“I never said it did.”
“You just called it ‘that awful thing,’ didn’t you?”
“I’m going to get a beer,” Edith tells her. “Do you want one, as long as I’m up?”
“Sure,” Sammie says and nods, not looking away from the stone. “I’d love a beer, as long as you’re up.”
Edith stands and pulls her bathrobe closed, tugging roughly at the terrycloth belt. The robe is a buttery yellow, and has small blue ducks printed on it. “You can have it if want it,” she tells Sammie, who frowns softly, then sets the stone down on the bedside table.
“No,” she replies. “It’s yours. You found it, so you should keep it. Besides, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than most of the junk you haul back from the shore. At least this time the house doesn’t smell like dead fish and seaweed. But I still say you should find an archeologist to take a look at it. Might turn out to be something rare.”
“Perhaps,” Edith says. “But I was thinking, just now, maybe it wasn’t lost. Maybe someone got rid of it on purpose.”
“Anything’s possible.”
“I’m afraid all I have is Heineken,” Edith says, nodding towards the kitchen.
“Heineken’s fine by me. Moochers can’t be choosers.”
“I meant to get something else, because I know you don’t like Heineken. But I haven’t been to the store in a few days.”
“The Heineken’s fine, really. I promise.”
Edith manages the ghost of a smile, then goes to the kitchen, leaving Sammie (whose birth name is Samantha, but everyone knows better than to call her that) alone in the bedroom with the peculiar greenish stone. Neither of them mentions it again that night, and later, for the first time in almost three weeks, they make love.
3.
“Well, first off, continents don’t just sink,” Edith says, and she’s beginning to suspect that she might only be dreaming. She’s sitting on the closed toilet lid in her tiny bathroom, and Sammie is standing up in the claw-foot tub. Sammie was the one who started talking about Atlantis, and then Mu, and Madame Blavatsky’s Lemuria.
“And I read about another one,” she says. “When I was a kid, I found a book in the library, Mysteries of the Sea, or something like that. Maybe one of those Time-Life series. One of the stories was about a ship finding an uncharted island somewhere in the South Pacific, back in the twenties, I think. They found an island, complete with the ruins of a gigantic city, but then the whole thing sank in an earthquake. Islands can sink, right?” she asks.
“Not overnight,” Edith says, more interested in watching Sammie bathe than all this nonsense about lost worlds.
“What about Krakatoa? Or Santorini?”
“Those were both volcanic eruptions. And the islands didn’t sink, they exploded. Boom,” and Edith makes a violent motion in the air with her right hand. “For that matter, neither was completely submerged.”
“Sometimes you talk like a scientist,” Sammie says, and she stares down at the water in the cast-iron tub.
“Are you saying I’m pedantic?”
“No, I’m not saying that. It’s kind of sexy, actually. Big brains get me wet.”
There’s a sudden fluttering noise in the hallway, and Edith looks in that direction. The bathroom door is standing half open, but the hallway’s too dark to see whatever might have made the sound.
“Okay,” Sammie continues, “so maybe, instead, there have been cities that never sank, because the things that built them never lived on land. Or maybe they lived on land a long time ago, but then returned to the water. You know, like whales and dolphins.”
Edith frowns and turns back to the tub. “You’re sort of just making this up as you go along, aren’t you?”
“Does that matter?” Sammie asks her.
“Whales don’t build cities,” Edith says, and there’s a finality in her voice that should have been sufficient to steer the conversation in another direction. But when Sammie’s been drinking and gets something in her head, she can go on about it for hours.
“Whales sing songs,” she says. “And maybe if we were able to understand those songs, we’d know about whoever built the cities.”
Edith frowns at her, trying not to think about the fluttering noise from the hall. “If we could understand those songs,” she says, “I suspect we’d mostly hear about horny whales, or which sort of krill tastes the best.”
“Maybe,” Sammie replies, and then she shrugs her narrow shoulders. “But the whales would know about the cities. Especially sperm whales, because they dive so deep and all.”
“You’re still working from an a priori assumption that the cities have ever existed. You’re trying to find evidence to solve an imaginary problem.”
Sammie holds up the greenish stone from the beach, then, as if it offers some refutation, or maybe she thinks Edith has forgotten it. In the light from the fluorescent bulb above the sink, the stone looks greasy. Sammie’s fingers look greasy, too, as if something has seeped out of the rock and stained her hands.
I really don’t like the way it feels.
“It’s just something one of the summer people dropped,” Edith says, wondering why Sammie didn’t leave the stone lying on the table beside the bed, why she’s in the tub with it. “The thing was probably made on an Indian Reservation in Arizona, or in China. It’s just a piece of junk.”
“Can’t you hear it?” Sammie asks her. “If you listen very closely, it’s singing. Not the same song that whales sing, but it’s singing, all the same.”
“Stones don’t sing,” Edith says, “no matter what’s carved on them. I don’t hear anything at all.”
Sammie looks mildly disappointed, and she shrugs again. “Well, I hear it. I’ve been hearing it all night. It’s almost a lamentation. A dirge. And I don’t just hear it, Edith, I can feel it. In my bones, I can feel it.”
“Really, I don’t know what you mean,” Edith says, and before she can add, and I don’t care, either, Sammie is already talking again.
“My body hears the song. Every cell in my body hears the song, and it’s like they want to answer. It’s a song the ocean sings, that the ocean has always been singing. But, suddenly, my body remembers it, from a very, very long time ago, I think. Back when there were still only fish, maybe, and nothing had crawled out to live on the land.”
“You were making more sense with Atlantis and the theosophists,” Edith sighs. She sits there on the toilet, staring at the greasy-looking stone in Sammie’s greasy-looking hands. The rock’s surface is iridescent, and it shimmers with a riot of colors, a rainbow film on an oil-slick mud puddle, or the nacreous lining of an abalone shell. Sammie’s hands have become iridescent, as well, and she’s saying something about inherited memories, the collective unconscious, somatic and genetic recollection, and Edith wants to ask her, Now who sounds like a scientist? But she doesn’t.
“We don’t know what’s down there,” Sammie says. “Not really. I read somewhere that we know more about the surface of the moon than about the deep sea. Did you even know that? Do you know about the Marianas Trench? It’s so deep, Edith, that if you were to set Mount Everest at the bottom, there would still be more than a mile of water covering the mountaintop.”
“Yes, I know a little about the Marianas Trench,” Edith replies, trying to be patient without trying to sound like she’s having to try to be patient. And that’s when Sammie stops rolling the tear-shaped stone between her fingers and quickly slips it down to the clean-shaven space between her legs and into her vagina. There’s no time for Edith to try to stop her.
“Do you think that was such a good idea?” Edith asks. Sammie only smiles back, a furtive sort of smile, and doesn’t answer the question. But she finally sits down in the tub, and Edith sees that where only a few moments before the water was clear and clean, now it has become murky, and dark strands of kelp float on the surface. There’s a sharp crust of tiny barnacles clinging to the white enamel, and she opens her mouth to tell Sammi
e to be careful, that they’re sharp, and she could cut herself. But then the fluttering noise comes from the hallway again, louder than before, and, hearing it, she’s afraid to say anything at all.
“It’s a message in a bottle,” Sammie whispers. “Or those golden phonograph records they sent off on the Voyager probes. Messages like that, no one ever expects to get an answer, but we keep sending them off, anyway.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Edith lies.
“Then I suggest you should try listening more closely. It’s the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard. And it’s taken so terribly long to get here.”
Edith shuts her eyes and smells the ocean, and she smells an evaporating tide pool trapped between rime-scarred boulders, and a salt-marsh mudflat, and all the soft, pale creatures that live in the briny ooze, and, last of all, the sweet hint of pink dog roses in the air. She keeps her eyes shut tightly, straining not to hear the strange, unpleasant commotion in the hallway, which sound nothing at all like any music she’s ever heard. And, for a hopeful moment, Edith begins to believe she’s waking up, before the dream abruptly drops away beneath her feet, the dream and the tile floor of the bathroom, and she understands that the water’s only getting deeper.
4.
There are dreams that stack in tiers, like a gaily frosted birthday cake, and, too, there are dreams that sit nested snuggly one within the other, the way that Russian matryoshka dolls may be opened to reveal a dizzying regression of inner dolls. Edith cannot say if this dream is falling into itself, or merely progressing from tier to tier, whether up or down. She is sitting on the sand among the cobbles at Moonstone Beach, listening to the surf. Above her, the sky is low and looks like curdled milk. In her right hand, she’s holding a stick that the retreating tide left stranded, and all about her, she’s traced the designs from the peculiar greenish stone. They form a sort of mandala, and she sits at its center. If asked, she could not say whether the circle is meant to contain her, or to protect her. Possibly, it’s meant to do both. Possibly, it is insufficient for either task.
The wind is the half-heard voice of the beach, or the voice of the sea. Behind her, it rattles the dry reeds at the edge of Trustom Pond, and before her, it whips the crests of the breakers into a fine spray.
There is something else there with her, tucked in amongst the sand and the cobbles and the symbols she’s traced on the shore. Something that desperately needs to be seen, and that would have her gaze upon nothing else. But Edith doesn’t look at it, not yet. She will not look at it until she can no longer bear the pain that comes from averting her eyes.
Only a few moments ago, Sammie was standing somewhere behind her, standing very near, and talking about the January thirteen winters before, when a tank barge and a tug ran aground here. The barge spilled more than eight hundred thousand gallons of toxic heating oil into the sea and onto the beach. The name of the barge was North Cape, and the tug was named Scandia, and, during a storm, they’d run afoul of the rocks in the shallows just offshore. Both Trustom and Card ponds were contaminated by the spill, and the beach was littered with the corpses of tens of millions of poisoned sea birds, lobsters, surf clams, and starfish.
“It was a massacre,” Sammie said, before she stopped talking. There was an unmistakable trace of bitterness in her voice, Edith thought. “She doesn’t forget these things. Maybe people do. Maybe the birds come back and the lobsters come back, and no one tells tourists what happened here, but the sea remembers.”
Edith asked her if that was why the song from the stone is a dirge, if it laments all the creatures killed in the oil spill. But Sammie said no, that the stone was made to keep the memory of a far more appalling day, one that predated the coming of man and was now otherwise lost to the mind of the world.
“Why are we here?” Edith asked.
“Because you would not hear the song,” Sammie replied. She said nothing else after that, and Edith assumes she’s alone now, sitting here alone on Moonstone Beach, buffeted by the icy wind and doing her best not to see the thing half buried in the sand only a foot or so away. She understands perfectly well that she’s fighting a losing battle.
I will close my eyes, she thinks. I can’t see anything with my eyes shut. I’ll close my eyes, and keep them closed until I wake up.
But shutting her eyes only releases the next doll in the stack, so to speak, and Edith finds herself adrift in an all-but-impenetrable blackness, a blackness that is almost absolute. She recalls, clearly, standing and walking out into Block Island Sound, recalls the freezing saltwater lapping at her ankles, and then her knees, recalls it rushing up her nostrils and down her throat, searing her lungs as she sank. But she was not drowned, and maybe that was the magic of the carved stone at work, and maybe it was some other magic, entirely. The currents carried her away from land and into the Atlantic, ferrying her north and east past Cape Cod, and at last she’d left the sheer bluffs of the continental shelf behind. Far below her, hidden in veils of perpetual night, lie flat abyssal plains of clay and silt and diatomaceous slime. She is suspended above them, unable to fall any farther, and yet incapable of ever again rising to the surface.
All around her—over and below and on every side—indistinct shapes come and go. Some are very small, a parade of eyeless fish and curious squid, jellies and other bathypelagic creatures that she knows no names for. Others, though, move by like enormous, half-glimpsed phantoms, and she can only guess at their identity. Some are surely whales, and probably also enormous deepwater sharks and cephalopods. But others are indescribable, and plainly much too vast to be any manner of cetacean or squid. Occasionally, she reaches out a hand, and her fingers glide over that alien flesh as it rushes by in the gloom. Sometimes, it seems smooth as any silk, and other times, rough as sandpaper. The haunted, endless night is filled with phantoms, and I am just one more, she thinks. They must wonder at me, too, at what I am, at where so strange a beast could have come from.
And the next leviathan glares back at her with a bulging ebony eye the size of a dinner plate. There’s no pupil in that eye, nor evidence of an iris, nothing to mar such an unfathomable countenance. And then the eye is gone, replaced by a flank adorned with huge photophores, each one glowing with a gentle pale-blue light. The sight delights her, and she extends a hand to stroke the thing as it moves past. And Edith clearly sees the thin, translucent webbing that’s grown between her own fingers, and the long hooked claws that have replaced the nails she chews to nubs. In the muted blue light cast by the bioluminescent creature, she sees that there are fine scales dappling the backs of both her hands, and they shimmer dully, reminding her of the oily, prismatic stone.
Edith opens her eyes, and she is once more merely sitting within the mandala that she’s drawn on Moonstone Beach, thirteen years after the wreck of the North Cape. She’s still clutching the piece of driftwood and shivering in the wind. She looks over her shoulder, hoping to find Sammie there, but sees at once that she’s still alone.
“Sam, I don’t know what I’m meant to listening for,” she says, almost shouting to hear herself over the wind. “I don’t know what it is, but I am listening.”
When there’s no reply, she isn’t disappointed or surprised, because she understood well enough that she wouldn’t be answered. Any answer she needs is right here before her, held within a crab-gnawed and gull-pecked anatomy, that misshapen mound of rotting flesh coughed up by whatever indifferent gods or goddesses or genderless deities call the globe’s ocean their domain.
In the sand before her is a slit, and at first she thinks it is no more than some depression fashioned with her own busy fingers. She leans towards it, and now the wind is speaking, though she cannot say that the words are meant for her ears. She cannot say they are meant for any ears, at all:
There are stories that have no proper beginning. Stories for which no convenient, familiar “Once upon a time . . . ” praeambulum exists. They may, for instance, be contained within larger stories, interwoven with the finest o
f gradations, and so setting them apart is a necessarily arbitrary undertaking. Let us say, then, that this story is of that species. Where it truly began is not where we will start its telling, for to attempt such a thing would require a patience and the requisite time for infinite regression. I may say that the sea had a daughter, though she has spent every day of her life on dry land. At once, the tumult of a hundred questions about how such a thing ever came to be will spring to mind. What is the nature of the sea’s womb? With what or whom did she or he have congress to find himself or herself with child? What of the midwife? What is the gestation time of all the oceans of the world, or its sperm count, when considered as a single being? And, while we’re at it, which being, and from which pantheon, do I mean when I say “the sea”? Am I speaking of the incestuous union of Oceanus and his sister Tethys? Do I mean to say Poseidon, or Neptune, Ægir and Rán, or Susanoo of the Shinto, or Arnapkapfaaluk of the Inuit?
I mean only to say the sea.
The sea had a daughter, but she was orphaned. She grew up in a city of men, a city at the mouths of two rivers that flowed down into a wide bay, fed by other rivers and dotted by more than thirty rocky, weathered islands. Here she was a child, and then a young woman. Here, she thought, she would grow to be an old woman. She’d never desired to travel, and had never ventured very far inland. She had seen photographs of mountain ranges, and read descriptions of the world’s great deserts, and that was sufficient.
Edith places the tip of one index finger into the nearer end the slit in the sand. Except it is not merely sand, though there is something of quartz granules and mica flakes and dark specks of feldspar in its composition. It is flesh crafted from sand, she thinks, or sand painstakingly crafted from flesh. The gross physiology is self evident now, the labia magora and labia minor, the glans clitoris and clitoral hood. It weeps, or simply secretes, something not so different from sea foam. And lying within it is the teardrop-shaped stone that Sammie slipped inside herself while standing in the tub.
Do you think that was such a good idea?
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 46