Nightmare Magazine Issue 8

by Caspian Gray

  Perhaps someone should put a bullet through her head.

  People said the same thing about Jacova Angevine. But assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.

  I left that door open, as well, and walked slowly towards the center of the empty warehouse, towards the place where the altar had been, the spot where that divine abomination of Jacova’s had rested on folds of velvet the color of a massacre. I held the Maglite gripped so tightly that the fingers of my right hand had begun to go numb.

  Behind me, there was a scuffling, gritty sort of noise that might have been footsteps, and I spun about, tangling my feet and almost falling on my ass, almost dropping the flashlight. The child was standing maybe ten or fifteen feet away from me, and I could see that the door leading back to the alley had been closed. She couldn’t have been more than nine or ten years old, dressed in ragged jeans and a T-shirt smeared with mud, or what looked like mud in the half light of the warehouse. Her short hair might have been blonde, or light brown, it was hard to tell. Most of her face was lost in the shadows.

  “You’re too late,” she said.

  “Jesus Christ, kid, you almost scared the holy shit out of me.”

  “You’re too late,” she said again.

  “Too late for what? Did you follow me in here?”

  “The gates are shut now. They won’t open again, for you or anyone else.”

  I looked past her at the door I’d left open, and she looked back that way, too.

  “Did you close that door?” I asked her. “Did it ever occur to you that I might have left it open for a reason?”

  “I waited as long I dared,” she replied, as though that answered my question, and turned to face me again.

  I took one step towards her, then, or maybe two, and stopped. And at that moment, I experienced the sensation or sensations that mystery and horror writers, from Poe on down to Theo Angevine, have labored to convey—the almost painful prickling as the hairs on the back of my neck and along my arms and legs stood erect, the cold knot in the pit of my stomach, the goose across my grave, a loosening in my bowels and bladder, the tightening of my scrotum. My blood ran cold. Drag out all the fucking clichés and there’s still nothing that comes within a mile of what I felt standing there, looking down at that girl, her looking up at me, the feeble light from the windows glinting off her eyes.

  Looking into her face, I felt dread as I’d never felt it before. Not in war zones with air-raid sirens blaring, not during interviews conducted with the muzzle of a pistol pressed to my temple or the small of my back. Not waiting for the results of a biopsy after the discovery of a peculiar mole. Not even the day she led them into the sea and I sat watching it all on fucking CNN from a bar in Brooklyn.

  And suddenly I knew that the girl hadn’t followed me in from the alley, or closed the door, that she’d been here all along. I also knew that a hundred coats of paint wouldn’t be enough to undo Jacova’s labyrinth.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” the girl said, her minotaur’s voice lost and faraway and regretful.

  “Then where should I be?” I asked, and my breath fogged in air gone as frigid as the dead of winter, or the bottom of the sea.

  “All the answers were here,” she replied. “Everything that you’re asking yourself, the things that keep you awake, that are driving you insane. All the questions you’re putting into that computer of yours. I offered all of it to you.”

  And now there was a sound like water breaking against stone, and something heavy and soft and wet, dragging itself across the concrete floor, and I thought of the thing from the altar, Jacova’s Mother Hydra, that corrupt and bloated Madonna of the abyss, its tentacles and anemone tendrils and black, bulging squid eyes, the tubeworm proboscis snaking from one of the holes where its face should have been.

  Mighty, undying daughter of Typhaôn and serpentine Ecidna—Urda Lernaia, gluttonous whore of all the lightless worlds, bitch bride and concubine of Father Dagon, Father Kraken —

  I smelled rot and mud, saltwater and dying fish.

  “You have to go now,” the child said urgently, and she held out a hand as though she meant to show me the way. Even in the gloom, I could see the barnacles and sea lice nestled in the raw flesh of her palm. “You are a splinter in my soul, always. And she would drag you down to finish my own darkness.”

  And then the girl was gone. She did not vanish, she was simply not there anymore. And those other sounds and odors had gone with her. There was nothing left behind but the silence and stink of any abandoned building, and the wind brushing against the windows and around the corners of the warehouse, and the traffic along roads in the world waiting somewhere beyond those walls.

  6.

  I know exactly how all this shit sounds. Don’t think that I don’t. It’s just that I’ve finally ceased to care.

  7.

  Yesterday, two days after my trip to the warehouse, I watched the MBARI tape again. This time, when it reached the twelve-second gap, when I’d counted down to eleven, I continued on to twelve, and I didn’t switch the television off, and I didn’t look away. Surely, I’ve come too far to allow myself that luxury. I’ve seen so goddamn much—I’ve seen so much that there’s no reasonable excuse for looking away, because there can’t be anything left that’s more terrible than what has come before.

  And, besides, it was nothing that I hadn’t seen already.

  Orpheus’ mistake wasn’t that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot’s wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked.

  After the static, the picture comes back and at first it’s just those boulders, same as before, those boulders that ought to be covered with silt and living things—the remains of living things, at least—but aren’t. Those strange, clean boulders. And the lines and angles carved deeply into them that cannot be the result of any natural geological or biological process, the lines and angles that can be nothing but what Jacova said they were. I think of fragments of the Parthenon, or some other shattered Greek or Roman temple, the chiseled ornament of an entablature or pediment. I’m seeing something that was done, something that was consciously fashioned, not something that simply happened. The Tiburon II moves forward very slowly, because the blow before the gap has taken out a couple of the port thrusters. It creeps forward tentatively, floating a few feet above the seafloor, and now the ROV’s lights have begun to dim and flicker.

  After the gap, I know that there’s only 52.2 seconds of video remaining before the starboard camera shuts down for good. Less than a minute, and I sit there on the floor of my hotel room, counting—one-one thousand, two-two thousand—and I don’t take my eyes off the screen.

  The MBARI robotics tech is dead, the nervous man who sold me—and whoever else was buying—his black-market dub of the videotape. The story made the Channel 46 evening news last night and was second page in the Monterey Herald this morning. The coroner’s office is calling it a suicide. I don’t know what else they would call it. He was found hanging from the lowest limb of a sycamore tree, not far from the Moss Landing docks, both his wrists slashed nearly to the bone. He was wearing a necklace of Loligo squid strung on baling wire. A family member has told the press that he had a history of depression.

  Twenty-three seconds to go.

  Almost two miles down, Tiburon II is listing badly to starboard, and then the ROV bumps against one of the boulders and the lights stop flickering and seem to grow a little brighter. The vehicle appears to pause, as though considering its next move. The day he sold me the tape, the MBARI tech said that a part of the toolsled had wedged itself into the rubble. He told me it took the crew of the R/V Western Flyer more than two hours to maneuver the sub free. Two hours of total darkness at the bottom of the canyon, after the lights and the cameras died.

  Eighteen seconds.

  Sixteen.

  This time it’ll be diffe
rent, I think, like a child trying to wish away a beating. This time, I’ll see the trick of it, the secret interplay of light and shadow, the hows and whys of a simple optical illusion—

  Twelve.

  Ten.

  And the first time, I thought that I was only seeing something carved into the stone or part of a broken sculpture. The gentle curve of a hip, the tapering line of a leg, the twin swellings of small breasts. A nipple the color of granite.

  Eight.

  But there’s her face—and there’s no denying that it’s her face—Jacova Angevine, her face at the bottom the sea, turned up towards the surface, towards the sky and Heaven beyond the weight of all that black, black water.

  Four.

  I bite my lip so hard that I taste blood. It doesn’t taste so different from the ocean.

  Two.

  She opens her eyes, and they are not her eyes, but the eyes of some marine creature adapted to that perpetual night. The soulless eyes of an anglerfish or gulper eel, eyes like matching pools of ink, and something darts from her parted lips —

  And then there’s only static, and I sit staring into the salt-and-pepper roar.

  All the answers were here. Everything that you’re asking yourself . . . I offered all of it to you.

  Later—an hour or only five minutes—I pressed eject and the cassette slid obediently from the VCR. I read the label, aloud, in case I’d read it wrong every single time before, in case the timestamp on the video might have been mistaken. But it was the same as always, the day before Jacova waited on the beach at Moss Landing for the supplicants of the Open Door of Night. The day before she led them into the sea. The day before she drowned.

  8.

  I close my eyes.

  And she’s here again, as though she never left.

  She whispers something dirty in my ear, and her breath smells like sage and toothpaste.

  The protestors are demanding that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) end its ongoing exploration of the submarine canyon immediately. The twenty-five mile long canyon, they claim, is a sacred site that is being desecrated by scientists. Jacova Angevine, former Berkeley professor and leader of the controversial Open Door of Night cult, compares the launching of the new submersible Tiburon II to the ransacking of the Egyptian pyramids by grave robbers. (San Francisco Chronicle)

  I tell her that I have to go to New York, that I have to take this assignment, and she replies that maybe it’s for the best. I don’t ask her what she means; I can’t imagine that it’s important.

  And she kisses me.

  Later, when we’re done and I’m too exhausted to sleep, I lie awake, listening to the sea and the small, anxious sounds she makes in her dreams.

  The bodies of fifty-three men and women, all of whom may have been part of a religious group known as the Open Door of Night, have been recovered following Wednesday’s drownings near Moss Landing, CA. Deputies have described the deaths as a mass suicide. The victims were all reported to be between twenty-two and thirty-six years old. Authorities fear that at least two dozen more may have died in the bizarre episode and recovery efforts continue along the coast of Monterey County. (CNN.com)

  I close my eyes, and I’m in the old warehouse on Pierce Street again; Jacova’s voice thunders from the PA speakers mounted high on the walls around the cavernous room. I’m standing in the shadows all the way at the back, apart from the true believers, apart from the other reporters and photographers and camera men who have been invited here. Jacova leans into the microphone, angry and ecstatic and beautiful—terrible, I think—and that hideous carving is squatting there on its altar beside her. There are candles and smoldering incense and bouquets of dried seaweed, conch shells and dead fish, carefully arranged about the base of the statue.

  “We can’t remember where it began,” she says, “where we began,” and they all seem to lean into her words like small boats pushing against a violent wind. “We can’t remember, of course we can’t remember, and they don’t want us to even try. They’re afraid, and in their fear they cling desperately to the darkness of their ignorance. They would have us do the same, and then we would never recall the garden nor the gate, would never look upon the faces of the great fathers and mothers who have returned to the deep.”

  None of it seems the least bit real, not the ridiculous things that she’s saying, or all the people dressed in white, or the television crews. This scene is not even as substantial as a nightmare. It’s very hot in the warehouse, and I feel dizzy and sick and wonder if I can reach an exit before I vomit.

  I close my eyes and I’m sitting in a bar in Brooklyn, watching them wade into the sea, and I’m thinking, Some son of a bitch is standing right there taping this and no one’s trying to stop them, no one’s lifting a goddamn finger.

  I blink, and I’m sitting in an office in Manhattan, and the people who write my checks are asking me questions I can’t answer.

  “Good god, you were fucking the woman, for Christ’s sake, and you’re sitting there telling me you had no idea whatsoever that she was planning this?”

  “Come on. You had to have known something.”

  “They all worshiped some sort of prehistoric fish god, that’s what I heard. No one’s going to buy that you didn’t see this coming—”

  “People have a right to know. You still believe that, don’t you?”

  Answers are scarce in the mass suicide of a California cult, but investigators are finding clues to the deaths by logging onto the Internet and Web sites run by the cult’s members. What they’re finding is a dark and confusing side of the Internet, a place where bizarre ideas and beliefs are exchanged and gain currency. Police said they have gathered a considerable amount of information on the background of the group, known as the Open Door of Night, but that it may be many weeks before the true nature of the group is finally understood. (CNN.com)

  And my clumsy hands move uncertainly across her bare shoulders, my fingertips brushing the chaos of scar tissue there, and she smiles for me.

  On my knees in an alley, my head spinning, and the night air stinks of puke and saltwater.

  “Okay, so I first heard about this from a woman I interviewed who knew the family,” the man in the Radiohead T-shirt says. We’re sitting on the patio of a bar in Pacific Grove, and the sun is hot and glimmers white off the bay. His name isn’t important, and neither is the name of the bar. He’s a student from LA, writing a book about the Open Door of Night, and he got my e-mail address from someone in New York. He has bad teeth and smiles too much.

  “This happened back in ‘76, the year before Jacova’s mother died. Her father, he’d take them down to the beach at Moss Landing two or three times every summer. He got a lot of his writing done out there. Anyway, apparently the kid was a great swimmer, like a duck to water, but her mother never let her to go very far out at that beach because there are these bad rip currents. Lots of people drown out there, surfers and shit.”

  He pauses and takes a couple of swallow of beer, then wipes the sweat from his forehead.

  “One day, her mother’s not watching and Jacova swims too far out and gets pulled down. By the time the lifeguards get her back to shore, she’s stopped breathing. The kid’s turning blue, but they keep up the mouth-to-mouth and CPR and she finally comes around. They get Jacova to the hospital up in Watsonville and the doctors say she’s fine, but they keep her for a few days anyhow, just for observation.”

  “She drowned,” I say, staring at my own beer. I haven’t taken a single sip. Beads of condensation cling to the bottle and sparkle like diamonds.

  “Technically, yeah. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart had stopped. But that’s not the fucked-up part. While she’s in Watsonville, she keeps telling her mother some crazy story about mermaids and sea monsters and demons, about these things trying to drag her down to the bottom of the sea and drown her and how it wasn’t an undertow at all. She’s terrified, convinced that they’re still after her, these monsters. Her mother
wants to call in a shrink, but her father says no, fuck that, the kid’s just had a bad shock, she’ll be fine. Then, the second night she’s in the hospital, these two nurses turn up dead. A janitor found them in a closet just down the hall from Jacova’s room. And here’s the thing you’re not gonna believe, but I’ve seen the death certificates and the autopsy reports and I swear to you this is the God’s honest truth.”

  Whatever’s coming next, I don’t want to hear it. I know that I don’t need to hear it. I turn my head and watch a sailboat out on the bay, bobbing about like a toy.

  “They’d drowned, both of them. Their lungs were full of saltwater. Five miles from the goddamn ocean, but these two women drowned right there in a broom closet.”

  “And you’re going to put this in your book?” I ask him, not taking my eyes of the bay and the little boat.

  “Hell yeah,” he replies. “I am. It fucking happened, man, just like I said, and I can prove it.”

  I close my eyes, shutting out the dazzling, bright day, and wish I’d never agreed to meet with him.

  I close my eyes.

  “Down there,” Jacova whispers, “you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”

  We would be warm below the storm

  In our little hideaway beneath the waves

  I close my eyes. Oh god, I’ve closed my eyes.

  She wraps her strong, suntanned arms tightly around me and takes me down, down, down, like the lifeless body of a child caught in an undertow. And I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean. I would go with her, because, like a stone that has become an incarnation of mystery, she has drawn a circle around me.