by Allyson Bird
But where was her mother?
There was the German trio with their fingers thick as Bratwursts and their Kommandant scowls glowing in the guttering light.
“Hey,” Serena called to them. “You there.”
They bristled as a unit, and Serena flinched away.
“Hey,” Serena tried again—this time to Nameless. He was grinning happily at his tally as the others began to close the gate. “My mother’s still out there.”
“Mother?”
“Yes. She hasn’t come back yet onto the boat yet.”
“No,” he grinned. He pointed at the tally.
“We can’t leave yet.”
“We leave.” He pointed at the tally again.
“Jesus, I’m trying to tell you, she’s still out there. She hasn’t come on board yet.”
Serena hated his uncomprehending stare.
“We leave,” he insisted, “now.”
“You said—” she gritted her teeth “—no one stays on the island. My mother is on the island.”
It was ridiculous. Fully ridiculous. Of course, they couldn’t leave. She looked around for allies, but they had all turned against her. They had reservations for dinner, appointments, there were cocktails waiting for them in quiet cafes, and the afternoon’s exertions were over—they should be abandoned as quickly and efficiently as possible.
She felt a coldness slither down her spine, a sense of how alone she was at that moment and how utterly unprepared she was for it. Her mother kept their passports in her purse, had only given her enough cash for tips…
Nameless shrugged his shoulders comically, waggled his eyebrows at her, and for a moment Serena thought it had all been a joke. She smiled. The tight knot at the centre of her belly began to lose, and her relief was such thought she felt a sudden urge to throw her arms around the Germans and kiss them on their sweaty, schnitzel faces.
Then Nameless pulled her in close again, so close she could smell the smoke on him and the salt and the sweat and something else, rancid, sweet as rotten meat. In that moment she was afraid, suddenly, that he was going to kiss her. Instead, he whispered into her ear—and the smell of him was so much worse, it was like smelling a dead animal—“I come back,” Nameless said, “an hour or two. No more. No one stays on the island, but you stay, for now, and I come back.”
And he gave her a small but deliberate push. Serena stumbled forward onto the gangway, her sandal catching awkwardly in the planking and nearly sending her for a nasty spill. She turned and stared at the sailor, all doe eyes and hurt, but he merely took his cigarette from his mouth with a flourish. Casually, he flicked the edge of it into the water.
The tourists smiled. It would be easier this way, for them, and she would be fine. Of course she was fine. After all, whatever the city was, it was in a guidebook now, and they all damn well knew that for a place such as this a guidebook was as good as a eulogy.
They left her on the shore, standing in the wavering sunlight, feeling naked and exposed as they watched her, each of them smiling, each of them with their fucking cameras, each of them grasping after one final, fatal shot of the shoreline.
Serena stumbled through the columns, calling, but she could not think where to look. Her mother had always wanted to go to Carcosa but that was it. There was no special part of Carcosa she had always wanted to see, as far as Serena could remember. It was just Carcosa. The entirety of it. It was a thing that could not be divided up. No piece would be enough.
Serena’s mother was not one to miss appointments. She had a pocketbook in which she kept everything in order. That pocketbook ruled her life: every hour perfectly accounted for, traffic snarls anticipated, emergency phone numbers recorded. Whatever was happening was clearly impossible.
That meant only one thing. Serena’s mother was dead.
Once the thought slipped around her like a noose she could not escape it. It was logical. It fit the facts. Serena seized up with shivers. She could not breathe.
Her mother was dead.
Her mother was dead.
Serena had never been one for sustained momentum. She was fickle, and she liked being fickle. Now she was tired. The rocks felt hot to the touch. It felt like she was running over fucking coals. Her skin was starting to burn even though evening had swept in already, she could feel it itching, that telltale sign she’d been out too long. She was thirsty. She was hungry. She was crying and that was a fucking waste of water, wasn’t it?
Serena sat on the shore and she stared up the sky. Hours had passed, how many she didn’t know. Her fear was like amnesia, but even that was starting to wear off. She dug her fingers into the sand. There were shells there. They had been left behind too, like she had been left behind. Something had crawled out of them, naked, and decided that life would be better without any protection. The shells shattered against her fingertips. They would have made bad protection anyway.
The sky was black. The stars were black. It made the water black too, black and slick as blood in an unlit room. She was watching for lights now because she couldn’t watch for shapes anymore. She imagined the Germans wherever they were guzzling beer and staring up at the moon. She imagined them drunkenly stumbling back to their rooms to fuck. The wife would be too tired. She’d spent the day exploring Carcosa after all. It was too much to ask of one person: Carcosa and fucking.
Serena thought about the husband, sad and still horny. She thought about him standing in front of the toilet, his thick sausage fingers wrapped around his thick sausage penis.
But then Serena stopped thinking those things because the first body had drifted onto the shore.
It wasn’t one of the Germans, she would have recognized the Germans anywhere. But she was sure he had been with them, this fucking guy now with his hair tangled up in the seaweed, his face still fresh but his cheeks starting to bloat as if he’d been holding his breath. He bobbed gently in the water. There were air pockets hiking up the armpits of his brightly coloured shirt. A camera tugged at his neck. It was an anchor now that he had found the sandy ridge of the beach. It held him in place.
There were two more not far behind him. A woman. She had a wedding ring, big and gaudy. She had bridal eyes, but they were frozen up, staring up at the black sky. Then a much fatter walrus of a woman just behind her.
Serena stepped into the water. Her feet slouched into the mud. There were more of them coming, bloated shapes that broke the pale gleam of the waves apart. She couldn’t see them properly, not in the darkness, but she knew they were out there, slowly drifting toward her. She rummaged through the pockets of the closest one for money, documentation, anything, then she realized what she was doing, rummaging through the slick and heavy pockets of dead people, and she stumbled away. Fell over backwards. Now she was lying half in the water, half out, damp cut-off jeans and the salt licking the sunscreen from her thighs.
Her toes bounced gently off the toes of the dead man.
Her revulsion was immediate. Serena scrabbled back onto the sand. Every part of her dripped, even the parts that hadn’t been in the water. She was sweating heavily. Shaking. She got to her feet and started to run. Her sandals weren’t very well-equipped for this sort of business, so eventually she tossed them aside and ran on her bare feet the way she had when she was twelve years old. The rocks cut her feet to ribbons but she kept running.
“Mom,” she screamed, “Mom!”
No one answered her.
“Mom!”
Still no one. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“They’re all dead! You can come out now!”
But for one brief second she thought she heard something in reply, something like heavy breathing, and she almost wept in relief. That was it then. Her mother had just been waiting for them to die, and now that they were gone she would reveal herself and take Serena home.
“Mom!” she screamed again.
In the silence that came after her screaming she realized it wasn’t heavy breathing at all. It was the sound of th
e waves beating against the shoreline, and it wasn’t even that sound. It was the sound of the silence between the beats. The sound of the great lung of the ocean inhaling.
Her own lungs were heavy now. The black air was too thick to breathe properly. She couldn’t get enough oxygen and so, slowly, her frantic pace stumbled to a crawl. She wandered directionless, completely adrift.
Then there were lights in the distance—like a constellation, some sort of hope in the darkness. She tried to remember what else she had read in the guidebook about Carcosa. Who else lived on the island? What language did they speak? She couldn’t remember. She hadn’t cared at the time. She hadn’t even wanted to come here, not to fucking Carcosa, dead Carcosa, lost Carcosa…
She knew she was leaving a bloody set of footprints behind her, but she didn’t care. There were lights ahead. That was something.
Lights and then sounds. A series of dense bass notes that reverberated through the rock, shook her ankles, shook her knees, sent her pelvis swinging.
She hadn’t expected to find a party here. In fact, it was just about the last thing she had expected to find, but even from a distance, she could recognize the pattern of the flashing lights, the way the earth shook and jived.
Something about it all—the loss of her mother, the horror of the dead bodies, those dark, insectoid stars—began to crack her up, and between the cracks the single word “PARTY!” rose out of her subconscious. Instinct kicked in. Even though she was soaked from the waist down and barefoot, there was a subtle but electric transformation taking place. She knew it. This was where she was supposed to be. This was always the place she was supposed to be. Maybe it was fucking Carcosa, but it was also fucking Carcosa, baby, or it could be—she thought—it could be, just like Mykonos, just like Paris, everywhere had a nightlife, right?
The music was loud, and she couldn’t understand the language of the people around her. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the way she smiled, that glow she had, how she could make soaked cut-offs seem like that’s the way they were supposed to be worn. She glinted and glimmered in the darkness. She was like a gem.
“Hey,” she said to the dark-haired man at the bar. He had long hair and teeth white like bleached bone. His arms were ripped and bulging, and for one brief moment the shape his muscles reminded her of the pockets coming out of the dead man’s pants, filled up with air, bulbous. She didn’t care though. She let her finger touch his finger. She paid with the dead man’s money, which turned out to be hundred dollar bills. That didn’t matter because the bartender said she didn’t need to pay anyway.
“Fuck it,” she said, flashing a smile at him. “It’s a tip.”
She went out onto the dance floor, trailing blood-stained footprints behind her. Her feet slid, and she made that seem cool too. Pretty soon there were men all around her, exactly the way she wanted there to be. One of them was pressing up against her from behind. She could feel his erection pressing against her ass. His hands touched her wrist. His hands touched her neck.
“See, I come back,” he said, and Serena recognized the voice, the slight hiss of it. Nameless the Sailor. He had come back for her after all. Fucking perfect. Everything would be all right. This was all as it was supposed to be.
“What happened to everyone?” she asked him.
“Threw them overboard,” he said and started laughing. She couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. She liked the feel of him against her, and she pressed herself hard against his crotch. He smelled like cigarettes. He looked dirty, but dirty in a kind of hot way.
“Why did you do that?” Serena asked him over her shoulder. She was trying hard to concentrate, but inside something inside her was heating up like a pot with the lid clamped down, first steam frothing at the edges, then the hissing as it hit the metal plate and vaporized instantly. That’s how she felt. She was the pot. She was the boiling water. She was changing inside.
“The cameras,” he said, still smiling, “you know, click click.” His teeth bit together as he made the noises.
“They were doing it wrong, huh?” she whispered, and she knew she was onto something there. Them with their stupid cameras. Their fat, sausage fingers, their eyes wanting to devour Carcosa, their disappointment…
“Wrong.” He brought his mouth close to her ear and the way he said it made it seem sexy. He was sliding his hands down her hips, underneath the belt of her jeans. “Ha.”
Serena arched her hips against him. It seemed as if he was everywhere now and the feel of his hands against her made her wet. She wanted to fuck him. She wanted to fuck him oh so badly but whenever she turned he turned too and so they were dancing like that, movement for movement as if they were already fucking and she just hadn’t noticed when they started.
“And my mother?” she managed to ask him, the breath coming like liquid out of her mouth.
“Not her,” he said. “Not your mother. Come.”
Suddenly his arms were like cabling and he was leading her off the dance floor. She stumbled, big smears of blood painted the tiles, but no one else seemed to notice. When she looked behind herself she could see every place she had been. She could see the pattern of her dancing, and where Nameless had stood behind her. The sight was shocking. It pulled her back into herself. She grew afraid of him, his gargantuan presence, larger than life. It was as if he slipped out of his body and into something more suited to himself. Reverse evolution. He looked as if he had only recently crawled his way out of the ocean.
But it was not only him. It was everyone. They were massive, towering creatures with slablike faces and jutting jaws, composed of a soft jelly that shook and quivered to the music. Their bodies glistened. They left their own trail as they moved, thin threads of silk that crisscrossed the stonework. They were beautiful in the way that strangers are beautiful, soft-shelled creatures.
Here it was, the filthy romance of the world. Here was everything. Everything.
For a brief instant she wanted to touch them: wanted it painfully, wanted it more deeply than she had ever wanted anything before in her life. They had stripped her down to pure craving. The air was hot in her lungs, everything was hot, and she knew how easy it would be to strip off her shorts, her soaked top, to move naked amongst them. To feel their bodies pushed up against her, the raw, manic energy of it.
Their bodies were so soft, softer even than the bodies of the tourists floating in the water. Serena did not know where they had come from, but she knew, instinctively, that they were weak. She knew this because she was good at sensing weakness. She knew it the way her mother knew it. She knew they were reaching for her the way she had reached for her mother’s hand, fumbling around in the darkness, wanting someone to hold. And knowing that made her powerful. It made her disdainful. It made her hate them a little bit for being so fucking weak that they would want her. They were as soft damageable as a newborn’s skull.
Nameless tugged her forward.
To see her mother.
To see her mother now.
This was what her mother had wanted. This. Carcosa. This was what she had been looking for all this time.
She loved these fucking things.
“Your mother?” said Nameless, but Serena could feel that his grip had grown spongy. She brushed it off without any problem at all. “Please?” he looked hurt. Bewildered. A kicked puppy.
“Just fuck right off, would you?” Serena said. “My mother’s fucking dead.”
Serena followed the trail of her blood away from the party.
Eventually the noises grew quiet around her. The lights grew dim. As midnight devoured the rocks and pillars, the crumbling foundations, Serena came to the shore. The bodies were still there. A whole crowd of them had gathered. They made her feel worshipped, the way they clustered around her. She decided she liked them better like that. She liked them better than she had liked them while they had been alive. What a fucking drag they had been then.
She gathered up the cameras one by one. Most of the came
ras were busted or drenched. A few shed sparks when she clicked the power buttons. Only one worked, it was practically antique, mechanical. There were canisters of film, little plastic waterproof jars, tucked away. Serena had never used a camera like this, but it felt right, somehow, holding this ancient thing, spilling its guts out. She wanted to know what it was they had seen. What had drawn them to this place. She peered at the frames one by one. She expected to see the crumbling rocks. Stupid German faces smiling blandly into the camera, dumb piggy eyes, not knowing how close they were to death, how it would be such a small push to send them overboard…
She laughed at what she saw. Just fucking laughed.
Night washed in. The darkness was nearly complete. Serena sat down heavily amidst the stones and the shells, and, making a necklace of the film, one long winding ribbon of pure black, she settled down to wait for the light to find her.
JUST BEYOND HER DREAMING
BY MERCEDES M. YARDLEY
She had a lover nobody could see.
There was nothing strange in this. In fact, it was better this way.
She had a husband, or at least a man she was married to. And this invisible lover that nobody could see or hear or smell or taste (he really was very delicious) was what kept her contented and sane for a while. Until, at last, he didn’t.
But nobody likes to talk about that. Not really.
It’s disturbing.
Unsavory.
But oh, it was so glorious.
She had wished for a name of beauty, but that wasn’t what was given to her. Perhaps her mother was in poor humor or ignorant or simply mad in the throes of childbirth, but she called her “Hester” before she died.
Hester spent years pretending that she had said, “Heather,” as the flowers, or “Ether,” as the phantasmagoric, or even “Esther,” who had been a great and beautiful queen.
But Hester it was and Hester it had always been, and after she curled up outside in the meadow with bare feet and a dirty shift reading The Scarlet Letter, she burned with shame for days. Every time anyone called her by name, she heard the obscene way their teeth closed as they hissed it out.
