The living room was dark and quiet. The kitchen pet door Mariee had refused to tape shut after her cat disappeared a week ago made a loud swooshing noise.
The linoleum floor glistened with what looked like frog eggs. The ooze led to the cat flap. Levi cleaned up then lit scented candles to remove the stench of decomposing fish.
Something caught his attention through the kitchen window. The door to the tool shed was open, the entrance blacker than its surroundings.
He walked across the small backyard. The trash cans hadn’t been disturbed. He turned the shed’s single light on. The interior was cluttered with Hollinger boxes, all labeled CV-7421.
“Not you, sis.” His voice sounded strange in the enclosed space.
The boxes held bags stuffed with human vertebrae, teeth, a fragment of a tibia. A partially intact skull wrapped in acid-free tissue paper.
The bones were sanguine from the clay they’d rested in for centuries. Several were drilled with tiny holes—Levi thought it likely anemia damage, but the cavities were unusually small and there were too many of the pockmarks for him to make a definitive diagnosis. He pulled out another box. A subtle shift of weight made it clear there was something larger within than individual bones.
Inside, its head wrapped in Ethafoam packing, was what he initially mistook for a small Hylobatidae. On further examination he realized it was human, despite the length of the ulna and radius and the four grotesquely long phalanges on each hand. The creature had seven true ribs but too many false and floating ones—more like bristles, a thin comb attached along its thoracic vertebrae. The metatarsals were elongated and bent at the wrong angle.
Its anatomy was unlike anything he’d ever held or seen in any journal. He removed the protective wrapping around the head.
The skull’s smooth inion suggested she was female. Someone had painted symbols all over her cranium in the same script with which the missing bone cylinder relic had been etched.
The face was a horror. Jaws rooted with pin-like teeth, enormous orbital cavities—all the better to absorb what little light was available at the bottom of the sea, Levi thought. For a moment, he nearly convinced himself it was a Jenny Haniver someone had made as a hoax.
Maybe she’d been ravaged by mutations, afflicted with a disorder that just happened to twist the body into something that resembled an organism accustomed to life in the ocean’s depths. Or maybe he was looking at some newly discovered body modification like those once practiced by the Chinook, something that altered their shape far more than cradle boarding could ever achieve.
But he was well aware that none of these adaptations came from cradle boarding or binding. He thought of ancient things his ancestors believed skulked at the outskirts of society, tentatively treading closer to civilization.
It was all a lie. Mariee accusing Hardy, luring him to the reservation-even the specifics of Adam’s involvement were likely fabricated.
There was only one other place Mariee might be.
He drove towards the coast as fast as he could navigate the rain-slick roads. He left his keys in the ignition and clambered down the path to the beach. The clay mound was an ominous silhouette against the sand and sky.
A large section of the Blood Mound had been leveled into a makeshift shrine, the ledge lined with driftwood sculptures of various sea creatures that appeared to be either poor interpretations of known species or animals whittled from imagination. The display surrounded the skeletal remains of something infant-sized. Its head was buried in a pile of seashells.
Levi yelled for Mariee once, then again. When there wasn’t any response, he went to examine the altar up close.
The skeleton had a similar morphology as the creature in Mariee’s shed. Its phalanges were intact save for a missing distal on the right hand. Its remaining fingers were still curled around the stolen bone artifact. He gently moved its hands aside and picked up the cylinder. Its weight and texture confirmed it was ivory, probably whale. The writing was still incomprehensible, but Levi could make out details such as strange starfish things with too many appendages and vaguely familiar sea animals, their faces inexplicably anthropomorphized.
The indentations reminded him of Braille. Something shifted in his brain and he suddenly knew this scrimshaw was a series of prayers that could be read in a realm where light couldn’t penetrate. Nausea swirled in his stomach when he thought about what exactly this shrine was meant to appease.
Levi carefully placed the creature’s hands back over the artifact then brushed aside the accumulation of shells hiding the head. The skull was even more disfigured than the specimen in the shed, but also decorated with the same pictograms and script.
He stared past the Blood Mound to the sea. Shadows flitted beneath the waves.
For a few moments, he thought it was a school of sardines thrashing around in the waters. When a phosphorescent glow began to spread he knew something else was responsible. Levi backed away from mound.
Something burst from the water.
His mind couldn’t quite interpret what he was seeing. The vague notion that an albino ribbon worm rose before him into the air so high it might punch through the clouds was all he could process. Its tubular body glowed with an inner luminescence, radiant against the black rain clouds as it swayed in place. The stench of organic matter long decomposing on the ocean floor wafted across the beach.
Levi inadvertently whispered, Kumugwe.
But this Kumugwe was not the majestic undersea god draped in copper finery the elders had told Levi and Mariee about when they were children. This god bore the striations and scars of age. Necrotic matter dangled from it in tatters as if shedding old skin to birth something new. Its hide was so white Levi could see arteries pushing fluids beneath.
Dozens of siamang-sized Pugwis the color of clam meat scurried across Kumugwe.
The worm roared. Its head split into several triangle- shaped sections, each flap billowing like wind-filled sails. Something squirmed in what Levi surmised was its mouth. Water fountained from the opening into the night sky.
Not water but a mass of thin, translucent cords whipping the air.
The beach swarmed with Pugwis. A groping, clumsy mob, their limbs not yet accustomed to an atmosphere free of water resistance, bulging eyes not yet adapted to this new, brightly lit world.
A creature brushed against Levi, its flesh the texture of a jellyfish. He couldn’t help but be astounded that he’d actually touched an organism unknown to science. Kumugwe lowered its head, with Levi in the direct path of its vast maw.
Ropy strands vomited from the mouth. Levi pushed one of the Pugwis into the filament’s path. The strands impacted the flabby horror with such force it was sent careening like a paper doll caught in gale force winds. When the hair-thin filaments squirmed over its bare skin, sank into its flesh and dragged the flailing body towards the sea, Levi understood why the bones in the shed had been riddled with so many tiny holes.
Several Pugwis sensed their kin’s blood. They swarmed over it in an orgy of decadent hunger as the doomed victim slid across the sand towards Kumugwe’s gaping mouth.
Levi ran past the Blood Mound.
The Pugwis seemed more interested in exploring than pursuing Levi. He reached the top of the hill and crouched behind some foliage, his view to where the ocean lapped at the edge of the Blood Mound unobstructed. There were now hundreds of the things frolicking up and down the beach and over the clay mound. He could make out the details of their long-fingered hands, digits connected by a layer of flesh, mouths dangling open far too wide, filled with crooked teeth jutting out at odd angles.
A Pugwi stopped its examination of the mound and stared up the hill. Levi was afraid to move for fear of revealing himself, just in case the creature hadn’t yet pinpointed his hiding spot. The thing’s gaze filled his head like unblinking black stars. An alien mind caressed his mind.
It revealed its history to him. They’d been trying to make contact shortly after he and Ma
riee had discovered one of their hybrid dead. His sister understood them better than he ever could—where he’d seen nothing but tsunami nightmares, Mariee had glimpsed their history and faith, their needs and desires. The twins had been ambassadors between the aquatic world and humanity, but Mariee had been the only one aware of that role.
Levi sprinted to the truck.
As he sped away he risked glancing back at the ocean. Kumugwe quivered in the air, darkness spreading beneath as if the worm were bleeding shadow.
Something incomprehensibly large was ascending.
Levi knew then that this was not Kumugwe in its entirety. This massive entity was a single tentacle, a fragment, a strand of a swimmer’s hair floating on the surface as the bulk of its form waits submerged just below.
He drove through an unusually dark Mosswood then onto the I5, pushing his truck to its limit. Mariee was gone and there was nothing but death and nightmares for him on the reservation.
He arrived home in Salem just as the sun was rising. Exhaustion and grief pulled him down onto the couch. He dreamt he was flying over the ocean, the sky filled with the flapping wings of death owls. He felt sleek, like he’d grown a layer of otter’s skin.
But the death owls were not birds. They were plump, albino things flopping in the dark and suddenly Levi wasn’t in the air but deep underwater. He plunged into a crevasse. Into abject blackness.
Levi retreated to the center of Arizona, severed all contact with friends, family and colleagues. He threw his phone out the window somewhere along Route 95. He was resigned to the fact they’d invade the surface soon enough, and when that happened all aspirations would simply be water under the bridge.
Though he’d dropped off the grid, as far as he could tell neither the white cops nor the Coastal Colony Tribes authorities ever tried to contact him. Maybe the Rez law and those working on the excavation were in on the conspiracy—Levi didn’t know and was resigned to the fact he likely never would. He read the news online at the public library to prevent anyone tracing his whereabouts. The police had launched an investigation into Dr. Alex Hardy’s disappearance.
But there were no media reports concerning Adam Joseph or Mariee. Levi wasn’t shocked that a missing white man attracted more attention than a vanished Duwamish teenager and a Coos woman.
There was no mention of the Blood Mound site. That clay must have been a veritable treasure trove of human remains dating as far back as the 17th century, but there wasn’t even a murmur of this in the news. Levi didn’t dare contact any of his former anthropologist colleagues for fear they were involved as well.
Mariee visited him in his sleep every night.
She’d hum beautiful Makah songs about “marine snow falling” and “graveyards of whale bones,” her voice fading then rising in volume, only to diminish again like a radio station while driving through a canyon. Her face would glow with a joy Levi had only seen on the faces of fancy dancers after an exuberant performance.
Mariee spoke of a tsunami that was going to wash away that terrible clay Blood Mound and cover the planet in waters so black and cold it would resemble the deepest recesses of space. She pleaded with her brother to join her, to swim away and never touch the ground again.
In his sleep, his sister’s skin and hair always smelled of seawater.
As the weeks passed Levi began to dream of great Kumugwe treading across a brackish realm, waters stagnant with decomposing salmon and human corpses. He dreamt of things pretending to be Indians, but their bodies were too small and crooked, their faces too hideous to offer any hope of kinship.
But they persisted. They prayed into his dreams through funnels whittled from whale’s bone. They left messages in his head that occasionally bobbed to the surface when he was awake. These revelations often made him cry out loud.
Levi had long known that the planet was forged from strife and ancient thunder and fire, but the depths of rot became clear to him when he was a seven-year-old boy cradling a dead child while his twin sister cried for a loss she had yet to understand. The cogs of existence are oiled by sorrow; the machine produces nothing but extinction and despair.
He wondered whether it was time to tear down the gears of the old and construct something new. Historical occupations and genocide were almost banal in their familiarity—maybe he should help Mariee blot out this world. Purge the planet and reconstruct everything from a pristine slate. Enemy of my enemy.
All he could do in the meantime was wait for the waters to rise and extinguish the stars.
THIS FRAGMENTED BODY
The Doll
places the porcelain figure back in the cabinet, closes the glass door. The dolls gaze lovingly at their benefactor then shift their glassy gaze down to the sleeping boy. Their frozen lips slide into contented smiles. The child has been exhausted from a long day of swimming. His sleep is profound and unpopulated by dream. The Doll touches the boy’s hair and marvels ar how soft it is. So unlike the cold, smooth surface of its own head.
Jarrod
woke up screaming. The bedroom was back-of-your-eyelids-painted-black dark. He fumbled around on the nightstand for his phone. It was 1:28 and the lack of any light source was unusual even for a blackout. The room smelled faintly of sex sweat and the intrusive stench of burnt garlic from an unknown apartment that shared their ventilation. Mark stroked Jarrod’s arm, inner elbow to wrist.
“Sssshhhh. Nightmare again?”
“Mm hm.”
“You ok?”
“Yeah, of course. This time they had porcelain teeth.”
“Fuck that. Don’t creep me out. Just a dream.”
“I understand that. I’m not one of your special needs students.”
Jarrod didn’t mean to snap, but Mark’s condescending tone set him off. He’d dealt with night terrors since he was a kid, but every once in awhile the puppet one would come back. Floppy limbed things with bathroom-sink smooth skin, cold stiff hands pinching. Not hard, just incessant. Nibbling at the toes on his right foot like a Garra Rufa fish pedicure.
Porcelain goddamn teeth.
He was embarrassed at his crying out; nightmare or not it was still nothing but phantom pains. At 17, he’d lost his right leg up to mid-thigh. A rare osteosarcoma. Multiple surgeries on his femur, then the amputation, two-years of chemotherapy, countless follow-up surgeries. Almost three decades ago, but those ghostly pinpricks kept seeping into his dreams.
Maybe that’s why he’d studied photography and sculpture. Fashioning life-sized rag dolls and mannequins then posing them in sexually explicit displays allowed him to keep the terrors at bay. He even had a pottery artist friend make him a porcelain leg and a harness to strap it to his stump. He’d taken nude photographs of himself in various positions with his mannequins and exhibited them at various galleries. He’d long acknowledged his art was overwrought, its purpose more to shock than elucidate. His had been a brief, meteoric rise to underground artist fame until his works were eventually dismissed as too derivative of Hans Bellmer. He hadn’t created anything to speak of in well over a decade.
“Wanna talk about it, dollface?”
“Real funny. Go back to sleep. Power’s out by the by.” Jarrod was annoyed by Mark’s concern. He didn’t like the insinuation he was too weak to deal with a stupid dream.
They’d been together since college, so it wasn’t like his nightly panic attacks were anything new. Theirs had been a head over heels type of love. Whirlwind romance and all that shit Jarrod had dreamt about when he thought he might be straight but eventually met the right guy who corrected him of that particular delusion.
He knew Mark like an extension of his own body: every nuance, every imperfection. Mark didn’t care about Jarrod’s disability. Called him his “Bionic Man” the first time they’d fucked, sweaty and fumbling in the college dorm room when the others were out watching a rare uncensored screening of Raymond Borde’s film Molinier. After sex they just held each other and Mark made that electronic bionic deh deh deh deh s
ound effect and they’d both laughed and all the tension just slipped away.
But college was a long time ago. Years had slipped away, things had gone sour incrementally. Intimacy took a powder, banal stresses led to bickering, led to no holds barred fights. Jarrod became adept at punching walls, while Mark was a right poet in his petulant threats to slit his goddamn wrists if Jarrod didn’t try to see the pain he was in. His fucking pain? Jarrod found Mark’s tantrums childish. Usually responded with a you know where the steak knives are.
“Wake me if you want to talk.” Mark’s voice was monotone.
“I’m not a fucking child.”
“I’m here if you need me. Just sayin’.” His role in going through the motions to placate him done, Mark rolled back over. He was quietly sleeping again in just seconds.
Jarrod gently slid his portion of the sheets aside, balanced on one foot. He was disturbed by the spongy sensation of the threadbare carpet; he’d left his shoes to air out on the balcony after that evening’s jog. He opened the corroded aluminum blinds just a slit. The street was a womb of darkness. Not one lamppost or store on the block had a functioning light.
He sat on the floor, grabbed his prosthetic leg near the nightstand. Socket suction tight, snug fit, pylon cold against his fingertips. Took a step, tested it under his weight out of habit. It felt right, as if the skin and muscle and bone of his leg had been redundant, an appendage he’d been born with unnecessarily.
As Jarrod walked through the bedroom doorway Mark whispered, Please don’t go outside. The children have mirrors.
He felt susceptible standing naked in the dark room. While he’d always been the night-screamer, Mark was quite the sleep-talker. The couple had a running joke that if they ever got married they’d include “in sleeplessness and in health” with their wedding vows.
Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales Page 8
