by Paula Guran
He shakes his head. No no no no no no . . .
A blob of stew falls between his lips. He chokes, but he must swallow. And now another blob falls.
It was here in the Sacred Cave that Manqu Inca died eight years after defeating the Spanish who spread smallpox throughout Peru. Manqu Inca knew that mutated viruses flourished in the alpaca of Wakapathtay, that the viruses infected the Inca after they ate the meat, and that the Sacred Cave held many of his people – transformed and on the shelf, but still alive. Manqu Inca wanted to die among these people, the strangest victims of the Spanish conquest.
“Do the alpaca grazing in Wakapathtay possess something in their meat that gives strength to these pots?” she asks.
Maras shakes his head. No no no no no no . . .
She twists her body and sits on his unbroken arm. Her free hand claps the bottom of the jar, and half the stew plops onto his face. She smears it into his wide, wide mouth.
His head slams from one side to the other. The gold ear plugs rattle, and tomatoes drip from the gold condor wings in his nose.
She rips strips from his alpaca tunic, the color of bloody sun. She ties his wrists behind his back and his ankles behind his body. He’s face down on the clay-red rock.
She places a huge pot next to Maras’s head. His lidless eyes weep. He knows what she’s going to do.
The pot is from the time of the people who built the temple Collud, ancestors of Chicya’s ancestors, and has a spider’s head, a feline’s mouth, and a bird’s beak. It is the spider god, who fills its webs with decapitated human heads.
She dumps stew on the spider god to revive him, then thrusts the last alpaca chunk into Maras’ mouth. She will return and force more meat into Maras. He will be a freak. And then she’ll go away from here, far away, and Maras will become pottery with a broken arm –
Unless the spider god takes care of him first.
She imagines the humiliation and torture endured by the spider god time and time again fighting for Maras.
“What did you get out of it?” she demands. “Money? Power? The people thought you provided the true Inca way. They ate your special Wakapathtay stew, thinking it medicine that kept them from turning into monsters. A terrible thought hits her. “They paid you to watch those fights, didn’t they? They paid you in hopes you would protect them from becoming freaks. Just like Narya, who cooked your guinea pig so the Inca gods, through you, wouldn’t turn her into a monstrosity.”
He sputters. She knows that she’s right. Money. Greed. Lies. Extortion. The human way.
“You’re so common,” she spits.
“And you,” he manages, “what are you that’s so special?”
She knew the answer as soon as she entered the Sacred Cave. It was in the old, old air. Now, she sucks in a deep breath, and heat races through her limbs and into her brain.
“I’m an ancient,” she says. “I’m the Inca before there was an Inca. I’m beyond known time. I’m . . .” she pauses. “I’m the Old One.” Her words are in the ancient Quechua language but with their original pronunciations. “Q’ulsi pertaggen cantatro’f’l Cthulhu fh’thagn. Q’ulsi perhagen n’cree’b’f’w’l.”
“You’re nothing! You’re an orphan!” he snarls.
“No,” she says quietly. “I’m not an orphan. I’m not a qzwck’l’zhadst. You see, I never had parents. People found me as a baby. Who were my parents, Maras? Do you know? Does anyone know?”
He’s beyond answering. Behind his eyes lurks madness.
She has him on the edge.
“You see, Maras, I never fit in. I never cared about being alive. Death was nothing to me. I’ve been biding my time, waiting for the right moment. I never understood until now.”
A thread slinks from the bottom of the spider god’s abdomen. Maras shrinks back, eyes bulging.
Let him think she’s brought the spider god back to life. Let him think it’s going to devour him or spin him, dead, into a web. What does she care?
These creatures are irrelevant. Maras, Cisco and Luis, Bachue and Cava, Narya, the villagers—
All of them, irrelevant.
No more fighting. No more alpaca stew. They will all turn to pots.
They’re all going on the shelf. Forever.
Her way is the only way. Inca before there was Inca . . . Old One. The sky will hold nothing but tarnished clouds. The world will groan. The Sacred Cave will be hers. The Others will come, and together, they’ll spend eternity here.
With “Umbilicus” Damien Angelica Walters “wanted to subvert the traditional mythos by writing a Lovecraftian story based on the maiden, mother, and crone archetype instead of an entity like Cthulhu. I asked myself: What if Cthulhu wasn’t the only deity who slumbered beneath the waves? What would happen if another, older, deity woke, determined to take her rightful place? What might she unleash upon the world?”
Her work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare, Black Static, and Apex. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, in 2016 from Dark House Press.
Umbilicus
Damien Angelica Walters
——
Tess places the last of Emily’s clothes in a box, seals it with a strip of packing tape, and brushes her hands on her shorts. Stripped of the profusion of books and games and art supplies, Emily’s room is a ghost.
The box goes into a corner in the living room with the other things earmarked for donation. In her own bedroom, she stands before the wall papered with newspaper clippings, notes, torn pages from old books, and turns away just as quickly, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger.
The small air-conditioning unit in the window growls like a cat that swallowed a dozen angry hornets; a similar sound sticks in her throat. Everyone has to say goodbye eventually, her mother said once from a hospital bed, three weeks before her heart failed for the last time.
With her mouth set in a thin line, Tess begins to remove the thumb tacks, letting the paper seesaw to the floor, catching glimpses of the pictures – a school photo with an awkward smile, her own face caught in grief’s contortion, a stretch of beach – and the words – depression in children, somnambulism, unexplained juvenile behavior – and the headlines – Suicide? . . . Not Sleepwalking, Her Mother Says . . . Body Not Found, Presumed Dead . . . Presumed Dead . . . Presumed Dead . . .
She drops the thumbtacks from her palm onto her dresser and rips the clippings free, tearing them into pieces before she lets them go. When the wall is nothing more than a study of pinprick holes in plaster and the floor a mess of tattered white, she grabs a dustpan and brush and a garbage bag. Sweeps everything in, refusing to pause even when Emily’s face appears.
Utter madness to try and find reason in the unexplainable, and Tess knew, without a doubt, she’d never find an answer. Let the doctors claim Emily was depressed – ignoring everything Tess told them to the contrary – and committed suicide, but they weren’t there that night. They didn’t see what happened, the way the ocean receded—
(the shape in the water)
—the way Emily kept walking, murmuring a word too low for Tess to discern.
She pulls a face. Ties a knot in the bag. Emily was only seven years old; the word suicide wasn’t even in her vocabulary.
Tess tosses the bag near the front door on her way into the kitchen to wash her hands. On the living room television, a commercial is listing side effects for a medicine to treat high cholesterol, side effects the stuff of nightmares. Background noise, its only purpose to swallow the silence.
“Mommy?”
The voice is muffled, but Tess would know it anywhere. She whirls around, soap bubbles dripping from her fingers, her heart racing madness in the bone-cage of her ribs, and pads into the living room.
“Mommy?”
Now it’s coming from
behind; Tess races back into the kitchen. “Emily?”
Nothing but the rush of water, then she hears another voice, too low to decipher, speaking under – inside – the water. Her stomach clenches.
Not possible, not possible at all – Emily is gone and all the pennies in the world tossed into a fountain won’t bring her back – but Tess grips the edge of the sink hard enough to hurt. “Emily?” she whispers.
Only water splashing on stainless steel answers. Reason kicks in; Tess turns the faucet off and steps back from the sink, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. Through tears, she glares at the boxes piled in the corner – a sandcastle built by sorrow’s hands.
From the kitchen window, she can see a small playground just beyond the parking lot. Two children are on the jungle gym, their mothers sitting on a nearby bench. Occam’s Razor, Tess thinks. Sound travels in odd ways.
With one hand in her pocket and the other clutching Emily’s favorite teddy bear, Tess takes the narrow pathway leading to the beach. Her apartment, the second floor of a converted house, is far away from the tourist trade, and the night is quiet and calm.
The soft whisper of her footsteps in the sand is masked by the susurration of the night waves kissing the shore. Once upon a time she loved the ocean, loved the feel of sand on her skin, loved the sound and smell of the surf – it’s the reason she moved to Ocean City the summer after her nineteenth birthday, why she stayed after David took off, leaving her with no warning, no money, and three-month old Emily – but now it’s a thing to be tolerated, endured.
She stops well above the waterline, afraid if the sea comes in contact with her skin she’ll follow it out, screaming for Emily as she did that night a long year ago. Only this time she won’t get knocked back to shore; this time, the waves will pull her in, and she’ll let them.
After a time, she lifts the teddy bear to her nose, breathes in, but it no longer smells of Emily, merely terrycloth and fiberfill.
“I’m sorry, punkin. I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice hitching. “I love you.” She hurls the teddy bear as far as she can; it bobs on the surface for several long moments, and then the waves suck it down.
Clouds scuttle across the moon, turning the ocean black. The weight of the air changes, a pressure Tess senses in her ears. The thunder of the waves striking the shore amplifies, and a stabbing cramp sends Tess doubling over. Her vision blurs, the salt tang of the ocean floods her nose and mouth, and a sensation of swelling fills her abdomen.
She staggers back. Presses both hands to her belly, feels the expected flatness there. The clouds shift again; something dark and impossibly large moves deep in the water, and she flees from the beach without a backward glance.
It’s all in your head, she tells herself. All in your head.
When she gets close to the apartment, the bright end of a lit cigarette glows from the shadows of the front porch. Tess waves a still-shaking hand; the orange glow makes a responding arc, but neither she nor her neighbor says a word.
Tess slides a box into the trunk of her car, wipes sweat from her brow, and heads back to the house. Her neighbor is sitting in her usual spot – the battered lawn chair in the corner of the porch – with a lit cigarette in her hand and a glass by her side. Gauging by the bright sheen in Vicky’s eyes, the liquid in the glass isn’t water.
“What are you up to, lady?” Vicky asks, her smile turning her face into a tissue paper crumple.
“Getting ready to go to the thrift store to drop some stuff off.” Tess cups her elbows in her palms, hunches her shoulders. “I finally boxed up some of Em’s things.”
Vicky nods. Exhales a plume of smoke. “Good on you. It might help, you know?”
“I hope so. I kept putting it off, kept thinking I should leave everything the way it was, just in case, but I guess I’m ready to try and let her go. That’s why I went to the beach the other night, to—
(see the shape in the water)
—say goodbye.” She touches her stomach. Swallows the unease.
“Grief is a bitch of a monster.” Vicky stubs out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “You think it’ll kill you, but it’s a hell of a lot more clever than that because it lets you live. Only thing you can do is give it the finger and move on as best you can. Only thing anyone can do.” She shakes her glass, rattling the slivers of ice inside. “I need a refill. Want one?”
“How about a rain check for later?”
“Absolutely.”
Tess strips off her dusty clothes in front of her full-length mirror. She’s all arms and legs and narrow hips and small breasts and her belly has no loose skin, no “pooch” that says a child once sheltered there.
Morning sickness lingering well into her second trimester and a waitressing job kept her from gaining too much weight, but now she wishes she’d gorged on ice cream and chocolate and gained fifty pounds, slashing her skin with stretch marks in the process and turning her breasts to sagging teardrops.
She pushes out her stomach, runs her hand over the curve, remembering the fluttering of butterfly wings and later, the heel of a tiny foot, the point of an elbow.
The air goes heavy and thick with the smell of the ocean. Beneath her palms, her skin ripples, and she yanks her hands away. She feels the tremor again, from the inside, and makes a sound low in her throat, then both the smell and the sensation vanish. Frowning, she pokes her abdomen with her fingertips and doesn’t stop until her skin is patterned with tiny red marks like overlapping scales.
When Tess stands, the world swims around her, and she grabs the porch railing with both hands, swaying on her feet.
Vicky laughs in commiseration, not mockery. “Need some help?”
“No,” Tess says, cupping one hand to her forehead, although it doesn’t stop anything from moving. “I got it.”
She takes each step to her apartment with careful measure, ascending one tread at a time the way Emily did as a toddler. Tess can’t remember the last time she drank this much; long before she got pregnant, of that much she’s sure. Thankfully, she left her door unlocked because sliding a key right-side up in the lock would require a bit more dexterity than she’s currently capable of.
Not bothering to remove her clothes, she drops down on her bed, leaving one foot on the floor – she can’t remember if that truly prevents a hangover or if it’s an old wives’ tale – and squeezes her eyes shut. The gray lure of sleep begins to tug.
“Mommy?”
The word cuts blade-sharp through the haze of alcohol, and Tess struggles to sit, her eyelids at war with her intention. Her arms and legs tingle, then her limbs elongate, her fingers and toes deform, her abdomen expands, and a slimy, brackish taste slicks her tongue. She gags, staggers from the bedroom into the bathroom, her body a peculiar, heavy weight to bear, and makes it – barely.
The alcohol and the two slices of pizza she had for dinner come up with a burning rush; she retches again and again until nothing’s left but bile, and then again until even that’s gone. She runs frantic hands over her arms and legs and torso to find everything the way it’s supposed to be and rests her head on the edge of the bathtub, breathing hard.
She flushes the toilet and hears, “Mommy,” this time from the chaos of the Coriolis swirl.
“Emily?”
An unintelligible voice – too deep, too big, to be Emily’s – mumbles something Tess can’t grasp; black clouds of octopus ink coalesce in her eyes, and she slips to the floor into darkness.
“Hair of the dog?” Vicky says with a smile.
Tess shudders. “Oh, god, no.” She half-sits, half-collapses into a lawn chair and holds her water bottle against her forehead. “How much did we drink?”
Vicky shrugs. “Enough to make you laugh. Hell, you even flirted with the pizza boy.”
Tess’s cheeks warm. “Ugh, there’s a reason I don’t drink like that.”
“Plenty of reasons why I do,” Vicky says, her lips set into a grapefruit twist. “I lost a daughter, too, a long time
ago. I was going to bring it up last night, but what’s the point? We were having a good time and you seemed happy.”
“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise. So, what happened to my daughter?” She lights a cigarette, exhales sharply. “Her boyfriend.”
Tess gnaws on a cuticle.
“He beat her. She hid the bruises from me, but I knew something was wrong, and when she finally got the gumption up to leave him, he came after her. And I wasn’t there to protect her.” Vicky takes a long swallow from her glass. “The bastard got his a couple years later. Got jumped in prison after he mouthed off to the wrong guy. Still didn’t bring Crystal back, though.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. For both of us. And for the record, I don’t think you were lying about what you saw that night. Depression, my ass. Anyone who met Emily even once would know that child didn’t have a depressed bone in her body. Damn fool doctors don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time.”
“Thank you.” Tess touches her water bottle to her forehead again, thinks about what she saw—
(the shape in the water)
—and didn’t—
(the shape)
—see.
“Hell, at least your story doesn’t make you a cliché or a stereotype. Never sure which one is the right word, but either way, had to be some truth before the word made sense, right?”
Tess can only nod in reply. She closes her eyes; in the shadows there the waves recede, and Emily walks into the space they left behind, and Tess almost remembers what her daughter said.
Tess wakes and she’s cold, wet, standing in the shower. Although the faucet is set to hot, the water pouring down is ice, her skin is bright pink, and there’s a thickness in her head as though she’s been listening to someone speak for hours or for days. Her nightgown is plastered against a protruding belly; she blinks, and it’s gone. Her fingers distort, turning too long with jagged fingernails that resemble lobster claws, but the image proves no more real than her stomach; when she reaches for the faucet, her hands are fine.