Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  Lamb stew and potatoes sat mostly untouched on his plate. Homer pushed the food around with his fork. The change of clothes clung to his flesh with an awkward, itchy fit. His mind drifted back to the locked door of the downstairs office where she rested, waited.

  “Is the meal not to your liking?”

  Homer blinked out of his trance to see the barmaid hovering close, too close. “No, everything is quite satisfactory, thank you.”

  She flashed a look that spoke of disbelief in his statement. Homer cut into a chunk of lamb, dragged it through the glop of beige gravy, and choked down the gamy morsel. The food wasn’t unpalatable; by all rights, he should have been ravenous following the arduous hike to the bog and the even slower return to Hill Hampstead. Food and other comforts, however, eluded him. Downshire Woman consumed his thoughts and desires. Dare he think it? Even his secret lusts.

  Homer pushed the plate away and reached for his billfold. On his way toward the stairs, he diverted to the sealed office and tested the door. Though locked, his anxiety worsened. Homer leaned his forehead against the door and whispered, “I am here, my love. You are not alone.”

  He booked return passage to New York onboard the luxury liner, due in Queenstown. Homer paced his room, unable to sleep. The cold April rain beat against the inn’s eaves and windows. He struggled to breathe. It was, he thought, a condition like drowning while also still very much alive.

  And then for the first time the notion struck him: most of the bodies recovered from the brine…hers was not the norm. Unlike Kreepen Man, discovered in 1903, Rendswühren Man, exhumed in Germany in 1871, Camnish Woman and Gallagh Man long decades before, Downshire Woman’s pose—seeming at rest—ran counter to other findings. Bog bodies in Denmark, Germany, Ireland, and Scotland fell into one of two categories: victims of accident or murder. Those who’d stumbled to their deaths or were dragged there. But not the beauty locked behind the office door. According to her repose, she appeared to have gone to her life’s end in the bog willingly.

  Happily even, judging by her tranquil expression.

  Homer closed his eyes. When he opened them, three black dots formed between the blinks, each perfectly round like the beads pinned to Downshire Woman’s clothing.

  She soon visited him when, at last, he drifted into a state not quite asleep.

  “You will not leave me, my love,” she sang in a voice that seduced him fully, and sent ribbons of electricity jolting through his consciousness.

  Homer opened his eyes and saw that she was stretched across the lumpy mattress beside him in her funereal pose. The bedclothes were damp. Tiny creatures born of the swamp undulated over and about her—segmented worms with hard shells, things with multitudes of short, skittering legs, pallid nightmares with unblinking amphibian eyes.

  Homer gasped himself awake in the dark room. Rain lashed the Rampion Inn. In the darkness, he tested the blanket beside him—dry. Only a dream. Still, as raindrops pelted the windows, he sensed her there, somewhere in the shadows. The dream’s revulsion evaporated. He began to sweat. The collar of his nightshirt tightened.

  She called his name. “Homer.”

  He sat up, aware of his thirst, his erection. Three black circles formed in the dark space before his eyes, reverse full moons that shone with a sinister kind of light.

  “I hear you,” he said, though Homer couldn’t tell if he spoke with his lips or thoughts. “Yes, my beauty. My love…”

  And then he felt the water engulf him, acidic and black, filled with primordial creatures. Homer clawed at his throat for breaths that refused to come. He was drowning, sinking. But he stopped caring, because she appeared to him in a vision that bloomed among the dark moonlight, alive as she once had been. Flowers, not sphagnum, wreathed her body, which glowed with an aura of sallow yellow color.

  “Who are you?” he thought/asked. The words resonated with a hollow ripple, like notes of rain falling into stagnant puddles. He realized he could breathe again, though not exactly.

  “I am…,” she said.

  He floated beside her and rested against the young beauty, conscious of the cold in her touch when she unfolded her hands and wrapped them around him in embrace.

  “I am yours.”

  Homer exhaled. The vision shorted out. Instead of dark circles, he now stared at a section of pale white rectangle glowing in the bald illumination of an electric light. He sucked in a deep breath and woke fully. For a terrible instant, he had no idea where he was. Turning around, recognition dawned.

  He stood outside the locked office door, hunched on bare feet and clad only in his nightshirt. For another second or so longer, the euphoria at having been with her in the bog persisted. Then an absence even deeper filled Homer, and the embarrassment at having wandered out of his room in a state of undress while in the throes of a somnambulant spell didn’t register.

  Homer leaned against the door and pressed his cheek against the wood. Cold worked through his sweaty skin. He could almost see her through the door. Almost.

  “I’m here,” he whispered.

  Then he remembered her pledge and realized the opposite was true.

  He was hers.

  Hers, and Homer found himself strangely at peace with the notion, even selling himself on the belief that he would be okay when she went on display and others fell enamored with her beauty. He would see her daily. Nightly. She would no longer be lost to the bog, alone. And neither would he.

  “Mister Callison?” a voice asked—the Rampion Inn’s keeper, Mister Donnelly.

  Homer peeled his face off the door and straightened. “I was checking to make sure the door was secured.”

  “Aye, you were,” said Donnelly.

  Though he made no direct contact with the other man’s eyes, Homer gleaned Donnelly’s expression from the periphery.

  “What’s in there is priceless,” he said, and continued on his way past Donnelly to the staircase.

  Donnelly be hanged, by morning he and his acquisition would be on their way to Queensland for the next long leg of the journey back to New York. Homer mopped his face with the back of his hand and entered his room. He imagined her in the bed beside him, wreathed in flowers. But when he shut his eyes and attempted to sleep, she again crawled with unwanted visitors from murky, stagnant pools, and the damp nightshirt clung to his flesh, making it impossible to drift off.

  The giant stretched across Cork Harbor, a sight unlike any seen before. Homer’s inner voice urged him to absorb its majesty—he was part of history on that April day, witness to the amazing. Only that modern miracle of science and industry didn’t interest him. His concern was foremost with miracles from the past.

  “Be careful,” he snapped at the four workers hired to transport Downshire Woman from dock to stateroom.

  At the onset, the crate wrapped in thick folds of burlap had been consigned to cargo. But special consideration from the museum—and Homer’s demands, made clear through several biting remarks—sealed the arrangement. The crate could not be trusted to survive intact in cargo, and that was the end of the argument. The men carried it amidships, through C Deck, to Homer’s first-class suite.

  The room was designed in the Queen Anne style, with scalloped ceilings and exquisite rosewood paneling. The bed was far better than that at the Rampion Inn; better than any in New York, Homer discovered after tipping the men and locking the stateroom’s door.

  Sleep claimed him almost immediately. Only sleeping felt more like falling, falling, through days and centuries. When he struck the icy water, she was waiting.

  She was alive. Young, though she moved with a manner that suggested far greater years and experience. Beautiful, so beautiful, but there was an edge to the maiden’s looks, a sharpness. She would always possess men’s hearts, and so they plucked hers at the very peak of blossoming. Carved out her heart and filled the gap with common earth. A blood sacrifice to the Three who ruled from the summit of Drum Keenagh whose names men had forgotten but still dreamed of; the Three wh
o could destroy a harvest, and had—or grant bounty through bloodshed. She was lonely, and her looks were a curse. They tore out her heart and offered it to the Three in the hope they would be blessed.

  Homer watched, a disconnected observer standing on the edge of the bog, aware of the sphagnum shifting beneath his feet. Spongy, almost not there, but there enough to register, he watched as the filthy men who’d done the deed lowered her corpse into the water. And again, he was struck by the smile frozen on her lips, as though their filthy hands somehow released her, as though she understood that living was the curse; that through death, she would be blessed forever and made immortal.

  Something glinted above the bog. Homer struggled to break focus with the image of Downshire Woman as she sank into the brine. He gazed up and cold rushed through his core, deeper than bones or marrow. Soul? Suspended in the overcast sky above the bog, there but not fully like the carpet of sphagnum beneath his soles, were three perfect black circles. The sinister orbs hovered behind the clouds, ghostly and colossal afterimages. Three obsidian moons had jumped down from orbit to levitate above the mountain.

  No, not moons. Homer felt the truth slither across his prickling epidermis with the unmistakable sensation of being watched. Three giant black eyes stared down through the clouds.

  The eyes shifted.

  Toward him.

  Homer jolted awake in the darkness, unsure of where he was. The trio of obsidian eyes hovered in the darkness, their focus trained upon him. The eyes closed, and he grew conscious of a different sensation, that of a beating heart, one so powerful that it shook his surroundings.

  He remembered his location and faced the direction of the pulse. The crate. The mummified corpse from the bog, beautiful Downshire Woman. Homer’s heart quickened in counterpoint for different reasons.

  He slid out of bed, slipped against the burlap-covered crate, and absorbed the vibrations rippling through the stateroom.

  “I’m here, beloved,” he whispered.

  Then he realized the pulses weren’t from heartbeats. The colossus had set sail and was steaming across the Atlantic, headed toward New York.

  She would become not only his work but his life. In a daze, Homer dressed in the one good suit he’d brought with him—midnight blue, fashionable and prestigious. He knotted his tie, tied the laces of his new wingtips, and wandered out of his stateroom for the first time since arrival, to D Deck. He was ravenous and soon discovered why: the whole of April the thirteenth had passed by while Homer slumbered. He hesitated leaving her, his new reason for being, but Homer sensed his world was soon about to change and the occasion needed to be marked if not exactly celebrated. Besides, the museum had spent a small fortune booking his passage home from Ireland. They would expect their money’s worth.

  He chose the First-Class Dining Saloon over the Café Parisien, drawn to its immensity. The saloon stretched between the second and third funnels and was, he assumed, the smoothest ride available onboard the luxury liner, judging by the absence of any vibration working up through floor tiles crafted to resemble Persian carpet.

  The table and chairs were made from oak, the style Jacobean. Opulence and newness filled the space, along with the clink of glasses and the scrape of silverware across plates. Homer sat alone at the table and drank in the debauched gluttony around him—a ten-course meal that began with oysters and then featured consommé Olga, poached salmon in a mousseline sauce with cucumbers, filet mignon, roast duckling with apple sauce, creamed carrots, roast squab and cress, cold asparagus vinaigrette, pâté de foie gras served with celery, Waldorf pudding, and, finally, French ice cream.

  Homer hesitated. He was surrounded by hundreds of souls but also alone. Alone, until the beautiful young woman approached the table where he sat by himself and, without waiting for an invitation or for Homer to pull out her chair, took a seat.

  They faced one another across the table.

  “Eat,” she urged.

  He couldn’t be sure that her lips moved. From the periphery, he noted the three black circles pinned to her tunic.

  As the courses arrived Homer ate like it was his last meal. Ate, like she had according to his vision from that long ago night before they tore out her heart and sacrificed her to the Three.

  At one point, Homer realized the chair across from him was empty. He wiped his mouth on the linen napkin and nodded.

  He made it to the deck. The chill in the air instantly cut through clothes and skin and attempted to settle into Homer’s marrow. The Atlantic rolled past far beneath, an oily black abyss that stunk of brine and fish. From the rail, Homer buried his eyes into the dark depths and revisited the bog, where she had willingly gone, a smile fixed upon her lips. New York no longer loomed at the end of the horizon, too distant to be seen. If he looked up, Homer knew Drum Keenagh would tower before him, with three empty eyes perched above its time-eroded summit.

  The Three were close, watching.

  “I will honor her,” he whispered. “Guard over her, my beauty, my life. I will keep her company, and love her for all time.”

  Homer closed his eyes and exhaled. His next conscious thought came at 11:40 as the behemoth’s starboard bow struck the iceberg, shocking him out of the trance.

  The order was given. Lifeboats were uncovered. A distress rocket sailed up, detonating somewhere far short of the unfeeling stars that speckled the cold night sky. More explosions followed from rockets and the vessel herself, which rapidly filled with water.

  “Women and children first!” crewmen called, and Homer’s only thought was for her.

  He attempted to reach her but was impeded by the throng of passengers streaming out of staterooms and cabins. So many people, announced by screams as terror thickened and sweated through the corridors. Then the doomed Titanic itself, holding its head low in shame, held him back. The luxury liner was not unsinkable as trumpeted, and seemed to concede the truth by aiming its bow beneath the icy water.

  Tears clouded Homer’s eyes. “No,” he said. And then he shouted the pledge, even as the ship was coming apart around him. “I won’t leave you!”

  The first lifeboat was lowered containing only twenty-eight souls though it was capable of carrying sixty-eight. Water surged into the ship. The tilt on the behemoth’s deck grew steeper, steeper.

  Homer stood frozen, barely aware of the hands of the two crewmen who dragged him away from C Deck and from reaching her. Around him, bodies scrambled to board the last of the lifeboats scurrying away from the Titanic. There was no way those few craft could hold the multitudes.

  The word passed quickly through the crowd in angry shouts—“Every man for himself!”

  An eighth distress rocket exploded overhead. Homer looked up. The flash waned. He blinked. Three obsidian circles superimposed across the insides of his eyelids.

  She was down there, submerged again beneath the icy water. As men began to dive from the deck, swimming toward the flotilla of escaping lifeboats, Homer closed his eyes and waited.

  A deafening crack of thunder split the luxury liner in two, and then he was falling. Homer struck the water. The last rational spark of his inner voice told him to surface, to swim—swim for his life toward the boats, because there was still a chance. But then he heard her voice, beckoning to him from the depth.

  “You promised to be with me, my love. Forever.”

  Homer opened his eyes. Far below, a spark of yellow-green light broke the darkness. It sank quickly out of sight.

  I’m coming, Homer thought.

  Then he exhaled the last sip of air from his lungs and breathed in the briny water.

  UNDERWATER FERRIS WHEEL

  by Michael Bailey

  The lanky gentleman in the pinstriped suit and moth-eaten neck ruffle staggers forward. He holds a card for you to take: COME RIDE THE UNDERWATER FERRIS WHEEL.

  There is a mixed scent of caramel corn, candied apples, corndogs, and spilled beer as Cate waits her turn in line with her son. The trailer has a sign lit with small y
ellowing bulbs, which works cordially with the other food trailers to light up the otherwise dark path of sweets, meats, and deep-fried foods on sticks.

  She lets go of Ian long enough to dig in her purse for money.

  “Large cotton candy,” she says to the man leaning over the counter.

  “Stick or bagged?” he says, pointing to the prefilled plastic bags of rainbow clouds lining the inside of the trailer.

  In back, a man wearing a hairnet spins pink silk onto a cone of white paper.

  She takes in the smells of hot sugar and oil.

  “Stick,” Cate says, and then adds a couple corndogs to the order.

  She turns to her son to see if he wants ketchup or mustard or both, but he’s gone. The couple standing in his place looks past her to the menu.

  “Ian?”

  She expects him at the ticket counter because he wanted more rides, not food, and he isn’t there, nor is he wandering around the carny games across the promenade.

  The others in line don’t seem bothered that he’s disappeared.

  Cate holds a twenty-dollar bill instead of her son and no longer is she hungry, the appetite for junk food replaced with a gut-wrenching feeling of losing him. The man leaning through the window balances a pair of hefty golden corndogs in one hand, the other expecting money. She hands him the bill, not remembering having taken the cotton candy.

  “Ma’am?”

  He holds her food, calling for her as she calls for Ian.

  “Did you see a boy,” Cate says to the couple, her hand waist high to estimate height, “blonde hair, red and white striped shirt?”

  Ian had chosen his outfit to match the tents he’d seen from the road when they were first setting up the carnival, she knew, because he had pestered her the entire week to go.

  Shaking their heads, they take her place as she steps out of line.

  Hundreds fill the food court and labyrinth of walking paths.