to ten miles an hour over the speed limit. She was justifying Rick’s plan, shoring up his ambition to be part of the story—an important part, the random, passing stranger who
turns out to be crucial to yanking someone at death’s very doorway back from that black rectangle. Because . . . because it was exciting to feel yourself caught up in a narrative like this, one that offered you the opportunity to be part of something bigger than yourself.
Rick had the speedometer to the other side of eighty-five. Connie reached her left hand across and squeezed his leg, lightly.
He did not remove his hands from the wheel.
Hour hours later, they were staring at the cooler sitting on the kitchen table. Its surface was pebbled plastic; Connie wondered if that contributed in any way to keeping its contents chilled. The red cross stenciled on its lid was faded, a shade lighter than the bottom half of the cooler, and beginning to flake off. The symbol didn’t look like your typical red cross. This design was narrow at the join, the sides of each arm curving outwards on their way to its end—the four of which were rounded, like the edges of a quartet of axes. Connie had seen this style of cross, or one close to it, before: Alexa, the first girl with whom she’d shared an apartment, and who had been more Catholic than the Pope, had counted a cross in this style among her religious jewelry. A Maltese cross? Cross of Malta? Something like that, although Connie remembered her old roommate’s cross ornamented with additional designs—little pictures, she thought; of what, she couldn’t recall. To be honest, this version of the cross seemed less a religious icon and more the image of something else—an abstract flower, perhaps, or an elaborate keyhole. For a moment, the four red lines opening out resembled nothing so much as the pupil of some oversized, alien eye, but that was ridiculous.
What it meant that the cooler resting on the blond wood of their kitchen table bore this emblem, she could not say. Did the Red Cross have subdivisions, local branches, and might this be one of their symbols? She’d never heard of such a thing, but she was a manager at Target; this was hardly her area of expertise.
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird Page 14
