The Sea of Ash (10 page)

17. VISITATION

I close
Dr. Pond's Journal
and
put it down on the bed.

They found his cell empty in the
morning. He had disappeared, though the confining chamber was intact. There was
nothing to be found but his journal and pen and a few limp strands of slippery
black sea rack. Neither the authorities, nor anyone else for that matter, ever
found Dr. Albert Pond.

It has been more than an hour
since I left the bottle at the little graveyard. I have once again finished
reading Pond's book. I've lost count of how many times I've read it. This time
it thrills and terrifies me even more than the first time I read it. I am about
to experience something that he, and Brinklow before him, experienced, an
earnest contact with another realm...a visit from Fractured Harry.

The rain has persisted; in fact it
has increased if anything. Several times I have mistaken its sounds for the
noise of a figure moving about in the darkness outside the house. Once I even
thought that I heard the distant door in the main entryway open and close. I
actually shuddered at the sound, and I find my hands trembling still, even
though there is no evidence whatsoever that Harry is anything but a benevolent
spirit.

It is nearly two in the morning,
and I am sitting here like a frightened boy in this ancient house. How small I
feel, stripped of the security of disbelief. It is an aching thing to know that
we are all so tiny, stumbling in a universe that is wider and darker than any
Earth-bound sea.

Two-fifteen and I hear the first
footstep. Rain patters in the leaves outside. The second step, like the first,
is soft, a measured pressure on the old floor planks. Others follow -- they are
too quiet to echo in the hall outside my room.

A single knock at the door. I have
left the door unlocked. I startle, jolt up from the bed. Another knock, just a
bit louder this time.

"Come in," I call
softly.

A third knock. A fourth. I step
toward the door. I remember that Brinklow and Pond both opened the door for
Harry -- I must do the same. I reach for the door -- it slides open several
inches before I can touch the knob.

A pale hand grasps my wrist! The
grip is icy, and the fingernails are tiny white trilobites. I cry out and jerk
free, stumbling back toward the bed as the door swings wide.

The creature has white hair -- wet
leaves tangled in the hair. It is naked, thin as an upright greyhound, smiling
a toothless smile.

I fumble a hand into my pocket,
grope for the small black bag.

It speaks -- a voice that is
several wound together like the threads of a string. A wintry, thin sound...

 
"Have you no manners? You can't even
say hello to an old friend? This is the second time you've stung me with your
impudence..."

The figure steps fully into the
room and pushes the door shut behind it. Hair obscures the eyes.

 
"Haven't you realized that I was
only going to thank you back at the library? I was going to thank you for
letting me out. But you scorned me." The black mouth twists around its
words, "A pity. You can't expect me to let a slight like that go
unpunished."

The creature raises one wrinkled
hand to the height of my face and advances as I pull the bag from my pocket and
throw it. A direct hit in the chest. Voices shrill. It dances backward and
folds to the floor. I hear an electric crackling sound as the pale mass jerks
then goes still, its limbs folded in as if it is a dead spider.

"Pain," voices hiss.
"Terrible pain!"

The being shoots up from the
floor. It is partly fragmented; there are gaps in the torso that I can see
through, and others filled with dull flashes of light, and what look to be
weaving swarms of tiny flies. One arm seems to be connected by nothing more
than twitching pixels.

"You hurt me," the thing's
voices rasp. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to kiss you now..." It
reaches up and flicks the long white hair away from its face, revealing the eye
sockets. There are no eyes, only gouges from which twin masses of small jointed
legs, like those of a crab or a trilobite, protrude. The legs quaver and flex
as the ghastly figure prepares to pounce.

The door behind the monster swings
open and a jerky figure with a pumpkin for a head lunges from behind. Its body
is a plaid bathrobe, the bloated fingers are bunches of colorful Indian corn.
It wraps its arms around the naked creature and the two figures grapple.

Fractured Harry hooks his fingers
into the holes in the other, and bursts of light widen the wounds. The grey
thing shudders and shrieks as an arm falls off and breaks like white ash on the
floor. Chunks of chest follow, then the legs and hips. The upper body rips and
tumbles, then the screeching head -- white hair trailing like the tail of a
comet -- it falls to the floor and breaks.

The cries fly away like birds and
fade until the only sound is the rain tapping its meaningless code on the
window. I sink to the edge of the bed, gasping and feverish. Fractured Harry
stands above the powdery stains, facing me. He bows stiffly. His corncob
fingers are scorched black and smoking. I look up at his pumpkin head.

"Thank you," I manage.

Harry takes a step closer and
leans down. His words are an alien whisper, a meaning that I receive just the
same. He tells me the name of the place where I must go. Home.

18. DUSK

The first snow of the season is
falling. It wanders down the grey November sky and settles on yards and roofs,
finds grooves in the limbs of naked maple trees. It brushes the windowpane,
each flake unique, each a ghostly fingerprint.

I am listening to a rare recording
of Davis Storrow's
Daughter of the Drowned Temple
. It is the first time
that I have actually heard the piece, and I find it as lovely and haunting as
Pond had described it to be. It actually gives me chills.

These last few weeks have been pleasantly
uneventful. I've kept to myself, safe in my small house in Grafton, snug in a
womb of tea steam and Nana's old books.

What of Pond and Brinklow? There
are those who claim that they have uncovered traces of them, like the eccentric
fellow in Vermont who insists that he found their initials carved on a rotten
old board that washed up on the shore of Lake Champlain. Down in Sturbridge,
Massachusetts there's a structure that Pond aficionados refer to as The
Trilobite House because the frost that appears on the windows looks distinctly
like those strange prehistoric creatures. Witnesses have even claimed to see
three handprints shaped by ice on the panes -- two of normal size, with one
small one in between. Then there's the Mt. Desert Photo, a grainy, half-focused
snapshot taken atop a mountain in Maine that purportedly shows a portly fellow
in Victorian garb and a dashing fellow in 1920s attire standing on a ledge,
gazing out over a misty expanse of sea and distant islands.

The music ends. I am pensive, too
comfortable to get up and put anything else on. The snow has stopped, having
left little more than a dusting. I continue to look out the window. The sky
clears, but for some of those brooding purple-grey clouds so characteristic of
November in these parts.

The days go dark so early now. The
tree shadows reach to each other and merge, and the moon comes up, as if
released from some forgotten stone temple, as if born of an ash-colored sea.

End

Afterword

Jeffrey Thomas

My brother Scott Thomas’ story
The Sea of Ash
has a rather convoluted back-story.

A decade ago now, publisher Sean Wallace of Prime
Books had a brainstorm. He was very enamored of a piece of artwork by Travis
Anthony Soumis (who has done covers for a number of my books), called
Dreams Are Dark
, which portrays a woman
lying supine in the surf, with her arms spread wide like wings, while in the
distance a strange pillared building looms against a moody sky. Sean asked if
Scott and I could each write a novella inspired by the same image, to be
collected in one book with Travis’ art serving as the cover. We agreed to this
unique challenge, and Scott came up with the book’s title:
The Sea of Flesh and Ash
. One of us would write a story called
The Sea of Flesh
, the other
The Sea of Ash
. I confessed I wanted the
flesh, Scott admitted he had hoped for the ash, and so with title and Travis’
image in hand, we went our separate ways to write our stories in solitude,
without sharing anything with the other about our respective stories until they
were finished.

After this promising beginning, however, the project
stalled, and remained in limbo for a number of years. While we were both
grateful to Sean for inspiring our stories, which wouldn’t have come into
existence without him, and fully understanding the difficulties and vagaries of
indie press publishing, ultimately we felt we needed to find a new home for the
book so that it could finally reach the hands of readers who had been hearing
about it, and anticipating it, for years.

So in 2011, we decided to take a chance on a new
publisher called Terradan Works, and the book was finally released with its
intended cover art (though Travis updated it slightly).

Though Terradan published a lovely looking book, it’s
often hard for a beginner publisher to reach out and garner sufficient notice
for their titles, and so in an effort to gain a wider audience for my novella
The Sea of Flesh
, in 2013 I included it
in my short story collection
Worship the
Night
, separate from Scott’s novella. I encouraged Scott to see that
The Sea of Ash
was likewise reprinted
somewhere, to reach the readership it deserved. Thus, I was overjoyed when Mike
Davis, of the widely esteemed
Lovecraft
eZine
, read Scott’s story, fell in love with it, and decided to
reprint it in digital
and print formats
-- gushing that it was
one of the finest stories he had ever read.

Indeed, the wildly inventive and intricately
constructed
The Sea of Ash
may very
well be Scott’s masterpiece to date, and that says a lot when you’re talking
about a writer who was selected by Karl Edward Wagner to be included in the
final edition of DAW’s
The Year’s Best
Horror Stories
, and who once saw
two
of his stories selected by Ellen Datlow for a single volume of
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
.
Scott’s stories typically take place in an 18th or 19th Century New England or
UK (or in some alternate reality version of either), and as such they are
impeccably researched. Scott’s work is very much informed by his love of
classic horror literature, most notably the great M. R. James, and yet it is
highly original. Typical of Scott’s fiction is an astounding level of
fantastical imagination bordering on the surreal, abounding with imagery and
concepts as poetically beautiful as they are eerily disturbing. Another
prominent feature of much of Scott’s work is his love of nature, and how the
natural world factors into his stories -- this, and the tragic plotlines of
many of his tales, calling to mind Thomas Hardy.

Having read
The Sea
of Ash
, I believe you will feel that its release to a wide audience was
worth the long wait, and you will understand why Mike Davis stepped in to
champion it.
I envy you your first
encounter with this novella. Indeed, if this is your first encounter with any
of the fiction of my younger brother, I envy you all the more.

Biography

Scott Thomas’ short
story collections include
Urn and Willow
,
Midnight in New
England
,
Quill
and Candle
,
Westermead
,
The Garden of
Ghosts
,
Cobwebs
and Whispers
and
Over The Darkening Fields
. His novel
Fellengrey
is a fantastical nautical
adventure set in an alternate 18th century Britain
.
Thomas lives in
New England.