Eighteen seconds.
Sixteen.
This time it’ll be different, 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.
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 Tiburón 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 22 and 36 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 worshipped 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 swallows 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 off the bay and the little boat.
“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.
* * *
Houses Under The Sea
It began with a line from an R.E.M. song. Then, Jacova Angevine. Circling back to John Steinbeck (Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday). Mother Hydra, Panthalassa, MBARI, gulper eels, whispered apocalypse, those who go down to the sea without ships.
We don’t doubt, we don’t take direction,
Lucretia, my reflection, dance the ghost with me…
Sisters of Mercy, “Lucretia, My Reflection” (1987)
“I am alone. There is no God where I am.”
Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis, 1904)
Publication History
Original publication dates appear first, followed in parentheses by the year each story was written. Sometimes, there were considerable discrepancies between the two.
“Emptiness Spoke Eloquent” Secret City: Strange Tales of London, 1997 (1993)
“Two Worlds, and In Between” Dark of the Night, 1997 (1994)
“To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)” Dark Terrors 2, 1996 (1994)
“Tears Seven Times Salt” Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium, 1996 (1994)
“Breakfast in the House of the Rising of the Rising Sun” Noirotica 2, 1997 (1995)
“Estate” Dark Terrors 3, 1997 (1997)
“Giants in the Earth” Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion, 1996 (1995)
“Rats Live On No Evil Star” White of the Moon, 1999 (1997)
“Postcards from the King of Tides” Candles for Elizabeth, 1998 (1997)
“Salmagundi (New York City, 1981)” Carpe Noctem, 1998 (1998)
“Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire” Tales of Pain and Wonder, 2000 (1995-1999)
“Spindleshanks (News Orleans, 1956) Queer Fear, 2000 (2000)
“The Road of Pins” Dark Terrors 6, 2002 (2001)
“Onion” Wrongs Things, 2001 (2001)
“Les Fleurs Empoisonnées” Subterranean Press 2001 (2001)
“Night Story (1973)” Wrong Things, 2001 (2001)
“From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6” Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, 2005 (2002)
“Andromeda Among the Stones” Embrace the Mutation, 2003 (2002)
“La Peau Verte” To Charles Fort, With Love, 2005 (2003)
“Riding the White Bull” Argosy #1, 2004 (2003)
“Waycross” Subterranean Press, 2004 (2003)
“The Dead and the Moonstruck” Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales, 2004 (2004)
“Daughter of the Four of Pentacles” Thrillers II, 2007 (2004)
The Dry Salvages Subterranean Press, 2004 (2004)
“The Worm in My Mind’s Eye” Subterranean Press (chapbook, 2004)
“Houses Under the Sea” Thrillers II, 2007 (2004)
The author wishes to note that the text for each of these stories, as it appears in this collection, will differ, often significantly, from the originally published texts. In some cases, stories were revised for each reprinting (and some have been reprinted numerous times). No story is ever finished. There’s only the moment when I force myself to stop and provisionally type THE END.
To Be Continued in Volume 2…
(Coming in 2014)
Acknowledgements
Knowing there isn’t anyway to thank everyone, I’m going to have to settle for a very sincere blanket thank you to all those people who held me up and pushed me forward and sometimes caught me in those early years, between 1992 and 2004, and in all the time since, all the friends, lovers, family, writers (peers and mentors), readers, agents, editors, artists, publishers, booksellers, librarians, fellow travelers, academics, bluestockings, bartenders, and baristas. There are thousands of you, and I can only hope you know who you are. Special thanks, though, to William K. Schafer for suggesting this book, and for his patience during all the long months I dithered. And to Richard A. Kirk, Ryan Obermeyer, Dame Darcy, Ted Naifeh, Steve Leialoha for their vision, and to Lee Moyer for magick and the truest portrait he could have painted, and to Kyle Cassidy for the Other Portrait. A special thanks to Karen Berger and DC Comics for permission to reprint pages from The Dreaming #56, and also to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Boston. Finally, to Sonya Taaffe, who came to the rescue in the eleventh hour, to Geoffrey H. Goodwin, and to Kathryn – my bear, my goat girl, my cranky, melancholic love.
About the Author
She wrote this book.
About the Font
This book was set in Garamond, a typeface named after the French punch-cutter Claude Garamond (c. 1480 – 1561). Garamond has been chosen here for its ability to convey a sense of fluidity and consistency. It has been chosen by the author because this typeface is among the most legible and readable old-style serif print typefaces. In terms of ink usage, Garamond is also considered to be one of the most eco-friendly major fonts.
Table of Contents
Author’s Introduction
Emptiness Spoke Eloquent
Two Worlds and In Between
To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)
Tears Seven Times Salt
Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun (Murder Ballad No. 1)
Estate
Rats Live on No Evil Star
Salmagundi (New York City, 1981)
Postcards from the King of Tides
Giants in the Earth
Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire
Spindleshanks (New Orleans, 1956)
The Road of Pins
Onion
Les Fleurs Empoisonnées
Night Story 1973 (with Poppy Z. Brite)
From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6
Andromeda Among the Stones
La Peau Verte
Riding the White Bull
Waycross
The Dead and the Moonstruck
The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles
The Dry Salvages
The Worm in My Mind’s Eye
Houses Under The Sea
Bibliography/Publication History
s and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)
Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) Page 65
