by Neil Clarke
Chena picked one up too, the size of clasped hands and scrolled tight as a flemished rope, and absent-eyed held the tiny opening to her ear: listening to her own lack of pulse, Dee reckoned though maybe not, so intent was she; and then dropped it chirking. “These are the dead.”
Dee’s Coyote-self knowing, saying: “Yes,” and seeing it was true as the word slid from her mouth.
Chena: “He’s a shell. Still you want him?”
And Dee nodded.
Wren added, practical she: “Good thing it’s forever-night, because it will take all night to find him, huh.”
Uncertain they stood looking this and that way: shells everywhere and the ravel-lorn waves, and all beyond Tierce’s light, dark as a cave. Wren speaking at last, quick-eyed as all birds: “There;” and they looked a way along down the beach beneath the cliff, and there were rocks pinnacled even higher than the shells. “A tide-pool.”
“Is there tide here?” Chena asked knowing No. No moon, so no tide.
On the night beach, distance was mutable or even irrelevant. Still, crossing took time and they walked for a while and a second while and more whiles still, to the rocky place Wren saw, the un-tided pinnacled pool.
Waning light from Tierce’s fire, as they shuffled through the shells of the chirpling, chinkering dead, speaking perhaps to one another though not to Dee as she leaned low and listened; nor to Wren, tipping her head close to the largest she saw, a whelk the size of a sleeping hound, and hearing nothing, no thing at all. Yet would not step inside the shell’s curling lip: no fool Wren.
It was hard to see the pillaring rocks clearly, scarce-lit to one side by the strange ocean’s glow, and to the other by Tierce’s fire and the half of the sky that still held stars: the dayworld’s moon long gone by now.
Wren could not fly but she was smaller than the others and not so careful with stepping on the shells, and so Wren sandpipering down to the water: “No tide,” she said. “The water just moves, doesn’t go anywhere, is all.”
Dee slower followed, for she kept picking up shells and listening for Jace, and Chena slowest of all though she listened only once: and lifted a cowrie folded pretty as a cunt, to which she harked for a time and then shook her head and replaced it carefully, and thereafter would not step upon even the smallest but pushed them aside as she passed.
Wren walking: “This is all they can do, the dead? Heap up like this?”
Dee thought of Jace alive run-running along a sun-crusted canyon, laughing and his black eyes agleam, and the bright taste of flesh and blood and the matings and the sleeping together coiled, and roiling about in a fight and the all all all of it. Hated being bored Jace, when he was alive.
And why was Jace so special, my dears, O my darlings? What man, what walker on legs and laugher at jokes, is worth all this? And Jace is not, of course, nor any man, all flesh and imperfect unminding; or rather say all men are, and all women. And Chena, who longed for her own sweet Linnel, which is her secret reason for being on the night beach; and Wren and her vast chattering family, aunts and sisters and brothers and bickering uncles back in the day-lands; and also Tierce now forever behind them, squinting through wearying eyes into the skyless dark above the night beach, but thinking of her nestlings asleep.
After all the whiles they walked, they came at last to the rocks.
Wren always with questions: “What exactly are we looking for?”
“Fuck if I know,” Dee said, tired for once and realizing suddenly that she was cold and getting colder. The breath not coming from her mouth (she noticing this again) scared her a little. “Just anything,” and they split up a bit.
Hard walking, or scribscrabbling rather, among rocks rough as new lava, pockmarked as Dee felt through her long fingers and toes, and the holes each filled with water. Stepped forward and sank to her knee. Bent-head she tasted and got salt, but sterile: no flesh-shred shit microlife broth. In a pool, she saw a small fringing glowness and touched it, and it snapped shut anemone-quick, only there was no life to it, she could tell from the touch, just cold light and this movement. Jace, she thought. What can he chase and what does he eat when a shell? And where in this ocean of shells?
A thing flashed by her face, and herself automatic in her hunting she caught it, felt muscle and quick coilings thrown over her hand, a sensation from the desert she knew well from snakes, but boneless this time and beaky, biting her palm without effect. She held the thing up and its wet surface gleamed under Tierce’s soft fading flare of a flame.
It was an octopus, so small that its head fit her cupped hand but it writhing rippled down, hydrostat legs yearning toward the pool until she caught the small beak and pinched it in her fingers and then the creature stopped. “Where is he?” she asked and shook it. “Jace.”
Tentacled her ankle now: another octopus roiling itself up her leg, and suckers this time like cold angry kisses, so she dropped the little one. Was a splash.
The new one was bigger, its head like her head and clearly too big for the pool. So many legs meant many things held, and it clutched her and also the rock, and also a whelk with an unfurling lip and a hole broken through. What’s inside? Dee wondered, and then chilled as she thought it: Nothing. In the dayworld, living-sea cephalopods drilled through shells and sucked their insides to inside themselves: food, and nothing left over but a hollowed-out hush.
So, here: there was death and that was nothing, a shell on a shore; but even that could be taken by these night-beach monsters, and then there was nothinger nothing.
Raging Dee did not bite at wrapping legs; but she called out and in a flash, Chena with her, they tore at the suckered coils—without effect, until Wren.
One copper nail pounded poisons a tree is the story, and maybe as well a many-branched beast. There were no nails but Wren gave it a penny she had carried onto the beach for no reason except that she had it, and perhaps had heard tales. The octopus brought it with the tip of a tendrilling leg to its beak and then everything loosed and was lost beneath the pool’s surface, the whelk and Dee freed.
She grabbed at the shell as it sank. As she listened this time, a flute-shrill whistling of the unbreathing breeze through the hole. Dead, and then deader than dead. But not Jace. She hoped. He was somewhere here still, lost and bored—and someday bored out. Unless she could find him.
“Let’s not do that again,” Chena said. Blood on her leg collecting where she had torn it on rock but not flowing, not here where the heart drove no pulse.
On a pumicey pillar beside, Wren: “We can’t find him, and then this. What now, Dee?”
“Fuck,” said Dee. “We’ll have to do a thing.”
Suspicious Chena, closest sister to Dee and thus knowing the ways of Coyotes too well for her own comfort: “Do what? This is the night beach, the end of all evers.”
“But beyond that?” and Dee pointed across the phorescent, fluorescing sea.
Nodding, Chena: “One shore means another.”
“But no boat to get there,” Wren said. “And how will going there, if There is—how will this change things, Dee? Jace is dead.”
“Is dead gone?” Dee said. “I’ll cross and find out if There is, and come back with an answer, maybe.”
“Or not.” Wren, tart. “Shells are dead and then deader than dead, and no coming back. So. There’s a night beach and maybe a beach nighter than night, and maybe no coming back from there, either—not even to here.”
Chena sighing: “It’s what Dees do that are Coyotes, is do. Foolish or not. Wren, can you stop her?”
“I am not the thing that stops Dees. But no boat . . . ? That will,” Wren said.
Dee said, “We will swim.”
Chena: “The thither there is, is maybe too far. We will drown.”
“Why would we drown?” Wren, askance. “We do not breathe here; why would unbreathing be a thing?”
“We will find out about drowning, I guess,” said Dee.
But. Back on the cliff in the dayworld, and the sun ri
sing at last though invisible from the night beach: fading, fire-eyed Tierce. She stood and looked down, and the light of her eyes still shone on cliff ocean and shells. And she saw the pinnacled rocks and the tentacled things; and dark Dee and bright Chena and the flicker of Wren. Read their lips from so high-distant a place; and knew they were gone, gone and lost; and blinked her eyes shut.
The water was black, thick as oil, and viscid it slid up their legs as they walked into the untided surf. The dirty pale seafoam clung to their hands like the ropes of saliva from a sunburnt dog’s mouth, and smelled not unlike. Wren fastidious turned her face away, and then, “Oh!” said she, smallest: lost her footing and came resting on the water’s face, unbreaking the surface tension. Dee and Chena could not float, slipped beneath.
There were no shells under the water, but a steady long shelf of sand the color of a deer dead beside a road. Chena curled her lip in distaste. It was not dark beneath the water, no more than above. There being no moon nor stars nor glass-cased hot-flaming filament meant that no place was lighter than any other, but also no darker.
Wren was right that they did not drown. Still, there was no satisfaction in this; the water crawled everywhere thick and cold along all their inches as they shoved through it. For a time, Chena could reach up and touch Wren’s feet above before she went too deep; but Dee paid no mind, only walked forward and on, the broken whelk in her hand.
For a while and then another while, Dee felt small coilings along the black ocean’s floor as she walked. She knew them for the tentacled things that killed the shells of the dead. One wrapped around her ankle, but she bent down and tore it free, and that was the last of them.
A third while: eels with hands and no eyes.
There were other things, and clouded bitter cold blood stained the sea. For a time.
I say to you, O my darlings, for a time, as though time was. The steps collected infinite until the sea’s floor shelved up again and for a time ended, and they came free of the sucking surface, and found Wren landed already and scraping her beak on the shore.
“That was exciting,” Chena said when the cold salt sea had drained from her mouth. “I saw a thing like a ray, and a forest of black kelp, and a car that wept, and a shark. What did you see?” she asked Wren; but what Wren saw or had done as she swam the surface between unsea and unsky, and what it was that she scraped so carefully from her beak, she said nothing about, then or ever.
Dee dropped the holed hollowed-out whelk to the ground: looking-‘round Dee. And this was the other shore. Sand. Behind them the ocean, water rocking but not crawling up/down. Ahead ramping dunes of pale sand-drift, and past that tufty grass and harsh-husked hollow sedges, and a hissing that would have been wind if wind would have been. And beyond that rising, the horizon’s notched plant-fringed ridge where dunes slanted into grass and unberried bushes. And after that the dun unsky only.
No life, of course. No footprints or pawprints or clawprints or shells, save the whelk.
They looked back (breathless no longer a surprise except remembering that it once had been different); and back past the slipping thick slippery ocean, the beach, and the cliff, nearly beyond sight was the ravel-halved world of the bright-breathing alive. But no fire nor Tierce. She had watched them walk deep and then deeper, as they sank her scorched eyes salt-soaked for a time. Then they opened again, and reduced but alive she turned and returned to the living, light-winging her way to her children her nest her mate and the taste of mice bright on her tongue. Home. For a time. Her story ends here for you, unless someday as fringed murex or peaked conch she tells it herself.
I do not know what secrets the shells of the dead share among themselves. I listen and hear hissing; but it is enough.
“Well,” said Wren when her beak was scrubbed clean. “Now we’re here. Where is here?”
Chena loped up to the ridge and back down. “There’s nothing. Beyond the ridge? More hills and grass is all, and maybe for all ways.”
Dee kicked at the untoed untouched and rippleless sand. “No shells on this side. But no octopus either.” Pausing she: “They would be safe here, all the shells.”
Cunning Coyote-Dee, and clever sister Dog-Chena as well, and Wren Queen of the Birds sharp enough though attending only half what was said, and always her eyes scanning the unsky. They thought it all through: the long sloping sand-floored ocean; but no waves moving shells, no tide making waves, no moon making tides.
“So we need a moon,” said Chena. “A moon to bring the shells.”
Headtipping Wren: “Let me see what I can do.”
“This is mine to do,” Dee said. “For Jace.”
Practical Wren: “Can you fly?”
Dee, shaking head.
“Then it’s not.”
The rules for the unliving lands are not what you thought when you walked under sunlight, my dears. There was no more thickness of air on this side of the ocean—and yet Wren up feather-light flew. The unsky was a flat textured hard curve like the inside of an eggshell, but fluttering Wren seeing a scuff in the surface no deeper than gravel-scratched shoe-leather, for long flitting whiles picked at the flaw. Flakes of nonshell curled free and fell, and dissolved into brass-tasting mist on the upturned faces of Dee and Chena. The scuff became a dent, a pocket, a niche—and now Wren hover-clung to its lip as she worked—and at last made a Wren-sized hollow. She came down, and with her a drift of bitter drab skyscrape that made Chena cough. “There’s that.”
“But no moon,” said Dee.
“Not yet, no. Now’s when you help. I need fur.”
Chena: “For a moon?”
Wren: “Also twigs.”
They looked: sedges ocean grass bushes sand slopes unsky. “No trees and no twigs,” Chena said.
“This is mine to do,” said Dee. “Finally.”
Dee biting bones free from her feet with her long bloodied teeth, slim fine phalanges for clever Wren’s craft—for you forgot, O my darlings, that they are each woman god and creature folded together in skin and desire; but so they are: mysteries nearly as great as yourselves and your once-stories. Chena did not see that the metatarsals of Dee’s feet grew back then or ever. Perhaps that is another way that the dunes beyond the ocean are different from the dayworld and its myths, where Coyotes retrofit rekit and retool, bones and blood renewed on demand as the stories require.
Wren carried each skinny-stick bone to the niche in the unsky, and she wove. It was not the tight basket she would have entwined in the dayworld for gawkish and featherless nestlings, but a shaggy untidy tangle: coyote bones and dog fur, and down plucked from her breast, each feather-shaft tipped in her unwelling blood.
And that nest was the moon of the dead: dun and unshining, but the great gravitational well of untime and unspace.
Then a pause. And nothing.
Wren sighing. “Well, then, there is another thing, I guess:” and she laid an egg and another and a third: air-fathered, Wren-willed, and wind-filled.
And then nothing again.
They three watched, Wren high in her nest, and her sisters on the sand: a whiles-long time.
And a wave and another, then long rolling coils repeating along the sands, each stronger as the new-built moon pulled. With tide comes time, and now static unnumbered whiles became waves and moments and soons and thens.
And now. Chena soft: “Listen.”
The first small shells came in a foaming wave-curl that withdrew and left whisper-light augurs and ceriths and wentletraps chirtling together. A hiss when they burrowed into the wet sand, to leave only holes. And followed by larger shells, the great conchs, the syrinx and the sheening nautilus, and always the waves. Imagine it, O my darlings—or do not, but remember instead if you can—your whispering shell-selves pulled along the sandy floor, past the sights Chena saw, and the long-tendrilled things that Dee had fought off, and all the wonders and terrors they did not meet. Perhaps you did not all make it, but many and many of you did, and found yourselves here.
And among the dragged massy shells at last, Chena heard the thing she was dreaming of: a whisper, a hush. A whelk washed to her feet, as long as her hand and smooth as an egg: rested and did not dig. She caught it up with a sob and pressed it against her ear and heard her name like a breath: Chena. Linnel, her own dear Linnel dead and lost, and now found, in a massy rose-colored calcium twist.
But no Jace. Not then, nor in the thens after, as each shell rolled up and found its own place on the shore, until holes spangled the sand and the water in each reflected the secret-egged moon of Wren’s making. Dee running stumble-foot, bitten-paw clumsy, desperately across the tiny dim stars on sandy dun under-unsky; Chena behind her pleading but cupping in her hand (or paw) her answer, the cradled whorl of Linnel.
The shells rolling in but fewer now and all only newest-dead: each cockle ark augur and bittersweet clam just fallen to the night beach, soon come and soon gone in moon-summoned tiding through oleic oil-thick sea to this shore; and quick digging down into the sand and thus: safe.
Still no Jace. No Jace among all the shells: so, either holed out or holding out on the night beach.
Dee stumbled to a halt: “He’s not here. He’s not coming.”
Chena’s voice like a gentle-soft growl: “Those we love do not come when we will it, but when they do. Death does not change this, just makes it harder.”
“But I loved him.”
Wren snorted. “As though that were enough.”
Startle-sharp face turned up to the moon: Dee, all id and hot eyes on herself, self-tricking trickster surprised by the truth; but despair does not sit long in Coyote-Dees. Lessons are learned. But not the right ones. A snapping nod: “I’ll go back for him. We all will.”
“No,” said Chena; and eyes-rolling Wren: “Try, if you must.”
Dee, a-limp to the shore where the tide swashed: stepped forward and pressed paw (that was hand) to the thick, viscid ocean. She could not break the meniscus, nor skate Wren-light on its surface. Stepped forward and forward. And just nothing: Dee still where she stood, unadvanced. “We cannot go back?”