Tidepool

by Nicole Willson

  The red trail led to the parlor, and Sorrow followed it despite Charlie’s restraining hand on her arm.

  She turned the corner and the back of her neck prickled as her brain attempted to make sense of what her eyes were seeing.

  Detective Warner lay sprawled on his back in the middle of the parlor floor, in an enormous pool of blood.

  He had been ripped open from neck to groin. His round spectacles lay several feet away from his head, and his glassy gray eyes appeared to be staring at Sorrow, pleading.

  As if he were still capable of asking for help.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE NEW DAUGHTER

  Mrs. Ada Oliver

  1851

  * * *

  I did not—and do not—like killing women. Women have a difficult enough time of it in this world, and I have no wish to further contribute to that.

  But the first two individuals I delivered to the depths were female.

  Ellen Oliver did not look terribly happy when I returned to the family home alone, even before I asked her where Simeon was. She was even less happy as the days went on and her brother did not return.

  Perhaps I should have felt compassion, as I too doted on my brother, but I could only remember how heartless this woman had been towards us. She had listened to my cries of pain on my wedding night and did nothing to help or comfort me. She said nothing when I appeared with a bruised face.

  And she had treated Quentin with increasing cruelty after I married Simeon. She’d shout at him or even strike him for following her around the house, or asking questions, or eating too much, or not eating enough. The simple fact of his existence in her house seemed to infuriate her. Although I’d told her in no uncertain terms what would happen to her if I saw her lay a hand on him again, she regularly raised her voice to him or banished him to his room, and Simeon never did anything to intervene.

  I felt nothing but cold anger towards her, even though her missing brother caused her much distress. Even so, I might have allowed her to remain with us if her suspicions had not turned to me.

  “It is odd, Ada, isn’t it?” she asked one evening as we sat in the parlor. Since Simeon had disappeared, the two of us spent most evenings sitting together in a chilly silence while Quentin, who detested Ellen as much as she did him, hid in his room. I read or did needlepoint. Ellen huddled in Simeon’s favorite chair and stared at the wall.

  “How so, Ellen?”

  She shot me a cool look.

  “That you disappeared in the water that night, and yet Simeon is the one nobody has seen again.”

  I put my book down. “It is believed he may have drowned while searching for me. Are you implying something else happened, Ellen?”

  She stared at the floor and took rather a long time to say that of course she wasn’t. But she did not fool me. Surely she was aware of how deeply unhappy I had been in my marriage to her brother. Perhaps she had even known of his dalliances with Mrs. Emma Willis; he had barely bothered to hide them.

  She said nothing else on that subject, but I frequently caught her watching me with narrowed eyes as I busied myself around the house. I was considering the best way to handle this when a voice sounded in my head.

  They are hungry. They grow restless.

  The next night, I asked Ellen to come with me to the beach for a walk so we could clear the air. She denied that there was anything to clear between us, but I insisted on it. We would have to rely on each other if Simeon was indeed lost for good, I said, and so we needed to resolve whatever tension remained after his disappearance.

  As we walked along the shore, I bade her look at a form on the beach that I claimed looked like a body. As she turned her back on me to glance where I’d pointed, I used the dagger I had hidden in my dress to slit her throat. And then I removed my clothing and carried her into the water, where the glowing green eyes of the Lords Below fell upon me and they took the corpse of my sister-in-law away.

  I did not hesitate long before sending Mrs. Emma Willis to join Ellen and Simeon. That ridiculous woman had been quite theatrical about mooning around town and bemoaning Simeon’s disappearance without letting anyone know just why she was in such profound emotional distress. She appeared at our house frequently on the pretext of keeping me company as I waited for any news about my husband’s fate.

  I would have liked to tell her that I bore her no grudge for her behavior with my husband, but I found her phony displays of concern for me both obnoxious and deeply offensive. She clutched my hand and wept on my shoulder and drank all my brandy and frequently fell into a drunken, snoring sleep in my parlor.

  The day a skull washed up on the beach, I knew that the Lords Below had sent a message. Quentin was the first one to spot it, and he found it so entrancing that I had some difficulty persuading him to give it to me. I studied the bone structure and wondered if it was what was left of Simeon’s head.

  We are hungry, Sister.

  I asked Emma Willis to the beach one night, telling her that I thought we could recite poetry to the water as a way to cope with our grief. She jumped at the chance to engage in such a maudlin, meaningless display, as I had known she would.

  And after I slit her throat, she joined her beloved Simeon in the depths, where they both belonged.

  But after Mrs. Willis disappeared, I began to worry. Sooner or later, someone was bound to notice that I was repeatedly spotted with people just before they vanished. People accepted that Simeon had drowned or met some other misfortune while trying to find me, and I told the few people who asked that Ellen had journeyed to stay with some older Oliver relatives to recover from the pain of losing her brother. She had few friends in the town, and nobody seemed especially bothered about her rather abrupt departure.

  But the disappearances of people like Mrs. Emma Willis were going to become more difficult to explain, especially if it was believed I had any connection to them.

  One night, as Quentin and I were idling in the now very quiet Oliver household, someone knocked on the front door. I had not been expecting anyone, and Quentin certainly had nobody who might come calling. I approached the door with great caution.

  A person covered completely in a black shroud stood on the doorstep. Fear made my pulse quicken at the sight.

  Before I could ask what they wanted, the disguised person moved into the house and motioned for me to shut the door.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  And then the creature pulled its shroud off, and I gasped. Quentin, who had come to the front hall to see who was calling on us, let out a cry of alarm.

  Although it stood on two legs, the creature was distinctly fishlike in appearance. It had large, bulging onyx eyes on either side of its head and a round lipless mouth that, I would discover later, concealed razor-sharp, dagger-like teeth that ran back towards its throat in narrow rows. Its bright emerald skin was covered in scales. A spiny ridge ran down its back. The creature’s arms and fingers were unnaturally long and tipped with alarming-looking talons. It reeked of fish and salt water, and of the metallic odor of blood.

  Something about its body suggested a woman’s shape to me; it had rounded hips and a scaled, curved green chest that could almost have been mistaken for the shape of breasts.

  What in God’s name was this frightful thing? Was one of the Lords Below displeased with me? Had the demon arrived here to mete out some sort of punishment – or to feed on me? My heart pounded, and I nearly stumbled backwards in my haste to get to the kitchen. I meant to find a knife to dispatch this hellish apparition before it could harm me or Quentin.

  “Quentin! Upstairs! Away from that thing!”

  His only response was to slide down the wall by the creature, whimpering.

  And then she spoke to me. Although I realized at once that the language she spoke was nothing like English, I understood her perfectly.

  “Do not fear me. I have come to help you.” That stopped me, and I turned back to her. “The Lords sent me to you so you do not ne
ed to do our work alone. I require a dark room and a source of water so my skin does not dry out, and sometimes, I will need to feed.”

  Quentin’s voice shook as he spoke up at last.

  “What is it, Ada? Get rid of it.”

  I studied the creature for a moment as she stood in front of me, her head now slightly bowed. And then I smiled.

  “I shall do no such thing, Quentin. This is your new niece, and I expect you to take good care of her.”

  “My niece?” Quentin wailed.

  Forever after, I would be certain that our homes had spacious cellars with washtubs and rooms that could be kept dark.

  The creature proved to be quite useful, and I began to call her Lucy, my mother’s name. Lucy and I became close enough that we no longer needed to open our mouths to speak to each other. I heard her thoughts, as she heard mine.

  She was the one who informed me that I was going to be needed in a tiny coastal town called Tidepool, in neighboring Maryland.

  I did not like Tidepool when I first saw it; it looked terribly small and quite shabby after the places where I’d grown up. I hired a team of workers to build a house for Quentin, Lucy, and me up on the hill, well removed from the townspeople.

  When the house had been finished to my satisfaction, we traveled at night to reach Tidepool. Lucy had to ride inside our carriage, swaddled in damp cloth; she could go outside without needing special consideration for a few hours at a time, but it would have been unhealthy for her to be exposed to the dry air for the entire duration of the trip.

  And it would have been quite unsafe for all of us if any outsiders caught a glimpse of her before I could speak to the town elders. For it was in Tidepool that I was first instructed to approach the townspeople, explain why I was there, and offer the bargain they could make with the Lords Below to end the brutal attacks that had long plagued the tiny, pitiful place.

  They were quite skeptical of my claims at first, and I could not blame them. But when the slaughter ceased and Tidepool residents began to live without constant fear, they became far more favorably disposed towards me. I informed them that my daughter Lucy was instrumental to these efforts, and if they were to catch a glimpse of her at night, they were to leave her completely alone no matter how alarming they might find the sight of her.

  Quentin never did reconcile himself to Lucy, nor did she seem especially fond of him. I sometimes caught her staring at him in a way that made me fear she was considering feeding on him, although she certainly knew that the brother of a priestess was off-limits.

  Truly, Quentin should have been grateful to her, because she saved his life. Or perhaps that is not quite accurate.

  Lucy told me how to get his life back.

  Shortly after our move to Tidepool, Quentin began complaining of pain in the right side of his abdomen. He yelped when the doctor pressed on the spot. The doctor was unsure of what might have caused such a complaint and advised Quentin to rest and eat nothing until his stomach upset abated.

  But Quentin grew increasingly ill and feverish. He tossed and moaned constantly, unable to find a position that relieved his pain or allowed him to rest in comfort. His skin went chalk white, and he could not keep even a sip of water down. He refused what little food I offered him.

  When I checked on him two nights after the onset of his illness, he was dead.

  My emotions had mostly died along with me on the night Simeon knocked me overboard; indeed, my feelings had been drained well before that thanks to my dreary existence as an unhappily married woman. But when I found Quentin lifeless in his bed, his glassy eyes fixed on the ceiling, something broke open inside of me and I dropped to the floor.

  I had always protected Quentin. Even as a child, when his odd nature first became apparent, I would defend him from the neighborhood children who tormented him. After our mother died, I attempted to take over that role for him, ensuring that he was clean and well-fed and that he did not leave the house in the kind of bizarre, mismatched, unseasonable clothing he would wear on his own initiative. Our father’s death made me even more protective of him, as now he was all I had in the world.

  Later, I protected him from Simeon’s anger when Quentin would not behave as Simeon thought a young man should. I defended him from the hateful Ellen.

  And after Simeon’s death, people who were openly cruel to Quentin made themselves into quick candidates for a visit to the Lords Below.

  Quentin was all I had ever truly cared about in life. I could not bear the thought of being without him.

  It was Lucy who told me what to do. She appeared in the doorway of Quentin’s room as I sat on the floor by his deathbed. I could barely see her through my tears.

  “They can bring him back, Mother.”

  “What? Who can?”

  “Our Lords can revive him. Wait until night and carry him into the water with you. Ask for a boon. You have served them well; you have earned it. They can restore him as they restored you.”

  I did what she said. The strength the priestesses had given me when I was in the ocean enabled me to carry Quentin in my arms as easily as if he were an infant, and I made my way down to Tidepool’s beach. Not even bothering to remove my clothing first, I carried Quentin’s body straight into the water. I walked along the sea bottom until I saw the glowing eyes of the Lords upon me.

  “Bring him back,” I told them, before they could assume he was meant for them.

  The surrounding water seemed to grow colder. “And why would we do that?”

  “Because I am his protector, as I am this town’s. I cannot lose him. I have served you ably and well since my death, and now I ask you for this boon.”

  There was a long pause before I heard the verdict.

  “If we do this, he is bound to you. He lives as long as you live. If you die, so does he.”

  “I understand.”

  Another moment passed.

  “Carry him back to the shore. He will not be able to thrive underwater as you do.”

  Their eyes faded in the gloom of the water. I did as they told me, and I lay Quentin’s body out on the sand.

  At first he did not move, and I thought the Lords had deceived me. I was thinking of how I could get my revenge on them for lying to me when Quentin’s eyes opened and he drew breath again. Even in the darkness I could see the gray pallor leaving his face.

  If I expected Quentin to display any gratitude that I had brought him back, I was to be disappointed. He seemed even more withdrawn and frightened of the world once he understood fully what had happened to him.

  He did not like Lucy. He did not like Tidepool.

  Although he never said so, I felt he did not like what I had become either. He had kept a certain distance from me since the night I returned from my own rebirth. Perhaps because he knew me best, he seemed to sense I was a completely different being from what I had been before my fall from the ship’s deck. I caught him eyeing me from around doors or corners, looking wary and uncomfortable.

  Maybe that was why he never seemed grateful to Lucy for offering the advice that brought him back into this life.

  Or to me, for bringing him back.

  Soon after his rebirth, Quentin began his futile attempts to return to the grave. I’d find him sprawled on the floor with his neck slashed, blood gushing from his sliced-open throat as he stared at me with despair.

  When the knives didn’t work, Quentin managed to obtain a revolver from someone in Tidepool. He left a horrid mess on the parlor wall when attempting to shoot himself. The wound in his head healed quickly, and when he could move properly again I set him to work scouring his own brain matter off the wall.

  I thought that having to clean up his own nauseating mess might deter him from trying to take his life again, but one night I arrived home to find him dangling by his neck from a rope; he had turned my front staircase into a gallows.

  I’d had enough. I always attempted to help him when finding him in these ghastly states, but clearly it did him no
good.

  He asked me to help him get down, although the damage to his neck made him rather difficult to understand.

  I refused.

  “You got yourself up there, Quentin. You can get yourself down. Or perhaps I could send Lucy up to help you.” He kicked uselessly at the sound of her name.

  It took him the better part of a day to get himself free from his own noose.

  “Are you going to stop this foolishness, Quentin?” I asked him. “It is as I’ve told you; you cannot die as long as I live. These stunts of yours are pointless. And messy.”

  He stared down at the floor, avoiding my eye.

  “Yes, Ada” he murmured. “I’ll stop.”

  But he never did. He refused to accept the truth of his situation.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE BLOODY MESS

  Sorrow Hamilton

  * * *

  The meager amount of breakfast Sorrow managed to eat that morning now fought hard to escape her stomach, and she pressed a hand against her mouth, willing herself not to be sick.

  Charlie pushed his way past her and stared down at the blood-spattered remains of Detective Warner.

  “Oh, for the love of…” Charlie spun around and started eyeing the house wildly. “That’s enough!” he screamed. “We’re on to you! This isn’t funny anymore!”

  “Charlie,” Sorrow whispered. “Oh, Charlie. This is no hoax.”

  “Of course it is,” Charlie said.

  Sorrow felt tears stinging her eyes. She knew now, beyond any doubt, that her brother was truly dead. And she and Charlie were in terrible danger.

  “Sorrow, it’s all going to be OK,” Charlie said, as if he wasn’t standing before a horribly mutilated body.

  “How, Charlie? What do you think this is?” She pointed to Warner’s eviscerated corpse.

  Charlie shook his head, moving his hands around as if he were trying to conjure up an answer that could explain the horrible sight in front of him. For once, he couldn’t seem to speak.