by Caspian Gray
The hospital called in the middle of the afternoon, when Lisa was napping. She was dreaming one of those domestic half-dreams that came when she was almost awake; in this one she was boiling pasta to make spinach manicotti for dinner. Every time she tried to add the pasta, the box was mysteriously back in the kitchen cabinet, too high up for her to reach without pulling out a chair.
“Is this Lisa Sucharski?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone. It was a harsh voice, particularly when contrasted with the susurrus of boiling water from her dream.
“Yes,” said Lisa. The word rose up her throat like a bubble through olive oil.
“You’re listed as next of kin to,” the voice paused, “Joette Lehman. We regret to inform you—” Lisa stopped breathing. “—that Ms. Lehman has been hospitalized.”
The woman kept talking as Lisa opened her mouth to speak. The words died in her throat and she hung up.
It took a while to find her keys buried in the loose change bowl. Then there were cardboard boxes balanced on top of her car that needed to be moved. The car started easily, and the shift didn’t stick when she switched gears. There was plenty of gas. Lisa pulled out of the garage and into the driveway, then idled there.
She sat for a long time, switching radio stations every time a song came on so that there were only commercials to listen to. Surely it wouldn’t take listening to too many commercials to finally inspire her to start driving.
Eventually, darkness fell.
Eventually, Lisa pulled back into the garage and carefully stacked the cardboard boxes back over the hot hood.
Alberto, a friend of Joette’s from college, drove her home from the hospital. He sat on the front steps with her, not saying much. The two of them went through half a pack of cigarettes with Lisa watching from the window before she went out to join them.
“Welcome home,” she croaked.
Joette took a drag on her cigarette. Either she looked skinnier or she didn’t, but Lisa thought she did. It had only been a few days.
“Thanks,” said Lisa to Alberto. He vacillated between lighting a new cigarette and pocketing his matches.
“No problem,” he said finally. “Happy to help.”
Lisa looked from Joette to him and back again. “Did they fix you?”
“I should go,” said Alberto.
Joette reached over and squeezed his hand as he passed. “Thanks.”
He murmured something back, too quiet for Lisa to hear. Joette watched his retreating back rather than meeting Lisa’s eyes.
“I wish you’d come to the hospital,” Joette said.
“I’m sorry.” Lisa plucked a pill off the front of her sweater. “I tried.” Her sweater was covered in pills. There were so many it was hard to decide which ones most needed her attention. “Are you okay now?”
“Kind of.” Joette sighed. “The office suite next to ours had some kind of infestation, and they brought in exterminators to deal with it. There was a memo sent to the whole building. Anyway, the weird thing was that nobody else seemed to be having bug problems. The hospital thinks that’s what got me sick.”
“Bug chemicals,” said Lisa. “You were poisoned.”
“I guess. Well, not really.” They looked at each other. Lisa reached across the space between them to cover Joette’s hand with her own. “Why are you wearing that sweater?” Joette asked. “It’s so hot out here.”
Lisa looked away. “But you’ll be okay now?”
“I assume so.” Joette sighed. “I called my boss and told him what was wrong, and I guess he’s gonna have our cubicles tested to make sure nobody else gets sick. I got better pretty quick at the hospital; they think I just needed to be away from the exposure.”
“Well, it’s good you’re home, then. Do you have to go back to work tomorrow?”
“Nah. Apparently passing out at the office gave Mike one hell of an insurance scare, so I’ve got all the time off I need.” She smiled. “It’ll be nice to relax for a little while.”
“It’ll be nice to take care of you.”
“It’ll be nice to be taken care of.”
Lisa cut the dosage of drione dust in half. She couldn’t stop and admit defeat, anymore than she could watch Joette shrivel up just like the centipedes inside her. She just needed to slow them down, to buy the time until she could find a cure.
The other centipedes were everywhere. They had the grace to melt into tiny cracks and crevices when Joette came home, but when Lisa was alone, they tormented her. She could not comb her hair without finding them in her brush, could not pour cereal without pouring their segmented bodies into the bowl, could not open the washing machine without finding them scurrying among her wet clothes.
She began to talk to them. She had talked to them all along, muttering curses and threats that she did not know how to carry out. For the first time, the scope of this one-sided conversation broadened. She began asking questions, even offering advice, in place of her old orders and declarations. The centipedes did not reply in words.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, braiding her hair so they had fewer places to hide within it. Knocked to the floor by the brush, they scurried away from her crushing feet.
“Why Joette?” she asked, pouring her bowl of cereal, uneaten, into the sink. The centipedes tried and failed to escape the roar of the garbage disposal; it was a small disappointment that they did not scream when they died. The slurry of their bodies was so thick she had to pull it out of the drain with her hands and drop it in the trash.
“How can I defeat you?” she asked, adding bleach to the laundry though she wasn’t washing whites, then starting the cycle over again, though these clothes were clean. For just a moment, there was the scrabbling of their hundreds of clicking feet against the metal walls of the washing machine. Then, just the flood of water.
The centipedes had nothing to say.
Joette went back to the hospital just over a week later. This time, Lisa called the ambulance herself.
“It’s so strange,” said Joette. “No one else at the office got sick. Mike brought people in. The whole place was clean.”
Lisa put down the telephone, though the 911 operator wasn’t finished speaking, to take a napkin and wipe a thin, bloody string of vomit off Joette’s chin.
“I don’t know,” said Lisa. “Maybe they could come check out the house. Maybe one of the neighbors did something.”
“Then you’d be sick, too.” Joette closed her bleary eyes. Lisa would not have said that Joette was crying, but slow tears were leaking down her cheeks. “I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
I know what’s wrong with you, Lisa wanted to say. The centipedes are fighting their hardest fight. All the hope she had been holding back bubbled up. And we are going to beat them.
“Do you have any gum?” Joette asked. “I don’t want the paramedics to have to deal with my puke breath.”
“They’ve dealt with worse,” said Lisa.
“God. I don’t want to have to go back to the hospital.”
“I’ll come visit you,” Lisa lied. “Alberto will come visit you. The hospital will make you better.” Lisa tried not to resent the hospital for failing to do just that. Their tests were worthless if they missed the centipedes. The doctors were not clever enough to fight them.
“Seriously,” said Joette. “I want some gum.”
Lisa went to the kitchen, digging around the anything drawer for a stick of Juicy Fruit or Doublemint.
She went back to the front porch. “No gum.”
Lisa sat there holding Joette’s hand while they waited for the ambulance to arrive.
Lisa hid the small tub of drione dust in the garage. On television, whenever the police executed a search warrant, something went wrong. Either they found evidence in a car or garage even though the warrant hadn’t said they could search there, or they just didn’t search those places at all and everything turned out fine.
In real life, the police were more compet
ent than that.
They arrested her on the back porch. Lisa slid into the backseat, understanding for the first time why policemen were always carefully guiding the heads of the arrested into their cars.
It had been a long time since she’d left the house.
Euphoberia, the king of centipedes, dragged its bulk across the Earth some 430 million years ago, and could reach almost four feet in length. Euphoberia fed mostly on fish and invertebrates; scientists believe that they missed the opportunity to dine on mammals by almost 200 million years. No one is sure exactly when they went extinct.
“No,” said Lisa again. “I wasn’t trying to kill her. If I wanted to kill Joette, I would have used poison. I used the desiccant because the label said it was safe.”
“Mh-hm,” said Detective Phó. “And what exactly does a desiccant do, Ms. Sucharski?”
Lisa closed her eyes. “It dries out arthropods’ exoskeletons, and then they die of dehydration.”
“And,” continued Detective Phó in that calm voice, “you never imagined that a chemical compound designed to kill insects would have a harmful effect on the human body?”
“It’s not chemicals,” said Lisa.
“Tell me, how have you and Joette been getting along lately? Is there any financial trouble that’s been worrying you?”
She paused.
“If you think that Joette might be cheating on you, for instance, that’s the sort of thing it would be very helpful for me to know.”
Lisa wanted to stand up and walk out. She wanted to go home.
“Joette and I love each other very much,” she said, instead of: I miss her. She works too much. We haven’t had sex or a real conversation in months. Most of all, she didn’t say anything about the centipedes. Lisa did not want to go to the kinds of places where they put people who talked about centipedes possessing their loved ones.
She meant to be cool for the entire interview, to impress them with her sang-froid. Instead, by the end of the first hour, she had stopped talking at all except to demand a lawyer. Detective Phó seemed disgusted as she led Lisa back to her cell.
Joette did not take long to come to her. Detective Phó let them meet in an interrogation room instead of leaving bars between them. Perhaps it was meant as kindness, but Lisa could only think of television cops tricking confessions out of people.
She had already all but confessed.
“Are you feeling better?” Lisa asked.
Joette shook her head. “Jesus, Lisa. Jesus.” She was still for a moment, and then all of her words burst forth like tiny arrows. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why did you do this to me?”
Lisa moved her hands. The scrape of her handcuffs against the table was louder than the echoes of Joette’s outrage.
“I was trying to save you.” Lisa tried to get Joette to meet her eyes. “You know that.”
“I know,” she said, looking almost ashamed. “I just. . . I don’t know why you did this. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”
“But you know what’s wrong with you,” said Lisa. “We both know what’s wrong with you.” She looked around the tiny room. Detective Phó stood in the corner next to the door, her hands folded casually over her crotch as if she had testicles to protect. Lisa wondered, almost idly, who was faster.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Joette. Lisa leaned closer to her. Detective Phó took a step forward, then leaned back against the wall. Under the bright lights, the shadows of the centipedes moving behind Joette’s eyes were so clear.
“Lean forward,” said Lisa, looking past Joette’s eyes and into the insects inside. Joette did.
“Open your mouth.”
Joette did.
Detective Phó abandoned the wall and stepped closer again. Lisa waited until the centipede shadows disappeared, then sprang forward. She hadn’t counted on the heaviness of the cuffs. They clicked against Joette’s teeth and knocked her head back.
There. From underneath Joette’s tongue. A single centipede.
Detective Phó put two hands on Lisa’s shoulder and tried to pull her back. Lisa knocked her off and sprang at Joette.
She threw the centipede to the ground, where it skittered toward the wall. Joette screamed, and Detective Phó recoiled.
There was so little time.
© 2013 Caspian Gray.
Caspian Gray currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he shares an apartment with a tall man and a small dachshund. He is a funeral director's apprentice whose work has previously appeared in magazines such as ChiZine, Interzone, and Odyssey.
Houses Under The Sea
Caitlín R. Kiernan
1.
When I close my eyes, I see Jacova Angevine.
I close my eyes, and there she is, standing alone at the end of the breakwater, standing with the foghorn as the choppy sea shatters itself to foam against a jumble of gray boulders. The October wind is making something wild of her hair, and her back’s turned to me. The boats are coming in.
I close my eyes, and she’s standing in the surf at Moss Landing, gazing out into the bay, staring towards the place where the continental shelf narrows down to a sliver and drops away to the black abyss of Monterey Canyon. There are gulls, and her hair is tied back in a ponytail.
I close my eyes, and we’re walking together down Cannery Row, heading south towards the aquarium. She’s wearing a gingham dress and a battered pair of Doc Martens that she must have had for fifteen years. I say something inconsequential, but she doesn’t hear me, too busy scowling at the tourists, at the sterile, cheery absurdities of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and Mackerel Jack’s Trading Post.
“That used to be a whorehouse,” she says, nodding in the direction of Mackerel Jack’s. “The Lone Star Cafe, but Steinbeck called it the Bear Flag. Everything burned. Nothing here’s the way it used to be.”
She says that like she remembers, and I close my eyes.
And she’s on television again, out on the old pier at Moss Point, the day they launched the ROV Tiburon II.
And she’s at the Pierce Street warehouse in Monterey; men and women in white robes are listening to every word she says. They hang on every syllable, her every breath, their many eyes like the bulging eyes of deep-sea fish encountering sunlight for the first time. Dazed, terrified, enraptured, lost.
All of them lost.
I close my eyes, and she’s leading them into the bay.
Those creatures jumped the barricades
And have headed for the sea
All these divided moments, disconnected, or connected so many different ways, that I’ll never be able to pull them apart and find a coherent narrative. That’s my folly, my conceit, that I can make a mere story of what has happened. Even if I could, it’s nothing anyone would ever want to read, nothing I could sell. CNN and Newsweek and The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Harper’s, everyone already knows what they think about Jacova Angevine. Everybody already knows as much as they want to know. Or as little. In those minds, she’s already earned her spot in the death-cult hall of fame, sandwiched firmly in between Jim Jones and Heaven’s Gate.
I close my eyes, and “Fire from the sky, fire on the water,” she says and smiles; I know that this time she’s talking about the fire of September 14, 1924, the day lightning struck one of the 55,000-gallon storage tanks belonging to the Associated Oil Company and a burning river flowed into the sea. Billowing black clouds hide the sun, and the fire has the voice of a hurricane as it bears down on the canneries, a voice of demons, and she stops to tie her shoes.
I sit here in this dark motel room, staring at the screen of my laptop, the clean liquid-crystal light, typing irrelevant words to build meandering sentences, waiting, waiting, waiting, and I don’t know what it is that I’m waiting for. Or I’m only afraid to admit that I know exactly what I’m waiting for. She has become my ghost, my private haunting, and haunted things are forever waiting.
“In the mansions of Poseidon, she will pre
pare halls from coral and glass and the bones of whales,” she says, and the crowd in the warehouse breathes in and out as a single, astonished organism, their assembled bodies lesser than the momentary whole they have made. “Down there, you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”
“Tiburon is Spanish for shark,” she says, and I tell her I didn’t know that, that I had two years of Spanish in high school, but that was a thousand years ago, and all I remember is sí and por favor.
What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?
I close my eyes again.
The sea has many voices.
Many gods and many voices.
“November 5, 1936,” she says, and this is the first night we had sex, the long night we spent together in a seedy Moss Point hotel, the sort of place the fishermen take their hookers, the same place she was still staying when she died. “The Del Mar Canning Company burned to the ground. No one ever tried to blame lightning for that one.”
There’s moonlight through the drapes, and I imagine for a moment that her skin has become iridescent, mother-of-pearl, the shimmering motley of an oil slick. I reach out and touch her naked thigh, and she lights a cigarette. The smoke hangs thick in the air, like fog or forgetfulness.
My fingertips against her flesh, and she stands and walks to the window.
“Do you see something out there?” I ask, and she shakes her head very slowly.
I close my eyes.
In the moonlight, I can make out the puckered, circular scars on both her shoulder blades and running halfway down her spine. Two dozen or more of them, but I never bothered to count exactly. Some are no larger than a dime, but several are at least two inches across.
“When I’m gone,” she says, “when I’m done here, they’ll ask you questions about me. What will you tell them?”
“That depends what they ask,” I reply and laugh, still thinking it was all one of her strange jokes, the talk of leaving, and I lie down and stare at the shadows on the ceiling.
“They’ll ask you everything,” she whispers. “Sooner or later, I expect they’ll ask you everything.”