Tidepool

by Nicole Willson

  “Lucy?” Sorrow whispered.

  Quentin let out a stream of words in a language Sorrow had never heard and did not recognize. But whatever they were, they had quite an effect on the creature in front of them. The thing hissed again, sending out odors of stagnant saltwater and rotting fish. Sorrow cursed the darkness, wishing she could clearly see what was threatening her.

  And then the thing turned and slunk away. The squelching footsteps faded. A door in the basement slammed shut.

  Sorrow let out a deep, shaky breath. She realized that she was clutching Quentin rather tightly, and she snatched her hands back.

  “Quentin? What the hell is happening down here? What was that?”

  “Lucy,” he said.

  “That thing is Mrs. Oliver’s daughter? How?”

  “Why did you come back here?” Quentin grabbed her wrist and started tugging her along the cellar floor. Sorrow attempted to pull her hand away from his, but Quentin hauled her implacably towards something.

  He let her go and she heard a lock unlatching. The sound of a squealing hinge pierced the gloom in the basement, and blessed daylight streamed through an open storm door.

  “I told you to leave before,” he said, his profile outlined in the daylight. “You shouldn’t have come back here, but now you need to go. Hurry, before Ada notices you’re not dead.”

  “Quentin,” Sorrow breathed. “Did that thing… did that thing kill my brother?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And it will be you next. Now go. Never come back to this house.” He gave Sorrow one last push out the door and then shut it behind her before she could say anything else.

  She ran up the dirt steps leading out of the cellar, and she continued running. She hoped Mrs. Oliver didn’t spot her as she tore through their yard towards Water Street.

  The sight of the enormous cemetery slammed Quentin’s words into her heart as she ran past it.

  Henry.

  Hal was dead. She didn’t understand most of what had just happened, but Mrs. Oliver was hiding a monster in the cellar, and the monster had killed her brother, had almost taken her too.

  Her calves burned as she ran down Water Street toward Cooper’s. The tears pooling in her eyes made it difficult for her to see.

  What the hell was Ada Oliver? What kind of a woman could do such things? There was going to be a reckoning when Sorrow returned to Baltimore. She would persuade Father to send whoever and whatever he could to this place and jail the entire miserable town if that was what it took to get justice for her poor, dear Hal. Her tightening throat made it hard to breathe as she ran.

  Cooper’s Inn drew into sight and she barreled through the front door and straight into Balt Cooper, who nearly tumbled backwards as he caught her.

  “Miss Hamilton! What on earth is the matter?” he said.

  “Mr. Cooper, Mrs. Oliver just tried to kill me!”

  Heads swiveled around from the tavern. Sorrow did not see Charlie’s among them, and she felt a note of panic.

  “Now really. There must be some misunderstanding,” Balt said, putting his hands on her shoulders.

  “Of course there isn’t! She locked me in the cellar with… I don’t even know what it was. Some ungodly, foul creature. She calls it her daughter.” Low voices and murmurs came from the tavern now.

  “I don’t understand,” Balt said.

  “What’s not to understand? Mrs. Oliver killed my brother. She tried to kill me. I’m certain now that she was responsible for that slaughtered man on the beach this morning.”

  Balt looked at her oddly. He didn’t, Sorrow noticed, look all that surprised to be told that a prominent citizen of his town was a murderess.

  “But it’s just very strange,” he said at last. “Ada Oliver doesn’t usually go after women.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  GOING TO CHURCH

  Sorrow’s stomach turned cold and she wrenched herself free from his hands.

  “You knew this was going on? And you allow it? Aren’t you afraid of what she’ll do to you?”

  Balt studied her face and then shook his head.

  “Miss Hamilton, you have no idea what’s going on here. You may think you know, but I tell you that you do not. If you come with me, I will explain.”

  “Balt?” Naomi called to her husband from behind the bar. “You’re not leaving me alone here for dinner, are you?” She gestured around the tavern, which was already filling up with patrons.

  “Be back in a bit, Naomi. I need to discuss something with Miss Hamilton.”

  Naomi didn’t like that at all, Sorrow noticed. She folded her plump arms over her chest and narrowed her dark eyes.

  “Follow me,” Balt said, gesturing to the door. Sorrow, remembering what had happened when she had heard those same words earlier that day, wouldn’t move.

  “Absolutely not. Whatever you have to tell me, do it here.”

  “Miss Hamilton, it’s important that I show you. I promise you that I’ve no intention of harming you. Not with your father’s detectives on their way.” His lips turned up in a smile that Sorrow didn’t find the least bit reassuring.

  Sorrow’s mind churned. She had no reason to trust this man, and no reason to believe he didn’t have another Lucy-type creature hiding somewhere, waiting to finish the job that Mrs. Oliver’s dreadful “daughter” had not.

  And yet, she still burned keenly to know what was going on in Tidepool. She had one piece of the puzzle, knowing what Mrs. Oliver harbored in her house. And Balt was offering her the other half. Possibly. At long last, these damnably stubborn people were opening up.

  But knowing what had happened would do her no good if they murdered her too.

  “Miss Hamilton? Are you coming?”

  “Where is Charlie? I’d like him to come with us.”

  “He’s having a lie-down in his room. Asked not to be disturbed.”

  Sorrow pondered that. She wanted very much to have him with her in case Balt attempted to complete what Ada Oliver had started. But on the other hand, Charlie had a way of distracting everyone that could ruin her chance of finally getting answers.

  “Then I want to leave him a note.”

  Balt sighed. “I tell you again that you will come to no harm with me. You may leave a note if you wish, but if you are doing so to leave a trail for him to follow, it’s not needed.”

  Sorrow asked for a piece of paper and wrote out a note anyhow.

  “Charlie— much to discuss when you wake up. If I am not here, it’s because I’ve gone somewhere with Balt Cooper, and if you can’t find me later on, he will know where I am and what happened to me. Don’t let him lie to you.”

  She folded up the note, hurried upstairs, and slid the paper under Charlie’s door. That done, she returned downstairs to Balt.

  “Very well. I shall probably regret this, but lead on.”

  Balt exhaled and left the tavern. Sorrow followed him as he headed up Water Street and turned right on Hallows Road, leading them right past that enormous cemetery. Sorrow had never been particularly fearful of graveyards, but the endless weathered headstones reaching back as far as she could see in the twilight unnerved her. And she wondered why Balt might be taking her to this particular place.

  “Where are we going, Mr. Cooper?”

  “To church.”

  Church? What on earth could a church have to do with the goings on in Tidepool? She felt a slight twinge of guilt thinking of how infrequently she had been to church herself in the last year. Her father attended Westminster Presbyterian Church regularly, but she herself felt no such obligation towards it. The lives of the people around her seemed to ebb, flow, improve, or decline without any obvious correlation to how often they presented themselves at a service, she had observed. Nor did frequent attendance seem to correspond in any way with a person’s kindness or generosity.

  However, she had to wonder: if God existed, could He intervene in a town like this?

  It was nearly dark outside now, and a lampligh
ter used a long, skinny pole to illuminate the streetlamps. There was little sound other than the steady noise of the ocean. Sorrow suppressed a shiver as she trailed Balt; she expected Mrs. Oliver’s repulsive creature to come flying out of the shadows at any time and attempt to finish her off. The hulking dark shape of the woman’s house loomed over the town in the night. A light shone from one window, but the rest of the place looked empty.

  “Here we are,” Balt said at last.

  From the outside, the church looked like all the other shabby wooden buildings that lined Tidepool. Even in the encroaching darkness, Sorrow noticed a sagging shutter and wood that appeared to be buckling from the town’s constant dampness. Balt pushed the door open and fumbled for a lamp. He lit it and motioned for Sorrow to follow him.

  Inside, the church looked as barren and unimpressive as everything else in Tidepool. Rows of shabby pews were bisected by a center aisle. A wooden table that Sorrow supposed was meant to be an altar of some sort sat at the front of the room. A faint scent of recently extinguished candles hung in the air, but that not-unpleasant smell was almost obscured by the familiar Tidepool stink of rotting fish.

  And then she looked up and covered her mouth with a hand.

  Skeletons hung suspended from the ceiling of the church, but they were unlike any skeletons Sorrow had ever seen in anatomy class. Some looked like giant fish that had arms with long, taloned fingers. Some resembled human skeletons, but with heads that looked utterly inhuman—elongated, with giant eye sockets and teeth that appeared to line up in columns rather than rows.

  And one, perhaps eleven feet long, looked like a human with an enormous head and unnaturally long, curved, weapon-like arms. All the creatures cast eerie, flickering shadows on the walls and floor.

  Sorrow stared at the hanging skeletons until looking upward for so long made her feel dizzy. She focused on Balt.

  “What is this, Mr. Cooper? What are these things?”

  Balt approached one of the paintings that lined the church walls.

  “See here, miss.”

  Sorrow approached the painting and looked. And then she blinked, and looked again.

  The painting depicted a beach that looked very much like Tidepool Beach, but something terrible was happening on its sands. A man in plain brown clothing was being brutally slashed apart by … what on earth was that? Sorrow first thought it was a green man, but no men had bulging black eyes like that. Or fishlike lips that flanked razor-sharp, bloodstained teeth. Or spiny backs. Or claws on their fingers, which was what the creature used to rip open its victim.

  Several other people lay behind them on the beach, all of them torn open and very obviously dead. The artist had made liberal use of red paint, Sorrow noted. And more of those bizarre fishlike creatures could be seen emerging from the waters.

  Sorrow felt ill.

  “I don’t understand,” she told Balt. “That’s a ghastly work, but what has it to do with what’s happening now?”

  Balt motioned her to move to the next painting.

  It appeared to be of the same beach. Green tentacles extended out of the water, pulling on people who were clearly losing the struggle to stay on land. Their tiny faces contorted in horror or agony—perhaps both. Blood poured from the places where the tentacles made contact with human flesh.

  The third painting Balt showed Sorrow depicted no horrible creatures, but was chilling nonetheless. The artist had written “The Dead of Tidepool” at the top of the painting, and the picture itself depicted lifeless bodies, almost too many to count, lining the beach. The sand itself was tinged pink. And the water … the water appeared to be blood red.

  Sorrow had expected more than just an art show, and her patience began to wear thin.

  “Mr. Cooper, whatever is the point of this grotesque exhibit? Did Mrs. Oliver do all these things? Did she somehow cause them to happen?”

  Bart shook his head.

  “No, Miss Hamilton. Ada Oliver is saving us from all these things.”

  Sorrow thought that she couldn’t have heard him correctly.

  “Saving you? Didn’t I tell you what happened at her home today?”

  “You did indeed. And I’m telling you, what she does is necessary. She must give up an occasional sacrifice to the water. It keeps these things” —and he swept an arm around the room, encompassing all the bones and all the paintings— “from happening again. Mrs. Oliver is all that stands between Tidepool and the creatures who would slaughter all of us and destroy our town.”

  Sorrow’s head spun at this news. She sat down heavily in a pew.

  “Is that what she’s telling you? You can’t possibly believe that.”

  “If it were only her word to go on, I’m sure I wouldn’t,” Balt replied. “But my family has lived in Tidepool for a long time. My older relatives remembered what things were like before she was here. Those who didn’t flee the town when they heard the Lords coming…well…” He indicated the gruesome paintings.

  “And that’s why you have this… church? To convert the doubters?”

  “I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.” Balt stood in front of her pew. “This is the place where those residents who have reached adulthood, or who’ve moved here from other places, meet Mrs. Oliver and learn who she is and what she must do. If they don’t want to remain in Tidepool under these circumstances, they are free to leave as long as they agree to never tell anyone what goes on here.”

  Sorrow took that in, certain that she must be going slightly mad to treat this story as anything other than laughable. Would Cooper attempt to extract that same promise from her? What would he do about it if she broke it as soon as she returned to Baltimore?

  “But why her? What exactly does Mrs. Oliver do to … to protect everyone?”

  “I thought you might have figured it out already.” Balt sounded disappointed. “She can speak to the creatures that live in the waters. She can give them what they need. If they get what they want, they’ll stay in the ocean, and the people of Tidepool will be safe.”

  “And what is it they need?” Sorrow suspected she already knew the answer, but she wanted to hear it from him.

  “They need what you saw this morning when you ran out to the beach. They need blood. And flesh. Tributes.”

  Sorrow was slightly nauseated as she pictured what had been left of that fisherman out on the sand. She felt as if the skeletal creatures hanging from the ceiling were staring down at her with their hollow eye sockets. The flickering lamplight made them look as if they were twitching, trying to break loose from the wires that bound them and get to her.

  “But that’s horrible. I don’t know much about that man, but surely he has family somewhere.”

  “That fisherman did himself no favors here, as you and Mr. Sherman heard. His behavior was selfish and reckless and resulted in the suicide of our shopkeeper’s poor daughter, and he was quite foolish to ever come back to Tidepool.”

  Sorrow’s anger flared.

  “And you’re all right with that? If the occasional passerby gets murdered, it’s fine as long as it’s not you?”

  Balt blinked his watery eyes and reached a hand around the back of his neck.

  “It isn’t that simple.”

  “What could be simpler? You let strangers be murdered to save your own skin. If it bothered you, you’d leave.”

  He stared at the wooden floor before continuing.

  “Once we agree to stay, we’re bound to the town. If we try to leave after that, the creatures come after us. They will get their tribute, one way or another.”

  “Then I don’t see how Mrs. Oliver offers you a real choice at all.”

  “That agreement isn’t Mrs. Oliver’s doing, miss. She does what she can to protect us all from a worse fate.”

  “By allowing some of you to be killed once in a while?”

  “She rarely goes after townspeople. Tidepool gets enough visitors that she seldom has to.”

  Visitors. Hal. Sorrow’s stomach be
gan to churn. “How long has this been going on, Mr. Cooper?”

  “The massacre shown here was in 1855, or thereabouts. Mrs. Oliver arrived not long after. She was already working to contain the creatures when I was born here.”

  And now Sorrow was deeply confused.

  “But that simply isn’t possible. Mrs. Oliver would have to be a very old woman by now, and most likely dead.”

  Balt nodded. “Indeed. We don’t claim to understand it, but she and her brother appear to grow no older, although they have been in Tidepool longer than I have and are both in their elder years by now.”

  Sorrow remembered the portrait of the children in Mrs. Oliver’s house.

  “And that doesn’t disturb you? Or anyone else?”

  Her questions were beginning to irritate him, she could tell. He scowled and let out a sigh.

  “Miss Hamilton, it truly doesn’t matter to us if she doesn’t show her age the way the rest of us do. She has kept her word and protected Tidepool from the massacres that used to happen here. As long as nobody attempts to harm her—or worse—we will remain safe.”

  “Oh? And what if someone does harm her?”

  Balt shook his head. “If any harm comes to her and causes her to be unable to fulfill her duty, her covenant with Tidepool is over, and the Lords will rise out of the ocean. Many lives will be lost, but it won’t stop there this time. Our town, the only home most of us have ever known, will be destroyed. If that covenant is broken, those creatures will wipe Tidepool completely off the map for their revenge.”

  If ye give not willingly, the Lords will rise.

  So that was what this odd saying referred to.

  “You say she offers people the chance to leave. Why in God’s name would anyone stay here, knowing what could happen?”

  Balt tilted his head sideways before continuing. “My family’s inn has been a part of Tidepool for a very long time. Life in this town is what we know. As for why others stay, I can’t say for certain. But we’ve noticed over the years that storms that have destroyed other shoreside towns have left Tidepool untouched. There’s always abundant fish in our waters.”