by Ellen Datlow
I follow links and fill my search engine with key words. I gather data as if it were the ingredients for a cure. I don’t even notice George when he enters the room.
“We could get out of town,” he says, sipping from his drink.
“Should you be drinking?” I ask. “Until we know more about this, you need to be careful.”
“Bullshit,” George says.
“But your immune system might be compromised, or the virus could affect the liver.”
“Don’t care,” George says. “I spent my whole life following rules, and I’m still fucked. Now, what do you think about getting out of town?”
“I suppose I could get time off work.”
“No,” George says. “I’m not talking about a vacation. I’m talking about moving. If I’m here, then someone could see me … acting up. Maybe we could sell our places, head north. I just keep thinking my family is going to find out. It scares the shit out of me. I can’t even function.”
“I can’t retire,” I say. “Not for another couple of years at least.”
“We’ll find jobs.”
“At our ages?”
“Well, I don’t know!” George shouts and throws his arms wide, sloshing whisky over the lip of his glass. “Am I supposed to just hide in here all day, waiting to see what new atrocity is lurking around the corner?” He sits on the arm of the sofa, staring at the splash of liquid pooling on the floor. “I suppose I could go by myself.”
The suggestion creates a painful vibration in my ribs. He doesn’t mean to be cruel. I know it.
“Don’t say that.”
“This fucking world,” George says. “I’m finally happy and then this. I thought Eugie would be my downfall, maybe Barry, but a fucking mosquito?”
“If you want to move, really want to do it, we’ll find a way. We can go anywhere you want.”
“I don’t care where,” George says.
“Then let’s leave,” I say. “Let’s get in the car and drive. We’ll head north until we find a place.”
“If you’re serious, I’ll need time to make arrangements,” George says. His mood is not bright, but the darkest edges are off of it. “I can’t just vanish or Eugie will release a squad of investigators to find me so the divorce proceedings aren’t inconvenienced.”
“Tell me when, and I’ll be ready.”
“A couple of days? I have an old friend who owns a B&B in Colorado. We’ll be okay there until we have a plan.”
Barry crossed to the dining table, a table George and I rarely used for anything as we tended to eat on the sofa in front of the television. He grasped the back of a chair upholstered in fawn-colored suede and shook his head.
“He shouldn’t have kept this from us. We’re his family. Family is everything.”
“He was embarrassed,” I said. “Once they had identified the virus, and we knew his seizure wasn’t a one-time event, he didn’t want to leave the apartment. Then after the people vanished at Holly Beach, George started to panic. Families of the missing came forward. They talked about the dancing and the chanting. It was the first connection between the Gibbet Virus and the disappearances. It hit him extremely hard.”
“We should have been told,” Barry said, rocking his belly against the back of the dining chair as if attempting to discreetly hump the piece of furniture. “We would have gotten him the help he needed. We’d have gotten him great doctors. The best doctors. He wouldn’t have just been walking around waiting for that thing to come along. He’d be alive right now, and my mother wouldn’t have to worry about her future.”
George had been right about his family. They would have declared him unstable and likely would have institutionalized him. He was their golden goose, and he’d gotten out of the pen. The sickening unease I’d felt since Barry’s arrival intensified. Hot and cold static avalanched from my face to my stomach and a tremor ran through my muscles. He was accusing me of negligence, incompetence, but this wasn’t the grief of a mourning child, it was the disgust of a disappointed heir.
This privileged brat couldn’t imagine what I’d lost with George. Why should he? To him, his father was an old piece of furniture, something to stick away in a basement or attic until it could be sold at auction. He didn’t understand the losses of aging. He couldn’t be bothered to see how amazing it was to actually gain something so late in life, something so important.
Everything I knew about growing old told me I would lose and lose, and then I would die. My body had changed. My cells refused to repair themselves; they became bungling and languid. My senses changed, became less than they were. The world looked different. It sounded different. It felt different. Everything was harder and colder to the touch. I accepted these losses as natural, as part of my flawed human existence.
But to gain something, to find someone at this stage of my life?
It was unexpected, because nothing I’d witnessed had prepared me for it. How could I expect the bloated trust-funder to understand exactly how precious George had been to me?
I couldn’t, and I knew I couldn’t, and I knew I shouldn’t have to.
“I’ve told you what you need to know,” I said.
Barry continued to hump the back of the chair. “You haven’t told me anything. Nothing that can be proven.”
“You are welcome to speak with the authorities, but right now, I’m mourning the man I loved, and I find it completely fucked up for you to come into my home and accuse me of … What exactly do you think I did?”
He shrugged and looked away. “You let him die,” Barry said.
His tone was so dismissive, so much like a teenager’s response of “Whatever,” that I wanted to punch him in the face. He gave up on the chair and turned back to the window.
“Is this where it happened?” he asked, gesturing to the beach beyond the glass.
The enthralled crowd ambles in a line over the gulf, appearing like saviors walking on water beneath a radiant moon. Amid the perfume of salted air, a deeper, fouler odor rises: the rot of fish; the pulsing stink of seaweed. Straining my vision, I note a glow drawing a path into the gulf, like a mesh of pale white wires. This mesh provides a bridge, over which the throng slowly march.
I shook my head. Sudden misery clotted in my throat, and I squeezed my lips tightly to keep from making a sound. Tears coated my eyes. Pointing to the south, I managed to say, “About half a mile.”
“But you have no proof he was there. He could be in the Bahamas.”
“He was there,” I said. A plea began to chant in my mind: don’t make me say this, don’t make me.
“None of the witnesses could definitively identify my father as one of the victims. Not one. I’ve asked them.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I can.”
The information startled Barry. “What?”
“I saw him on the beach. I saw that thing in the water. I watched George die.”
My panic as I search the apartment is venom, stinging and spreading through my system as I shout George’s name. He never came to bed. He was planning our escape from Galveston and was making a list of people he needed to contact and a set of talking points to keep his story straight. He tells me to get some rest, but I can’t sleep. After thirty minutes, I get up and join him at the dining room table, where I notice he is still dressed. He’s so consumed with his plans that he’s forgotten to indulge his nudity. We chat until he shoos me off so he can concentrate.
An hour later, I again climb out of bed. But George isn’t at the table. He isn’t anywhere in the apartment.
I throw on clothes and run into the hall, but it is empty and quiet. My mind babbles in static bursts, like a radio picking up desperate cries. We had talked about this. This was a possibility we’d considered.
In the grip of the Gibbet Virus, George could enter a trance and wander off. I’d found material about Bermuda and Holly Beach, suggesting the Gibbet Virus could be connected to the vanishing crowds. It struck me as unlikely when he’d suggest
ed it, but I’d learned to take George’s paranoia seriously, if only to keep him grounded.
His cell phone. I call and get voice mail. I call again and again. The device is useless.
Except it isn’t.
At George’s insistence, we’d linked his phone to mine with a tracking application. If he has the phone, if it is receiving a signal, I can find him.
I run down the beach, the distance between the small blue dot on my cell’s screen and another green dot slowly diminishing. In the distance, I see people. They trudge through the sand, smudges in the night. At first I count only three, but as I draw closer to the light swath of sand, I make out so many more.
They converge from the west and north and south. They walk in unison, like robots programmed to a lazy march. Left. Right. Left. Right. Already a large group has gathered at the water’s edge. Their chant pummels the air. The violent syllables share no pitch, but the cadence is matched precisely. It is a tone-deaf chorus, casting their voices at the waves.
And I see George at the water’s edge. He has not reached the entranced throng. He is still thirty yards away from the growing crowd.
I catch up and move in front of him to block his path but he marches into me. His eyes are blank. His throat rumbles with the indecipherable mantra. I struggle with him, but he continues toward the gathering at the water’s edge.
With tears turning cold against my eyes, I punch him in the jaw, and then I tackle him, wrestle him to the sand. George grunts beneath me, voicing the primal chant. Wet, pasty sand grinds into my elbows and forearms.
As I attempt to soothe him, assuring him everything will be okay, the gulf itself rises up.
An enormous blister forms on the water. It forces waves to crash with greater force against the shore on either side of the entranced brigade. The blister keeps growing, but I can’t see what creates it. Maybe I see movement under the water; I can’t be sure. Violent waves crash over George and me, and as I splutter and blow the stinging salt water from my nose, the thing breaches the surface of the gulf.
Far down the beach on the other side of the entranced crowd, another witness screams. More shouts, only a handful really, climb into the air.
It rises, long and flat like the crushed fuselage of an airplane surfacing after years below the waves. The thing is transparent, as if its skin is cellophane encasing the enormous white organs throbbing inside it. My first thought is that it is a species of whale, but I’m quickly convinced it is something different. Something new or extremely old. Spines and lumps cover its back. Triangular fins like those of a giant manta ray lay out like sandbars eighty feet to either side of the bulbous, distorted body. Long black slits run near the center of the face. I see no eyes anywhere on it.
And there are lesser creatures, like crabs with beaked heads, scurrying over the clear, wet tissue. Their pointed legs jab into the meat of the thing for purchase as they panic in the chill night air. One of them skitters down the clear face of the monstrosity and plucks a vaguely glowing gelatinous wad, maybe a jellyfish, from between the black trenches, before racing back over the crown to vanish amid the protuberances and bristles.
As the water settles, the entranced begin to walk into the water, but they don’t submerge. They tread near the surface on a bizarre, glowing mesh, walking toward the monstrous creature as if being summoned. Their chant continues.
Maybe I have caught the virus from George, and this is the kind of horrifying thing he sees when he falls into his trances. Perhaps what plays out before me is not an example of mysterious nature, but rather an amalgam of sickening pieces, cobbled together by my infected mind.
Except it’s not, and I know it’s not.
Barry’s eyes grew wide as I described the Emergence. Certainly he’d seen the video clip one witness had captured that night, but the clip would be a pale, flat fiction compared to an eyewitness account.
“Then, George went crazy. He punched me and kneed my body and convulsed like he was attached to a live wire. I couldn’t hold him down. I tried so hard to keep him with me, but I failed. During the struggle he managed to kick my knee. I didn’t even notice the pain until I tried to stand. I fell on my face and started to crawl after him but I wasn’t fast enough.
“George made it to the bridge just before it broke the surf. The mesh rose into the air, but remained level. Beneath the rising bridge, the water again swelled as the creature notched its head back, like a ship in the final stages of sinking. Its lower jaw emerged from the waves then. Scooped like a canoe, only ten times the size, the creature’s mouth became apparent, and with this came the realization that the marchers who shared George’s affliction walked steadily over this nightmare’s tongue.
“I screamed. I think everyone who wasn’t infected screamed. I’m not sure. I was so focused on George.
“The glowing mesh bridge began to fray at the end and curl skyward behind your father. Filaments pulled away and whipped violently against the purple-black horizon. The crab-like creatures moved in a wave over the bulbous back to swarm the top of the creature’s head, driving their appendages into the face for purchase.
“Then the end of the bridge, the part that lingered near the beach, came fully apart. It unwove, or unraveled. Something. I don’t know. The ends began to snap through the night like a collection of glowing lashes. The bridge bucked upward, sending everyone flying, and the cords creating it came apart completely.
“As the victims fell toward the waiting jaw, the wiry filaments of tongue lashed them. But these strands didn’t just wound. They severed, slicing off limbs and opening torsos. I tried to keep my eyes on him, but George … h-he … remained whole for only a second. Half of his head vanished in a spray of blood, and then he came apart completely. The mechanical hiss of the whipping cords filled the night, but the creature’s food made no sound. Before the first piece of meat hit the thing’s mouth, the people that had marched over the gulf had been reduced to insignificant shreds.
“Standing on the mound of the creature’s face, the lesser crab-like creatures scurried about for bits of meat and drops of fluid cast off by the whipping threads.
“The tongue rewove itself and then retracted quickly into the mouth. Inside the mouth, a long, pale blue wad of tissue streaked through with purple veins rode the interior of the cheek like a blister. It was one of the globsters George had seen.”
During the story’s telling, I’d wandered the room. When it was complete, I found myself near the front door. I stepped to the wall and leaned against if for support as I struggled with the weight that had settled in my chest.
“Did you tell the police?”
“Yes,” I said. My voice cracked, breaking the syllable in two. “I told them.”
“No,” Barry said, shaking his head. “I’ve read every article about that night. You were never quoted.”
“I was one of six witnesses. I didn’t want to talk about what happened, and the other five did. The media didn’t need me.”
“It’s a shame,” Barry said. “You could have banked a fortune if you’d have filmed the Emergence with your phone,” He sounded disappointed, yet smug, as if under the same circumstances he would have succeeded in making a bankable clip from the atrocity. “The only other video is garbage. The guy caught about three seconds of the monster before he started screaming and running off. Can’t see much of anything except the water swelling up and flooding the beach. Stupid fuck.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Stupid.”
We’d witnessed the emergence, or perhaps reemergence, of a life form that could produce spores containing a commutable virus, a virus that appeared to act as some kind of link between its monstrous source and the people it infected. Through this link, the creature could manipulate human behavior, summoning hordes of men and women to its waiting mouth. And this idiot could only think of photo opps and bank accounts.
And it occurred to me in that moment, that while I didn’t know exactly what Barry wanted, the man might not know either.
The erratic path he’d taken through the conversation and the non-sequiturs suggested flailing and grasping, a struggle to remain in control. But he had no control here.
When he finally got to his point, it came as no surprise.
“We’re going to fight you on the will,” Barry said.
“I figured you would,” I replied. “You’ll be happy to know I don’t intend to fight back. Make a reasonable counter offer, something that shows even a modicum of respect for your father’s wishes, and I’ll sign off on it.”
“Really?” Barry asked. “Just like that?”
“Yes,” I said. “Your father and I had a lot in common, including the desire to have you and your mother out of our lives forever.”
After a bout of pointless outrage, Barry finally left. I said goodbye to George’s divorce shack and carried the suitcase and boxes to my car. Driving across town, my temper settled and the rage heating my face lessened. I’d never sold my house, though I hadn’t spent more than the occasional minute there since moving in with George. After the Emergence, I was grateful to have a place at the center of the island, away from the water. With the sound of Barry Caldwell’s voice still infecting my ears, I couldn’t wait to be back among my things.
I trudged to the door and inserted the key. The door opened onto gloom. Gray light and black shadows filled the room like heaped corpses reduced to char and ash. The shapes in the room made no sense. Tears smeared the chiaroscuro and I pressed back against the closed door, exhaling deeply as if the air in my lungs was the weight that held me back and not grief.
Reliving that night ruined me. Picturing George on the tongue of that unfathomable creature, blankly marching toward its gullet, played in a loop behind my eyes. The Benny Hill theme accompanied it, only the tune had been slowed to a moaning dirge, every beat in time with George’s footsteps, and those of the other fodder, crossing the beast’s tongue.