The Book of Cthulhu 2

The Ocean and All Its Devices

William Browning Spencer

Left to its own enormous devices the sea

in timeless reverie conceives of life,

being itself the world in pantomime.

—Lloyd Frankenberg, The Sea

The hotel’s owner and manager, George Hume, sat on the edge of his bed and smoked a cigarette. “The Franklins arrived today,” he said.

“Regular as clockwork,” his wife said.

George nodded. “Eight years now. And why? Why ever do they come?”

George Hume’s wife, an ample woman with soft, motherly features, sighed. “They seem to get no pleasure from it, that’s for certain. Might as well be a funeral they come for.”

The Franklins always arrived in late fall, when the beaches were cold and empty and the ocean, under dark skies, reclaimed its terrible majesty. The hotel was almost deserted at this time of year, and George had suggested closing early for the winter. Mrs. Hume had said, “The Franklins will be coming, dear.”

So what? George might have said. Let them find other accommodations this year. But he didn’t say that. They were sort of a tradition, the Franklins, and in a world so fraught with change, one just naturally protected the rare, enduring pattern.

They were a reserved family who came to this quiet hotel in North Carolina like refugees seeking safe harbor. George couldn’t close early and send the Franklins off to some inferior establishment. Lord, they might wind up at The Cove with its garish lagoon pool and gaudy tropical lounge. That wouldn’t suit them at all.

The Franklins (husband, younger wife, and pale, delicate-featured daughter) would dress rather formally and sit in the small opened section of the dining room—the rest of the room shrouded in dust covers while Jack, the hotel’s aging waiter and handyman, would stand off to one side with a bleak, stoic expression.

Over the years George had come to know many of his regular guests well. But the Franklins had always remained aloof and enigmatic. Mr. Greg Franklin was a man in his mid or late forties, a handsome man, tall—over six feet—with precise, slow gestures and an oddly uninflected voice, as though he were reading from some internal script that failed to interest him. His much younger wife was stunning, her hair massed in brown ringlets, her eyes large and luminous and containing something like fear in their depths. She spoke rarely, and then in a whisper, preferring to let her husband talk.

Their child, Melissa, was a dark-haired girl—twelve or thirteen now, George guessed—a girl as pale as the moon’s reflection in a rain barrel. Always dressed impeccably, she was as quiet as her mother, and George had the distinct impression, although he could not remember being told this by anyone, that she was sickly, that some traumatic infant’s illness had almost killed her and so accounted for her methodical, wounded economy of motion.

George ushered the Franklins from his mind. It was late. He extinguished his cigarette and walked over to the window. Rain blew against the glass, and lightning would occasionally illuminate the white-capped waves.

“Is Nancy still coming?” Nancy, their daughter and only child, was a senior at Duke University. She had called the week before saying she might come and hang out for a week or two.

“As far as I know,” Mrs. Hume said. “You know how she is. Everything on a whim. That’s your side of the family, George.”

George turned away from the window and grinned. “Well, I can’t accuse your family of ever acting impulsively—although it would do them a world of good. Your family packs a suitcase to go to the grocery store.”

“And your side steals a car and goes to California without a toothbrush or a prayer.”

This was an old, well-worked routine, and they indulged it as they readied for bed. Then George turned off the light and the darkness brought silence.

* * *

It was still raining in the morning when George Hume woke. The violence of last night’s thunderstorm had been replaced by a slow, business-like drizzle. Looking out the window, George saw the Franklins walking on the beach under black umbrellas. They were a cheerless sight. All three of them wore dark raincoats, and they might have been fugitives from some old Bergman film, inevitably tragic, moving slowly across a stark landscape.

When most families went to the beach, it was a more lively affair.

George turned away from the window and went into the bathroom to shave. As he lathered his face, he heard the boom of a radio, rock music blaring from the adjoining room, and he assumed, correctly, that his twenty-one-year-old daughter Nancy had arrived as planned.

Nancy had not come alone. “This is Steve,” she said when her father sat down at the breakfast table.

Steve was a very young man—the young were getting younger—with a wide-eyed, waxy expression and a blond mustache that looked like it could be wiped off with a damp cloth.

Steve stood up and said how glad he was to meet Nancy’s father. He shook George’s hand enthusiastically, as though they had just struck a lucrative deal.

“Steve’s in law school,” Mrs. Hume said, with a proprietary delight that her husband found grating.

Nancy was complaining. She had, her father thought, always been a querulous girl, at odds with the way the world was.

“I can’t believe it,” she was saying. “The whole mall is closed. The only—and I mean only—thing around here that is open is that cheesy little drugstore, and nobody actually buys anything in there. I know that, because I recognize stuff from when I was six. Is this some holiday I don’t know about or what?”

“Honey, it’s the off season. You know everything closes when the tourists leave.”

“Not the for-Christ-sakes mall!” Nancy said. “I can’t believe it.” Nancy frowned. “This must be what Russia is like,” she said, closing one eye as smoke from her cigarette slid up her cheek.

George Hume watched his daughter gulp coffee. She was not a person who needed stimulants. She wore an ancient gray sweater and sweatpants. Her blonde hair was chopped short and ragged and kept in a state of disarray by the constant furrowing of nervous fingers. She was, her father thought, a pretty girl in disguise.

* * *

That night, George discovered that he could remember nothing of the spy novel he was reading, had forgotten, in fact, the hero’s name. It was as though he had stumbled into a cocktail party in the wrong neighborhood, all strangers to him, the gossip meaningless.

He put the book on the nightstand, leaned back on the pillow, and said, “This is her senior year. Doesn’t she have classes to attend?”

His wife said nothing.

He sighed. “I suppose they are staying in the same room.”

“Dear, I don’t know,” Mrs. Hume said. “I expect it is none of our business.”

“If it is not our business who stays in our hotel, then who in the name of hell’s business is it?”

Mrs. Hume rubbed her husband’s neck. “Don’t excite yourself, dear. You know what I mean. Nancy is a grown-up, you know.”

George did not respond to this and Mrs. Hume, changing the subject, said, “I saw Mrs. Franklin and her daughter out walking on the beach again today. I don’t know where Mr. Franklin was. It was pouring, and there they were, mother and daughter. You know…” Mrs. Hume paused. “It’s like they were waiting for something to come out of the sea. Like a vigil they were keeping. I’ve thought it before, but the notion was particularly strong today. I looked out past them, and there seemed no separation between the sea and the sky, just a black wall of water.” Mrs. Hume looked at herself in the dresser’s mirror, as though her reflection might clarify matters. “I’ve lived by the ocean all my life, and I’ve just taken it for granted, George. Suddenly it gave me the shivers. Just for a moment. I thought, Lord, how big it is, lying there cold and black, like some creature that has slept at your feet so long you never expect it to wake, have forgotten that it might be brutal, even vicious.”

“It’s all this rain,” her husband said, hugging her and drawing her to him. “It can make a person think some black thoughts.”

George left off worrying about his daughter and her young man’s living arrangements, and in the morning, when Nancy and Steve appeared for breakfast, George didn’t broach the subject—not even to himself.

Later that morning, he watched them drive off in Steve’s shiny sports car—rich parents, lawyers themselves?—bound for Wilmington and shopping malls that were open.

The rain had stopped, but dark, massed clouds over the ocean suggested that this was a momentary respite. As George studied the beach, the Franklins came into view. They marched directly toward him, up and over the dunes, moving in a soldierly, clipped fashion. Mrs. Franklin was holding her daughter’s hand and moving at a brisk pace, almost a run, while her husband faltered behind, his gait hesitant, as though uncertain of the wisdom of catching up.

Mrs. Franklin reached the steps and marched up them, her child tottering in tow, her boot heels sounding hollowly on the wood planks. George nodded, and she passed without speaking, seemed not to see him. In any event, George Hume would have been unable to speak. He was accustomed to the passive, demure countenance of this self-possessed woman, and the expression on her face, a wild distorting emotion, shocked and confounded him. It was an unreadable emotion, but its intensity was extraordinary and unsettling.

George had not recovered from the almost physical assault of Mrs. Franklin’s emotional state, when her husband came up the stairs, nodded curtly, muttered something, and hastened after his wife.

George Hume looked after the retreating figures. Mr. Greg Franklin’s face had been a mask of cold civility, none of his wife’s passion written there, but the man’s appearance was disturbing in its own way. Mr. Franklin had been soaking wet, his hair plastered to his skull, his overcoat dripping, the reek of salt water enfolding him like a shroud.

George walked on down the steps and out to the beach. The ocean was always some consolation, a quieting influence, but today it seemed hostile.

The sand was still wet from the recent rains and the footprints of the Franklins were all that marred the smooth expanse. George saw that the Franklins had walked down the beach along the edge of the tide and returned at a greater distance from the water. He set out in the wake of their footprints, soon lost to his own thoughts. He thought about his daughter, his wild Nancy, who had always been boy-crazy. At least this one didn’t have a safety-pin through his ear or play in a rock band. So lighten up, George advised himself.

He stopped. The tracks had stopped. Here is where the Franklins turned and headed back to the hotel, walking higher up the beach, closer to the weedy debris-laden dunes.

But it was not the ending of the trail that stopped George’s own progress down the beach. In fact, he had forgotten that he was absently following the Franklins’ spoor.

It was the litter of dead fish that stopped him. They were scattered at his feet in the tide. Small ghost crabs had already found the corpses and were laying their claims.

There might have been a hundred bodies. It was difficult to say, for not one of the bodies was whole. They had been hacked into many pieces, diced by some impossibly sharp blade that severed a head cleanly, flicked off a tail or dorsal fin. Here a scaled torso still danced in the sand, there a pale eye regarded the sky.

Crouching in the sand, George examined the bodies. He stood up, finally, as the first large drops of rain plunged from the sky. No doubt some fishermen had called it a day, tossed their scissored bait and gone home.

That this explanation did not satisfy George Hume was the result of a general sense of unease. Too much rain.

* * *

It rained sullenly and steadily for two days during which time George saw little of his daughter and her boyfriend. Nancy apparently had the young man on a strict regime of shopping, tourist attractions, and movies, and she was undaunted by the weather.

The Franklins kept inside, appearing briefly in the dining room for bodily sustenance and then retreating again to their rooms. And whatever did they do there? Did they play solitaire? Did they watch old reruns on TV?

On the third day, the sun came out, brazen, acting as though it had never been gone, but the air was colder. The Franklins, silhouetted like black crows on a barren field, resumed their shoreline treks.

Nancy and Steve rose early and were gone from the house before George arrived at the breakfast table. George spent the day endeavoring to satisfy the IRS’s notion of a small businessman’s obligations, and he was in a foul mood by dinner time.

After dinner, he tried to read, this time choosing a much-touted novel that proved to be about troubled youth. He was asleep within fifteen minutes of opening the book and awoke in an overstuffed armchair. The room was chilly, and his wife had tucked a quilt around his legs before abandoning him for bed. In the morning she would, he was certain, assure him that she had tried to rouse him before retiring, but he had no recollection of such an attempt.

“Half a bottle of wine might have something to do with that,” she would say.

He would deny the charge.

The advantage of being married a long time was that one could argue without the necessity of the other’s actual, physical presence.

He smiled at this thought and pushed himself out of the chair, feeling groggy, head full of prickly flannel. He looked out the window. It was raining again—to the accompaniment of thunder and explosive, strobe-like lightening. The sports car was gone. The kids weren’t home yet. Fine. Fine. None of my business.

Climbing the stairs, George paused. Something dark lay on the carpeted step, and as he bent over it, leaning forward, his mind sorted and discarded the possibilities: cat, wig, bird’s nest, giant dust bunny. Touch and a strong olfactory cue identified the stuff: seaweed. Raising his head, he saw that two more clumps of the wet, rubbery plant lay on ascending steps, and gathering them—with no sense of revulsion for he was used to the ocean’s disordered presence—he carried the weed up to his room and dumped it in the bathroom’s wastebasket.

He scrubbed his hands in the sink, washing away the salty, stagnant reek, left the bathroom and crawled into bed beside his sleeping wife. He fell asleep immediately and was awakened later in the night with a suffocating sense of dread, a sure knowledge that an intruder had entered the room.

The intruder proved to be an odor, a powerful stench of decomposing fish, rotting vegetation and salt water. He climbed out of bed, coughing.

The source of this odor was instantly apparent and he swept up the wastebasket, preparing to gather the seaweed and flush it down the toilet.

The seaweed had melted into a black liquid, bubbles forming on its surface, a dark, gelatinous muck, simmering like heated tar. As George stared at the mess, a bubble burst, and the noxious gas it unleashed dazed him, sent him reeling backward with an inexplicable vision of some monstrous, shadowy form, silhouetted against green, mottled water.

George pitched himself forward, gathered the wastebasket in his arms, and fled the room. In the hall he wrenched open a window and hurled the wastebasket and its contents into the rain.

He stood then, gasping, the rain savage and cold on his face, his undershirt soaked, and he stood that way, clutching the window sill, until he was sure he would not faint.

Returning to bed, he found his wife still sleeping soundly and he knew, immediately, that he would say nothing in the morning, that the sense of suffocation, of fear, would seem unreal, its source irrational. Already the moment of panic was losing its reality, fading into the realm of nightmare.

The next day the rain stopped again and this time the sun was not routed. The police arrived on the third day of clear weather.

Mrs. Hume had opened the door, and she shouted up to her husband, who stood on the landing. “It’s about Mr. Franklin.”

Mrs. Franklin came out of her room then, and George Hume thought he saw the child behind her, through the open door. The girl, Melissa, was lying on the bed behind her mother and just for a moment it seemed that there was a spreading shadow under her, as though the bedclothes were soaked with dark water. Then the door closed as Mrs. Franklin came into the hall and George identified the expression he had last seen in her eyes for it was there again: fear, a racing engine of fear, gears stripped, the accelerator flat to the floor.

And Mrs. Franklin screamed, screamed and came falling to her knees and screamed again, prescient in her grief, and collapsed as George rushed toward her and two police officers and a paramedic, a woman, came bounding up the stairs.

Mr. Franklin had drowned. A fisherman had discovered the body. Mr. Franklin had been fully dressed, lying on his back with his eyes open. His wallet—and seven hundred dollars in cash and a host of credit cards—was still in his back pocket, and a business card identified him as vice president of marketing for a software firm in Fairfax, Virginia. The police had telephoned Franklin’s firm in Virginia and so learned that he was on vacation. The secretary had the hotel’s number.

After the ambulance left with Mrs. Franklin, they sat in silence until the police officer cleared his throat and said, “She seemed to be expecting something like this.”

The words dropped into a silence.

Nancy and Steve and Mrs. Hume were seated on one of the lobby’s sofas. George Hume came out of the office in the wake of the other policeman who paused at the door and spoke. “We’d appreciate it if you could come down and identify the body. Just a formality, but it’s not a job for his wife, not in the state she’s in.” He coughed, shook his head. “Or the state he’s in, for that matter. Body got tore up some in the water, and, well, I still find it hard to believe that he was alive just yesterday. I would have guessed he’d been in the water two weeks minimum—the deterioration, you know.”

George Hume shook his head as though he did know and agreed to accompany the officer back into town.

* * *

George took a long look, longer than he wanted to, but the body wouldn’t let him go, made mute, undeniable demands.

Yes, this was Mr. Greg Franklin. Yes, this would make eight years that he and his wife and his child had come to the hotel. No, no nothing out of the ordinary.

George interrupted himself. “The tattoos…” he said.

“Didn’t know about the tattoos, I take it?” the officer said.

George shook his head. “No.” The etched blue lines that laced the dead man’s arms and chest were somehow more frightening than the damage the sea had done. Frightening because… because the reserved Mr. Franklin, businessman and stolid husband, did not look like someone who would illuminate his flesh with arcane symbols, pentagrams and ornate fish, their scales numbered according to some runic logic, and spidery, incomprehensible glyphs.

“Guess Franklin wasn’t inclined to wear a bathing suit.”

“No.”

“Well, we are interested in those tattoos. I guess his wife knew about them. Hell, maybe she has some of her own.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“Not yet. Called the hospital. They say she’s sleeping. It can wait till morning.”

An officer drove George back to the hotel, and his wife greeted him at the door.

“She’s sleeping,” Mrs. Hume said.

“Who?”

“Melissa.”

For a moment, George drew a blank, and then he nodded. “What are we going to do with her?”

“Why, keep her,” his wife said. “Until her mother is out of the hospital.”

“Maybe there are relatives,” George said, but he knew, saying it, that the Franklins were self-contained, a single unit, a closed universe.

His wife confirmed this. No one could be located, in any event.

“Melissa may not be aware that her father is dead,” Mrs. Hume said. “The child is, I believe, a stranger girl than we ever realized. Here we were thinking she was just a quiet thing, well behaved. I think there is something wrong with her mind. I can’t seem to talk to her, and what she says makes no sense. I’ve called Dr. Gowers, and he has agreed to see her. You remember Dr. Gowers, don’t you? We sent Nancy to him when she was going through that bad time at thirteen.”

George remembered child psychiatrist Gowers as a bearded man with a swollen nose and thousands of small wrinkles around his eyes. He had seemed a very kind but somehow sad man, a little like Santa Claus if Santa Claus had suffered some disillusioning experience, an unpleasant divorce or other personal setback, perhaps.

Nancy came into the room as her mother finished speaking. “Steve and I can take Melissa,” Nancy said.

“Well, that’s very good of you, dear,” her mother said. “I’ve already made an appointment for tomorrow morning at ten. I’m sure Dr. Gowers will be delighted to see you again.”

“I’ll go too,” George said. He couldn’t explain it but he was suddenly afraid.

* * *

The next morning when George came down to breakfast, Melissa was already seated at the table and Nancy was combing the child’s hair.

“She isn’t going to church,” George said, surprised at the growl in his voice.

“This is what she wanted to wear,” Nancy said. “And it looks very nice, I think.”

Melissa was dressed in the sort of outfit a young girl might wear on Easter Sunday: a navy blue dress with white trim, white knee socks, black, shiny shoes. She had even donned pale blue gloves. Her black hair had been brushed to a satin sheen and her pale face seemed just-scrubbed, with the scent of soap lingering over her. A shiny black purse sat next to her plate of eggs and toast.

“You look very pretty,” George Hume said.

Melissa nodded, a sharp snap of the head, and said, “I am an angel.”

Nancy laughed and hugged the child. George raised his eyebrows. “No false modesty here,” he said. At least she could talk.

On the drive into town, Steve sat in the passenger seat while George drove. Nancy and Melissa sat in the back seat. Nancy spoke to the child in a slow, reassuring murmur.

Steve said nothing, sitting with his hands in his lap, looking out the window. Might not be much in a crisis, George thought. A rich man’s child.

* * *

Steve stayed in the waiting room while the receptionist ushered Melissa and Nancy and George into Dr. Gowers’ office. The psychiatrist seemed much as George remembered him, a silver-maned, benign old gent, exuding an air of competence. He asked them to sit on the sofa.

The child perched primly on the sofa, her little black purse cradled in her lap. She was flanked by George and Nancy.

Dr. Gowers knelt down in front of her. “Well, Melissa. Is it all right if I call you Melissa?”

“Yes sir. That’s what everyone calls me.”

“Well, Melissa, I’m glad you could come and see me today. I’m Dr. Gowers.”

“Yes sir.”

“I’m sorry about what happened to your father,” he said, looking in her eyes.

“Yes sir,” Melissa said. She leaned forward and touched her shoe.

“Do you know what happened to your father?” Dr. Gowers asked.

Melissa nodded her head and continued to study her shoes.

“What happened to your father?” Dr. Gowers asked.

“The machines got him,” Melissa said. She looked up at the doctor. “The real machines,” she added. “The ocean ones.”

“Your father drowned,” Dr. Gowers said.

Melissa nodded. “Yes sir.” Slowly the little girl got up and began wandering around the room. She walked past a large saltwater aquarium next to a teak bookcase.

George thought the child must have bumped against the aquarium stand—although she hardly seemed close enough—because water spilled from the tank as she passed. She was humming. It was a bright, musical little tune, and he had heard it before, a children’s song, perhaps? The words? Something like by the sea, by the sea.

The girl walked and gestured with a liquid motion that was oddly sophisticated, suggesting the calculated body language of an older and sexually self-assured woman.

“Melissa, would you come and sit down again so we can talk? I want to ask you some questions, and that is hard to do if you are walking around the room.”

“Yes sir,” Melissa said, returning to the sofa and resettling between George and his daughter. Melissa retrieved her purse and placed it on her lap again.

She looked down at the purse and up again. She smiled with a child’s cunning. Then, very slowly, she opened the purse and showed it to Dr. Gowers.

“Yes?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“There’s nothing in it,” Melissa said. “It’s empty.” She giggled.

“Well yes, it is empty,” Dr. Gowers said, returning the child’s smile. “Why is that?”

Melissa snapped the purse closed. “Because my real purse isn’t here. It’s in the real place, where I keep my things.”

“And where is that, Melissa?”

Melissa smiled and said, “You know, silly.”

* * *

When the session ended, George phoned his wife.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it went fine. I don’t know. I’ve had no experience of this sort of thing. What about Mrs. Franklin?”

Mrs. Franklin was still in the hospital. She wanted to leave, but the hospital was reluctant to let her. She was still in shock, very disoriented. She seemed, indeed, to think that it was her daughter who had drowned.

“Did you talk to her?” George asked.

“Well yes, just briefly, but as I say, she made very little sense, got very excited when it became clear I wasn’t going to fetch her if her doctor wanted her to remain there.”

“Can you remember anything she said?”

“Well, it was very jumbled, really. Something about a bad bargain. Something about, that Greek word, you know ‘hubris.’”

“Hewbris?”

“Oh, back in school, you know, George. Hubris. A willful sort of pride that angers the gods. I’m sure you learned it in school yourself.”

“You are not making any sense,” he said, suddenly exasperated—and frightened.

“Well,” his wife said, “you don’t have to shout. Of course I don’t make any sense. I am trying to repeat what Mrs. Franklin said, and that poor woman made no sense at all. I tried to reassure her that Melissa was fine and she screamed. She said Melissa was not fine at all and that I was a fool. Now you are shouting at me, too.”

George apologized, said he had to be going, and hung up.

On the drive back from Dr. Gowers’ office, Nancy sat in the back seat with Melissa. The child seemed unusually excited: her pale forehead was beaded with sweat, and she watched the ocean with great intensity.

“Did you like Dr. Gowers?” Nancy asked. “He liked you. He wants to see you again, you know.”

Melissa nodded. “He is a nice one.” She frowned. “But he doesn’t understand the real words either. No one here does.”

George glanced over his shoulder at the girl. You are an odd ducky, he thought.

A large, midday sun brightened the air and made the ocean glitter as though scaled. They were in a stretch of sand dunes and sea oats and high, wind-driven waves and, except for an occasional lumbering trailer truck, they seemed alone in this world of sleek, eternal forms.

Then Melissa began to cough. The coughing increased in volume, developed a quick, hysterical note.

“Pull over!” Nancy shouted, clutching the child.

George swung the car off the highway and hit the brakes. Gravel pinged against metal, the car fishtailed and lurched to a stop. George was out of the car instantly, in time to catch his daughter and the child in her arms as they came hurtling from the back seat. Melissa’s face was red and her small chest heaved. Nancy had her arms around the girl’s chest. “Melissa!” Nancy was shouting. “Melissa!”

Nancy jerked the child upwards and back. Melissa’s body convulsed. Her breathing was labored, a broken whistle fluttering in her throat.

She shuddered and began to vomit. A hot, green odor, the smell of stagnant tidal pools, assaulted George. Nancy knelt beside Melissa, wiping the child’s wet hair from her forehead. “It’s gonna be okay, honey,” she said. “You got something stuck in your throat. It’s all right now. You’re all right.”

The child jumped up and ran down the beach.

“Melissa!” Nancy screamed, scrambling to her feet and pursuing the girl. George ran after them, fear hissing in him like some power line down in a storm, writhing and spewing sparks.

In her blue dress and knee socks—shoes left behind on the beach now—Melissa splashed into the ocean, arms pumping.

Out of the corner of his eye, George saw Steve come into view. He raced past George, past Nancy, moving with a frenzied pinwheeling of arms. “I got her, I got her, I got her,” he chanted.

Don’t, George thought. Please don’t.

The beach was littered with debris, old ocean-polished bottles, driftwood, seaweed, shattered conch shells. It was a rough ocean, still reverberating to the recent storm.

Steve had almost reached Melissa. George could see him reach out to clutch her shoulder.

Then something rose up in the water. It towered over man and child, and as the ocean fell away from it, it revealed smooth surfaces that glittered and writhed. The world was bathed with light, and George saw it plain. And yet, he could not later recall much detail. It was as though his mind refused entry to this monstrous thing, substituting other images—maggots winking from the eye sockets of some dead animal, flesh growing on a ruined structure of rusted metal—and while, in memory, those images were horrible enough and would not let him sleep, another part of his mind shrank from the knowledge that he had confronted something more hideous and ancient than his reason could acknowledge.

What happened next, happened in an instant. Steve staggered backwards and Melissa turned and ran sideways to the waves.

A greater wave, detached from the logic of the rolling ocean, sped over Steve, engulfing him, and he was gone, while Melissa continued to splash through the tide, now turning and running shoreward. The beast-thing was gone, and the old pattern of waves reasserted itself. Then Steve resurfaced, and with a lurch of understanding, as though the unnatural wave had struck at George’s mind and left him dazed, he watched the head bob in the water, roll sickeningly, bounce on the crest of a second wave, and disappear.

Melissa lay face down on the wet sand, and Nancy raced to her, grabbed her up in her arms, and turned to her father.

“Where’s Steve?” she shouted over the crash of the surf.

You didn’t see then, George thought. Thank God.

“Where’s Steve,” she shouted again.

George came up to his daughter and embraced her. His touch triggered racking sobs, and he held her tighter, the child Melissa between them.

And what if the boy’s head rolls to our feet on the crest of the next wave? George thought, and the thought moved him to action. “Let’s get Melissa back to the car,” he said, taking the child from his daughter’s arms.

It was a painful march back to the car, and George was convinced that at any moment either or both of his charges would bolt. He reached the car and helped his daughter into the back seat. She was shaking violently.

“Hold Melissa,” he said, passing the child to her. “Don’t let her go, Nancy.”

George pulled away from them and closed the car door. He turned then, refusing to look at the ocean as he did so. He looked down, stared for a moment at what was undoubtedly a wet clump of matted seaweed, and knew, with irrational certainty, that Melissa had choked on this same seaweed, had knelt here on the ground and painfully coughed it up.

He told the police that Melissa had run into the waves and that Steve had pursued her and drowned. This was all he could tell them—someday he hoped he would truly believe that it was all there was to tell. Thank god his daughter had not seen. And he realized then, with shame, that it was not even his daughter’s feelings that were foremost in his mind but rather the relief, the immense relief, of knowing that what he had seen was not going to be corroborated and that with time and effort, he might really believe it was an illusion, the moment’s horror, the tricks light plays with water.

He took the police back to where it had happened. But he would not go down to the tide. He waited in the police car while they walked along the beach.

If they returned with Steve’s head, what would he say? Oh yes, a big wave decapitated Steve. Didn’t I mention that? Well, I meant to.

But they found nothing.

* * *

Back at the hotel, George sat at the kitchen table and drank a beer. He was not a drinker, but it seemed to help. “Where’s Nancy?” he asked.

“Upstairs,” Mrs. Hume said. “She’s sleeping with the child. She wouldn’t let me take Melissa. I tried to take the child and I thought… I thought my own daughter was going to attack me, hit me. Did she think I would hurt Melissa? What did she think?”

George studied his beer, shook his head sadly to indicate the absence of all conjecture.

Mrs. Hume dried her hands on the dish towel and, ducking her head, removed her apron. “Romner Psychiatric called. A doctor Melrose.”

George looked up. “Is he releasing Mrs. Franklin?” Please come and get your daughter, George thought. I have a daughter of my own. Oh how he wanted to see the last of them.

“Not just yet. No. But he wanted to know about the family’s visits every year. Dr. Melrose thought there might have been something different about that first year. He feels there is some sort of trauma associated with it.”

George Hume shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary as I recall.”

Mrs. Hume put a hand to her cheek. “Oh, but it was different. Don’t you remember, George? They came earlier, with all the crowds, and they left abruptly. They had paid for two weeks, but they were gone on the third day. I remember being surprised when they returned the next year—and I thought then that it must have been the crowds they hated and that’s why they came so late from then on.”

“Well…” Her husband closed his eyes. “I can’t say that I actually remember the first time.”

His wife shook her head. “What can I expect from a man who can’t remember his own wedding anniversary? That Melissa was just a tot back then, a little mite in a red bathing suit. Now that I think of it, she hasn’t worn a bathing suit since.”

Before going to bed, George stopped at the door to his daughter’s room. He pushed the door open carefully and peered in. She slept as she always slept, sprawled on her back, mouth open. She had always fallen asleep abruptly, in disarray, gunned down by the sandman. Tonight she was aided by the doctor’s sedatives. The child Melissa snuggled next to her, and for one brief moment the small form seemed sinister and parasitic, as though attached to his daughter, drawing sustenance there.

“Come to bed,” his wife said, and George joined her under the covers.

“It’s just that she wants to protect the girl,” George said. “All she has, you know. She’s just seen her boyfriend drown, and this… I think it gives her purpose.”

Mrs. Hume understood that this was in answer to the earlier question and she nodded her head. “Yes, I know dear. But is it healthy? I’ve a bad feeling about it.”

“I know,” George said.

* * *

The shrill ringing of the phone woke him. “Who is it?” his wife was asking as he fumbled in the dark for the receiver.

The night ward clerk was calling from Romner Psychiatric. She apologized for calling at such a late hour, but there might be cause for concern. Better safe than I sorry, etc. Mrs. Franklin had apparently—well, had definitely—left the hospital. Should she return to the hotel, the hospital should be notified immediately.

George Hume thanked her, hung up the phone, and got out of bed. He pulled on his trousers, tugged a sweatshirt over his head.

“Where are you going?” his wife called after him.

“I won’t be but a minute,” he said, closing the door behind him.

The floor was cold, the boards groaning under his bare feet. Slowly, with a certainty born of dread, expecting the empty bed, expecting the worst, he pushed open the door.

Nancy lay sleeping soundly.

The child was gone. Nancy lay as though still sheltering that small, mysterious form.

George pulled his head back and closed the door. He turned and hurried down the hall. He stopped on the stairs, willed his heart to silence, slowed his breathing. “Melissa,” he whispered. No answer.

He ran down the stairs. The front doors were wide open. He ran out into the moonlight and down to the beach.

The beach itself was empty and chill; an unrelenting wind blew in from the ocean. The moon shone overhead as though carved from milky ice.

He saw them then, standing far out on the pier, mother and daughter, black shadows against the moon-gray clouds that bloomed on the horizon.

Dear God, George thought. What does she intend to do?

“Melissa!” George shouted, and began to run.

He was out of breath when he reached them. Mother and daughter regarded him coolly, having turned to watch his progress down the pier.

“Melissa,” George gasped. “Are you all right?”

Melissa was wearing a pink nightgown and holding her mother’s hand. It was her mother who spoke: “We are beyond your concern. Mr. Hume. My husband is dead, and without him the contract cannot be renewed.”

Mrs. Franklin’s eyes were lit with some extraordinary emotion and the wind, rougher and threatening to unbalance them all, made her hair quiver like a dark flame.

“You have your own daughter, Mr. Hume. That is a fine and wonderful thing. You have never watched your daughter die, watched her fade to utter stillness, dying on her back in the sand, sand on her lips, her eyelids; children are so untidy, even dying. It is an unholy and terrible thing to witness.”

The pier groaned and a loud crack heralded a sudden tilting of the world. George fell to his knees. A long sliver of wood entered the palm of his hand, and he tried to keep from pitching forward.

Mrs. Franklin, still standing, shouted over the wind. “We came here every year to renew the bargain. Oh, it is not a good bargain. Our daughter is never with us entirely. But you would know, any parent would know, that love will take whatever it can scavenge, any small compromise. Anything less utter and awful than the grave.”

There were tears running down Mrs. Franklin’s face now, silver tracks. “This year I was greedy. I wanted Melissa back, all of her. And I thought, I am her mother. I have the first claim to her. So I demanded—demanded—that my husband set it all to rights. ‘Tell them we have come here for the last year,’ I said. And my husband allowed his love for me to override his reason. He did as I asked.”

Melissa, who seemed oblivious to her mother’s voice, turned away and spoke into the darkness of the waters. Her words were in no language George Hume had ever heard, and they were greeted with a loud, rasping bellow that thrummed in the wood planks of the pier.

Then came the sound of wood splintering, and the pier abruptly tilted. George’s hands gathered more spiky wooden needles as he slid forward. He heard himself scream, but the sound was torn away by the renewed force of the wind and a hideous roaring that accompanied the gale.

Looking up, George saw Melissa kneeling at the edge of the pier. Her mother was gone.

“Melissa!” George screamed, stumbling forward. “Don’t move,”

But the child was standing up, wobbling, her nightgown flapping behind her.

George leapt forward, caught the child, felt a momentary flare of hope, and then they both were hurtling forward and the pier was gone.

They plummeted toward the ocean, through a blackness defined by an inhuman sound, a sound that must have been the first sound God heard when He woke at the dawn of eternity.

And even as he fell, George felt the child wiggle in his arms. His arms encircled Melissa’s waist, felt bare flesh. Had he looked skyward, he would have seen the nightgown, a pink ghost shape, sailing toward the moon.

But George Hume’s eyes saw, instead, the waiting ocean and under it, a shape, a moving network of cold, uncanny machinery, and whether it was a living thing of immense size, or a city, or a machine, was irrelevant. He knew only that it was ancient beyond any land-born thing.

Still clutching the child he collided with the hard, cold back of the sea.

George Hume had been raised in close proximity to the ocean. He had learned to swim almost as soon as he had learned to walk. The cold might kill him, would almost certainly kill him if he did not reach shore quickly—but that he did. During the swim toward shore he lost Melissa and in that moment he understood not to turn back, not to seek the child.

He could not tell anyone how he knew a change had been irretrievably wrought and that there was no returning the girl to land. It was not something you could communicate—any more than you could communicate the dreadful ancient quality of the machinery under the sea.

Nonetheless, George knew the moment Melissa was lost to him. It was a precise and memorable moment. It was the moment the child had wriggled, with strange new, sinewy strength, flicked her tail and slid effortlessly from his grasp.

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