by Ellen Datlow
At the bedroom door, I wiped my eyes and took several deep breaths.
Some lies are told to protect the ones we love. Others are told to protect ourselves. The lie I’d told Barry Caldwell was both.
Pushing the door open, I forced a smile to my lips and stepped inside.
On the bed, George turned his head to me. He’d never reached the creature’s tongue the night of the Emergence. He’d walked to the beach. He’d struggled. Those things were true, but he’d never gotten away from me. I’d never have let him.
The leather cuffs at his wrists and ankles had held. His gag remained firmly in place. Eyes squinted against the meager, though unexpected light. Then they grew wide.
I sat on the edge of the bed and ran the back of my hand down the side of George’s cheek. Leaning over, I knocked my head lightly against his.
“They won’t come looking for you,” I said. “They’ll offer me a fraction of your estate when they contest the will, and I’ll take it.”
He squeezed his eyes closed and tears spilled down his cheek to pool against my thumbs. Gently, I removed the gag, and he sobbed softly.
“Thank you for this,” he said. “Can we go now?”
“The movers will meet us in Denver. Then we’ll go into the mountains. We’ll disappear.”
The deception had been his idea. In death, his family could no longer hope to control him. His family would get the bulk of his estate, and that’s the only closure they required. With all the disbelief and chaos surrounding the Emergence, and with no conflicting testimony from witnesses, the authorities had accepted my story with little more than a nod.
Now, we could disappear. We could build something new without the accumulation of his life littering our happiness. We’d decided to move far away from the Gulf, from all connected masses of water.
The Emergences were becoming more frequent, and those afflicted with Gibbet’s remained at risk. The victims still blacked out. They still wandered, requiring constant observation or restraint. They still danced.
“So, we’re okay?” George asked.
His hopeful eyes lost their life and turned hard. The grunting chant bubbled low in his throat, and I managed to get the gag in place before the violent syllables bellowed forth. I pulled away from him, but kept one hand on his cheek as he ranted into the muffling fabric.
“We’re okay,” I told him. “We’re just fine.”
THE CURIOUS ALLURE OF THE SEA
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN
So stunning was the view from the deck of her new house that Jenny thought it might be worth the loneliness. Late afternoon sunlight made monstrous shadows of the pine trees on either side of the property, but straight back from the deck where the ground dropped away toward the rocks, she had the perfect vista—nothing but the indigo sweep of the Atlantic Ocean, the cold wind off the water, the white froth of the chop around the island, the circling gulls, and the occasional seal basking on the rocks. The romance of it plucked at her heart. She stood on the deck, tugged her thick wool sweater more tightly around her, and thought there might not be a more beautiful place on Earth. The house was hers. The deck was hers. But she couldn’t share it with anyone.
Not ever.
It started months earlier, on the rainy autumn morning when they found her father’s boat. Tom Leary had gone missing two days earlier after a lifetime at sea. Jenny had spent the time praying for him to radio in, praying the Coast Guard would find some trace of his fishing boat, the Black Rose. Praying for it, and dreading it as well.
Matt Finn knocked on her door at just past seven that morning. She opened the door of her rented cottage in pajama pants and a threadbare Patriots shirt, an arm placed self-consciously across her chest, eyes narrowed because she was too sleepy to open them all the way just yet. Officer Finn normally cut a fine figure in his uniform—Matt had been proud of his badge since his first day on the job, back when they’d still been dating—but that morning he just stood in the rain looking tired and sad, blues soaked almost black, and Jenny took one glance at him and knew.
He hesitated as he tried to muster up the words.
Jenny just shook her head. “I’ll get some clothes on and be right out.”
She shut the door and let him stand out there in the cold September rain. It never occurred to her until much later that she should have let him in. By then, she’d wish that she had. If she’d known how things would turn out, she’d have savored every moment of contact she could get. But wisdom always came too late.
In the car, Matt shut off the crackling voices on the radio. She was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to do that, but the silence helped.
“They found the Rose?” she asked.
Hands tight on the wheel, Matt nodded. The wipers swished the rain off the glass and the engine hummed, and it took him a moment or two before he spoke.
“He wasn’t on it.”
“No sign of him at all?”
In answer, Matt reached out and took her hand, holding it there on the seat between them as the police car carried her out to the dock. When they’d parked and gotten out and were walking the rest of the way, and she saw the dark figures milling about in the gray storm light, and the Coast Guard ship, and the Black Rose bobbing against the dock beyond it, she wished Matt could take her hand again, almost reached for him but thought better of it. He was married now, and didn’t belong to her anymore.
Cops murmured words she barely heard. Three strutting seagulls had landed on the boat’s bow railing and were squawking at each other in some kind of territorial dispute. When a fourth tried to land, they banded together to chase it off.
A Coastie put a hand on Jenny’s shoulder, trying to prevent her from boarding the Rose, but a cop intervened and the hand vanished. Her heart broke with the force of her gratitude. She had to see for herself. Her father had always known the sea would take his life, but he’d always said it gave him life, too, so that would only be fair.
It didn’t feel fair.
The boat creaked under foot as she stepped down onto the deck. She glanced around, saw an abandoned life vest and some long black Guinness cans, empty of course. This was the debris of her daddy’s idea of fishing. His catch would be in the coolers, no doubt, though one would have several more of those black cans. The life vest made her brow furrow, though. Why had he dragged that out from its usual resting place? There hadn’t even been a storm.
A couple of the gulls hopped to the deck and started making their way back toward her, angry at her intrusion. Lost in the worst of dreams, Jenny noticed the oddness of their behavior, but only barely. Ignoring the birds, she stepped into the wheelhouse.
It felt haunted, but it took a moment for her to realize it was the silence that gave it that ghostly atmosphere. The boat was too dark. Too quiet.
A creak behind her caused her to turn, but it was only Matt and another cop.
“The engine?” she asked.
“Dead.”
“How does that happen?”
The cops shifted uncomfortably. “It’s being investigated.”
“He still had his cell phone, Matt. Radio or not, he could’ve called. And he would have, unless he thought he didn’t need to. Could he have flagged down another boat? Maybe someone …”
She didn’t want to think about it. About violence toward her father.
“Anything’s possible,” the other cop said. “The weird thing is there’s no damn fish.”
Jenny frowned, glanced past the cops toward the deck. “He drank at least three beers, which meant he was out for a while before … whatever happened. No way did he spend that kind of time and not catch anything. This is Tom Leary we’re talking about.”
Matt shot a dark look at the other officer, then shrugged. “No fish. No sign he’d even been fishing. Equipment all put away, nice and neat.”
Her frown deepened. She hung her head, pondering what her father had been up to on that morning two days past. The emptiness of the wheelhouse began to feel s
uffocating, the air too close despite the side windows being open. She took a deep breath and felt a tingle at her back, as if someone might be in there with them, watching from a shadowed corner. Jenny turned, but saw no one. Instead, she felt her gaze drawn to the hook to the right of the throttle, where her dad had often hung his hat. In its place was a grimy silver necklace upon which dangled a flat rectangular stone about two inches in height.
Jenny bent to study that stone, reached out to lift it into her palm, chain still looped around the hook. The stone had been carved with three spirals, all connected at the center so they seemed to flow one toward the other in a never-ending circle.
Waves, she thought. They look like—
“Hey, Jen, don’t do that,” Matt said, taking a step toward her. “You know you’re not supposed to touch anything.”
Jenny let the stone talisman slip from her fingers and it swung for a moment below that hook. She took out her cell phone, opened the camera, made sure the flash was on and snapped a shot. Her fingers felt warm where she’d touched the stone and the urge to reach out for it again grew powerful. An unfamiliar regret ignited inside her, and for just a moment the loss of that stone, the wish to return it to her grasp, seemed more important than the mystery of what had happened to her father.
“Looks pretty old,” the other cop said, crouching to peer at the stone. Jenny fought the urge to keep it from him.
“Your father’s?” Matt asked.
Jenny pulled herself away, skin crawling with unease at the way the presence of that stone tugged at her insides. “I guess it might’ve been. I don’t remember seeing it before.”
Matt bagged it for evidence while she stood out on the deck in the rain. Jenny felt the eyes on her as she waited for him to drive her home, knew they were wondering just as she was what happened to Tom Leary, whether he’d gotten drunk and fallen overboard or if there’d been some kind of foul play, or if—as happened from time to time with those men who spent most of their lives alone out on the water—he had just given himself over to the sea.
“The Coast Guard’ll keep looking,” Matt promised later, as he was driving her home, the shush of the windshield wipers and the drum of the rain on the cruiser’s roof making her sleepy. The words sounded hollow coming out of his mouth. Jenny barely heard them and certainly didn’t believe them. “We’ll find him.”
But of course they didn’t.
Someone stole the spiral-carved stone out of evidence on that first night. Jenny couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop looking at the photo she’d taken with her phone.
The morning after the Coast Guard called off the search, she had that ocean symbol tattooed on the inside of her right forearm. Three days later, she went back to the same shop and had the friendly, bearded artist tattoo her father’s name in the same spot on the opposite arm. She mourned, of course. Grief cut into her in moments quiet and loud, sometimes out of nowhere. Sorrow welled up like blood in a wound, spilling over and staining whatever it touched. And yet there were good moments as well, and anytime she looked at the tattoo, the ocean rolling on forever in that circle of waves, the infinite sea, a kind of peace filled her. Healed her. Though she’d never been much for fishing, Jenny had inherited her father’s love for the sea, felt its allure just as he always had. With that tattoo, it felt like the sea remained with her wherever she went.
And her father, of course. Tom was with her as well.
As much as it hurt to lose him, she felt as if somehow they were still together, out on the water, sharing that serenity. But it was the skin on the inside of her right arm that drew her gaze most often. Sometimes she would trace the three spirals with her fingertip. It relaxed her completely, made her feel as if she might float away. The thought did not trouble her at all.
All would be well. She felt sure of it.
On the third day after her second tattoo, she noticed the behavior of the gulls. In the aftermath of her father’s death, Jenny had put off her real estate clients the best she could and spent her time cleaning up after him. The funeral had brought with it a maelstrom of emotions. She’d listened to a hundred stories about her dad, some of them new to her and others comfortingly familiar. There’d been tears and laughter, and the unwelcome presence of her Aunt Eleanor, who’d spent the wake and funeral with her lips in a constant twist of disapproval. She’d come with her son Forrest, this woman who’d never understood the way the sea had called to her brother and always believed it had been laziness that caused him not to make “more” of himself, as if a man who earned his living out on the water could ever be conceived of as lazy.
Jenny had wanted to be polite but only barely stopped herself from telling Aunt Eleanor and her tax attorney son to go fuck themselves. Maybe down the line, when Jenny could clear her head, she’d realize she ought to dig through her father’s things and mail some keepsake or other to Eleanor, but as she began to go through the old man’s belongings, she found nothing her aunt deserved. Not that there was much to choose from. The boat still had a loan and would need to be sold. The house, though—she’d grown up in it, and so had her father. The taxes were nothing to sneeze at, but it had no mortgage, and she was grateful for that. Over the years he’d gone through very lean times, but Tom Leary had never given in to the temptation to take the money out of the house. There’d be an official reading of his will and it would have to go through probate, but she knew what was in it. Whatever he’d had would come to her.
All of these things were swirling in her mind as she parked her car outside the Whale’s Tale, a pub that looked over the harbor. As she climbed out, her shoes crunching in the gravel, the tattoo on her right arm felt strangely cold, as if it were winter instead of early fall. She slammed the car door and shivered despite the sweater she wore. She turned her wrist to stare at the tattoo on the inside of her forearm. It looked just as it had before and she felt foolish, wondering what she had expected.
Jenny took the walkway next to the restaurant—the main entrance opened onto a wooden boardwalk facing the harbor. She scanned the handful of people seated on the outside deck in spite of the chill and wondered if her lunch date would have opted for inside. It was comfortable for September, but the sky hung low and the clouds promised rain. She wished Matt had been her lunch date—he’d been so kind and attentive since her father’s death that she wondered if they might start over—but instead she was meeting with Rudy Harbard, who’d been one of her dad’s competitors and wanted to buy the Black Rose. They’d never liked each other much, Dad and Rudy, but Tom Leary had always respected the man.
As she stepped onto the boardwalk, Jenny inhaled deeply. The smell of the ocean, the sound of it, filled her heart. She glanced out at the water, at the boats bobbing out there, at the men working on their decks, and she longed to be with them. For a moment the idea of selling the fishing boat felt so wrong that she couldn’t take another step. She had always loved the sea, but now she felt a yearning so deep her bones sang with it. If she sold the boat—
A flash of white and gray whipped past her face. The gull cried out as it struck her right arm. She felt its claws but its momentum carried it past her and she twisted away from it. The bird alighted on the boardwalk, sending several people scurrying out of its path. Jenny glanced down at her arm, saw the small trickle of blood there, and then stared at the bird.
“You little shit,” she said. “You’re in for a kicking.”
She marched toward the bird, expecting it to hop backward or fly away, but instead it came toward her. A shiver went through her. Jenny heard another cry and looked up to see other gulls alighting on the little fence outside the restaurant’s porch and on top of a trashcan on the boardwalk.
A man touched her back. Startled, she jerked away from him, feeling as if she were under attack. The gull hopped closer.
“Let me help you,” he said, so calmly that he almost seemed to be sleepwalking. Maybe fifty years old, handsome and tan but leathery from a lifetime in the sun, he star
ed at Jenny as if he’d never seen another human being before, studying her as if to decipher some puzzle she represented to him.
“If you want to help—” she started.
The first gull cawed and took flight, right toward her. The leathery man dragged Jenny into a protective embrace. The bird might have struck him, she wasn’t sure, but then he turned and shooed it away. A toddler carrying an ice cream cone shrieked as the bird zipped over her head. Two other gulls jumped down to the boardwalk, and the leathery man shooed them away as well.
Over a dozen passersby had paused to become spectators, not including the people on the deck of the Whale’s Tale who were observing the show. Several of them, Jenny saw, were focused on her instead of the weirdness going down. One woman had her head tilted, her mouth slightly open, as if she’d taken the world’s best drugs. Jenny felt her skin crawling with the attention.
The man with the toddler—her father, she assumed—abandoned his child and walked toward her, scrutinizing her in a way that reminded her of a hundred showing-up-naked-at-school nightmares.
“Hey,” he said softly as he approached. “You. I need … I want …” He blinked and crinkled his brow like a flicker of common sense had tried to push into his forebrain. Then he shook his head. “What are you? Why do I want to—”
Leathery guy grabbed him from behind and slung him away. The quiet man almost tripped over his own toddler, startling the girl into letting her ice cream drop from the cone. She stared down at the strawberry glob on the boardwalk and her lip trembled, and then she started to cry.
The little girl’s sobs drew everyone’s attention. Even those who’d seemed somehow mesmerized were distracted long enough for Jenny to rush to the hostess stand. The fiftyish brunette had been watching the whole thing unfold and she frowned with maternal worry as she escorted Jenny straight to the restaurant’s entrance.
“Come inside, honey,” the brunette said. “We can call the cops—”