He went home to Oakland the next summer, carrying among his dorm-room possessions three books from Solange’s library and an oil painting from 1919, a Vorticist’s ocean in harsh malachite and the salt-white of tumbled bone. He did not dream, then or ever, of Solange Adair.
§
“My father,” Gorgo said, into the afternoon quiet. “He left me a book.”
In the shadow of her hood, her face looked alien again, all eyes and curves of colorless shell. Much to Anson’s surprise, Tony had left her clothes after all, in a grocery bag in the bedroom with an illegible note hand-markered on the side. They looked like secondhand potluck, but the label-less black jeans fit well enough and once she had sorted out a red-and-white Breton-striped shirt and a dark hoodie from the wad of T-shirts and underthings, the fierce springiness with which she moved—bathrobe slung over one arm, rejected clothes bequeathed to the already chaotic bed—left him slightly taken aback, as if a barnacled rock on the seafloor had suddenly split a mouth open and lunged for its prey. Her feet were still bare, the bones as visible in them as the rays in a fin. She had disdained the Neighborhoods T-shirt, which made Anson smile. She did not look any more enthused about the situation, resting on the farther arm of the couch with her toes curled into a gap between cushions, but they had drunk enough tea to require heating another kettle, and eventually Anson had offered the contents of his backpack to her, mostly a choice of canned soups and the most plausible-looking of the refrigerated sandwiches. Making lunch in an unfamiliar kitchen gave him a moment of postgraduate vertigo, never mind that he had not taken classes since Bush’s first term of office. Tuna salad and tomato soup later, he stacked the plates in the sink and settled into the armchair drawn cater-corner to the couch to read. However closely he was supposed to watch Gorgo, he did not think it extended to ignoring an unexpected shelf of DAW paperbacks.
“He died six years ago. A friend of the family had to track me down to tell me. I hadn’t seen him since the divorce. Which wasn’t so much a divorce as my mother finally throwing all his stuff out into the street and screaming that if he said one more thing about taking me down to the sea in my time, she was calling the cops and taking her chances with a restraining order.” Her voice hardened in mimicry of a dialogue she must have heard in too many variations, intractable as oil and sea. “I told you everything when we married. I never lied to you. This flesh, it’s temporary. When the changes of the life to come begin, then you’ll see who I really am. Who I always was all along, underneath. Which was her cue to tell him to call his doctors, until she gave up and started calling his doctors herself, at which point she generally found out he’d never filled any of his prescriptions and usually missed most of his appointments. Rinse, repeat, fuck that shit. A month after she kicked him out, we moved. I never”—sardonically for the cliché, but he saw how her pale throat tightened—“saw him again.”
Toward the end of their time in the charmed space of Pinckney Street, Anson had sat all afternoon on a loft bed with Isobel, neither of them speaking as she rested her head in his lap and played the same track from Rachel’s The Sea and the Bells over and over again. Fabulous as a unicorn, twenty years old and already lashless and browless, the bones of her skull warping beneath her skin like the grinding drift of tectonic plates, her father’s blood nearly bursting her veins in its eagerness to reach the sea. Her mother had gone willingly to a bride-bed of rockweed and clamshells and borne her much-wanted sea-child in a haze of antipsychotics, already dissociating at the smells of salt and blood; her scars had nearly healed in nine months, but they shocked the obstetrician anyway. He thought of his father patiently sponging his wife’s shedding skin with seawater and the herbs she had gathered or bought herself, still human enough that the slowness of the changes ached where a sudden transformation would have soothed.
Anson closed Merlin’s Mirror and asked gently, “When did he go down?”
“He didn’t.” Gorgo gave him a narrow grey smile. “He died of cancer first. CTCL—cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. First you break out in a rash, then it turns out the rash is malignant, then it metastasizes and then you die. He didn’t see a doctor until it was way too late; he thought it was the changes coming on. He’d been waiting his entire life for the sea to come and cleanse him and take him away and it never did. I’ll never even know if it would have. You can live years with that kind of cancer, but only if you notice that you’ve got it. And he didn’t exactly trust doctors, anyway. He always thought they’d see something strange in him and—I don’t even, dissect him, institutionalize him, whatever you worry about if you’re a fucked-up fish-person. He had a couple of diagnoses, my mother said. He didn’t write about any of that.”
At Anson’s querying look, she explained, “He’d written a journal for me. He started it with the time he was thirteen and dreamed of the moon. I think the oldest parts must have been right after I was born; it was in years of different handwriting and he’d gone back and edited some of it later. He wrote down the litanies, as many of them as he could remember, prayers and observances and even some of the instructions for sacrifice, even though there’s no way he could have participated in one. He was born in Sheboygan—I looked it up after he’d died. Waite was his mother’s name. He changed it sometime before meeting my mother, which was maybe the one unambiguously nice thing he did for me. I had a crappy enough childhood without having to deal with Szajewicz.”
She spelled it for him with a notecard and a pen from his backpack: small, neat, hard-pressed handwriting, half-print. The diffident noise he made in response was a direct inheritance from his father.
“My grandmother’s name was Zychlinsky.”
“Fine, maybe that works in hippie country. The point is, I didn’t know till he was dead. My mother didn’t know. And he just kept fucking being like that. Parts of the book were like a memoir. He worked in a cannery in Alaska, way out on the peninsula by the Aleutian Islands. He had some kind of job on an oil rig off Newfoundland. He never went to Innsmouth, or if he did, he didn’t say anything about it. But he tried once, in 1968 or ’69, to talk to one of the men who’d been part of the original investigation, a retired prohi agent named Julius Harvey. The guy not only wouldn’t let him in, he called the cops and my father spent a night in jail in Queens for getting in a fight with the arresting officer.” Briefly, Gorgo looked away to the window, where gulls were roosting on the asphalt shingles of the house across the street. “After that was a page explaining how to curse an enemy of the deep cities with the hunger of the moon and the indifference of the sun and the desire of the abyss. On the facing page was a design like a maze or a fishing weir, to be drawn with the entrails of a young shark and the dried egg cases of a whelk and a knife boiled with sea salt—he put an asterisk at the center without saying what it stood for. Then he went back to talking about how much he was looking forward to seeing me in my true form, in the endless days beneath the water. He never dated any of the entries. I don’t know how old I was then.”
Tony had not mentioned a book, or anything other than a woman with a name he recognized. “What happened to it—your father’s journal?”
Gorgo opened one hand, fleetingly boneless as anemones. “I brought it with me when I came here. According to your cousin, I didn’t have it, or my clothes, or my duffel bag, when he found me. I didn’t have a room for the night; I didn’t have anything except what I took to the beach with me. So either it’s down by the rocks or the sea’s got it.” Her voice was the cool edge he remembered, daring him to respond with any emotion. “You want to go look for it? Sea air’ll do us both good.”
Anson said instead, “Why did you come here?”
He had wanted to ask her for hours; now that he had, he was thinking of Lelian with his long wrists and his soft natural hair, kneeling at the marshy edge of the Atlantic to touch his fingers to the sky reflecting like faience between stems of cordgrass and say, in a wonderment so close to pain that Anson almost did not want to look at him, It’s singin
g. Tony in his indefatigable denim jacket, leaning on the rail of the Summer Street Bridge to watch the moon jellies blooming in the cloudy green water, some July past when he still had hair for the harbor breeze to tousle. You can’t imagine what it looked like at its height. I’ve been shown it and I can’t imagine. It was any fishing port at the turn of the century and it was a beacon, like the Windward Islands were before it. Like a bell sounding, Y’ha-nthlei resounding with it. Strong as the scars left where two worlds meet. Meredith murmuring sleepily from the other side of a well-worn feather pillow, Just as well. I’d follow you down and then where would you be?
“What did you think you were going to find? Innsmouth was scattered in 1928—it was camouflaged as a bootlegging bust, but it was a tiny little genocide, right here in the heart of open-minded Massachusetts. They took people away. The government wouldn’t say where, but we know most of them never made it down to the sea. They burned the church. They burned books. Supposedly they even tried to dynamite the reef, though that might just be newspaper exaggerations of the time—it’s not like there are a lot of reliable records between the federal cover-up and the razing of the town, everything but sowing the ground with salt. So whatever there was of a centralized religion of Dagon, it all precipitated out to less-than-half-breeds like my family, who were far enough from the epicenter of Innsmouth that the Bureau of Investigation didn’t come knocking at their doors to ask if it could maybe measure their skulls and borrow their family heirlooms, thank you. Or my cousin Tony, whose great-grandparents got the hell out of town in the middle of the night and never came back in their lifetimes; that was their grandchildren or their children, decades later, banking that there was no one left in Gloucester or Ipswich or Newburyport who would recognize the old look outside of urban legends—and the fish-people’ll get you if you don’t watch out! Generations dying land-stranded to keep the secret, or simply because they didn’t know what to do when they started to change. There are true-bred half-deep now and do you know how old they are? My age, maybe. That’s how long it took to reestablish the old ways with Y’ha-nthlei. Or so my mother told us, before she went down.” Suddenly exhausted, he trailed off, “It’s not like she talks to me these days.” From the way the silence rang in the room, he was afraid he had been shouting.
Gorgo said very tightly, arms crossed in her hoodie and her eyes as black as the benthic zone, “I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I just wanted the sea.”
“I’m sorry,” Anson said, and meant it.
She made a restless half-shrug in response, something like scorn in the movement: flicking off his sympathy. “I do, you know.”
“Do what?”
“Dream of Y’ha-nthlei.” Her eyes closed and opened with the nictitating membrane across them, glaucous as sea-ice. “I dream of cities and they sing like whales. I dream of strangers in a sunken reef and they call me by name. I can drink salt water, I can lie in a cold bath for hours. I just can’t fucking breathe.”
He could see her then, momentary and clear as the dreams he had never shared: a black-haired woman with unbending eyes, her duffel bag over her shoulder and her breath clouding less than it should in the dry freezing air, waiting at train stations and bus stops like a mermaid in winter clothing, hellbent as a salmon on its spawning grounds. The moon lulled her down the tide-road every night in dreams, the sea-doors opened to her from between the lines of her father’s book. Her head already knew the weight of Y’ha-nthlei’s jewelry, undying gold and the living ornament of sea-things that had died from the waters above millennia ago; her hands had learned the writhe and hollow of sculptures that had never seen the sun, fin-flicked for centuries by the passage of suppliants and priests. If she had not yet tasted family blood, she knew its secret tang of salt and iron on her tongue. But she stuck in the sea’s throat: the road broke up like spring ice beneath her, the jewels turned to half-picked cockles and rotting weeds, the doors slammed closed. The only blood she swallowed was her own. It was no leap to imagine her in Trina’s tiny bathroom, running the tap cold until even her siren’s fingers ached testing the water, turning headfirst into its shallow, sufficient sanctuary like a dolphin gathering for the dive. From the other side of the water, she could see the abyss opening for her, even if it was the wrong one.
He said abruptly, “Get your coat,” and after she had stared at him for a moment, “Or find one. You’re right. We’ll both do better with some fresh air.”
§
From the white curl of the tide-line, Gorgo called, “Your cousin’s going to shit when he finds out you let me out of the house.”
They were not the only people on Good Harbor Beach in the dead eye of winter, but at least they were not picking their way between beach towels and folding chairs, children clambering up the massive ledges of granite streaked weed-green and brown as shipwrecked wood. The clouds had turned shale-grey with afternoon, but patches of sunlight brightened and faded as randomly on the strand as the watering in silk. The tide was drawing out, patterning scales into the sand as it ran; it left stones and shells behind like windbreaks. Anson had counted three razor clam shells and the sea-matted feathers of some bird’s outstretched, amputated wing. Gorgo stooped and bent far more often, but he could not see what she was collecting—Codd marbles, dogwinkles, the hairpin bones of a flounder for all he knew. The coat she had found in the bedroom closet was probably Tony’s, a men’s black leather blazer that made her look like a spy in a ’60’s television show so long as she kept her hood back; when she pulled it up, Anson refrained from telling her Meredith’s latest rant about hipster fashion. He called back now, “My cousin has been disagreeing with me ever since I blew off a Splashdown show to make out with the smartest boy in Philosophy of Physics,” and hoped the movement he could see across the pale smudge of her face was a smile. He did not expect it. Careless as she looked with her hands in the blazer’s pockets and the hoodie unzipped—no gloves, no scarf, only the candy-striped Breton shirt between herself and the teeth of February—she had trembled like a hunting cat at the first salt smell on the wind. Past Thatcher Road, she was hardly seeing him at all.
He had left two text messages for Tony and a quick hand-scrawled note, tucked into the mailbox with the keys. There was nothing to be done about the blazer or the black combat boots Gorgo had borrowed from the assortment under the coat rack, but he had washed the dishes and left them drying in a slant of cider-gold light and written another letter for Trina, signed with his own name after all. He had met her maybe twice in the ten years since Tony had introduced them, a college medievalist turned tech writer with a feathery brush of sugar-brown hair and a Greek fisherman’s cap she had plated like a backpack with buttons and pins; he had never seen the old look in her, but then again he had never asked what she saw in him beyond Tony’s vague and all-encompassing cousin. After another look at his thank-you note, he had shelved the rest of the soups from Tedeschi’s in her pantry and restacked all thirty-three issues of National Geographic.
They had found nothing after half an hour, but he had not really imagined they would, not after nearly a day’s worth of high and low tides and beachcombers. There were Canada geese in the yellowed saltgrass beyond the boulders, black-and-white mergansers and some rusty-backed waterbird he did not recognize bobbing farther out on the wind-rucked water; he bent to turn over a tumble of seaweed, reddish-olive strings and pods as cold and rubbery as a monster-movie prop, but there was nothing beneath it except more sky-grey sand. He had already passed a pair of well-bundled dog-walkers and a runner in an angelfish’s electric red and black. At the corner of his eye, he saw Gorgo crouched with her fingers in the running tide. She stood with something shining in her hands: when it dripped through her fingers, he saw it was only the sea.
She glanced up only a little when Anson joined her, eyes half-lidded against the wind. “Recess over?”
“Just seeing how you are.”
“Still breathing.” Her voice cocked challengingly. “Why?”
&
nbsp; He and Lelian had been the ones to pack out Isobel’s apartment, scarcely a week into his junior year of college when she finally went down to the sea. She had been living out of her studio by then, a high-windowed rough masonry loft in a former warehouse overlooking the Fort Point Channel: light-filled, empty of almost everything else but a futon mattress in a nest of blankets and the necessary paraphernalia of painting, finished canvases stacked against the walls, unfinished ones still on the easel or lying on the broad-beamed floor. Pieces of light-colored clothing looked like shed skins, dropped haphazardly among the stacks of oversized books and CDs. Even her keepsakes were few and scattered, turning up inside boxes of empty paint tubes or hidden in a rack of solvents, fixatives, and rags—the sand-dollar-stoppered green glass jar in which she had kept Gibraltars and Black Jacks, the string of iridescent purple plastic beads Anson had caught at an unexpected parade at the Big E, a blue-and-white T-shirt from the New England Aquarium, the very last time they had all gone together and Isobel spent nearly all her time in front of the electric eel, gloved fingertips pressed to the glass as though caressing the silt-cloud softness of its skin, listening to the crackle of its attention ranging through its artificial river basin. They did not work in silence, but there seemed very little to say: in some ways it was a wonder that she had hung on to anything of the land at all. There were damp marks all across the floorboards, tracked stickily into her sheets. The harbor-smell in the linseed-tinted air was dizzyingly strong.
He had not planned to take any of her paintings, despite the knowledge that she had left them to anyone who cared; he knew Tony had always loved the smear of red pouring into yellow and sea-green called we paint our own doors and that she had painted the heart’s hook tugs home for Lelian, blurring tetra-blue and silver into the warm burnt umber of his skin, but Anson at the end of his sophomore year had fallen headlong into Norman Bel Geddes and the industrial design of the future and felt obscurely overextended taking care of the one painting he owned. All the same, he could not pack them up without knowing they were the last he would ever see of Isobel. She had worked to the end in the deep, vibrating colors she had loved, even as her palette narrowed to a hot-hearted undersea and already abstract forms diffused into an unending tidal roil. The final canvases looked as thickly sculpted as knifework, but she had used her own clawed webs on them, her own milky spit to moisten the oils. Then he found the small paintings, none larger than a page from a hardcover book: she had scratched words through the heavy impasto of each one, a mosaic of fragmentary litanies: come deep-spawning father come mother of endless waves come treasurer breaker of all our salt-bottled hearts. He was not crying when Lelian found him, coming upstairs with more boxes from the car, but he was making sounds he did not realize until his cousin put an arm around him and the embarrassment brought him back to himself. Shaving his head had only made Lelian hotter; it had not made him any more interested in big geeky white boys, especially not ones who had just broken up with their first boyfriends in an argument that began over Brian Molko. But he held Anson through his dry grief, and found him extra garbage bags and packing peanuts to cushion the five small canvases with, and said nothing afterward that made it worse. He locked up the studio behind them and turned in the keys.
Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Page 17