by Paula Guran
I couldn’t hear Merk scream, but I could feel it.
“Is something wrong?” Oswald asked me. His voice sounded normal now because we were becoming part of that other wave system. “Are the police coming? You seem to be looking through the walls.”
“No,” I told him. “Nothing’s wrong. But Oswald, if something gets through to our world from that other world, like something that could hurt people, because of us, does it just stay over there?”
“Have you seen such a thing?”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Not sure.”
“If it came through it might do some damage but once we’re gone, the gap will close and it will be drawn through, back to the Alternating World, as the gap closes – a kind of energy suction. Are you concerned about someone?”
I looked away from the wall, and went back to looking at the monitor, to check wavelength ratios. “No. I’m not concerned.”
So right now, we’re taking a break, and I’m writing this last part up in this notebook, and then I’ll put it in the insulation covers, and let it fall to the field. And we’ll see what happens now, as soon as we finish the transition, and we go over there for good.
But Oswald and me, we are partners. Nothing will stop us.
And when we’re tired of that world, there are more.
But we can never come back here, Oswald told me. He said I have to choose.
It’s okay. Because, I choose that world, the Alternating World. I choose it, and whatever else we see. I choose the world of crepuscules and The Yellow Fog That Hates and the slow exploder and the slitherers and the floppers. I have a pet, waiting for me there. My own blue-spotted slitherer. Spot.
We have tools, and weapons. The Baphomet, I know, will be there, and it will kill me if it can, just like it killed the servants of Oswald’s grandfather.
I don’t care. It’s still better than my own world.
Almost anything would be better.
“The Sea Inside” is Amanda Downum’s response to Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep.” “It’s one of my favorite Lovecraft stories,” she states, “but I’m very skeptical of the events as presented by Daniel Upton. This is my first rebuttal, and probably not the last.”
A resident of Austin, Texas, Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles series, published by Orbit Books, and Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, from Solaris. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and elsewhere. One day she will return to the sea.
The Sea Inside
Amanda Downum
——
“[O]cean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.”
– H. P. Lovecraft, “The White Ship”
The sky above the gulf was the color of oysters, a pale, sunless stretch. It might have been late morning or late afternoon. Verdigris waves rolled over bone-grey sand, leaving behind a lace of foam and swags of rusty sargassum. The wind gusted warm and sticky off the water. Beneath the brine, it smelled faintly of decay. The shore was empty save for a few distant beachcombers, a couple swimming, a man and a dog.
At the edge of the beach, between the dry sand and Seawall Boulevard, a woman sat at a picnic table on the weathered gray planks of a shrimpshack patio. A plastic cup sweated at her elbow, leaving rings on the wood. She stared at the sea through dark glasses. The damp wind pulled her hair loose from its braid and set it frizzing around her face.
A car idled by the curb on the street above the strand. It had been there ten minutes. Finally the engine died and another woman stepped out. Younger, sleeker, also wearing sunglasses. The wind had its way with her styled hair. She stood beside the car for a while, staring at the water. Then she made her way down the steps to the beach. Her expensive, impractical shoes sank into the sand.
The older woman didn’t stir except to lift her drink. Moisture dripped off her fingers. When the younger woman sat down opposite her, she turned. Each pair of dark plastic lenses reflected the other.
“You’re the one,” the young woman said at last.
The other woman smiled, a flash of white in a light brown face. “I am.”
“You know why I’m here.”
“Yes.”
“You can really do this?”
“Are you hungry?” The woman lifted her cup again. Ice rattled. She raised a hand and a stooped, balding man stepped out of the shack.
“No.” The young woman reached into her purse for a cigarette and a lighter. A diamond glittered on her left hand, brilliant even in the wan daylight.
Dark glasses tilted. Brown lips pursed. “Do you think you should do that?”
“Why—” The angry question died away. She looked down at the cigarette she held between two manicured fingers. “They told you.”
“I have to know if I’m going to help you.” The bald man had arrived at their table. “Are you hungry?”
The young woman frowned. “Shrimp,” she told the man. “I don’t care what kind.” She lifted her chin. “And a beer.”
The man turned away, shuffling across the warped deck. “Can you?” the young woman asked when he was gone. “Help me?”
“I can change things. You have to help yourself in the end.”
“Did they tell you why I’m here?”
“Some. The details don’t matter. People only have one reason for finding me in the end. You need out.”
“This is crazy.”
The woman shrugged. “You don’t have to do it.”
“Then what?”
“Eat some shrimp. Drink a beer, if you want to. Go home and wait.”
“Just like that?”
Another shrug. “It’s a nice day, and I have all the time in the world.”
“I have money.”
“So do I. I’ll take yours, though, if you want. It’s useful.”
The young woman fell silent, staring at her unlit cigarette. Slim fingers tensed and the paper cylinder crumpled. Flecks of tobacco danced on the salty wind. “Money solves problems. But not this one. He’ll find me.”
“You don’t have to go through with it. With me. With him. With . . .” She lifted a hand and let it fall. “Any of it.”
“It doesn’t matter if I do or don’t. He’ll find me. He’ll find you if you help me.”
The woman grinned. She showed a lot of teeth. “I don’t care.”
“The worst thing is . . . part of me still thinks I can go back and everything will be fine again. Just like before.” She shook her head, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. The wind whipped it loose again.
“You can’t go back from this,” the woman said. “Only forward.”
The old man returned, one sandaled foot dragging softly across the boards as he walked. He set down a paper basket full of breaded shrimp and a plastic cup of pale beer. The young woman handed him a bill from her purse. “Keep the change.”
He nodded. The creases on his weathered face never shifted. The money vanished into his pocket and he returned to the shack.
She picked up a shrimp. It crunched between her teeth and she exhaled a short, hot breath. “Coconut.” Her voice lifted with surprise. She touched the cup of beer, studied it for a moment, then sighed and inched it away from her.
“Why? Why do you do this?”
The older woman watched the waves roll in. White foam surged against the sand. “For the same reason. But this way it’s on my terms. I know what it’s like to be trapped.”
“What’s it like? What you do, I mean.”
Brown shoulders lifted in a shrug. “It can be perfectly simple, if you let it. Or it can be hell. It’s what you make it.”
“Really? Perfectly simple?”
“Well.” Her lips curled, a lopsided smile. “Not perfectly simple. But easy enough. You can’t have your old life back, but you can make a new one.”
“Really?” the young woman said again, softer this time.
“Yes.”
“What w
ill happen to . . . everything?” One hand settled in her lap.
She put it back on the table again. “If things were different – less complicated – I could take care of it myself. I know lots of people who have. Some of them say that’s simple, too.” Her mouth twisted. “Or maybe I wouldn’t. I wanted a family, once. I thought it would all be so easy.” She laughed, and the sound rose high and wild over the steady crush of the waves. “Did you ever have a family?”
Plastic lenses reflected the sea. “My mother left when I was young. My father” – she made a soft, ugly sound – “taught me a lot of things. Part of me always wanted a daughter. I know I’d leave, too, eventually, but I’d at least make sure she was in a good place when I did.”
The young woman sighed. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose. I just don’t want . . .” She trailed off. “You’d leave her in a good place? With people less selfish than me?”
“With people less selfish than either of us.”
“Let me see your eyes.”
The older woman turned to face her and slowly removed her sunglasses. The other woman did the same. They studied their reflections in each other’s eyes.
“How does it work?” the young woman finally asked.
“Give me your hand.”
She reached across the table, but stopped halfway. She stared at the diamond flashing on her finger. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and she twisted the ring free with three sharp tugs. It traced a glittering arc through the sticky air, vanishing somewhere in the damp sand and foam. She rubbed at the crease it left on her finger. Then she extended her hand.
They sat for several moments, two women under a cloudy sky, holding hands and watching each other wordlessly. The man and the dog walked behind a pale line of dunes in the distance. The swimming couple had disappeared. The man inside the shrimp shack didn’t look up from his crossword puzzle.
The older woman jerked, chest hitching. Her eyes widened.
The younger woman blinked once, twice. She lifted her left hand and studied the careful manicure, the fading ghost of a diamond ring.
“Look in your purse,” she said. Her voice was slower, lower. “Do you have everything you need?”
The other woman sorted for the bag beside her on the bench. With shaking hands she fumbled through its contents: wallet, driver’s license, cash, passport, a keychain full of keys.
“A car?”
“Parked down the street. You’ll find it. Not as nice as the other one, but it will take you wherever you need to go. How do you feel?”
“Fine.” Her voice rose uncertainly. “I feel fine,” she said, steadier. “It’s what I make of it.”
The younger woman smiled. “That’s right.” She reached into her bag and slid the cigarettes across the table. “Here. I should go. Enjoy your food. Enjoy the day. You have time.” She picked up her sunglasses, and plastic eclipsed her eyes. One hand rested briefly against her stomach.
“Like a sea inside,” she murmured.
She toed off her expensive, impractical shoes and hooked them with two fingers. Her toes dug into the warm sand as she walked away.
A woman sat alone at the picnic table. The shutters had been pulled down on the shrimp shack, and a Closed sign shifted in the breeze. A glass of beer sweated at her elbow. After a moment she lit a cigarette and took one deep drag. She laughed, high and wild, and the sound and the smoke drifted away in the salty air. The cigarette burned down between her fingers as she watched the sea.
She continued to laugh while her shoulders trembled, and tears tracked slowly down her cheeks.
John Langan is the author of three collections of short fiction: Sefira and Other Betrayals, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (both from Hippocampus), and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime). He has written a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade), and with Paul Tremblay, co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime). He lives in upstate New York with his wife and younger son.
For Langan, one of the key elements of Lovecraft’s stories is the forbidden text. “To be exposed to this text is to have your eyes opened to another world, one whose intersection with ours leaves your perspective forever changed, generally for the worse. I suppose ‘The Necronomicon’ is the best-known example of this, but there are other stories – ‘Pickman’s Model,’ ‘The Music of Eric Zann’ – where another means of expression is the source of revelation. We’ve all had the experience of the tune that will not leave us alone. What, I wondered, if there was more to it than that?”
Outside the House, Watching for the Crows
John Langan
——
Dear Sam,
I know: who writes a letter, anymore?
I suppose you’re used to the mail as a conduit for care packages from your mom and Steve, or Liz and me, but if you’re anticipating any written communication from us, you’ll check your email, or your Facebook account, or even Twitter. I thought about sending this as an email. Actually, I did more than think about it. In the “Drafts” folder on my laptop, there are a couple of paragraphs I obsessed over for several hours after our last conversation, then for several more hours the following night, before I decided it would be better to sit down at my desk with a pad of legal paper, an extra-fine Precise V5 (black), and compose a letter to you. (For reasons you’ll understand later, the social media options never were.) This is the way I plan out a case, spread all my notes around me and arrange the facts they relate into a coherent structure.
I don’t have any notes, now. What I have is your question, “What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you – I mean, the weirdest?” which (I admit) I speculated might have been prompted by your experimentation with substances I probably don’t want to know about. Yet the answer that instantly occurred to me seems to come directly from such an experience. To be honest, I’m almost embarrassed to tell it to you. For one thing, it’s so extravagant you may suspect I’ve finally started the novel I’ve been threatening. For another, it doesn’t show me in the best light, and while I know you’ve been aware of my clay feet for a long time, I’m reluctant to call attention to them. At the same time, there’s a part of me that’s been desperate to relate this story to someone since it happened. I thought I had long since learned to control that urge, to suppress it, but your question threw open the doors and let it loose. By writing this, I suppose, I’m giving in to my need to confess; although I’m doing so in such fashion that I still have the option to delete it once I’m finished.
So: it begins with the answer to your question: at the beginning of the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I attended a concert by a band called The Subterraneans at The Last Chance, which was a club in what I guess would have been called downtown Poughkeepsie. There weren’t many other people present. Aside from me and the friend I’d met there, maybe two dozen bodies filled the space in front of the stage. At the beginning of the show, I had positioned myself toward the rear of the open area. About halfway through the band’s set, in the midst of a keyboard solo that went on and on, I felt a breeze tickle the back of my neck. I glanced behind me, and saw the section of the club there, under the balcony, had changed. It was completely dark, except for a strip in the middle opening into a narrow alley right through what had been the club’s bar. I was not hallucinating – at least, I hadn’t ingested anything that would have allowed this to be a possibility. The breeze blew out of the alley against my face, carrying with it the smell of the ocean, brine and baked seaweed. I looked away, but the odor persisted. When I turned around, the alley was still there. I took a step toward it. Around me, the keyboard, sounding like a manic pipe organ, continued its solo. Bright moonlight picked out scraps of paper skittering across the alley’s cobblestones. At the far end of the passage, a group of tall figures stood in silhouette. I advanced another step. I didn’t like the way the moonlight slid over those tall shapes, but this didn’t stop me from continuing in their direction. I was wonderi
ng why none of the rest of the audience was noticing this when Jude, the friend I’d met here, shoved past me and walked right up to the verge of the alley, where he stopped – waiting, I realized, for me to join him.
There isn’t a great deal more – though there is something – but what I’ve related is incomplete, devoid of the context that brought me to that moment. If I’m being frank, then I have to admit, I’m not certain how much those details explain the events of that night. But it feels wrong to relate this portion of the narrative without what came before. I need to back up, to an aging manila envelope I’ve kept for twenty-five years, through moves from apartments to rental houses to my own house. It contains an audiocassette tape, a ticket stub, and a Polaroid faded almost beyond visibility. The tape has been unplayable since it unspooled in my car stereo and became so hopelessly entangled in the deck’s mechanisms that I had to snap it in several places to extract it. Although I spent I can’t tell you how many hours attempting to repair it, smoothing its creases, gluing its ends together, winding it back onto its wheels, it was too far gone. Nor could I replace it, since it was a copy of a bootleg recording of which, as far as I know, there was only one original. (I’m not even sure about that, since I never saw the tape it was copied from.) And yes, I’ve searched online for it, and no luck. When it still played, the tape contained fifty-nine minutes of the band I mentioned, The Subterraneans, performing a live show at The Last Chance. The ticket stub is for another concert by the same band at the same place on 21 June 1986.
The Polaroid is not a picture of the band. It’s of a group of people I spent Friday and Saturday nights hanging out with during the spring of my junior year of high school. Even with the damage two and half decades have done to it, I can identify everyone in the photo; though my memory supplements details that have deteriorated beyond recognition. Were you to look at it, I imagine you’d see a collection of pale ovals like a talented child’s approximation of faces, each one ornamented with a tag screaming “Eighties!” Long hair hair-sprayed into exaggerated pompadours in the case of the guys; short hair spiked and/or dyed purple in the case of the girls. Short leather and denim jackets festooned with buttons displaying the names of bands, the anarchist “A,” slogans like “Sticks and stone may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me.” Jeans and Doc Martens, or ankle-length skirts and Keds, or leather miniskirts and fishnet stockings with Docs or Keds. Clunky jewelry. It was Punk meets New Wave meets Proto-Goth.