Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  He has never had to explain his collecting of suffocations, of the deaths of suffocated girls, as it is such a commonplace thing, and a secret collection, besides. But he has frequently found it necessary to explain to some acquaintance or another, someone who thinks that she or he knows the Collector, about the ammonites. The ammonites are not a secret and, it would seem, neither are they commonplace. It is simple enough to say that they are mollusks, a subdivision of the Cephalopoda, kin to the octopus and cuttlefish and squid, but possessing exquisite shells, not unlike another living cousin, the chambered nautilus. It is less easy to say that they became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, along with most dinosaurs, or that they first appear in the fossil record in early Devonian times, as this only leads to the need to explain the Cretaceous and Devonian. Often, when asked that question, What is an ammonite?, he will change the subject. Or he will sidestep the truth of his collection, talking only of mathematics, and the geometry of the ancient Greeks, and how one arrives at the Golden Curve. Ammonites, he knows, are one of the sea’s many exquisite expressions of that logarithmic spiral, but he does not bother to explain that part, keeping it back for himself. And, sometimes, he talks about the horns of Ammon, an Egyptian god of the air, or, if he is feeling especially impatient and annoyed by the question, he limits his response to a description of the Ammonites from the Book of Mormon, how they embraced the god of the Nephites and so came to know peace. He is not a Mormon, of course, as he has use of only a single deity, who is the sea and who kindly grants him peace when he can no longer bear the clamor in his head or the far more terrible clamor of mankind.

  On this hazy winter day, he has returned to his small house from a very long walk along a favorite beach, as there was a great need to clear his head. He has made a steaming cup of Red Zinger tea with a few drops of honey and sits now in the room that has become the gallery for the best of his ammonites, oak shelves and glass display cases filled with their graceful planispiral or heteromorph curves, a thousand fragile aragonite bodies transformed by time and geochemistry into mere silica or pyrite or some other permineralization. He sits at his desk, sipping his tea and glancing occasionally at some beloved specimen or another –this one from South Dakota, or that one from the banks of the Volga River in Russia, or one of the many that have come from Whitby, England. And then he looks back to the desktop and the violin case lying open in front of him, crimson silk to cradle this newest and perhaps most precious of all the items which he has yet collected in his lifetime, the single miraculous piece which belongs strictly in neither one gallery nor the other. The piece which will at last form a bridge, he believes, allowing his two collections to remain distinct, but also affording a tangible transition between them.

  The keystone, he thinks. Yes, you will be my keystone. But he knows, too, that the violin will be something more than that, that he has devised it to serve as something far grander than a token unification of the two halves of his delight. It will be a tool, a mediator or go-between in an act which may, he hopes, transcend collecting in its simplest sense. It has only just arrived today, special delivery, from the Belgian luthier to whom the Collector had hesitantly entrusted its birth.

  “It must be done precisely as I have said,” he told the violin-maker, four months ago, when he flew to Hotton to hand-deliver a substantial portion of the materials from which the instrument would be constructed. “You may not deviate in any significant way from these instructions.”

  “Yes,” the luthier replied, “I understand. I understand completely.” A man who appreciates discretion, the Belgian violin-maker, so there were no inconvenient questions asked, no prying inquiries as to why, and what’s more, he’d even known something about ammonites beforehand.

  “No substitutions,” the Collector said firmly, just in case it needed to be stated one last time.

  “No substitutions of any sort,” replied the luthier.

  “And the back must be carved – ”

  “I understand,” the violin-maker assured him. “I have the sketches, and I will follow them exactly.”

  “And the pegs – ”

  “Will be precisely as we have discussed.”

  And so the collector paid the luthier half the price of the commission, the other half due upon delivery, and he took a six a.m. flight back across the wide Atlantic to New England and his small house in the small town near the sea. And he has waited, hardly daring to half believe that the violin-maker would, in fact, get it all right. Indeed – for men are ever at war with their hearts and minds and innermost demons – some infinitesimal scrap of the Collector has even hoped that there would be a mistake, the most trifling portion of his plan ignored, or the violin finished and perfect but then lost in transit, and so the whole plot ruined. For it is no small thing, what the Collector has set in motion, and having always considered himself a very wise and sober man, he suspects that he understands fully the consequences he would suffer should he be discovered by lesser men who have no regard for the ocean and her needs. Men who cannot see the flesh and blood phantoms walking among them in broad daylight, much less be bothered to pay tithes which are long overdue to a goddess who has cradled them all, each and every one, through the innumerable twists and turns of evolution’s crucible, for three and a half thousand million years.

  But there has been no mistake, and, if anything, the violin-maker can be faulted only in the complete sublimation of his craft to the will of his customer. In every way, this is the instrument the Collector asked him to make, and the varnish gleams faintly in the light from the display cases. The top is carved from spruce, and four small ammonites have been set into the wood – Xipheroceras from Jurassic rocks exposed along the Dorset Coast at Lyme Regis – two inlaid on the upper bout, two on the lower. He found the fossils himself, many years ago, and they are as perfectly preserved an example of their genus as he has yet seen anywhere, for any price. The violin’s neck has been fashioned from maple, as is so often the tradition, and, likewise, the fingerboard is the customary ebony. However, the scroll has been formed from a fifth ammonite, and the Collector knows it is a far more perfect logarithmic spiral than any volute that could have ever been hacked from out a block of wood. In his mind, the five ammonites form the points of a pentacle. The luthier used maple for the back and ribs, and when the Collector turns the violin over, he’s greeted by the intricate bas-relief he requested, faithfully reproduced from his own drawings – a great octopus, the ravenous devilfish of so many sea legends, and the maze of its eight tentacles makes a looping, tangled interweave.

  As for the pegs and bridge, the chinrest and tailpiece, all these have been carved from the bits of bone he provided the luthier. They seem no more than antique ivory, the stolen tusks of an elephant, say, or a walrus, or the tooth of a sperm whale, perhaps. The Collector also provided the dried gut for the five strings, and when the violin-maker pointed out that they would not be nearly so durable as good stranded steel, that they would be much more likely to break and harder to keep in tune, the Collector told him that the instrument would be played only once and so these matters were of very little concern. For the bow, the luthier was given strands of hair which the Collector told him had come from the tail of a gelding, a fine grey horse from Kentucky thoroughbred stock. He’d even ordered a special rosin, and so the sap of an Aleppo pine was supplemented with a vial of oil he’d left in the care of the violin-maker.

  And now, four long months later, the Collector is rewarded for all his painstaking designs, rewarded or damned, if indeed there is some distinction between the two, and the instrument he holds is more beautiful than he’d ever dared to imagine it could be.

  The Collector finishes his tea, pausing for a moment to lick the commingled flavors of hibiscus and rosehips, honey and lemon-grass, from his thin, chapped lips. Then he closes the violin case and locks it, before writing a second, final check to the Belgian luthier. He slips it into an envelope bearing the violin-maker’s name and the address of the sho
p on the rue de Centre in Hotton. The check will go out in the morning’s mail, along with other checks for the gas, telephone, and electric bills, and a handwritten letter on lilac-scented stationary, addressed to a Brooklyn violinist. When he is done with these chores, the Collector sits there at the desk in his gallery, one hand resting lightly on the violin case, his face marred by an unaccustomed smile and his eyes filling up with the gluttonous wonder of so many precious things brought together in one room, content in the certain knowledge that they belong to him and will never belong to anyone else.

  The violinist would never write this story, either. Words have never come easily for her. Sometimes, it seems she does not even think in words, but only in notes of music. When the lilac-scented letter arrives, she reads it several times over, then does what it asks of her, because she can’t imagine what else she would do. She buys a ticket, and the next day she takes the train through Connecticut and Rhode Island and Massachusetts until, finally, she comes to a small town on a rocky spit of land very near the sea. She has never cared for the sea, as it has seemed always to her some awful, insoluble mystery, not so very different from the awful, insoluble mystery of death. Even before the loss of her sister, the violinist avoided the sea when possible. She loathes the taste of fish and lobster and of clams, and the smell of the ocean, too, which reminds her of raw sewage. She has often dreamt of drowning and of slimy things with bulging black eyes, eyes as empty as night, that have slithered up from abyssal depths to drag her back down with them to lightless plains of silt and diatomaceous ooze or to the ruins of haunted, sunken cities. But those are only dreams, and they do her only the bloodless harm that comes from dreams, and she has lived long enough to understand that she has worse things to fear than the sea.

  She takes a taxi from the train depot, and it ferries her through the town and over a murky river winding between empty warehouses and rotting docks, a few fishing boats stranded at low tide, and then to a small house painted the color of sunflowers or canary feathers. The address on the mailbox matches the address on the lilac-scented letter, so she pays the driver, and he leaves her there. Then she stands in the driveway, watching the yellow house, which has begun to seem a disquieting shade of yellow, or only a shade of yellow made disquieting because there is so much of it all in one place. It’s almost twilight, and she shivers, wishing she’d thought to wear a cardigan under her coat, and then a porch light comes on and there’s a man waving to her.

  He’s the man who wrote the letter, she thinks. The man who wants me to play for him. For some reason she had expected him to be a great deal younger and not so fat. He looks a bit like Captain Kangaroo, this man, and he waves and calls her name and smiles. And the violinist wishes that the taxi were still waiting there to take her back to the station, that she didn’t need the money the fat man in the yellow house had offered her, that she’d had the good sense to stay in the city where she belongs. You could still turn and walk away, she reminds herself. There’s nothing at all stopping you from just turning right around, and walking away, and never once looking back, and you could still forget about this whole ridiculous affair.

  And maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t, but there’s more than a month’s rent on the line, and the way work’s been lately, a few students and catch-as-catch-can, she can’t afford to find out. She nods and waves back at the smiling man on the porch, the man who told her not to bring her own instrument because he’d prefer to hear her play a particular one that he’d just brought back from a trip to Europe.

  “Come on inside. You must be freezing out there,” he calls from the porch, and the violinist tries not to think about the sea all around her or that shade of yellow, like a pool of melted butter, and goes to meet the man who sent her the lilac-scented letter.

  The Collector makes a steaming-hot pot of Red Zinger, which the violinist takes without honey, and they each have a poppy-seed muffin, which he bought fresh that morning at a bakery in the village. They sit across from one another at his desk, surrounded by the display cases and the best of his ammonites, and she sips her tea and picks at the muffin and pretends to be interested while he explains the importance of recognizing sexual dimorphism when distinguishing one species of ammonite from another. The shells of females, he says, are often the larger, and so are called macroconchs by paleontologists. The males may have much smaller shells, called microconchs, and one must always be careful not to mistake the microconchs and macroconchs for two distinct species. He also talks about extinction rates, and the utility of ammonites as index fossils, and Parapuzosia bradyi, a giant among ammonites and the largest specimen in his collection, with a shell measuring only slightly under six feet in diameter, a Kraken of the warm Cretaceous seas.

  “They’re all quite beautiful,” she says, and the violinist doesn’t tell him how much she hates the sea and everything that comes from the sea, or that the thought of all the fleshy, tentacled creatures that once lived stuffed inside those pretty spiral shells makes her skin crawl. She sips her Red Zinger and smiles and nods her head whenever it seems appropriate to do so, and when he asks if he can call her Ellen, she says yes, of course.

  “You won’t think me too familiar?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she replies, half charmed at his manners and wondering if he’s gay or just a lonely old man who’s grown a bit peculiar because he has nothing but his rocks and the yellow house for company. “That’s my name. My name is Ellen.”

  “I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable or take liberties that are not mine to take,” the Collector says and clears away their china cups and saucers, the crumpled paper napkins and a few uneaten crumbs, and then he asks if she’s ready to see the violin.

  “If you’re ready to show it to me,” she tells him.

  “It’s just that I don’t want to rush you,” he says. “We could always talk some more, if you’d like.”

  And so the violinist explains to him that she’s never felt comfortable with conversation, or with language in general, and that she’s always suspected she was much better suited to speaking through her music. “Sometimes, I think it speaks for me,” she tells him and apologizes, because she often apologizes when she’s actually done nothing wrong. The Collector grins and laughs softly and taps the side of his nose with his left index finger.

  “The way I see it, language is language is language,” he says. “Words or music, bird songs or all the fancy, flashing colors made by chemoluminescent squids, what’s the difference? I’ll take conversation however I can wrangle it.” And then he unlocks one of the desk drawers with a tiny brass-colored key and takes out the case containing the Belgian violin.

  “If words don’t come when you call them, then, by all means, please, talk to me with this,” and he flips up the latches on the side of the case and opens it so she can see the instrument cradled inside.

  “Oh my,” she says, all her awkwardness and unease forgotten at the sight of the ammonite violin. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Never. It’s lovely. No, it’s much, much more than lovely.”

  “Then you will play it for me?”

  “May I touch it?” she asks, and he laughs again.

  “I can’t imagine how you’ll play it otherwise.”

  Ellen gently lifts the violin from its case, the way that some people might lift a newborn child, or a Minoan vase, or a stoppered bottle of nitroglycerine, the way the Collector would lift a particularly fragile ammonite from its bed of excelsior. It’s heavier than any violin she’s held before, and she guesses that the unexpected weight must be from the fossil shells set into the instrument. She wonders how they will affect the sound, those five ancient stones, how they might warp and alter this violin’s voice.

  “It’s never been played, except by the man who made it, and that hardly seems to count. You, my dear, will be the very first.”

  And she almost asks him why her, because surely, for what he’s paying, he could have lured some other, more talented player out here to h
is little yellow house. Surely someone a bit more celebrated, more accomplished, someone who doesn’t have to take in students to make the rent, but would still be flattered and intrigued enough by the offer to come all the way to this squalid little village by the sea and play the fat man’s violin for him. But then she thinks it would be rude, and she almost apologizes for a question she hasn’t even asked.

  As if he might have read her mind, and so maybe she should have apologized after all, the Collector shrugs his shoulders and dabs at the corners of his mouth with a white linen handkerchief he’s pulled from a shirt pocket. “The universe is a marvelously complex bit of craftsmanship,” he says. “And sometimes one must look very closely to even begin to understand how a given thing connects with another. Your late sister, for instance – ”

  “My sister?” she asks and looks up, surprised and glancing away from the ammonite violin and into the friendly, smiling eyes of the Collector. All at once, there’s a cold knot deep in her belly and an unpleasant pricking sensation along her forearms and the back of her neck, goose bumps and histrionic ghost-story clichés, and now the violin feels unclean and dangerous, and she wants to return it to its case. “What do you know about my sister?”

  The Collector blushes and peers down at his hands, folded there in front of him on the desk. He begins to speak and stammers, as if, possibly, he’s really no better with words than she.

  “What do you know about my sister?” Ellen asks again. “How do you know about her?”

  The Collector frowns and licks nervously at his chapped lips. “I’m sorry,” he says. “That was terribly tactless of me. I should not have brought it up.”

  “How do you know about my sister?”

  “It’s not exactly a secret, is it?” the Collector asks, letting his eyes drift by slow, calculated degrees from his hands and the desktop to her face. “I do read the newspapers. I don’t usually watch television, but I imagine it was there, as well. She was murdered – ”