Текст книги "And The Sea Called Her Name"
Автор книги: Joe Hart
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 3 страниц)
“That’s fine, I’m just looking for something to go on.”
“I know you’re frightened and worried for your wife and unborn child, but this isn’t the end of the world. The mind is more complex than we could ever know. It’s like the ocean. No matter how far we delve into its depths and map its floor, we’ll never truly know all of its secrets. And don’t feel ashamed for your emotional responses to the events, they were and are perfectly normal given the circumstances.” Chave paused and shifted on the stool. “Jason, I believe your wife may be experiencing some type of seizures, but not any typical kind that can be easily diagnosed. I believe these episodes are unique and possibly are being brought on by a traumatic event in her past.”
I shook my head. “She would have told me if something terrible had happened to her. I mean, her mother disappeared seven or eight years ago, but there was never anything that pointed to foul play. Her body was never found or anything.”
“Ah, but this might be the source of what we’re looking for. Even something a person has divulged and dealt with on a conscious level may come back to haunt them, so to speak. Memories are the densest things in the world, Jason. They are heavier than anyone knows, most times their burden becomes clear last to those who carry them.”
“You think her mother missing could have—” I waved my hand. “triggered all this?”
“It’s possible, given the right circumstances. Especially with the expected arrival of your child. The responsibility of parenthood is daunting to say the least. Perhaps, and I’m only extrapolating once again, perhaps the changes to your wife’s body along with the realization that she will soon be a mother, brought these emotions and memories to the surface and these episodes she’s experiencing are her mind’s way of coping.”
I struggled to absorb the theory. I hadn’t given much thought to Del’s mother in years. She had been so matter-of-fact about the whole thing, it seemed a moot topic that she’d put to rest long before she met me. But perhaps the doctor was correct. Maybe by becoming a mother herself something inside her had broken open, a trove of undiscovered emotions that bubbled up from a chasm she didn’t know she played host to.
Slowly I nodded. “It could be,” I said, not looking up.
“I would suggest your first stop be the hospital,” Chave said, pulling out a small pad of paper and writing on it. He tore off the note and handed it to me. “This is a referral for an MRI. We want to rule out anything physical before we go any further. Once she gets a clean bill of health, then we can move on to treatment if she’s willing.”
I folded the piece of paper over and placed it in my coat pocket. Standing, I held out my hand. Chave rose as well and shook, giving my palm a reassuring squeeze.
“Everything will work out for you both, I’m sure. You need anything, day or night, don’t hesitate to call me.”
I told him I would and left the dim office, giving the receptionist a quick tip of my head before stepping outside.
So there it was. An adversary neither of us ever dreamed of facing. An enemy from within that couldn’t be stabbed, shot, or overpowered physically. But we could still fight it. There was hope. Always hope.
I climbed into the truck as the first drops of rain cascaded down from the burgeoning clouds that had expanded from horizon to horizon. A small tree branch clattered across the pickup’s hood and skittered away down the sidewalk as several people caught in the gale hurried with hands held above their heads or tugging at coat collars.
I drew out my phone and pulled up the clinic’s number before putting the truck in gear, windshield wipers sliding swaths of rain aside as I steered into the lane leading out of town. A voice answered after two rings and I asked for Megan Teller’s extension. The line was silent while I was transferred and I leaned forward, turning on the defrost to dispel the fog obscuring the windshield. I made a right turn and then I was on Route One heading north away from the city.
“This is Megan.”
I was planning on leaving a message telling Megan to see if she could schedule an MRI that day or as soon as possible, so when she answered I was surprised and delighted.
“Megan, it’s Jason Kingsley.”
“Jason, hi! How are you?”
“Good, good. Say, I was wondering if you’d be able to talk to Del’s doctor and see if you could schedule her for an MRI. She’s been having some…issues lately and we’re a little worried to be honest. I’ve got a referral too if you need one.”
“Oh, sorry to hear that. I was actually going to call her this week to see how the pregnancy was going.”
A cold pick of ice slid slowly through my stomach at the tone of her voice.
“Well, the pregnancy’s going fine. I mean, you were there at the ultrasound she had, right?”
The resounding silence on the line made the tightening fist in my chest clench harder. Please, God, no, no, no.
“Jason, I don’t know what to say. I thought Del was going to another hospital. She hasn’t had an appointment here since last year.”
~
I’d never covered the miles between town and our home as fast as I did that day. Not even when I was seventeen, racing my best friend Benny through the curves at night. Given the fact that I was calling our house and Del’s cell phone in succession the entire trip; it’s an absolute miracle that I didn’t kill anyone on that twisty road.
A low hum thrummed below the straining of the truck’s engine, and I realized I was making the noise myself, deep down in my chest where I hadn’t known it was possible for a person to create sound. I took the last turn off the main road too fast and the rear end of the pickup slewed to the side, raking gravel in a fan that flew off into the ditch and rattled against a lone mailbox at the end of the road. Then our drive was on my right, its path splitting when the view opened to the sea. To the left was Harold’s house, dark and quiet in the rain, and on the right was ours, bright and shining.
The frenzied animal in my chest calmed only a fraction at seeing the lights. They might mean Del was okay, maybe even up making a late breakfast for herself, but they did nothing to explain the fact that she’d lied to me about both of her checkups at Megan’s clinic. Why? But that was the question of the hour, wasn’t it? Why was any of this happening to us?
I slid the truck to a stop a couple feet from our walk and didn’t bother to shut it off. The rain hammered my back and head, its cold touch like dead, probing fingers. I yanked the door open and was yelling her name before I cleared the entry.
No reply.
I spun through the house in a fury, spending only enough time in each room to be sure Del wasn’t anywhere within before moving on. I half slid, half ran down the stairs from our room, the last vestiges of hope evaporating with the knowledge that she wasn’t in the house.
I stopped in the kitchen, trying to think through the whirlwind my mind had become. Where? Where would she go? Immediately I ran for the door, rushing through the rain to the edge of our yard. I leapt onto the highest rock I could see, nearly slipping from its wet top.
The sea tossed itself against the beach below in utter abandon. It was as if it shared in my despair and wished to dash itself apart on the rocks. Or maybe it was reaching for me after all my time spent upon it. Perhaps it wanted revenge for harvesting its waters without recompense. Maybe it had already taken something back from me as payment.
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.
Author’s Note
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.
Other Works by Joe Hart
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
