by Ellen Datlow
“Someone might have left a window open.” We trudge upstairs, checking all the rooms. Sure enough, one of the windows in an upstairs bedroom is slightly cracked, and water damage spreads all throughout the room and into the hall. I grimace and shut the window. “Goddammit. At least it’s not the master bedroom.”
“That’s where most of your mom’s stuff is, right?” Gina twines her fingers with mine. “We don’t have to go in right away. We could get dinner first, or unload the car.”
“I need to know if there’s water damage there, too,” I say, pulling my hand free and wiping my palms on my jeans. The knot of stress and nervousness in my stomach constricts. The beach house had been Mom’s haven. She’d always come alive at the beach, bright and vibrant the way she wasn’t at home. As far as I knew, she hadn’t come up here alone in the ten years since then. “We can unload the car after I check.”
Walking the hallway dredges up more old memories. Lying on the carpet by the stairs, playing Pokémon on my Gameboy. My mom singing to herself when she thought she was alone, straightening the pictures on the wall. My dad pulling me aside, nodding at a photo on my phone. That boy’s a keeper. Don’t let him go.
The master bedroom lies at the end of the hall. My hands are cold as I reach for the door. All of the what-ifs spin through my head, constricting my thoughts like a lasso. Images of water damage, boxes of ruined possessions beneath the bed, sea-streaked clothing flash through my head. What if someone’s carelessness had ruined everything Mom had left behind? What if I couldn’t handle what I’d find?
But when I push the door open, I breathe a sigh of relief. Just like the rest of the rooms, everything is faded and covered in dust, but all the windows are locked tight. Mom’s ugly rose-pink bedspread is still there, along with the lace-lined pillows and the painting of gulls coasting above the surf. It looks just like she left it.
“Emma?” Gina’s voice breaks through my head, and the knot in me eases. I turn and hug her tight, ignoring her surprised noise. Her body is soft against mine.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “I’m so glad.”
Gina hums and presses a kiss to my forehead. “Me too,” she says. “Let’s get the beer out of the trunk and sit down for a bit. You look like you could use a drink.”
That night, we drink too much and curl up together on the couch. Gina runs her fingers through my hair as I listen to her heartbeat, slow and steady. “I can’t believe you wanted to do this alone,” she murmurs. “You can rely on me a little more, okay?”
I’m not good at relying on people, but Gina insists. I press my cheek against her chest. “I’ll try,” I say.
The bad weather persists, and we spend most of the next day excavating the house. Gina finds the vacuum cleaner and makes sure we have livable conditions to work in, and I haul giant bag after giant bag of trash out to the dumpster down the cul-de-sac. The worst part, though, is the smell of rotten fish that wafts in halfway through the day.
Gina shuts off the vacuum cleaner and gags, holding her throat. “Em, if you don’t open a window, I will actually die.”
She’s being dramatic, but she’s right. Even turning the AC on high doesn’t dispel it, and the stench chases us out of the house by afternoon.
The wind kicks sand up around us, and it stings my exposed legs as we walk toward the boardwalk. Gina’s got a pair of giant bedazzled sunglasses on, and it’s never seemed like a smarter fashion choice. My phone keeps buzzing in my back pocket, and after twenty minutes of notifications, it’s starting to make my butt go numb. Gina frowns at it.
“Em, you should’ve left that back at the house.”
“What if we get lost? I need to make sure we can find our way back.” My fingers itch toward my phone and she grabs my wrist. Her eyes are clear and serious.
“Don’t text him back,” Gina says. “You said you were done with him.”
I drop my hand and let my thoughts slide away from the barrage of texts from my boyfriend. Clayton hadn’t taken the breakup well. He punched a hole in my apartment wall right next to the refrigerator. I’d headed over to Gina’s after that, and Clayton’s been blowing up my phone since then, trying to apologize. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m trying.”
She laces her fingers with mine possessively. “Why haven’t you deleted his number? He doesn’t love you, Em. He wants to own you; that’s different.”
I wince. Even when we were just friends, Gina never passed up a chance to shit on Clayton. She’s usually right, and she only does it because she cares about me. But it still leaves an uneasy taste in my mouth. “I broke up with him yesterday, give me a break.”
“I love you, Em,” says Gina. Her grip on my hand is tight. “And what you had with him isn’t love. Don’t let him occupy your head and ruin this trip for us.”
That makes me bristle. “It’s not a vacation, Gina. Jesus. I’m sorry, but is sorting through my dead mom’s effects your idea of fun? Because it sure as hell isn’t mine.”
Her mouth drops open. “I didn’t mean—”
My phone buzzes again, and I swear, grabbing it and shutting it off. Clayton’s latest text—EM, WHERE ARE YOU? I’M CALLING YOUR DAD—flashes across the screen before it goes dark. When I look back at Gina, the naked hurt on her face is visible even behind her sunglasses. Shit. “Look,” I say, guilt gentling my voice. “I just … I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. That was really unfair.”
“Yeah,” she says. “It was.”
I rub my face. My eyes sting from the salty air. “Can we just get lunch?”
Her mouth sets in a thin line. “Fine.” We walk the rest of the way side by side, not looking at each other.
By the time we make it to the beach, Gina’s shoulders have lost some of their tension, and I reach for her hand. She starts to tuck it into the pocket of her jeans shorts, but then she sighs and takes it. “You better be sorry, you bitch.”
“Yeah, I am,” I say.
“A bitch, or sorry?”
“Both,” I say. When I lean in to bump her shoulder with mine, she laughs.
“That’s for sure.”
“You don’t have to worry about him,” I tell her quietly. “I love you. So don’t be insecure, okay?”
Clayton would have dragged the fight out for days, guilt-tripping and giving me the cold shoulder. And maybe it’s what I deserve. But Gina nods. She forgives me more than she should, and when I’m around her, I want to do better. I want to be a better person than I am, for her.
I’m leaning in to kiss her when she stops walking abruptly, and I miss her face by a full inch. “What the hell is that?”
A few feet away, a dead fish lies on the damp sand, stranded by the receding tide. Sandflies swirl around it in wild clouds. Its bottom half looks normal, but something has split its top half all the way down its spine. White bones poke out of its back, fanning out like a house centipede’s legs.
Then the fish gives a weak twitch, and I realize it’s not dead. Its gills flap as it strains for air. As it moves, its flesh catches and bubbles. Its exposed bones dig into the sand.
The tide rushes back in and swirls around it. But instead of bearing the fish back into the ocean, the water tugs gently at its body, and then, in one fluid moment, the fish’s skin rips like a soggy piece of toilet paper, parting along the dorsal fin and peeling away in a single ugly, awful curl. Its scales flash and then it’s gone, dragged away by the waves, leaving the fish’s raw, naked body flopping weakly on the sand.
“What the fuck,” breathes Gina. Her hold is so tight that my fingers hurt. The fish’s sides flutter frantically, and its eyes roll in its head. The white spines poking out of its flesh shiver delicately. “Em, there are a bunch of them, look!”
She points up the beach. The sand is littered with bodies, half-decomposed fish being dragged in and out by the tide. Some have lost their skin, and others are having theirs torn off in messy segments. All of them have spines peeling out of their bodies.
The rotten smell is so s
trong that it makes my eyes water. It smells, I realize, like my mother in the weeks before she died. I take a step back from the water, and then another. “We should go,” I say.
We run, stumbling through the sand. We don’t let go of each other until the beach house is in sight and we’re stumbling through the door.
The first thing we do when we get back is Google “silver fish peeling,” “ocean fish dissolving,” and “coastal fish of nag’s head.” We learn it’s a butterfish, and that no, that isn’t something butterfish are supposed to do.
“Please tell me there’s a liquor cabinet here,” says Gina. When I point it out, she raids it and scours the kitchen for shot glasses.
Even with the AC running while we were out, the salty, rotten smell lingers. This time, it seems to be coming from a specific direction. “Hey, Gina?”
“What?” Gina raises her head, emerging with a hidden bottle of Fireball whiskey.
“I’m gonna go check upstairs,” I say. “I wanna know where that smell is coming from.” The rotten scent grows stronger the further I go into the house. Sure enough, I find that the window in the water-damaged bedroom has creaked open again. But as I turn toward the master bedroom, the scent becomes suffocating again. When I open the door, a tidal wave of rot-sea-stink hits me in the face. I choke, eyes watering.
The room is completely fucked up. The wallpaper has long rents in it, and Mom’s pink duvet lies in a shredded heap at the foot of the bed. The mattress on Dad’s side is gutted, from the headboard down. Pieces of foam spill out of its carcass. The pillows are an explosion of feathers. Even the seagull painting is a mess, peeling out of its broken frame. The carpet is soaked in seawater. It squelches underfoot as I tread inside, my heart sinking to my feet.
“No,” I whisper. Mom’s room. It’s ruined. But who could have—
There’s a dry skittering noise behind me. I whip around just in time to see a thin, flesh-colored thing launch itself at me. I shriek and stumble back, caught off guard. The creature—not a person, no, some alien thing—is light, but when it slams into my chest, it does so with enough force to knock me to the carpet. It raises its humanoid head, its eyeless face swiveling to meet me.
It’s a fucking skin. An empty human skin. Its body is floppy and it lurches forward, dragging its empty flaps across me. It’s tough, grayed, and scrapes like sandpaper. Almost like there are endless rows of tiny teeth trying to slough off my skin. As it paws at my face, I catch a glimpse of the way its awful, hollow hands are fused partway into fins, each finger tipped with a crumbling acrylic nail.
“Gina!” I scream, beating at it. It wraps its flat legs around me and opens its mouth, its awful empty mouth. I can see all the way down its dry, ragged throat. “Help! Gina!”
The skin bends its face toward mine, and its non-breath ghosts over my mouth. Its curly black hair tumbles around us.
Gina bursts in, bottle of Fireball in hand. She screams when she sees the creature, and immediately smashes the bottle into its head like she’s hitting a home run. The bottle doesn’t break, but it does send the skin spinning into the wall with a soft whump. I stagger upright as Gina seizes the wicker chair parked in front of the vanity and beats the skin until one of the chair’s legs splinters.
“It was behind the door,” I wheeze.
She pants, red with exertion. The skin lies still, and I don’t know if it’s stunned or dead, but I’m taking no chances. Together we use the broken chair to prod the skin into the walk-in closet. It scrapes against the chair, but it rolls obediently and lifelessly across the carpet. There are some minor tears here and there from Gina’s beating, but it looks mostly intact.
Before I close the door, I poke the skin until it’s lying flat on its back. It’s the shape of a small woman, with small, sagging breasts. Long, withered gills run down each side of its ribs. Its black curls sprawl on the floor, lit by the flickering closet overhead light. Swallowing, I crouch over it, ignoring Gina’s hiss.
There’s a familiar birthmark on its right forearm.
“Gina,” I say hoarsely. “It’s my mom.”
The skin twitches as if it’s heard me, and I leap back and slam the closet door shut so hard that my ears ring.
After Gina pukes—after we both do, if I’m being honest—we regroup in the kitchen and polish off a third of the Fireball. It helps a little, but neither of us can shake what we saw in the bedroom.
“Your dad had her cremated,” says Gina. She wipes her mouth, and I smell the sharp scent of vomit on her jacket. “We saw that. We fucking saw it.”
“I know!” Back at my parents’ house, I’d placed her urn on the mantle myself, and then gone upstairs and cried for hours. “I don’t know what that thing is. But it looks exactly like her. It’s even got her birthmark.”
My earliest memories of my mom involve sitting on the beach house porch, watching her whittle sandpipers out of driftwood. I remember watching that birthmark rise and fall with each deft movement of her knife. I’d recognize it anywhere.
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” says Gina. She heads into the living room and throws her clothes and iPhone charger into her duffel bag. “Did you leave anything upstairs?”
My phone pings from where it’s charging on the kitchen table. It’s a text from my dad that reads: CLAYTON SAYS YOU BROKE UP WITH HIM?
I flip the phone face down. Not now. “I’m not leaving,” I say. “Not until I know why she’s here.”
Gina stares at me in disbelief, her hair falling in front of her face. “Are you serious, Em? That thing just tried to kill us!”
“I noticed! But why is it here?” I rub my eyes. “Her skin should have been on her when she was cremated, not hiding in the beach house like a fucking horror movie monster. How is it even alive?”
“If it’s still alive, it’s going to come after us. So let’s get moving.”
My phone vibrates on the tabletop. Another text from Dad: EM, ANSWER ME.
Gina seizes my shoulders. “Emma,” she says, low and urgent. “We can figure this out when we’re on the road. I’m not staying in the house any longer, not with that thing. I’ve watched enough horror movies to know that if we sleep here, it’s going to murder the fuck out of us.”
“Then you go,” I say, surprising us both. “I need to stay and find answers.” Mom’s death is raw, and I know, with utmost certainty, that I need to know why she’s here. If I back out now and let other people deal with the skin creature, I never will.
“If you’re staying, I’ll stay too.” She glances at my buzzing phone and narrows her eyes. “People who love each other don’t leave them behind.”
We exhaust Google after a couple hours, and all that comes up are a bunch of Wikipedia articles about various mythologies. None are particularly helpful. I lean across the table and glance around the living room, lingering on the bookshelves against the walls. “Maybe there’s something in here that will tell us about … whatever that thing is.”
“Like what? All I’ve seen here are birding guides and encyclopedias about different kinds of shells. Your parents don’t have a copy of the Necronomicon.”
“Gina, my mom’s empty skin just tried to take my face off. At this point, anything’s possible.” I stand up, pushing my chair back. “We should go look. If there’s anything, it’ll be in their bedroom. They kept all their important shit there.”
Gina reluctantly follows me upstairs. The rotting fish smell lingers in the hallway, but when I push the door open, the master bedroom is dark and still. The closet door remains closed.
I remember that the skin has human hands. What if it knows how to work doorknobs?
I flick on the lights and advance slowly. We fan out and check under the bed, behind furniture, and inside drawers. We find nothing but empty cardboard boxes and stacks of old photos of my parents. There are more recent ones too, and Gina pointedly shuffles the ones that include Clayton posing with my family, his arm around my waist, to the back of the pile.
There’s one photo that catches my attention. It’s of Mom sitting on the wooden steps, gazing wistfully into the distance. The wind sweeps her hair out of her face, and I know she’s looking at the ocean. She loved the beach, but Dad never let Mom go swimming. I asked him why, once, and he told me that it was too dangerous. It would damage her skin.
I tuck the photo into my pocket.
“Em, look at this.” Gina holds up my dad’s old hunting knife. It’s the same model as his normal, current hunting knife, from the black blade to the serrated edge by the hilt. But this one is bent out of shape, wildly crooked. It looks like it was dragged hard across asphalt.
There’s a faint but steady scraping coming from the closet. I freeze, all the hair on my body standing on end. Gina hisses.
It’s the sound of acrylic nails raking against wood.
My eyes meet Gina’s. “Let’s sleep in the car tonight,” I whisper.
She grips the knife tighter. “Sounds like a plan.”
The scraping grows more frantic than ever, right before we shut the bedroom door.
That night, I dream that I’m standing on the porch in front of the beach house, and my mom’s skin is sitting next to me, carving a wooden bird out of a piece of driftwood. It turns its head, and there’s nothing inside it but empty space. I can see the pale flipside of the skin, shining like the moon on the water, through the empty eyeholes of her almost-face.
“Watch,” it says, and points its hollow arm at the ocean. I follow the glint of its knife down the long white expanse of sand. Two figures splash in the surf, a tall man with blond hair and a surfer’s build, and a woman whose curly black hair swings around her in a long, thick braid. In the distance, dark, sharp-finned creatures glide through the water, each as long as a whale, their massive, long-necked animal heads breaching the surface. I know, somehow, that these are my mom’s family. “See what he did to me.”
My parents look young, maybe about as old as Gina and I are. My dad’s swimming trunks have his fraternity’s symbols on them, the same as the ones on all of Clayton’s clothes. As I watch, my mom kisses my dad and then turns to face the ocean. Her pod, her family, waits many yards away, just close enough to see. She takes a breath and arcs toward the waves, and her skin ripples, growing gray and rough, her body expanding into a large, powerful shape.
