The Book of Cthulhu 2

Nor the Demons

Down Under the Sea (1957)

Caitlin R. Kiernan

The late summer morning like a shattering blue-white gem, crashing liquid seams of fluorite and topaz thrown against the jagged shale and sandstone shingle, roiling calcite foam beneath the cloudless sky specked with gulls and ravens. And Julia behind the wheel of the big green Bel Air, chasing the coast road north, the top down so the Pacific wind roars wild through her hair. Salt smell to fill her head, intoxicating and delicious scent to drown her city-dulled senses and Anna’s alone in the backseat, ignoring her again, silent, reading one of her textbooks or monographs on malacology. Hardly a word from her since they left the motel in Anchor Bay more than an hour ago, hardly a word at breakfast, for that matter, and her silence is starting to annoy Julia.

“It was a bad dream, that’s all,” Anna said, the two of them alone in the diner next door to the motel, sitting across from one another in a Naugahyde booth with a view of the bay, Haven’s Anchorage dotted with the bobbing hulls of fishing boats. “You know that I don’t like to talk about my dreams,” and then she pushed her uneaten grapefruit aside and lit a cigarette. “God knows I’ve told you enough times.”

“We don’t have to go on to the house,” Julia said hopefully. “We could always see it another time, and we could go back to the city today, instead.”

Anna only shrugged her shoulders and stared through the glass at the water, took another drag off her cigarette and exhaled smoke the color of the horizon.

“If you’re afraid to go to the house, you should just say so.”

Julia steals a glance at her in the rearview mirror, wind-rumpled girl with shiny sunburned cheeks, cheeks like ripening plums and her short, blonde hair twisted into a bun and tied up in a scarf. And Julia’s own reflection stares back at her from the glass, reproachful, desperate, almost fifteen years older than Anna, so close to thirty-five now that it frightens her; her drab hazel eyes hidden safely behind dark sunglasses that also conceal nascent crow’s feet, and the wind whips unhindered through her own hair, hair that would be mouse brown if she didn’t use peroxide. The first tentative wrinkles beginning to show at the corners of her mouth, and then she notices that her lipstick is smudged and licks the tip of one index finger and wipes at the candy-pink stain.

“You really should come up for air,” Julia shouts, shouting just to be heard above the wind, and Anna looks slowly up from her book. She squints and blinks at the back of Julia’s head, an irritated, uncomprehending sort of expression and a frown that draws creases across her forehead.

“You’re missing all the scenery, dear.”

Anna sits up, sighs loudly and stares out at a narrow, deserted stretch of beach rushing past, the ocean beyond. “Scenery’s for the tourists,” she says. “I’m not a tourist.” And she slumps down into the seat again, turns a page and goes back to reading.

“You could at least tell me what I’ve done,” Julia says, trying hard not to sound angry or impatient, sounding only a little bit confused, instead, but this time Anna doesn’t reply, pretending not to hear or maybe just choosing to ignore her altogether.

“Well, then, whenever you’re ready to talk about it,” Julia says, but that isn’t what she wants to say; she wants to tell Anna she’s getting sick of her pouting about like a high-school girl, sick of these long, brooding silences, and more than sick of always feeling guilty because she doesn’t ever know what to say that will make things better. Always feeling like it’s her fault, somehow, and if she weren’t a coward she would never have become involved with a girl like Anna Foley in the first place.

But you are a coward, Julia reminds herself. Don’t ever forget that, not even for a second, and she almost misses her exit, the turnoff that would carry them east to Boonville if she stayed on the main road. Julia takes the exit, following the crude map Anna drew for her on a paper napkin; the road dips and curves sharply away from the shoreline, and the ocean is suddenly lost behind a dense wall of redwoods and blooming rhododendrons, the morning sun traded for the rapid flicker of forest shadows. Only a few hundred yards from the highway there’s another, unpaved road, unnamed road leading deeper into the trees, and she slows down, and the Chevrolet bounces off the blacktop onto the rutted, pockmarked logging trail.

* * *

The drive up the coast from San Francisco to Anchor Bay was Anna’s idea, even though they both knew it was a poor choice for summertime shelling. But still a chance to get out of the laboratory, she said, to get away from the city, from the heat and all the people, and Julia knew what she really meant. A chance to be alone, away from suspicious, disapproving eyes, and besides, there had been an interesting limpet collected very near there a decade or so ago, a single, unusually large shell cataloged and tucked away in the vast Berkeley collections and then all but forgotten. The new species, Diodora thespesius, was described by one of Julia Winter’s male predecessors in the department, and a second specimen would surely be a small feather in her cap.

So, the last two days spent picking their way meticulously over the boulders, kelp- and algae-slick rocks and shallow tide pools consistently buried and unburied by the shifting sand flats; hardly an ideal place for limpets, or much of anything else, to take hold. Thick-soled rubber boots and aluminum pails, sun hats and gloves, knives to pry mollusks from the rocks, and little reward for their troubles but scallops and mussels. A few nice sea urchins and sand dollars, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus and Dendraster excentricus, and the second afternoon Anna had spotted a baby octopus, but it had gotten away from them.

“If we only had more time,” Anna said. “I’m sure we would have found it if we had more time.” She was sitting on a boulder, smoking, her dungarees soaked through to the thighs, staring north and west towards the headland and the dark silhouette of Fish Rocks jutting up from the sea like the scabby backs of twin leviathans.

“Well, it hasn’t been a total loss, has it?” Julia asked and smiled, remembering the long night before, Anna in her arms, Anna whispering things that had kept Julia awake almost until dawn. “It wasn’t a complete waste.”

And Anna Foley turned and watched her from her seat on the boulder, sloe-eyed girl, slate-gray irises to hide more than they would ever give away; She’s taunting me, Julia thought, feeling ashamed of herself for thinking such a thing, but thinking it anyway. It’s all some kind of a game to her, playing naughty games with Dr. Winter. She’s sitting there watching me squirm.

“You want to see a haunted house?” Anna asked, finally, and whatever Julia had expected her to say, it certainly wasn’t that.

“Excuse me?”

“A haunted house. A real haunted house,” and Anna raised an arm and pointed northeast, inland, past the shoreline. “It isn’t very far from here. We could drive up tomorrow morning.”

This is a challenge, Julia thought. She’s trying to challenge me, some new convolution in the game meant to throw me off balance.

“I’m sorry, Anna. That doesn’t really sound like my cup of tea,” she said, tired and just wanting to climb back up the bluff to the motel for a hot shower and an early dinner.

“No, really. I’m serious. I read about this place last month in Argosy. It was built in 1890 by a man named Machen Dandridge who supposedly worshipped Poseidon and—”

“Since when do you read Argosy?”

“I read everything, Julia,” Anna said. “It’s what I do,” and she turned her head to watch a ragged, commingled flock of Mew and Herring gulls flying by, ash and charcoal wings skimming just above the surface of the water.

“And an article in Argosy magazine said that this house was really haunted?” Julia asked skeptically, watching Anna watch the gulls as they rose and wheeled high over the Anchorage.

“Yes, it did. It was written by Dr. John Montague, an anthropologist, I think. He studies haunted houses.”

“Anthropologists aren’t generally in the business of ghost-hunting, dear,” Julia said, smiling, and Anna glared at her from her rock, her stormy eyes narrowing the slightest bit.

“Well, this one seems to be, dear.”

And then neither of them said anything for a few minutes, so there were no sounds but the wind and the surf and the raucous gulls, all the soothing, lonely ocean noises. Finally the incongruent, mechanical rumble of a truck up on the highway broke the spell, the taut, wordless space between them.

“I think we should be heading back now,” Julia said finally. “The tide will be coming in soon.”

“You go on ahead,” Anna whispered and chewed at her lower lip. “I’ll catch up.”

Julia hesitated, glancing down at the cold saltwater lapping against the boulders, each breaking and withdrawing wave tumbling the cobbles imperceptibly smoother. Waves to wash the green-brown mats of seaweed one inch forward and one inch back; Like the hair of drowned women, she thought and then pushed the thought away.

“I’ll wait for you at the top, then,” she said. “In case you need help.”

“Sure, Dr. Winter. You do that,” and Anna turned away again and flicked the butt of her cigarette at the sea.

* * *

Almost an hour of hairpin curves and this road getting narrower and narrower still, strangling dirt road with no place to turn around, before Julia finally comes to the edge of the forest, and the fern thickets and giant redwoods release her to rolling, open fields. Tall yellow-brown pampas grass that sways gently in the breeze, air that smells like sun and salt again, and she takes a deep breath. A relief to breathe air like this after the stifling closeness of the forest, all those old trees with their shaggy, shrouding limbs, and this clear blue sky is better, she thinks.

“There,” Anna says, and Julia gazes past the gleaming green hood of the Chevy, across the restless grass, and there’s something dark, outlined against the western horizon.

“That’s it,” Anna says. “Yeah, that must be it,” and now she’s sounding like a kid on Christmas morning, little girl at an amusement park excitement; she climbs over the seat and sits down close to Julia.

I could always turn back now, Julia thinks, her hands so tight around the steering wheel that her knuckles have gone a waxy white. I could turn this car right around and go back to the highway. We could be in the city in a few hours. We could be home before dark.

“What are you waiting for?” Anna asks anxiously, and she points at the squat rectangular smudge in the distance. “That’s it. We’ve found it.”

“I’m beginning to think this is what you wanted all along,” Julia says, speaking low, and she can hardly hear herself over the Bel Air’s idling engine. “Anchor Bay, spending time together, that was all just a trick to get me to bring you out here, wasn’t it?”

Anna looks reluctantly away from the house. “No,” she says. “That’s not true. I only remembered the house later, when we were on the beach.”

Julia looks towards the faraway house again, if it is a house. It might be almost anything, sitting out there in the tall grass, waiting. It might be almost anything at all.

“You’re the one that’s always telling me to get my nose out of books,” snaps Anna, starting to sound angry, cultivated indignation gathering itself protectively about her like a caul, and she slides away from Julia, slides across the vinyl car seat until she’s pressed against the passenger door.

“I don’t think this was what I had in mind.”

Anna begins kicking lightly at the floorboard, then, the toe of a sneaker tapping out the rhythm of her impatience like a Morse code signal.

“Jesus,” she says, “It’s only an old house. What the hell are you so afraid of, anyway?”

“I never said I was afraid, Anna. I never said anything of the sort.”

“You’re acting like it, though. You’re acting like you’re scared to death.”

“Well, I’m not going to sit here and argue with you,” Julia says and tells herself that just this once it doesn’t matter if she sounds more like Anna’s mother than her lover. “It’s my car, and we never should have driven all the way out here alone. I would have turned around half an hour ago, if there’d been enough room on that road.” And then she puts the Bel Air into reverse and backs off the dirt road, raising an alarmed and fluttering cloud of grasshoppers, frantic insect wings beating all about them as she shifts into drive and cuts the wheel sharply in the direction of the trees.

“I thought you’d understand,” Anna says. “I thought you were different,” and she’s out of the car before Julia can try to stop her, slams her door shut and walks quickly away, following the path that leads between the high and whispering grass towards the house.

Julia sits in the Chevy and watches her go, watches helplessly as Anna seems to grow smaller with every step, the grass and the brilliant day swallowing her alive, wrapping her up tightly in golden stalks and sunbeam teeth. And Julia imagines driving away alone, simply taking her foot off the brake pedal and retracing that twisting, tree-shadowed path to the safety of paved roads. How easy that would be, how perfectly satisfying, and then she watches Anna for a few minutes more before she turns the car to face the house and tries to pretend that she never had any choice in the matter at all.

* * *

The house stands like a grim and untimely joke, like something better off in a Charles Addams cartoon than perched on the high, sheer cliff, the pampas grass and a bumpy ride ends. This ramshackle grotesquerie of boards gone the silver-gray of old oyster shells, the splinterskin walls with their broken windows and crooked shutters, steep gables and turrets missing half their slate shingles, and there are places where the roof beams and struts show straight through the house’s weathered hide. One black lightning rod still standing guard against the weather, a rusting garland of wrought iron filigree along the eaves, and the uppermost part of the chimney has collapsed in a red-green scatter of bricks gnawed back to soft clay by moss and the corrosive sea air. Thick weeds where there might once have been a lawn and flower beds, and the way the entire structure has begun to list perceptibly leaves Julia with the disconcerting impression that the house is cringing, or that it has actually begun to pull itself free of the earth and is preparing to crawl, inch by crumbling inch, away from the ocean.

“Anna, wait,” but the girl’s already halfway up the steps to the wide front porch, and Julia’s still sitting behind the wheel of the Chevy. She closes her eyes for a moment, better to sit listening to the wind and the waves crashing against the cliffs and the smaller, hollow sound of Anna’s feet on the porch, than to let the house think that she can’t look away. Some dim instinct to tell her that’s how this works, the mere sight of it enough to leave you dumbstruck and vulnerable.

My god, she thinks. It’s only an ugly old house. An ugly old house that no one wants anymore, and then she laughs out loud, like it can hear.

As if it’s listening.

After she caught up with Anna and made her get back into the car, and after Julia agreed to drive her the rest of the way out to the house, Anna Foley started talking about Dr. Montague’s article in Argosy again, talking as though there’d never been an argument. The tension between them forgotten or discarded in a flood of words, words that came faster and faster as they neared the house, almost piling atop each other towards the end of her monologue.

“There were stories that Dandridge murdered his daughter as a sacrifice, sometime after his wife died in 1914. But no one ever actually found her body. No, she just vanished one day, and no one ever saw her again. The daughter, I mean. The daughter vanished, not the wife. His wife is buried behind the house, though I’m not sure…”

Only an ugly, old house sitting forgotten beside the sea.

“…to Poseidon, or maybe even Dagon, who was a sort of Mesopotamian corn king, half man and half fish. Dandridge traveled all over the Middle East and India before he came back and settled in California. He had a fascination with Indo-Iranian antiquities and mythologies.”

Then open your eyes and get this over with, and she does open her eyes, then, staring back at the house, and Julia relaxes her grip on the steering wheel. Anna’s standing on the porch now, standing on tip-toes and peering in through a small shattered window near the door.

“Anna, wait on me. I’m coming,” and Anna turns and smiles, waving to her, then goes back to staring into the house through the broken window.

Julia leaves the keys dangling in the ignition and picks her way towards the house, past lupine and wild white roses and a patch of poppies the color of tangerines, three or four orange-and-black monarch butterflies flitting from blossom to blossom, and there’s a line of flagstones almost lost in the weeds. The stones lead straight to the house, though the weedy patch seems much wider than it did from the car.

I should be there by now, she thinks, looking over her shoulder at the convertible and then ahead, at Anna standing on the porch, standing at the door of the Dandridge house, wrestling with the knob. No. I’m so anxious, it only seems that way, but five, seven, ten more steps, and the porch seems almost as far away as it did when she got out of the car.

“Wait on me,” she shouts at Anna, who doesn’t seem to have heard. Julia stops and wipes the sweat from her forehead before it runs down into her eyes. She glances up at the sun, directly overhead and hot against her face and bare arms, and she realizes that the wind has died. The blustery day has grown suddenly so still, and she can’t hear the breakers anymore, either. Only the faint and oddly muted symphony of the gulls and grasshoppers.

She turns to face the sea, and there’s a brittle noise from the sky that makes her think of eggshells cracking against the edge of a china mixing bowl, and on the porch Anna’s opening the door. And the shimmering darkness, somehow wet and sticky, that flows out and over and through Anna Foley makes a different sound, and Julia shuts her eyes so she won’t have to watch whatever comes next.

* * *

The angle of the light falling velvet soft across the dusty floor, the angle and the honey color of the sun, so Julia knows that it’s late afternoon, and somehow she’s lost everything in between. That last moment in the yard before entering this place without even unconsciousness to bridge the gap, then and now, and she understands it’s as simple as that. Her head aches and her stomach rolls when she tries to sit up to get a better look at the room, and Julia decides that maybe it’s best to lie still a little while longer. Just lie here and stare out that window at the blue sky framed in glass-jagged mouths. There might have been someone there a moment ago, a scarecrow face looking in at her through the broken window, watching, waiting, and there might have been nothing but the partitioned swatches of the fading day.

She can hear the breakers again, now only slightly muffled by the walls and the wind around the corners of the house; these sounds through air filled with the oily stench of rotting fish and the neglected smell of any very old and empty house. A barren, fishstinking room and a wall with one tall arched window just a few feet away from her, sunbleached and peeling wallpaper strips, and she knows that it must be a western wall, the sunlight through the broken window panes proof enough of that.

Unless it’s morning light, she thinks. Unless it’s morning light, and this is another day entirely. Unless the sun is rising now instead of setting. Julia wonders why she ever assumed it was afternoon, how she can ever again assume anything. And there’s a sound, then, from somewhere behind her, inside the room with her or very close to it; the crisp sound of a ripe melon splitting open, scarlet flesh and black teardrop seeds, sweet red juice, and now the air smells even worse. Fish putrefying under a baking summer sun, beaches strewn with bloated fish-silver bodies as far as the eye can see, beaches littered with everything in the sea heaved up onto the shore, an inexplicable, abyssal vomit, and she closes her eyes again.

“Are you here, Anna?” she whispers. “Can you hear me?”

And something quivers at the edge of her vision, a fluttering darkness deeper than the long shadows in the room, and she ignores the pain and the nausea and rolls over onto her back to see it more clearly. But the thing on the ceiling sees her, too, and it moves quickly towards the sanctuary of a corner; all feathery, trembling gills and swimmerets, and its jointed lobster carapace almost as pale as toadstools, chitin soft and pale, and it scuttles backwards on raw and bleeding human hands. It drips and leaves a spattered trail of itself on the floor as it goes.

She can see the door now, the absolute blackness waiting in the hall through the doorway, and there’s laughter from that direction, a woman’s high, hysterical laugh, but so faint that it can’t possibly be coming from anywhere inside the house.

“Anna,” she calls out again, louder than before, and the laughter abruptly stops, and the thing on the ceiling clicks its needle teeth together.

“She’s gone down, that one,” it mutters. “She’s gone all the way down to Mother Hydra and won’t hear you in a hundred, hundred million years.”

And the laughing begins again, seeping slyly up through the floorboards, through every crack in these moldering plaster walls.

“I saw a something in the sky,” the ceiling crawler whispers from its corner, “No bigger than my fist.”

And the room writhes and spins around her like a kaleidoscope, that tumbling gyre of colored shards, remaking the world, and it wouldn’t matter if there were anything for her to hold onto. She would still fall; no way not to fall with this void devouring even the morning, or the afternoon, whichever, even the colors of the day sliding down that slick gullet.

“I can’t see you,” Anna says, definitely Anna’s voice, though Julia’s never heard her sound this way before: so afraid, so insignificant.

“I can’t see you anywhere,” Julia replies and reaches out (or down or up) into the furious storm that was the house, the maelstrom edges of a collapsing universe, and her arm sinks in up to the elbow. Sinks through into dead-star cold, the cold ooze of the deepest seafloor trench. “Open your eyes,” Anna says, and she’s crying now. “Please, god, open your eyes, Julia.”

But her eyes are open, and she’s standing somewhere far below the house, standing before the woman on the rock, the thing that was a woman once, and part of it can still recall that lost humanity. The part that watches Julia with one eye, the desperate, hate-filled, pale-green eye that hasn’t been lost to the seething ivory crust of barnacles and sea lice that covers half its face. The woman on the great rock in the center of the phosphorescent pool, and then the sea rushes madly into the cavern, surges up and foams around the rusted chains and scales and all the squirming pink-white anemones sprouting from her thighs.

Alone, alone, all all alone,

The woman on the rock raises an arm, her ruined and shell-studded arm, and reaches across the pool towards Julia.

Alone on the wide wide sea

Her long fingers and the webbing grown between them, and Julia leans out across the frothing pool, ice water wrapping itself around her ankles, filling her shoes, as she strains to take the woman’s hand. Straining to reach while the jealous sea rises and falls, rises and falls, threatening her with the bottomless voices of cachalots and typhoons. But the distance between their fingertips doubles, triples, origami space unfolding itself, and the woman’s lips move silently, yellow teeth and pleading, gill-slit lips as mute as the cavern walls.

—murdered his daughter, sacrificed her—

Nothing from those lips but the small and startled creatures nesting in her mouth, not words but a sudden flow of surprised and scuttling legs, the claws and twitching antennae, and a scream that rises from somewhere deeper than the chained woman’s throat, deeper than simple flesh, soulscream spilling out and swelling to fill the cave from wall to wall. This howl that is every moment that she’s spent down here, every damned and salt-raw hour made aural, and Julia feels it in her bones, in the silver amalgam fillings of her teeth.

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

And the little girl sits by the fire in a rocking chair, alone in the front parlor of her father’s big house by the sea, and she reads fairy tales to herself while her father rages somewhere overhead, in the sky or only upstairs, but it makes no difference, in the end. Father of black rags and sour, scowling faces, and she tries not to hear the chanting or the sounds her brother is making again from his attic prison, tries to think of nothing but the Mock Turtle and Alice, the Lobster Quadrille by unsteady lantern light. Don’t look at the windows, she thinks, or Julia tries to warn her. Don’t look at the windows ever again.

Well, there was mystery. Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-Master was an old conger-eel…

An old conjure eel—

Don’t ever look at the windows even when the scarecrow fingers, the dry-grass bundled fingers, are tap-tap-tapping their song upon the glass. And she has seen the women dancing naked by the autumn moon, dancing in the tall moonwashed sheaves, bare feet where her father’s scythe has fallen again and again, every reaping stroke to kill and call the ones that live at the bottom of the pool deep below the house. Calling them up and taunting them and then sending them hungrily back to down to Hell again. Hell or the deep, fire or ice-dark water, and which makes no difference whatsoever in the end.

Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.

Julia’s still standing at the wave-smoothed edge of the absinthe pool, or she’s only a whispering, insubstantial ghost afraid of parlor windows, smoke-gray ghost muttering from nowhen, from hasn’t-been or never-will-be, and the child turns slowly towards her voice as the hurting thing chained to the rock begins to tear and stretches itself across the widening gulf.

“Julia, please.”

“You will be their queen, in the cities beneath the sea,” the old man says. “When I am not even a memory, child, you will hold them to the depths.”

And they all dead did lie, And a million million slimy things Liv’d on—and so did I…

“Open your eyes,” Anna says, and this time Julia does. All these sights and sounds flicker past like the last frames of a movie, and she’s lying in Anna’s arms, lying on her back in the weedy patch between the car and the brooding, spiteful house.

“I thought you were dead,” Anna says, holding onto her so tightly she can hardly breathe. Anna sounds relieved and frightened and angry all at once, the tears rolling down her sunburned face and dripping off her chin onto Julia’s cheeks.

“You were so goddamn cold. I thought you were dead. I thought I was alone.”

Alone, alone, all all alone…

“I smell flowers,” Julia says, “I smell roses,” because she does, and she can think of nothing else to say, no mere words to ever make her forget, and she stares up past Anna, past the endless, sea-hued sky, at the summer sun staring back down at her like the blind and blazing eye of Heaven.

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