by Paula Guran
“Mommy?”
With a grimace, she shuts off the water. Leaves the nightgown dripping on the edge of the tub and curls up in bed, shivering. Disoriented. Scared. She hasn’t walked in her sleep since she was a child.
Is this some sort of involuntary penance for thinking Emily was sleepwalking that night, even though she’d never done it before? Tess followed her, remembering how her mother always said waking up a sleepwalker was a bad thing, curious to see where she’d go, and she was only a few paces behind her. More than close enough to keep her safe.
When Emily approached the beach, Tess took her arm, intending to turn her back around, but Emily pulled free and kept walking, heading across the sand toward the water. And then the world changed, became a rubber band stretching Tess into one place and Emily into another with a huge distance between them.
As before a tsunami, the waves pulled back and they kept receding, the sea folding back on itself to reveal an endless stretch of wet sand littered with fish trapped in the throes of death, driftwood, and tangled clumps of seaweed. Tess screamed her throat raw, but Emily kept walking, and no matter how fast Tess ran, Emily remained out of reach. Between her screams, Tess heard Emily say a word (and why the hell can’t she remember what Emily said?), and then the waves curled into their rightful place again and Emily was gone. In the space between, did Tess see a shape, an unknowable being, deep inside the water? Her mouth yearns to say no; her mind says an emphatic yes.
Even if the police didn’t believe her, she saw something. It wasn’t an optical illusion, as one police officer suggested, not unkindly. The media shitstorm and the blame from the legions of armchair detectives seems a distant dream now. The press was all too willing to give up when they realized Tess didn’t make a good subject; she wouldn’t answer their questions, wouldn’t get mad and curse them out, wouldn’t tear her hair and break down in hysterics. Not in front of them anyway.
Two steaming coffee mugs in hand, Tess pads downstairs, knocks on Vicky’s door with her elbow. After she refills their cups a second time, Tess scrubs her face with her hands, clears her throat, and says, “I keep hearing Emily. Every time I turn on the water, I hear her saying Mommy.” She fiddles with the drawstring on her pants, hating the quiet desperation of her words and wishing she could take them back, inhale them like cigarette smoke.
Vicky takes several sips of her coffee before she answers in a soft voice. “Well . . . You’re trying to move on and you’re feeling guilty about it, and Emily disappeared in the water so it makes sense you’d hear her like that.”
“But it sounds so much like her.”
Vicky leans forward. Fixes Tess’s gaze with her own. “For a couple years, I used to see Crystal all the time. Once, I even followed a girl nearly a mile because I was convinced it was my baby. And I identified Crystal’s body, I knew she was dead, but I knew it up here.” She taps her forehead. “I didn’t know it here.” A second tap, to her chest. “Once my heart caught up, it stopped. You’ll get through this part of it, too.”
“Right now, I don’t feel like I will. Not today or tomorrow or forever.”
“But you will. One day you won’t hear her, and then a little while later you’ll realize you haven’t heard her, and then a little while after that, you’ll realize you don’t need to hear her anywhere but in here.” She touches her chest again.
Tess wants to believe her, but her fingers curl in and her fingernails leave half-moon bruises in her palms.
“Mommy?”
Tess’s head snaps around, the washcloth falls from her hand. She places her palms on the porcelain, bends over the sink. Takes a shuddering breath. No one there, no one there, she thinks, but another sound emerges from the water, an evocative yet inhuman voice, one she knows she’s heard before –no. She had too much to drink that night. She heard nothing then and hears nothing now.
Her belly curves, her breasts swell, her limbs are taffy caught in the pull, her mouth is salt tang and bitter.
“No,” she snaps. “Do you hear me? No.”
Her ears pop, and a dull throb spreads through her abdomen, radiates in a slow spiral to her back. Moaning through clenched teeth, she fumbles for the faucet.
The pain ebbs. Her stomach, her limbs, are perfectly normal, perfectly fine. She rinses away the taste of the ocean with mouthwash, hears only the normal rush of water when she turns the faucet back on.
Tess wakes in the middle of the night with her pulse racing. In her dream, she was on the beach, running toward Emily, and she stopped her before her feet met the water but when Emily turned around, she wasn’t Emily but other, her skin the white of a deep-sea creature and cold as the Atlantic Ocean in January.
Tess turns on her bedside light and scrubs the sleep from her eyes. The sheets are gritty against her feet, and she throws back the covers – sand coats both cotton and skin. Hands clamped tight over her mouth can’t keep in the shout.
* * *
Without curtains hanging at the windows, sunlight floods Emily’s bedroom. Tess lugs in paint, brushes, and a canvas tarp, and pulls the bed toward the center of the room. From behind the headboard, something thumps to the floor; Tess retrieves the sketchbook with tears shimmering in her eyes.
From the time she could hold a crayon in a chubby fist, Emily loved to draw and while not a prodigy, her passion made up for it in spades. The first picture is her favorite dinosaur, stegosaurus; the pages that follow show more dinosaurs, a picture of Tess wearing a superhero cape, the beach at night, a second sketch of the beach with a scattering of shells, and then the beach with the waves high and arcing and a dark outline in the raised water.
Tess sinks down on the edge of the bed. The shape in the water, done in crude strokes of pencil, is not a whale or a prehistoric shark. It’s alien and wrong with too many limbs, too many curves. Tess flips the page. Yet another sketch of the same, the lines more defined, darker, the likeness slightly different, but still improbable. In the next sketch, the shape has altered even more, as if Emily couldn’t quite capture on paper what she wanted. Tess’s fingers leave indentations in the paper. This can’t be real. It can’t be right.
“Who are you?” Tess says. “What are you?”
What she can’t bring herself to say aloud: why did you take my daughter?
Tess stands on the beach, wind tossing sand into her face and twisting her nightgown around her hips. Her mouth opens but nothing escapes. Is she dreaming? Dreaming awake? She turns in a slow circle, spies the steady tracks her feet left behind.
The waves begin to recede, and she freezes in place. A dark silhouette twists beneath the changing water; pain threads through her body, the darkness moves closer, and she sees—
No. It’s too much. She closes her eyes, can’t bear to look. The agony seizes her tight; when it loosens its hold, Tess runs, kicking sand in wide arcs. Behind her, the waves crash upon the shore, and she hears something else beneath – a moan, a whisper.
(Emily said Mother. That’s what she said, and Tess knew she wasn’t calling out to her, wasn’t referring to her in any way.)
By the time she gets to the porch, she’s sobbing hard enough that her chest aches, and when Vicky grabs her arm, she shrieks.
“Tess? What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Talk to me. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Words spill from Tess’s lips, and she knows they don’t make sense, but she can’t make them stop.
Vicky shoves a glass in her hand. “Drink.”
Tess does, grateful to wash the salt from her tongue.
“Now take a deep breath and talk to me. What happened?”
“I woke up on the beach, and I saw something in the water. I saw, I don’t know, I couldn’t look, but I know it was there. I felt it. It was there the night Emily went into the water, too. I know it was. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was there. I think it wants something from me, but I don’t know what it wants. I don’t know what to—”
“Shhh, take another drink.”
&n
bsp; “You don’t understand. Emily saw it, too. She drew it in her sketchbook—”
Vicky presses the glass gently to her mouth. Tess drinks, this time wincing at the liquor burn.
“Okay,” Vicky says. “I don’t know what you thought you saw, or whether you just had a bad dream or what, but maybe you need to get away from here for a while. I know things have been rough, maybe being close to where it happened isn’t good for you right now.”
Tess pushes the glass back in Vicky’s hand. Vicky continues to talk, and Tess responds in the right places with the right phrases while her thoughts drift elsewhere.
She sleeps on the bathroom floor with the water running. Spends the day in the kitchen with the faucet on full blast and the sketchbook in her lap. Ignores Vicky’s knocks at the door.
“Why did you want my daughter?” she says over and over, the tone of her voice as foreign as the thing in Emily’s sketches. “What more do you want from me?”
After the sunlight bleeds from the sky, she waits until Vicky goes back into her apartment and creeps down the stairs as quickly and quietly as possible. Her hands are shaking when she walks onto the beach, and she steps as close to the water as she dares.
“I’m here,” she calls out into the wind.
The waves break and crash, break and crash. Tess steps closer.
“I’m here,” she shouts. “Isn’t this what you want? Goddammit, isn’t this what you fucking want from me?”
The wind tears her words to ribbons. She steps into the waves, hissing at the sudden sting of cold. Like fabric gathered in a hand, the waves recede, and Tess links her fingers together, wills herself to keep still. The water withdraws even more, and a leviathan, the shape from Emily’s sketchbook, undulates beneath the darkness. Goosebumps rise on her arms; her nipples go hard and painful; a shiver makes a circuit on the racetrack of her spine. The air thrums with an electric undercurrent.
A distant gaze bores into hers. A distant mind delves, tastes. An image of Emily’s face flickers in her peripheral vision, flickers and breaks apart into nothing at all.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” Tess shrieks. “Just give me back my daughter.”
Her mouth is salt and seaweed. Crab claws dig into her stomach, and she falls to her hands and knees. Her abdomen swells; something unfolds inside her, shoving razored points and spiked edges against the confines of her womb. She grips fistfuls of sand and arches her back, lets loose a keening wail.
Muffled by the water, another wail echoes her own, but Tess isn’t sure if she’s hearing it in her ears or only her mind. She rolls onto her back, supports herself with her elbows, and draws up her knees. The grotesque curve of her belly ripples, and as the claws dig in again, the other cries out as well, a great and terrible groaning cry.
Tess arches her back as an urge to push fills her body. She strains with all her might. And then again. The world melts into shadow and stardust, leaving only the torment inside her and the exertion of her muscles. She screams as something breaks free and falls flat on her back, panting.
Reaching under her nightgown, she expects to find ribbons of torn flesh, and although the contact makes her wince, her vulva is intact, albeit swollen, and there’s nothing beneath her but sand. Her stomach is flat, but the skin is loose, elastic.
Emily emerges from the water, walking as though she’s forgotten how legs work. Tess climbs to her feet, staggers forward, and then halts, her mouth in a wide O. Beneath a mottled covering of viscous liquid and traces of sand – a nightmarish mockery of lanugo – Emily’s skin is sea-pale. Where once she had a navel, she now has a fleshy protuberance resembling an ornate skeleton key emerging from a lock. She blinks once, twice, and nictitating membranes roll back, revealing black eyes – shark eyes – and Tess swallows a scream. This isn’t Emily, it can’t be.
“Mommy?”
Tess’s entire body jolts. The eyes and skin might be wrong, but the voice and smile are all Emily, yet when Tess holds out her arms, Emily steps back, not closer, and lifts her chin. Moonlight reflects in the black of her eyes, and an image comes in view: a still-swollen abdomen, pendulous breasts, vulva concealed by a thick thatch of curls, long tentacular limbs, eel-like fingers ending in claws, a dark eye emerging from tendrils of coiling hair.
Tess backs away, her hands held palm out; Emily stands, face impassive. Her lips don’t move, but a deep, mellifluous voice says, “I see you, first mother of my firstborn.”
Tess bites back a sob. “What, who, are you?”
“I am the mother of all, she who birthed the world and made it whole. I am all that was, and all that will be.”
Emily takes her hand, and Tess hisses in a breath – Emily’s skin is cold, so cold – and once again, the world melts away. Tess sees the shape, the mother, sitting atop a throne. Another being emerges from beneath the ocean floor and wrenches the mother from her place. Sand obscures a great battle, then settles to reveal black blood and lifeless limbs, and the mother, battered and bruised, crawling back to her throne. A second beast rears, rends; the mother’s mouth opens in a silent scream; battle begins anew. More blood and sand and fury; endless creatures, endless battles.
Tess covers her eyes. No more. She can’t bear this. Emily squeezes her hand; she reopens her eyes. Sees Emily walking on the beach and into the waves, into the mother’s embrace; sees inhuman hands guiding her between two great thighs, pushing her into a cavernous womb; sees Emily floating, sleeping with her hands clasped together beneath her cheek; sees small creatures crawling from her navel to drift and grow beside her in the amniotic fluid.
Emily withdraws her hand. “Now you see,” the voice, not Emily’s, says. “The usurper gods are finally dead, and it is time for my children to put the world right. The birthing is over, but your work is not done. You must open the door.”
“But why me? Why my daughter?”
“Because you are her first mother and she alone had the strength to answer my call.”
Tess swallows hard, pushes defiance in her words. “And what will happen if I don’t?”
There is a silence, a profound absence of everything, and stars glitter in the sky. Tess’s fingers tremble; in the black pits of Emily’s eyes, the mother quivers.
A peal of inhuman laughter slices through the quiet. “Then I will take my children back into my womb, and I will unmake the world.”
In Emily’s eyes, a face begins to rise to the surface, and every instinct tells Tess to avert her eyes, to run, then the face slips into the depths again. More laughter.
Emily steps forward and touches Tess’s cheek. “Everything will be okay.” She takes Tess’s hand and places it on her belly.
Sobbing, Tess curls her hand around the umbilicus. Its pulsing warmth is unexpected, and she fights the urge to pull away. It changes, softens, wraps around her fingers. The narrow strands dance across her skin, and in the center of it all, Tess’s fingertips meet a hardness. Emily’s gaze, with its strange, black un-Emily eyes, locks on hers.
Panic courses through her veins. What is she going to set in motion? What if this is the end of everything?
“I love you, Mommy. I’ve missed you so much.”
Tess sobs harder; the panic shatters. “I love you, too, punkin, with all my heart. I’ve missed you every single day.”
Emily smiles. “But now I’m back and everything will be okay, I promise.”
Tess sucks in a breath and turns the key. The umbilicus shrivels, turns the shade of an oyster shell, and falls to the sand. The weighted silence returns, hangs, and then the creak of a great doorway opening. From the water emerges a thousand, no, a hundred thousand Emilys, all black eyes and pale skin, but there is something inhuman in their faces, something painful to look upon, as though their Emily skin is nothing more than mimicry and a closer inspection will reveal the truth and send her screaming into madness.
They move with odd, liquid strides and when they pass, each pauses to pat Emily’s shoulder and whisper, “Sister.” Tess catch
es sight of jagged teeth, too many teeth, and where navels should be, they have a circular patch of translucent skin that reveals not organs, but a darkness hiding in a shifting sea. As they leave the beach, disappearing into the shadows, Tess whimpers. What are they going to do? What has she unleashed?
And how can such wrongs set anything right?
“Don’t worry,” Emily says. “They won’t hurt you.” She blinks and familiar green eyes replace the black, wraps her arms around Tess and the cold is gone, too.
Tears turn Tess’s vision to a blur, and she can’t speak, can only hold Emily tight, breathing her in, terrified to look too close, to see beneath the camouflage. But she has her daughter back, and that’s worth everything and anything at all. No matter what, it has to be.
Some years back, Veronica Schanoes was having a drink with Nick Mamatas and John Langan. “They were waxing eloquent about H. P. Lovecraft,” she explains. “Though I can’t deny that Lovecraft has influenced my work, I couldn’t relate to the exalted place he seemed to occupy, and I wondered if the difference could be ascribed to gender. More to the point, I made a sweeping generalization rather off-handedly: ‘Lovecraft does nothing for me,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t the horror the girls were passing around in fifth grade. V. C. Andrews is to girls what Lovecraft is to boys.’
“Of course, I was wrong – plenty of women have found Lovecraft very important indeed – but I don’t think I was entirely wrong. Lovecraft is the cosmic gothic (how insignificant and futile a thing is man!); Andrews is the domestic gothic (the call is coming from inside the house!), and of course the resonance of those categories is highly gendered. So what I have done in my piece is to try to take Lovecraftian themes (monstrous generation, inherited guilt, the horror of the Other) and reconfigure them as domestic gothic, using Lovecraft’s own life and predilections. These themes are of course treated by Andrews in the domestic gothic – the monstrosity of one’s origin (incest), how one bears the guilt for the sins of one’s forbears, and the horror of the Other when the Other is uncomfortably close to being oneself. In this piece, I wonder about Lovecraft’s own monstrous generation; about the racist horrors that founded the United States and what they mean to someone who saw himself as an avatar of eighteenth-century America; the horror of the Other that took the form of Lovecraft’s anti-Semitism, and what that means to me, as a twenty-first-century Jew in New York City.
