“The reason I mention it, man, I thought I could help.”
“You need a cashier?”
“I don’t have a surf shop. But hey, I do have a house I’m not using.” She nodded down the beach. “I was renting it to my daughter’s old man, but he took off.”
“Too many memories.”
“I’m sure that must have been part of it.”
Jane was watching him like she was looking for something.
“Thing of it is, Jane, till I do find somebody needs a cashier, I’d be a little short putting down any kind of deposit, or even the first month’s rent or anything.”
She shielded her eyes from the sun. “I thought we could work something out.”
Ah, this. He had heard about this kind of thing. Usually with men younger than him, but surfing kept him in good shape.
“I need your skills, Mickey,” she said, before he could make up his mind. “Your magic, whatever it is you do, whatever you call it.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Hey, I don’t know the whole story but I’ve been on this beach since before you got here, and I know not everything’s quite right out there. Not since the end of the war.” World War II, she meant. It was something few people had noticed. Experiments in New Mexico for the war effort had gone all wrong. Parts of the state were unlivable now, at least by anything human. And in the rest of the world … the locks had come off of some very old doors. Sediment had been churned up. “I know sometimes when bad things happen, you’re there to help. That day the bones washed up on the beach. The thing with the Wilson girl. I know you surf Echo every morning no matter the weather, and that sometimes you paddle out so far you don’t come back for days.” She put a cigarette in her mouth, passed him one, and he lit them both, not bothering about a lighter. “I know these might be the last of the real good days.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“I know. And so I need your help with this. You can keep the house. But you have to get rid of her.”
“Wait, get rid of who?”
“Pamela. My daughter.”
“Another daughter?”
She sighed like he was supposed to have figured this all out already. “My daughter died over in Vietnam. Red Cross, you know, the doughnut dollies?” He shook his head. “Recreational Overseas program, some such thing, they go from hospital to hospital to entertain the boys. She heard Jack Kennedy’s speech and signed right up. Met a soldier, fell in love, came home with him, went back over when it didn’t work out.” The lines in her face deepened. “Might still be with us if not for that. Not for him.”
“If she’s not, eh, ‘with us,’ who am I getting rid of?”
She tapped the pillar of ash off her cigarette and nodded.
* * *
The house was a boxy midcentury with sky-blue paint flaking off and a deck that hadn’t been cleaned in so long the butts in the ashtray were still floating in a pool from whenever it last rained. He parked the woodie in the carport. May as well get right to it.
It wasn’t uncommon for the ghost of some dead person to snap back to somewhere they’d lived, even if they hadn’t died there. What exactly a ghost was, that was harder to say for sure. Maybe it really was the spirit of a once-living person, or at least some kind of psychic residue. Maybe it was something conjured up unconsciously by the bereaved. Either way it wasn’t usually hard to deal with. He might not be able to get rid of the ghost right away, but he could deal with cohabitation for a while, if it came to that.
He set his box of records down on a sideboard in the living room-cum-dining room. The rusty orange carpet squidged under his huarache. The place smelled and it was too cold. It was at least fifteen degrees colder than outside, but with no air conditioner that he could see. With the windows all shut up, it should’ve been a heat trap. It was a murky wet cold, like when you swim through a sudden chilly current; a snotty cold, like putting your bare foot down in the worm-brown muck of a lake.
Whatever they were, ghosts could do things like that, or maybe it’d be better to say that they happened where things like that also happened. You can’t assume every spider you see built that particular web it’s on, you dig? Some haunted places, you couldn’t keep milk from going bad, couldn’t keep books from falling off the shelves while you were sleeping. Other places, everybody who hung out too long would kill somebody or themselves. This wasn’t that bad, and Mickey had enough wards accumulated that, even if it was, it’d probably just make him really blue.
He chewed on a candy, rolling it around the roof of his mouth. He could make this work. Plenty of room and no rent. So it was a little squidgy. So it didn’t smell great. You were expecting Versailles at this price?
Then Pamela came into the room.
He heard her first, squiidge-squidge, squiidge-squidge, like a rocking chair wringing out sponges. She walked stiffly, not moving anything but her legs, and even those moved like somebody else was moving them for her. Like the way a little kid moves a doll’s legs. He would swear there were moments when she missed a step but came forward anyway, like something was just pushing or pulling her, and she only moved her feet because it was expected. He’d taken a girl to see Peter Pan on Broadway once and that’s what it reminded him of: Mary Martin on wires.
“Hey,” he said.
She opened her mouth and closed it again. The family resemblance to Jane was there even in death, a wide mouth and narrow eyes, prominent eyebrows. Her clothes stuck to her in places like she’d worked up a sweat and fallen asleep in them. You couldn’t tell she was dead right away. She wasn’t decayed or pale or any of those things. It wasn’t that kind of deal. There was some drool on her chin. Her forehead had a small but definite dent with fine ridges, like wet clay somebody’d run a dime across. “Good morning, gentleman,” she said, but it wasn’t really in sync with her mouth any more than her legs were in sync with her walking. So that was awful.
“Hey, hi,” he said, wishing he had his board in his hands. Argo was lashed to the top of the woodie in the carport. “So I’m Mickey, I’m the new tenant. Jane’s renting the place to me. So. I’m just going to get moving my stuff in.”
She stiff-legged toward him with an arm out and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. Cold. Colder than the room. Her touch left a trail of something snail-gross on his skin. For a hot second he was actually drawn to her, and that was awfuller.
He hurried back out the door, got in the woodie, and drove up the street to Jane’s.
* * *
“Jane, did your daughter die near the water?”
She’d answered the door as soon as he got there, obviously expecting him, probably expecting him to throw the key down and say hey the hell with this free house and whatever. “What? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Depends on the answer.”
“She drowned. She was drowned. By a—by this asshole she met over there. He shot himself but he drowned her first.”
“Traumatized spirit,” Mickey mumbled to himself. “All that emotion in the water, overheard by God knows what, God knows how far away. Like sharks scenting blood.” He was going to have to go back in, back in Deep.
“What are you saying? What are you talking about?”
He shook his head. “Listen, I don’t know what you thought it was, what you believe in, the whole Heaven trip and like that? But this isn’t your daughter. It’s just wearing a Pamela mask. And not even that, because it’s not on its face, not it, but her, but not her face, but like a—” He held up his hands in front of her face, wiggled his fingers. “Right? You know?”
“What?”
“Those little rubber monster faces, Jane. Like little kids put on their fingers.” He tried making a face to get the point across. Tongue out, bug eyes.
She turned away from him. His bedside manner, it wasn’t the best.
“Fuck!” he said, mostly to himself. “Anyway, don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry
about it? What does that even mean, Mickey?”
But he was already gone, stomping back to the woodie in his huaraches, trying to look decisive. Maybe, if he caught a glimpse of his reflection, he’d even convince himself.
* * *
The Pamela thing was sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, an upside-down coffee cup in front of her, her hands cupping the air to either side of it. What Mickey should have seen the first time was impossible to miss now, the faint trace of shadow leading away from her foot on the blue and white checkered tile. It lined up perfectly with the grout lines on the tile, and happened to continue on the other side of the floor—a jagged little twist of shadow that curled toward and beyond the front door. It was something like a siren, he figured. Something like a mermaid. Not either of those things, but some ancient half-remembered thing that gave birth to those myths. Something wet and womanly that lured you to the water.
“Uhhh,” Mickey said.
“Mickeylyric,” the woman said.
“Yep,” he said, and left again, grabbing Argo from the rack on the woodie. She shouldn’t know his last name. That wasn’t great. From touching him? From being in the room with him? Or worstest, from just wanting to?
A crack in the driveway picked up where the shadow on the carpet had left off, and just happened to continue all the way across the street. When street became sand, the crack continued—a thinner, fainter version of the cracks that appeared when wet sand dried. On and on it went like that, Mickey following along. A crack would lead perfectly up to what looked like a stray piece of kelp, which happened to touch an inexplicable but almost invisible shadow, and so on, forming an unbroken line from the woman’s foot to the sea. It wove a path right through crowds who instinctively stepped over it without seeing it, kids who somehow never put their board down on it, somehow never covered it up with their bingo beach blankets. Maybe it was some bullshit like this that started the whole “step on a crack” business. Just because superstitions didn’t work didn’t mean they never meant anything. They all meant something.
The line wouldn’t end at the water, of course. It just came from there, because this was Echo Beach, where the walls were thin.
“Goddammit, Argo,” he said. Argo didn’t respond but surely empathized.
Mickey paddled out from the north end of the beach, ignoring the chatter from the surfers. He was trying to get into the right groove. For the routine stuff, a little grass never hurt, but he only had a vague idea what to expect here, and not much clue of the scale. This might be a dive that would be improved by a button of peyote or some tabs of acid, but if it wasn’t, who knows how badly things might go, or where a bad trip could wind him up. So he went in sober, doing what he thought of as entering the Deep, the same way he always did. He found a good seven footer to ride, used Argo’s fin to carve the sigils in the wave’s face, and then let it knock him down, down, down into the water. He used to paddle out further to do this, but these days the kids on the beach didn’t really know him and wouldn’t be shocked to see him wipe out. Probably figured him for some guy in from the suburbs on his day off. Some kind of dad.
But he didn’t wipe out. The sigils swam silver in the churn as the wave crashed down, most of them surrounding him in protective bands, while two of them crawled up his nose and mouth and made him breathe. The ruby in his necklace warmed up now, glowing enough to let him see in front of and below him. The line from Pamela glowed brightly in its light, leading far off into the sea. It was probably supposed to look like seaweed, and probably would, if not for the ruby.
Go deep enough into the woods and, where it gets darkest and deepest, all forests are the same. You might get lost in Big Bear and walk out in the Black Forest. Mickey didn’t think it had always been like that, but it was these days. It was the same with the ocean. You can’t swim from the coast to the deep ocean. The continental shelf extends too far. And yet. And yet there are certain currents you can catch. There are certain depths you can find yourself in. And suddenly, there you are, far from the worlds of men.
That was the nature of Mickey’s work and what kept him tethered to Echo Beach. Something had happened during the war. Things washed up from the Deep now. Sometimes by accident, sometimes by design. Mickey kept the beach clean.
The light from above disappeared and the waters ran cold when he passed over some threshold from the shore to the deeps, still following that line attached to Pamela. It looked like a crack in the world, like the finest hairline crack.
With his board in his hands in front of him, and the silver sigils protecting him, Mickey followed the tendril to one of the deepest parts of the ocean. The water tasted different here. Thicker and saltier. At the bottom of the sea the saltiest currents of water have sunk to the bottom and slowed in the cold. On his bare skin, which the sigils protected from the crushing weight of the world above him, it felt like liquid metal.
The tendril led to a brine pool ahead of him, a place where the saltiest, heaviest water settled in a sea floor valley, and now he understood what he was dealing with, more or less. Here it stopped pretending to be a crack, or seaweed, or the space between tiles. Here it didn’t camouflage and he saw it for the thin and slender tentacle it was, impossibly long, a lure tossed out from brutal depths in search of something. Something male, something to mate with. Mating magic wasn’t hard to spot, it was common enough. It just didn’t usually go this badly. He turned Argo around, closed his eyes, and let the world drag him back to its shores.
* * *
As soon as he was out of the water he got back in the woodie and drove straight to the Thoroughbred Club, his watering hole in times of crisis. It meant putting a shirt on for the first time in weeks, and they wouldn’t let him into the dining room without a tie and probably pants, but he sat at the bar with an Old Fashioned and got the bartender to bring him a baked potato with sour cream and chives and a dish of bright orange sherbet. He sat, drank, smelled the steaks cooking in the kitchen and being carried out to the dining room, and ate his baked potato like he was just picking at it after a big meal of T-bone bordelaise or whatever.
“You’re supposed to have something wise to say to me,” he told the bartender. “Something that puts it all in perspective.”
“Lunch is winding down,” the bartender said. “It’s usually pretty quiet until the early bird dinner. I didn’t have anything prepared.”
“You’re no good to me, Jonesey.” He was three Old Fashioneds down at this point, maybe four or something. The bartender’s name wasn’t Jonesey, that’s how many Old Fashioneds down he was.
“There’s always more fish in the sea, fella,” the bartender said. “How about that one?”
“Jesus,” Mickey said. “That’ll sober me up.”
But not all the way. He smoked half a joint of the Trip’s grass, but it made him jittery, considered a lude from the unmarked pill bottle in his glove compartment, but put it back after a long, long time of staring at it on the dashboard, and finally decided if he sobered up any more, the only cure for it was going to be drinking again, and at that point you’d cut away to calendar pages flying off, which wouldn’t get anything done.
You’re thirty years old, Mickey Lyric. You’re too old to learn a trade, you don’t like people enough to teach them how to surf, and nobody’s hiring cashiers. There’s only one thing you’re good at, and it’s a bummer, but if you don’t get it done you’re sleeping in a parking lot until the Trip gets out.
The Pamela thing was sitting on the living room floor, cross-legged, staring at the ceiling. The back of its blouse was sticky.
“So hey,” he said. “Hey there, Pamela.”
“Miiickeylyric,” the thing said.
“I had to take care of some errands, you know. Let’s do this thing.”
“Mickeylyric you want to make love to me,” it said, or asked, or whatever that inflection was.
“I’m hot for it, babe. Come on.”
It swept him up in its arms and that tendr
il tugged hard. Like they were walking at first, but her legs still weren’t moving right. She just held him and waggled her legs, and that tendril pulled them both across the street, across the beach, and down down down into the salty thick sea. Did anyone see them getting dragged across the beach? Time got thick and salty with magic like this, too. Maybe they moved too fast or too slow to be seen, maybe nobody noticed them the same way nobody stepped on the tendril. When they hit the water, sigils unfurled from his necklace and the tattoos on his hips, letting him breathe, letting him survive this. Pamela’s ex probably hadn’t vamoosed on his own. He’d probably drowned when he got dragged in. Did Mickey have to tell Jane that? He didn’t want to be the one, but it wasn’t like there was anyone else who knew. Just Mickey and the Pamela thing.
Being dragged through the Deep is worse than swimming through it. It’s a charleyhorse kind of hurt, swirled up with an ice cream headache that covers you head to toe. The sigils let him breathe, but they didn’t make it nice, so his lungs stung and felt too heavy, like every breath was leaning on an old tube of toothpaste to get the last sludge out. He wished he had Argo with him, but what if he didn’t survive this any better than the other guy did? What if the Pamela-thing was able to crack Argo open and slurp up its power? Jesus, what awful questions, stop it.
It was close to freezing at the bottom of the sea, the salinity keeping ice from forming. The things that lived down here, even the normaller things that weren’t horrible fucking monsters, ate mostly dead whales that fell like manna from far above. There was little here that was recognizable as what you thought of as fish. Most were long and brittle-looking, with hinged jaws and recurved teeth. Some were gelatinous and globby. Those with eyes had huge ones, but the ones that never left the seafloor lived blind.
Even that weird sea life thinned out as they reached the end of the line in a pitch-black brine pool. The tattoos on his hips started pulsing a warning, and the very, very old metals alloyed with the gold in his necklace did likewise, and it was like, what could he say? Thanks for the warning, charms and amulets, but this is the thing we’re here to do, so just get on board and do your part, right? Board. He should have brought Argo. So what if the thing might crack Argo open if he died, he’d be dead then, and having his board with him could be the only thing to prevent that. He should have brought him.
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