And The Sea Called Her Name (6 page)

I scanned the roiling water but there was
nothing. Its surface was so bleak and cold, I knew that if Del had
entered the ocean even since I had pulled up in front of the house,
she would be lost. With that thought, my head snapped around to
Harold’s darkened house. I almost jumped from the rock and sprinted
to the old man’s home, but thought better of it at once. Harold
wouldn’t be of any help searching for her in the rain, and if he
had seen her wander off he would have already called me or been
waiting at our door when I came home.

I was about to leap down from my perch when
something caught my eye, trailing off to the south down the beach.
My stomach fell as if a trapdoor had been opened beneath it and my
legs nearly collapsed.

Because it was at that moment I realized
where Del had gone.

~

I climbed the last few steps up the hill
bordering the cove. Our cove, we used to call it, laying claim to
something so large and free as a border between sea and land being
only within the reaches of two people young and so in love. The
wind had risen even more since I had pelted down to the beach,
following the ghostly impressions of where she’d walked, their
indentations already being muted and washed away by the rain, as if
the weather didn’t want me to find her. Even now I think it might
have been better if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t seen.

But I did. I did.

I spotted her as soon as I crested the rise.
She was a deeper shadow among the swirling water within the cove.
She wore the thin, cotton pants and t-shirt I’d dressed her in the
night before and she stood with her back to me, the water reaching
nearly to her hips.

“Del!” I screamed her name as I ran down the
path that stretched to the beach, her form disappearing behind a
tall rock that the trail wound around. When I stepped onto the soft
sand she was even further out, the rolling waves washing against
her bulging stomach. “Del!” I didn’t break stride, the sand giving
way beneath my feet, the rain and wind shoving me back. She didn’t
seem to hear me as she took another step. But that was wrong. She
hadn’t stepped, she had
glided
deeper into the water.

Even though there was something elementally
wrong about how she moved, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t have stopped
as much as I could have forced the sea away from her, away from us.
It was only when my feet touched the water that she finally looked
back.

She was so pale it looked as if she had lost
all the blood in her body. She was translucent, shimmering there in
the shadowed waves, blue veins and vessels teeming in her white
skin. And her eyes. They were full of something that scared me more
than anything had since the beginning of our dual descent.

Her eyes brimmed with regret.

“Stop, Jason!” She put up a hand and I obeyed
because there was power in her voice. The diminutive tone she
normally spoke in was gone and I could even hear the rasp of her
tongue through the tempest surrounding us. “I’m sorry,” she said,
tears springing from her eyes and mixing with the rain. “It made
me! It made me!”

And she changed then.

Her outstretched hand thinned and something
moved beneath her skin. It was as if she were a living casing
harboring something else. Her fingertips flowed together, joining
into a fleshy mass that bent and twisted how a human hand never
should. Her spine arched in pain and she tipped her head back, her
mouth opening as if to cry out to the sky. And that was when it
emerged.

The tips of something, of many somethings,
poked and prodded into the open air past her teeth. Her jaw gaped
wider to accommodate the tentacles. And as I watched, the water
darkened around her waist and a thousand black appendages appeared
from where her legs had been. She hadn’t been walking at all; she
was being carried by what her lower half had become.

Her mouth split along the edges of her lips
and the face that I had looked at a hundred thousand times—kissed,
caressed—broke apart as her true form was revealed. It was a
blackened carapace of shiny flesh that emerged. Many folds rimmed
with red fluttered in the soaking air.
Gills,
I thought
wildly as the borders of my sanity began to fray. Her skin
continued to slough off in the water like an insubstantial sheet
peeling away, and more of her body was exposed. A gelatinous
substance, mucousy and gray, covered her back between spiny fins
that looked poisonous in the stormy light. The tendrils rising from
the water around her pricked and preened the fins until they stood
out like smoky sails. Del’s chest and belly were now flat and I
realized that there had never been a child. It was only her, the
true
her, becoming what I saw now.

A low bellow that I felt more than heard,
rippled through the air and Del’s mouth opened in a gash of needled
teeth, their rows too many to count lining her cavernous
throat.

And her eyes. Her beautiful gray eyes that
had captivated me were now the pools of darkness that I’d witnessed
that day looking out at the sea with longing. They held none of the
softness and love of before.

I screamed then. I know I did, though I don’t
remember it. I do know I raked trails of flesh from my face with my
fingernails because to this day I bear the scars, and fell to my
knees in the surf that roiled around me. I knew then that there was
nothing left to do but scream and die in the sea because what I had
seen wasn’t something a human mind or heart could ever accept.
There was no swallowing the immensity of it. I sobbed something
then, surely her name, and that was when the sea moved.

It began to rise a hundred yards out from the
cove. It
bulged
, something surging beneath it so vast and
powerful that the ocean itself seemed to be giving it precedence to
the tide. The water rushed away from me, receding with the thing’s
birth, and I watched, dumbstruck, as it emerged.

It was darker than the eye of midnight, its
skin glistening as the water rolled away from it. It rose, shunting
the sea aside as its tentacles, easily two-hundred feet long, their
number beyond counting, thrashed the air. It body was
torpedo-shaped, two slits on its closest end blasting air and mucus
in a wave of air that smelled of dead things decaying in some
forgotten place. A hundred, or a thousand, fins spread from its
sides between the tentacles, shaking off garlands of seaweed and
two hooked barbs that wouldn’t have fit on my boat appeared,
shining white in bright contrast to its black body near its front.
A great flap of skin slid back and a single eye easily fifty-feet
in diameter gazed down with liquid malevolence. I still cannot say
what color it was since there’s no name for it any language. It was
painted of malice and age, and of some horrible, ancient knowledge.
I was pinned beneath its stare, its utter and tangible hatred so
thick it choked me.

I lost consciousness then. There was nothing
for it, my mind could absorb no more and I fell to the wet sand
that normally was always covered by the sea. The returning water
awoke me and now I know that I was only unconscious for seconds,
perhaps a minute. The water rushed over me and I spluttered as it
closed over my head and I struggled for the surface, pawing at the
ground below me. I gained my feet and turned, coughing out the
sickening taste of saltwater.

A ridge of sea that would have capsized a
thirty-foot sailboat was cutting away from the cove. A fin so tall
it would have blocked the sun had it been shining, rose from the
crest that was being upraised by the thing’s passing. And I saw
then that what I had seen rising from the water had only been its
head. The disturbance of water hid, I was sure, miles of the thing
from the deep, its length and vastness beyond comprehending. Beside
it a miniscule trail slashed the water where something much smaller
swam, the movement of whipping tendrils barely visible through the
rain as they headed further out to sea where the depths became
deeper and deeper.

And then they were gone and I slept.

~

That was fourteen years ago this fall. As I
write this I sit on my front porch and look out at the flatness of
the Kansas field before my small house. Two miles to the south
rests a marker that signifies the very geographic center of the
United States. It is equally as far as I can get from either ocean
that flanks the country and most days it doesn’t rain, which is
good.

You see I can’t stand the rain. Water in
general for that matter. I have a feeding tube that I put down my
throat twice a day and pump fifteen ounces of water through since I
gag whenever it touches my tongue. I hate everything about it, the
taste, the texture, how it moves. There’s also a port I had placed
permanently in my arm that I hook up to an IV on days when I can’t
get myself to use the feeding tube. I bathe with baby wipes,
tolerating a shower only once a month, and never a bath. Never a
bath.

I love the dry reaches of Kansas and how the
sun seems to shine longer than anywhere I’ve ever been before. I
know the days don’t really hold more hours of light here, I suppose
it’s the lack of trees and hills that create the illusion, but I’ll
take it.

Because the nights are hard.

When the dusk begins to crawl toward my house
across the land and the shadows lengthen in the fields, each blade
of grass and every stalk of wheat seem to have a secret. And I
already know too many secrets. I lock all the doors and windows
then as the day dies outside and I turn on every light in the
house. I’ve had extra installed in each room to dispel every inch
of darkness.

And I try to sleep, but the dreams come for
me when I do.

Dreams of sinking down through water the
color of ink, so black you can’t see your hand before your face.
The water crushes me and there is no air to breathe, but I don’t
perish. I fall into an abyss where something waits. I always awake
screaming before it touches me because I know that it will turn me
over and show me. Show me its unblinking eye again. And what’s
worse, I know she’ll be there beside it.

I’ve had a lot of time to think and some
would say that it wouldn’t be a good habit to get into considering
my situation. But I’ve swam in madness and I’m sure I left my
sanity somewhere behind me in the surf of that cove. On days that
the sky darkens and the wind speaks of rain, I think about her last
words, so full of regret and horror.

It made me. It made me.

And I know now that she not only meant that
the thing from the deep had controlled her actions in those days
that should have been the happiest of our lives, but also that she
knew where she truly came from and where her mother disappeared to
for a week nearly nine months before Del was born.

But I try not to think of that too much,
though it’s hard not to when the rain begins to fall. Because
sometimes the hammering of a storm on my roof sounds like waves
rushing up onto a rock-studded beach.

And sometimes it sounds like my name.

As always, thanks for reading. I hope you had
as much fun with this story as I did.

This story was one of the rare ones that came
after the title popped into my head. My wife and I were on vacation
in Maine, standing on a huge slab of rock, watching the tide come
in when I realized I really wanted to write a horror story about
the ocean. Now I’ve done it before; in my collection,
Midnight
Paths
, I have a story called
Adrift,
which is one of my
favorite stories of the bunch. But this time I wanted to have a
different theme attached to it. The title flew into my head out of
nowhere along with a glimpse at the basis of what the plot would
be. The theme however was born out of the distance that can come
between a couple. I’ve been in, and seen several relationships that
slowly failed, the life draining of them for apparently no reason
other than individuals growing away from one another instead of
closer together. People drift apart and the cause isn’t always
apparent. I wanted to capture that essence within the story,
hopefully I did so.

Novels

Lineage

Singularity

EverFall

The River Is Dark

The Waiting

Widow Town

Cruel World

Collections

Midnight Paths

Short Stories

The Edge Of Life

Outpost

The Line Unseen