He swore beneath his breath and straightened. His excitement at owning the town’s living legend was considerably less than it had been a minute earlier. Turning away, he dropped the mop into the bucket. He needed the broom now. And then he heard the patter of tiny footsteps over broken glass.
Bruce revolved and caught a shadow of movement darting at the corner of his eye. It disappeared quickly into the muddy gray half-light beneath a corner booth. The exposed flesh of his arms prickled. “What the fuhh…?”
He started toward the booth – the booth, and whatever had run into the dining area through the gaping hole blown into the door. His senses clicked to that higher setting a person experiences during moments of flight-or-fight that demand total awareness of his surroundings.
Bruce noticed a single set of tiny, wet footprints across the tired wooden floor, like the kind a child makes when racing through the house after a summer day’s swim. The glistening line of toes, heels, and ankles vanished beneath the booth.
“Who’s there?” Bruce called.
No answer came in words, just a desperate scurrying sound and a commotion of bare feet slapping against weathered oak.
“I said, who the fuck’s back there?”
Movement flickered to the left of his line of sight, a faint shadow skirting the orbit of the picnic tables, the register, the lobster tank. Bruce whipped around. The mop moved with him until striking a table leg. Gripping its handle, he made a stab behind the cash register.
The presence behind there shoved back with unexpected strength, almost enough to knock the mop handle out of Bruce’s hands. He yelped in surprise, swung again on instinct. This time the mop struck the corner of the wooden stand upon which the anemic cash register sat. The slap of bare feet on the wet floor resumed, only to quickly drown in a clatter of metal pots bouncing across the floor. The intruder was now loose in the kitchen.
Bruce drew in a deep breath of air; salty and corrosive with the stink of decaying shellfish, and started toward the kitchen. A ten-gallon lobster pot, two colanders, and a frying pan were strewn across the floor. Among the clutter, he saw the same wet prints from the dining room. Bruce followed them past the stacked plastic crates filled with water glasses, along the wall of industrial-sized containers of spices, toward the fryolators. He cautiously shuffled forward. The fryolators ended at an empty concrete wall. The trail died there.
As he brushed past the shelves containing dried chives, garlic salt and pepper, a jolt of searing pain exploded across his outer thigh. Bruce screamed a rosary of half-formed sentences and stumbled away. The tines of a large, dirty fork were sticking out of his pants. White-hot agony exploded across his legs.
Bruce grabbed the metal utensil by its handle and pulled, aware of its icy slickness. It wasn’t stainless steel or iron, rusted or encrusted, though oxidized to a shade almost the color of turquoise. Bruce tugged. A rush of searing pain followed, but the impalement ripped free of his leg meat.
Bruce held up the fork, convinced he was going to pass out at any second. It had three tines, not four, each ending in a serrated arrow that had drawn plenty of blood, along with a few scraps of flesh. His lower jaw chattered. It wasn’t a fork, any more than it was from his restaurant. You don’t live for a decade within pissing distance of the Atlantic Ocean and not recognize a trident – especially, when you’ve just yanked one out of your left quadriceps. The image of the three-pronged fork graced boats, restaurant signs, mugs in gift shops, and the tacky plaster statue of Neptune in the Pelican Cove town common.
And something loose in his own kitchen had impaled him upon one.
Bruce staggered back until a counter stopped his ass from going farther, and tossed the vile weapon. The flesh of his empty hand prickled; the metal cold and wet, conjured images of something that had come from a dark place deep in the ocean.
Another thunderous crash of glass pulled him back to the moment. A rush of water – lots of it – followed. A deluge that could only mean one thing rained across the Claw & Slaw’s dining room.
The lobster tank. An aftershock of splintering glass brick followed the first great quake as Marnie-Rae’s hundred-gallon beast came apart in a terrible symphony of destruction. Bruce started out of the kitchen, wincing at the unholy pain in control of his leg. A wave rolled up to greet him at the kitchen’s swinging door, foul-smelling, reeking of the monstrosity now loose in the dining room.
The Old Chief had broken out of the tank. Something dangerous was running around in the kitchen. Nothing was going according to plan. Things were quickly spiraling out of control. The money – his money, his fortune – were slipping away. Fresh anger boiled through his guts. Suddenly, the second Bruce Marionville was in control. He pushed through the swinging door and felt a sickening crunch underfoot. The Bruces glanced down to see one of the released chicken lobsters lying in a fleshy, twitching puddle under the heel of their right moccasin.
Then the swinging door clouted them both from behind, launching them forward, off their mutual feet, and face-first into the slosh. Putrid salt water invaded Bruce’s nostrils and his mouth. His chin struck the floor hard enough to drive two teeth up into his gums and sink more into the tip of his tongue. A supernova of exploding stars filled his eyes. The sickening taste of blood ignited across his tongue. Blood leaked from his outer thigh. Blood and salt water, one the evolution of the other. Dazed and in pain, Bruce remembered this snippet of information from school classes thirty years behind him. The origins of human life can be traced back to the sea, he thought. Our blood is like sea water. Sea water and blood, they were everywhere he turned.
The clatter and scrabble of movement across the floor pulled him back from the Big Bang to the now. Bruce shook his head, pinched the corners of his stinging eyeballs, and focused. A shape, large and malevolent, crawled toward him. The skitter of its legs, the heavy, wet dragging sounds it made on the floor, filled his being with a level of revulsion he’d never before experienced. Another worse followed; spring-like, that of claws opening and then the whip-crack of them scissoring closed.
The Old Chief was free of its binds.
Bruce scrambled back to his feet, slipped, caught himself at the register, and narrowly avoided losing his right foot cleanly at the ankle. As it was, the swipe of the giant claw along his heel unleashed a firestorm of pins and needles up his leg, phantom chills from a living sea monster.
Bruce rounded the register and stole a clear look at the behemoth. Repellent, the way it walked more like a spider than a crustacean. How it hovered on its legs, danced with an agility and grace not expected of something so primeval, so ugly. The Old Chief, reminded a voice in his thoughts, had to be at least seventy-five years old, perhaps even a hundred. That’s how long the eggheads studying the region’s lobster boom were giving to the other giants caught off the coast of Pelican Cove. Giants. Bruce wanted to laugh. Those giants had weighed in at twelve to fifteen pounds.
Bruce’s giant skittered closer, its antennules flicking, the click of its legs on the wet floor sending fresh jolts of disgust through his insides, and again reminding him of an enormous, hard-shelled spider more than a lobster.
The phone – he needed to call for help. As he thought this, he also realized there was still a way to make his million. All it would take is a bit of spin. He had purchased the giant from his pal, good old Captain Crustacean. But it had gotten free and had attacked him, in his very own All-American, mom and pop apple pie restaurant. He would have to prevail and slay it. Kill the monster, like Captain Ahab and his demon whale. Man against evil. The newspapers would love that. So would Hollywood. And in this version, only he would reap the windfall. He wouldn’t share any of it with Marnie-Rae, because he alone had lived it, fought it, slain it.
Bruce crunched over another hapless chicken lobster on his way to the wall phone, felt its exoskeleton crack and come apart beneath his sole, spilling expensive meat and lobster guts into the briny puddle and broken glass. But his eyes never left the hound-sized h
orror with its clicking legs and snapping claws a dozen feet away. He fumbled the phone off its cradle, pressed the receiver to his ear –
And heard nothing. The line was dead.
Bruce stabbed the hang-up button once, twice, then in a blurry succession. Each repetition caused the monstrosity to snap and dance with greater agitation. Eventually, he slammed the phone in place loud enough to shock the giant back several steps.
Not a lobster, not really, Bruce thought. A spider. A sea spider, or something even worse than that.
Clack. The menace snapped one of its claws.
If the Old Chief was a spider, what the hell was running around in his kitchen?
Bruce faced the shattered front door. Suddenly, reaching the outside world was his only imperative. Screw the money, the fame, the escape from his loveless marriage. The normal rules of the sane world had been suspended within the walls of the Claw & Slaw. The diaphanous mist, all that remained of a forgettable hurricane that had wreaked more havoc on the sea than the land, obscured the world beyond the door, but truly, somewhere out there sanity would prevail. A world of football games and expensive whores and cold beer and cheese sandwiches. He would never eat seafood again.
The door.
Bruce whipped around the other side of the register, ignoring the demonic pain in his left thigh and the satanic agony of the broken teeth sticking in his mouth like missed fish bones. He ignored the stink in the air, spit the noxious cocktail of phlegm, blood, and chips of shattered teeth at the horror and bolted for the door. All it would take was the turning of the old lock, releasing the deadbolt.
Bruce hurried toward the door, but the other interloper, the one who’d broken into the restaurant, got there first. Bruce skidded to a halt, not sure what he was looking at. A hallucination, brought on by loss of blood, perhaps.
It was a child, no larger in size than a toddler, dressed in a slick green loincloth of kelp. A string of shells hung around its neck. Seaweed and barnacles grew from its ankles. The cherubic image that formed in his head was fleeting. The child’s eyes were cold, dark, and hateful, similar to the monstrosity’s. The eyes, and the child’s gills. They had to be gills. Crenellated ridges ran along its pale, smooth neck, right behind the jawbone, a shade of color somewhere between purple and indigo.
“Who the fuck are you?” Bruce demanded.
In his surprise, he didn’t notice the child had retrieved the trident until it lashed out. The serrated tines sliced into Bruce’s belly, cutting through skin, muscle, and stomach lining. Bruce fell.
The last two images to greet his wide, unblinking eyes were his stomach juices, oozing out of his perforated guts, white and acidic, reminding him of drawn butter. He started to chuckle at the notion. But then he saw the gilled cherub climb atop the giant lobster, riding the Old Chief the way a human child would a pony, trident raised, legs clamped to the sides of the beast’s exoskeleton. It trotted the clawed horror across the restaurant, right to where Bruce lay sprawled in an inch of water from the ruptured tank.
The Old Chief opened its claws, closed them, and Bruce ceased laughing.
There were two Bruce Marionvilles, and pieces of both were strewn across the Claw & Slaw’s dining room.
Marnie-Rae Marionville parked the old sedan beside her husband’s truck behind the restaurant and entered through the back door, the way she always did, with a smile on her face.
Her smile evaporated at the sight of cauldrons and pans scattered across the kitchen floor.
“Bruce?” she called.
Nobody answered. The restaurant sat under a shroud of silence, except from the bubbling hiss of boiling water. Atop one stove burner, a big lobster pot cooked over a flame.
Marnie-Rae approached the cauldron, engulfed by a wave of apprehension. She shook down the sleeve of her sweater. Using it like a pot holder, she lifted the lid.
There were two Bruce Marionvilles, joined by a single brain, and Marnie-Rae found their severed head floating in the lobster pot, eyes steamed white, skin boiled red, just like the hundreds of lobsters that had gone into the scalding water there before him.
Death Roe
By
Mark Onspaugh
Mike Clute stepped out of the trailer and checked the Sunoco thermometer nailed to the awning support.
110°F. And it was only 10:00 a.m. He had a feeling the mercury wanted to break some records today.
He put the beer bottle against his forehead, feeling a delicious shiver as the coldness touched him. He never thought the day would come when he would miss Michigan winters, the snow and slush, the temperature so low your every breath was a gasp.
But it was the ocean he missed, especially the Pacific and the island of Maui.
A year and a half. Eighteen months of living in a Mojave trailer without plumbing, getting by on bottled water and bottled beer. Eighteen months of taking sponge baths and staying away from indoor plumbing, swimming pools, and any body of water larger than the average pothole after an all too infrequent rainstorm.
Any place she might hide.
So here he sat, one of the richest men in California, living like a pauper.
Oke would have found the whole thing funny, if he had lived.
Mike had been living on Maui for two years. He got along well with both the locals and the tourists, and this helped him build up a snorkel and dive charter business in short order.
His partner at Deep Blue Dive Charters was Oke, a big Hawaiian from Molokai. They had met when Mike had decked another haole in a local bar for making a pass at a local girl. That girl had been Oke’s little sister Kalea, and the big guy took an immediate liking to the white boy from St. Ignace.
One day in early December found them without a charter. A family group had bought up the whole day but then had to cancel due to illness. That left Mike and Oke with a fat cancellation fee and nothing to do.
It was Oke who suggested they dive the Cathedrals out near Lanai. Huge lava tubes that opened to the sky, the Cathedrals offered challenging dives and were recommended for intermediates or betters. As such, Deep Blue rarely went there.
The day was dreary when they set out, but cleared in true Hawaiian fashion to skies and waters of impossible cerulean blue. A rainbow to starboard seemed to portend good luck and a remarkable dive.
They anchored in the vicinity of Cathedral 2, the larger of the formations. They donned their gear, cleared their masks with spit and gave each other the waggle-finger “hang loose” sign and dove.
Mike followed Oke as he made his way to the main entrance to the lava tube. Oke had been diving these waters since he was a boy, and there was very little he didn’t know about dive sites on the various islands.
It was a perfect day. No one else was diving the Cathedrals at that moment and the waters were clear and full of fish. A profusion of creatures in electric orange, neon yellow, purple, vermillion, cobalt, obsidian, crimson and teal. Combinations of color and form that were both fanciful and breathtaking.
Inside the tube, shafts of light from the opening topside refracted into a range of colors with the brilliance of stained glass. It was no wonder, thought Mike, that they had named this place a cathedral.
Inside, fish gave way to crabs, lobsters and eels. Mike spotted a white tip reef shark, but it hurried away before he could get a good look at it.
Oke was heading for one of the larger chambers and Mike gave him a signal that he was going to a smaller one off to their right. They agreed to meet up at a main arch in twenty minutes.
Mike entered the chamber and explored, delighting in a cache of bright cowrie shells which he stowed in a net sack on his belt. He was about to leave the chamber when an eel seemed to emerge from the rock itself. Curious, he swam to the wall and went over it carefully with his flashlight.
There was an entrance to another chamber, its entrance hidden by the formation of the lava walls and the dim light. It was a tight squeeze but Mike was able to enter.
The new chamber was dimmer t
han the others, very little light finding its way past a natural overhang above him. Large black coral waved delicate fronds as he passed, and he glimpsed four or five eels undulating through the chamber like the sea serpents of legend.
A cloud overhead cast the chamber in absolute darkness, and Mike switched on his flashlight to better navigate the small space. As he swept his light across the chamber, it reflected off something in a small pocket about ten feet up.
Something that glimmered in the spectral light.
Mike swam to that spot, and suddenly a large, black eel lunged at him. It was huge, its body covered with small yellow and purple spots. It thrashed and struck at him, and he dealt it a glancing blow off the side of the head with the flashlight. This only served to enrage it, and it came after him with renewed fury. Fearing for his life, Mike pulled his dive knife from a sheath on his ankle and faced the big fish as he slowly backed away. The moray actually left its burrow to pursue him. In all his years of diving Mike had never heard of one these eels being so aggressive unless it was cornered.
The thing kept coming and now Mike found himself backed against the lava wall. He was loathe to hurt any creature, but the bite of a moray could be painful and laced with toxic bacteria.
As the thing struck again, Mike lashed out with his knife, and the tip of his blade took the eel’s left eye.
The creature retreated at once. It did not return to its burrow, but swam swiftly for the narrow passageway and was gone.
Mike stayed put as his hammering heart slowed.
He trained his light up the wall to the vacated burrow.
Once again he saw a glint of something there, and felt an odd compulsion to see what it was. It was something beyond mere curiosity; it was as if he was being called.
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