Instead, he asks, “Keep going?”
She nods.
“We don’t have too, you know.”
“Yes we do. It’s bad if we do. It’s worse if we don’t. It hurts more if we don’t.” Of course, Michael knows this perfectly well, and there’s the briefest impatience that she has to remind him. Not anger, no, but an unmistakable flash of impatience, there and gone in the stingy space of a single heartbeat.
He dips the sponge into the salt water again, not bothering to squeeze it out, because the more the better. The more, the easier. Water runs down his arm and drips to the hardwood floor. Before they’re finished, there will be a puddle about her bare feet and his shoes, too. Michael gingerly swabs both her hands with the sponge, and at once the vestigial webbing between her fingers, common to all men and women, begins to expand, pushing the digits further away from one another.
Elizabeth watches, biting her lip against the discomfort, and watches. It doesn’t horrify her the same way that the appearance of the gills and the change to her eyes does, but it’s much more painful. Not nearly so much as the greater portion of her metamorphosis to come, but enough she does bite her lip (careful not to draw blood). Within five minutes, the webbing has grown enough that it’s attached at the uppermost joint between each finger, and is at least twice as thick as usual. And the texture of the skin on the backs of her hands and her palms is becoming smoother and faintly iridescent, more transparent, and gradually taking on the faintest tinge of turquoise. She used to think of the colour as celeste opaco, because the Italian sounded prettier. But now she settles for turquoise. Not as lyrical, no, but it’s not opaque, and turquoise is somehow more honest. Monsters should be honest. Before half an hour has passed, most of her skin will have taken on variations of the same hue.
“Yesterday,” she says, “during my lunch break, when I said I needed to go to the bank, I didn’t.”
There are a few seconds of quiet before he asks, “Where did you go, Elizabeth?”
“Choate Bridge,” she answers. “I just stood there a while, watching the river.” It’s the oldest stone-arch bridge anywhere in Massachusetts, built in 1764. There are two granite archways through which the river flows on its easterly course.
“Did it make you feel any better?”
“It made me want to swim. The river always makes me want to swim, Michael. You know that.”
“Yeah, Betsy. I know.”
She wants to add, Please don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to, but she doesn’t. It would be rude. He means well, and she’s never rude if she can help it. Especially not to Michael.
All evidence of her fingernails has completely vanished.
“It terrified me. It always fucking terrifies me.”
“Maybe one day it won’t. Maybe one day you’ll be able to look at the water without being frightened.”
“Maybe,” she whispers, hoping it isn’t true. Pretty sure what’ll happen if she ever stops being afraid of the river and the sea. I can’t drown. I can’t ever drown. How does a woman who can’t drown fear the water?
There are things in the water. Things that can hurt me. And places I never want to see awake.
Now he’s running the sponge down her back, beginning at the nape of her neck and ending at the cleft between her buttocks. This time, the pain is bad enough she wants to double over, wants to go down on her knees and vomit. But that would be weak, and she won’t be weak. Michael used to bring her pills to dull the pain, but she stopped taking them almost a year ago because she didn’t like the fogginess they brought, the way they caused her to feel detached from herself, as though these transformations were happening to someone else.
Monsters should be honest.
At once, the neural processes of her vertebrae begin to broaden and elongate. She’s made herself learn a lot about anatomy: human, anuran, chondrichthyan, osteichthyan, et al. Anything and everything that seems relevant to what happens to her on these nights.
The devil you know, as her grandfather used to say.
So, Elizabeth Haskings knows that the processes will grow the longest between her third and seventh thoracic vertebrae, and on the last lumbar, the sacrals, and coccygeals (though less so than in the thoracic region), greatly accenting both the natural curves of her back. Musculature responds accordingly. She knows the Latin names of all those muscles, and if there were less pain, she could recite them for Michael. She imagines herself laughing like a madwoman and reciting the names of the shifting, straining tendons. In the end, there won’t quite be fins, sensu stricto. Almost, but not quite.
Aren’t I a madwoman? How can I possibly still be sane?
“Betsy, you don’t have to be so strong,” he tells her, and she hates the pity in his voice. “I know you think you do, but you don’t. Certainly not in front of me.”
She takes the yellow sponge from him, her hands shaking so badly she spills most of the salt water remaining in the bowl, but still manages to get the sponge sopping wet. Her gums have begun to ache, and she smiles at herself before wringing out the sponge with both her webbed hands so that the water runs down her belly and between her legs. In the mirror, she sees Michael turn away.
She drops the sponge to the floor at her feet (she doesn’t have to look to know her toes have begun to fuse one to the next), and gazes into her pitchy eyes until she’s sure the adjustments to her genitals are finished. When she does look down at herself, there’s a taut, flat place in place of the low mound of the mons pubis, and the labia majora, labia minora, and clitoris—all the intricacies of her sex—have been reduced to the vertical slit of an oviduct where her vagina was moments before. On either side of the slit are tiny, triangular pelvic fins, no more than an inch high and three inches long.
“We should hurry now, Betsy,” Michael says. He’s right, of course. She has to reach the bathtub full of warm salty water while she can still walk. Once or twice before she’s waited too long, and he’s had to carry her, and that humiliation was almost worse than all the rest combined. In the tub, she curls almost foetal, and the flaps in front of Elizabeth’s gills open and close, pumping in and out again, extracting all the oxygen she’ll need until sunrise. Michael will stay with her, guarding her, as he always does.
She can sleep without lids to shield her black eyes, and, when she sleeps, she dreams of the river flowing down to the ruined seaport, to Essex Bay, and then out into the Atlantic due south of Plum Island. She dreams of the craggy spine of Devil Reef rising a few feet above the waves and of those who crawl out onto the reef most nights to bask beneath the moon. Those like her. And, worst of all, she dreams of the abyss beyond the reef, and towers and halls of the city there, a city that has stood for eighty thousand years and will stand for eighty thousand more. On these nights, changed and slumbering, Elizabeth Haskings can’t lie to herself and pretend that her mother fled to Oregon, or even that her grandfather lies in his grave in Highland Cemetery. On these nights, she isn’t afraid of anything.
THE CHAIN
by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
THE FIRST DAYS were pleasant. Fun, even. Different from normal life. A break. A change—exactly what David needed, and what he’d come there for.
He slept well and rose early, carrying his first herbal tea of the day down to the beach. He took long walks and ate healthy meals, and sometimes when he felt like a cigarette he elected to not have one. He avoided alcohol. He thought about what he might paint, and in the evening sat on the small deck in front of the cottage and read non-taxing fiction or sat gazing calmly into space, nodding affably at people who walked by, as if he really lived here.
Everything flowed. One day led comfortably into the next.
It took a week before the chain began to break.
* * *
On Monday he’d arrived by car down from San Francisco and moved into the cottage. This didn’t take long. The tiny house was thoughtfully set up for vacation rentals, and provided everything he could possibly need e
xcept something to wear and something to do, both of which he’d brought with him in the back seat of his convertible Mini Cooper. Once a source of pride, the car was now battered and prone to malfunction (much like, David occasionally felt, himself).
He put his regular clothes in the drawers in the bedroom. He put his painting clothes in the small garage, along with easel, paints and a stack of canvases. He’d brought ten, a statement of intent. All were three feet square, purely because his supplier in the city happened to have them on sale. Tackling a fixed aspect ratio might be invigorating, and having no choice might also help focus the mind. So he hoped.
The garage had no windows except for a thin frosted strip along the top of the door, but the owner evidently used the space as an occasional workshop and it was artificially well lit via bulbs and fluorescent tubes. It seemed a shame, having driven five hours to such a beautiful part of the coast, to be planning to spend large portions of every day hidden from it—but that was the purpose of being here. To paint. To kick himself back into enjoying his vocation, even caring about it again.
If he really got his groove on, ten canvases wouldn’t be nearly enough for three weeks’ work—his process was to rough out initial masses quickly, returning at leisure to detail and finesse—but should additional ones be needed then he was confident he’d be able to obtain them. Carmel has a bewildering number of art galleries, and is home to people who fill them. They weren’t David’s kind of painter, but that was okay. David wasn’t sure if he was his kind of painter any more either—or any kind of painter at all.
That was what he was here to find out.
* * *
By Wednesday his temporary studio was laid out and ready to go. David was not. This wasn’t procrastination—he was wearily familiar with that pissy little demon, alert to its polymorphic disguises and insidious creep. The need to detox from the city and the last year’s inactivity, coupled with a desire to explore, seemed a reasonable excuse to postpone sequestering himself on such beautiful fall days.
Carmel is an extremely attractive place to stroll around. It’s the first (and rather small) town north of the wilderness of Big Sur, on a ruggedly stunning stretch of coast. There is a craggy cove with a beach, and a great many cypress and eucalyptus and pine trees up and down the narrow streets, at times giving the impression of a village built in a forest. What is most noticeable, however, is the houses.
There are few large dwellings in Carmel—the mansions start further north, on 17 Mile Drive and Pebble Beach and the outskirts of Pacific Grove. Carmel is a collection of cottages, as cute as can be—from perfect little Victorians to jewel-like Gothic and Mission and playful Storybook and Folk Tudor, all cheek-by-jowl, with nothing but narrow strips of intensely manicured garden in between. You wander the streets constantly struck by the dreamlike juxtaposition of styles, stopping to gaze upon one house before realising its neighbour is even more striking, and walking on a few yards to look at it, before having the same realisation about the next dwelling along.
And thus, for David, a few hours would happily pass, and whole mornings and afternoons.
It’s a small place—ten streets in one direction, twelve in the other, made cosy and intimate by all the trees, and whichever way you walk you’ll get to the centre before long. It’s here that (should you somehow have remained in doubt) it becomes clear that Carmel is a place for the wealthy. The centre is quiet and serene, dominated by the sound of birds, the purring of expensive automobiles, the polite chink of silverware. There’s an immaculate little bookstore. Patio restaurants, where waiters in white aprons deliver high-spec food and perfectly chilled glasses of local wines to sunglassed patrons in chinos or dresses in muted shades. A charming grocery market. A few coffee houses—mostly hidden down alleys, as if to make the point there are some people who truly live in this paradise, and everyone else is merely a tourist passing through. No Starbucks, God forbid.
And, of course, there are the galleries.
The art wasn’t all bad, either. Usually it’s axiomatic that the closer a gallery stands to the ocean, the worse its contents will be. The galleries of Carmel are not for enthusiastic amateurs hawking garish sunsets, however. From earliest days the village had been a Mecca for painters who could actually paint, along with poets, writers and free-thinkers of every stripe (though few such could dream of affording to live there now). There’s aesthetically lamentable work on sale, naturally—ominously perfect farmhouses in narcotically bucolic country scenes, anthropomorphised dogs, excessively winsome little girls in ballet outfits—but also plenty of serious stores specialising in admirable California painters of the last hundred years, and plenty of contemporary artists who know what they’re doing, too, and are capable of keeping on doing it.
Unlike, it might appear, David.
His intention had been to avoid the galleries, in order to avoid provoking the acid churning in the guts that comes from experiencing the work of others, while in the throes of personal non-productivity. This didn’t last, and he told himself it was to remind himself that canvases did get finished, and hung up, and bought.
As had David’s, though not recently. Five years ago he could expect to earn ten to fifteen thousand dollars for a painting, less a gallery’s draconian cut, naturally. Then two years ago he’d hit the wall. He’d start work, get as far as blocking out… but a week later realise that he’d never gone back to it. Soon this gap extended to a month, or two, and eventually it got to the point where he’d conceive of a painting and be able to imagine exactly how it might progress, and as a result feel disinclined to even start—knowing it’d be okay, but that there was no real need for it; believing that if he failed to create it, nothing of substance would be lost to the world.
Except, as his bank and other creditors eventually started to remind him, it paid for everything. This information did not help.
It broke the chain.
* * *
Finally, on the Friday afternoon, he went into his temporary studio. He put up a canvas. He lifted a 2B pencil from where he’d placed it in readiness, and quickly outlined some shapes. After ten minutes he pulled the iPhone out of his pocket and consulted a shot he’d taken that lunchtime, in the tiny courtyard of a coffee house hidden in the centre of the village. He put the phone back in his pocket—even when working from reference he needed to feel he worked from memory too—and made minor alterations.
He stood back, looked at what he’d done. It seemed okay. He put the pencil back in its place and walked into the house and had a shower.
* * *
On Saturday morning he found himself back at the same coffee shop. He sat at the same rickety metal table in the courtyard, watching the light on the opposite wall. The wall was more or less white, the kind of white you see on an exterior surface that was painted white a year or two ago, on top of a previous coat of white, and has since then experienced sun, shade, and only very occasional rain.
To the incurious eye, it looked… white. David’s was not an incurious eye, and the wall was what he was hoping to portray. His additions would be shadows. His last successful series of works had involved placing shadows of people on largely featureless walls. A woman sitting, a man standing. A couple together. A suggestion of content through absence. He’d stopped wanting to paint these things, but now he was finding that he did again.
He sat for two hours, drinking three coffees. Usually he’d have one in the course of a morning, two at the most. The brew at Bonnie’s was good, though. It had a nutty flavour, a little smoky. While he sat, he eavesdropped and observed a sequence of locals as they passed through, stopping to chat at the other tables. There was talk of planned or recent trips to Europe, the pleasures of a newly acquired boat, upcoming IPOs in Silicon Valley. This was not the kind of content he wished to suggest.
He left and went back to his temporary studio, where he worked all afternoon. It felt good, and as always when it felt good he was baffled why he didn’t do this all the time, springing out
of bed in the mornings and getting straight to it. Each stroke of the brush seemed to flow from the previous and into the next, urging forward. So why did the chain fall apart so often? Why did it fragment into a series of dull, rusty links that seemed impossible to join together?
Rather than worry at the problem—David did not want to bring activity upon himself by thinking about it, however constructively—he kept working, for once going beyond outlining and starting to actually paint. This wasn’t his process, but maybe this was a good thing. Maybe the process itself was flawed. If there’s one thing he’d learned over the years it was that if something’s working, you keep doing it. Don’t question, don’t second-guess. If you decide later that you don’t like what you’ve done, you can fix it. But you’ve got to have done something first.
So he did.
* * *
That evening, to celebrate, he took himself out to dinner. He chose Max’s mainly on the basis that it had the most attractive patio, overlooking one of the central streets. He drank two glasses of a very crisp Sauvignon Blanc and ate a ribeye, medium rare. The steak was excellent, of course, accentuated before grilling by some kind of spice rub, smoky and a little sweet.
When the waiter came for his plate David asked what was in the spice mix. The man smiled and said it was a house secret. As usual, David found this irritating. He wasn’t going to run off and start his own restaurant on the back of a single recipe.
“Is there coffee in it?”
The waited inclined his head. “You have a good palate.”
“Tastes like the brew they have over at Bonnie’s,” David said.
The waiter smiled again, as if to say that he couldn’t possibly confirm or deny such a speculation, and took his plate away.
Back at the cottage, David found himself wishing he’d had one more glass of wine, or else thought to buy a bottle earlier in the day. To distract himself from this line of thinking he went into the studio, though he never normally worked in the evenings. He picked up his brush.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 29