by Ellen Datlow
He turned onto his side and swam parallel to the sea floor, really mermaiding it now, cruising the length of the deck from bow to stern, inspecting the damage and the rot. He was gliding back the opposite way when it struck him: He’d been so focused on the small details that he had missed the big obvious one right in front of him.
He’d been looking for a hole ripped in the deck, or a broken stump, evidence of a missing mast. He’d been looking over what remained for signs of mast hoops, iron reinforcements especially, that might have chafed a groove of rust and wear around the bottom of its mast in the push and pull of the currents.
And they were there.
It was only when he took in the big picture that he realized: Three weeks ago the wreck had two masts, angled down toward the sediment. Now there was only one, the foremast.
There appeared to have been three, total. Masts detached from wrecked ships, sure, it happened. But where were they now? No telling how long the rearward mizzen had been gone. But within the past twenty-two days, the main mast shouldn’t have gotten far.
Shouldn’t. But had.
He feared he could guess where thirty-plus feet of them might have ended up. Where, but not how. There was no how he could imagine. There was no how he wanted to imagine. There was only his quickening heart and the hunger to breathe and the air above the waves.
He surfaced and plunged, surfaced and plunged again, like a pearl diver looking for a prize too big to be misplaced. He widened his search to the limits of his safety line, and still it wasn’t enough. Looking out toward deeper waters, beyond the spot where he’d caught that glimpse of the whale emerging through the dim blue, he saw how the sea floor sloped away, and that down the incline, some indistinct patch of shadow waited. A trick of light would waver. This didn’t waver.
“We need to move,” he told Kimo the next time he surfaced. “Forty or fifty yards that way.”
Never thought he’d see Kimo balk at piloting the boat. “Dude. You’ve had a month of downtime since the Corona Open. Is this really how you want to spend your final days of it, instead of getting your mind on the Billabong Pro?”
Treading water, spitting salt: “Yeah. It is. It helps. Everything helps.”
“What’s so special about fifty yards that way?”
“Because I’m ready for it.”
Kimo made the move, grumbling, but insisted on doing a sonar reading of the bottom. Ninety-four feet—Danny had never dived that far. Not a huge leap from last week’s new personal best of eighty-three, but still, it meant more pressure and another twenty-two feet of round-trip. This was not insignificant.
He went anyway. Deeper, bluer, colder, darker. He relaxed into the squeeze, welcoming it like an embrace.
From above and to the side, he couldn’t yet tell what was waiting below. Submerged another eighteen feet lower than the yacht, even less light reached his target zone. But it was more than that. The water looked cloudier here, too. As his vision acclimated to the gloom, he could make out what appeared to be a slab on the sea floor, three times the width of a car, furred with growth and set in the midst of a forest of bull kelp. Their stalks swayed with the currents, their fronds wavering like pennants in a breeze.
The further he sank and the closer he drifted, the less natural the slab looked, like a mound of sand and mud and stones scraped into a heap and packed together with intent. For no reason he wanted to explore, its flatness and order—its look of purpose—reminded him of the worktable in Gail’s shop. Again he was overcome with the uneasy sense of facing something out of place, lost from above and drowned without pity.
Because rising from the mound was a grove of logs, eight of them, seemingly jammed into the muck to hold them in place. Their tops were ragged, splintered, a sight that nearly locked his mind. He could imagine no force in the sea that could take a ship’s mast and break it up this orderly way, or would even want to.
Around each piece, a thrashing cloud of motion churned and blurred the water. By now he knew a shipworm on sight. Even at their most normal they still filled him with loathing, but he didn’t think they were supposed to behave like this, hundreds of them visible, like hagfish burrowed into the side of a decomposing whale. They streamed over the wood with the furious energy of a feeding frenzy.
The dread crept in cold, from the outer dark. This was something no one was meant to see. Ever. A hiker would feel this way, stumbling across the half-eaten carcass of a mule deer, then smelling the musk and carrion scent of the returning grizzly.
Danny flicked his fin to drift close enough to see the hard little shells on the worms’ heads, scouring the wood, shaping it as surely as rasps and chisels and lathes.
He recognized the human form gnawed free from the lengths of mast. Anyone would.
He knew their contours. He’d lugged their predecessors up from the beach five times already.
And among the three that appeared farthest along, he recognized the face taking shape out of the grain. He had loved it for the past nineteen years.
Danny tried to will the sight away as an illusion born of low light and a brain hungry for oxygen. But it wouldn’t resolve into anything else. He pinched off a half-dozen of the worms, fat and lashing, and flung them to the silt so he could caress his hand along the fresh-carved visage. Even blind, in the dark of an infinite abyss, he would know that cheekbone, that nose, that jawline, that hollow at the throat.
Already, the worms he’d dropped were wriggling back up to her face, to dig back in and resume their task. Mindless, they seemed to obey a directive he couldn’t begin to fathom. But if something out here was capable of snapping a ship’s mast into pieces like a pencil, then maybe it followed that it had workers, drones subjugated by the kind of group mind that turned a school of fish in perfect unison.
There was no why he wanted to imagine, either.
Five above, eight down here, and who knew how many more might be drifting unfinished somewhere between. In revulsion, in the grip of something he felt but couldn’t name, he gave the foremost effigy a shove to send it toppling back, pulling free of the muck and thunking into another behind it, then a third gave way, a slow chain reaction that disturbed the silt, but the worms not at all.
Abruptly, his legs were yanked from beneath him and he was upside-down again, moving up and away, something reeling him in like a fish. He nearly panicked and lost the breath locked inside, until the tug on his ankle made sense. Kimo being Kimo again. He couldn’t right himself under the tension, never enough slack to turn around. Rather than flail at the end of the rope, he relaxed and let it happen, until he broke the surface spewing bubbles and foam, and breathed with a violent gasp, once more a creature of land and air.
Kimo peered down from the boat as if expecting to see him floating motionless. Huh. Must have set another personal best without even realizing.
“How long?” Danny said. Normal. He had to act normal.
“Seven minutes.”
Seven? Whoa. He would never have guessed.
“I had to pull the plug. And yet … you’re fine.”
“You sound disappointed about that.”
“No. That part’s good.” Kimo shook his head—never again, never again. “You need to find somebody else to take you out for this. All you do is scare the shit out of me.”
Poor Kimo. Danny felt genuinely bad for him. Bad for them both. Because it wouldn’t have helped one bit to tell Kimo that, no, he wasn’t fine. He hadn’t come up fine at all.
Worse, he couldn’t tell Gail, either. How was he supposed to convey a thing like this? They’re you. They’re supposed to be you. He couldn’t even be sure how she would react—if she’d find it flattering, the best thing since ambergris, or if the balance would tip and this weird synergy between her and the sea would finally leave her spooked.
Once she picked up on the obvious, that something was wrong, his only option was to lie. Had a bad dive. Burst a blood vessel in my nose. It happens.
All he could do was l
ook ahead. Try to get her away for two weeks, inject some time and distance to break this encroaching spell, and leave whatever carvings might wash up next for someone else to find.
“Why don’t you come with me to Tahiti, for the Billabong? It’s been years.”
“I know. But I should stay. I don’t have the kind of work I can take with me.”
She was hardly doing the work now. “It’ll still be here when you get back. You might even get some new ideas there to bring home.”
“Like tiki carvings? I went through my tiki phase years ago.”
Oh. Right. She had.
He packed and planned and tried his best to make it sound enticing: Seeing the Pacific from another side would do them good. This could be the last time he went there as a competitor. None of it seemed to quite get through.
“I know. I just like it here. There’s something about here. Some people go their whole lives looking for the place they should be. I found my here a long time ago.”
Even before she’d found him—Gail was too kind to say so, but it had to have crossed her mind. He was one more thing the sea had given her, the one thing it was most capable of taking back. That worried her. It had all along.
I love you. You’ve always been my anchor, she would tell him. But it scares me what could happen if the anchor chain ever broke.
In that way of sounds, unusual enough to penetrate, familiar enough to not alarm, it worked its way into his dreams before teasing him awake. The dream dissolved at once, so he lay in the dark with the only thing left: the far, reverberant squeal of a whale rolling in across the water and floating up through the open window.
“Listen,” he whispered, and reached over to give Gail a gentle shake. But her side of the bed was empty, a sure sign she was listening already.
She wasn’t at the window, wasn’t in the kitchen, wasn’t in the bathroom or front room. He knew the feel of a house emptied of any other heartbeat than his own. Danny yanked on enough clothing to call himself decent, a T-shirt and shorts that felt backwards, then stumbled outside, but she wasn’t on the deck, either.
The night was as bright as nights got … all moon and no clouds, and the sea a glittering expanse of silver-white and blue-black. It was the world. It was their entire world.
Braced against the redwood deck, he peered down at the beach. After a moment, his fingers gripped the rail with the same steadying ferocity as his toes gripped a surfboard. He felt every bit as much in motion, shooting through a rolling barrel that collapsed behind him.
From up here, he was so accustomed to the sight of Neptune’s Throne that the high-backed platform was as familiar a fixture of the landscape as the ridge on which they lived. But now … now its shape was different, wrong. He couldn’t see what, exactly, only that some hulking form occupied it, bulbous and enormous, wet enough and slick enough to catch the moonlight with an iridescent gleam.
To his left, a form no bigger than a person traversed toward it, small and dark against the pale sands.
He heard it again, rebounding from the cliffs—the same high, rolling squall that had brought him awake, the forlorn cry he’d always taken for a passing whale, roaming the endless waters and calling out for what or who might answer.
Danny sprinted for the beach stairs, the zigzag flights up which he’d helped lug a lifetime’s worth of the sea’s gifts, clueless, never imagining what it might have wanted, or expected in return.
Pounding down the steps he was as good as blind, the moonlight trapped above the canopy of leaves that crowded up and over. Although he held the rail, heedless of the splinters he picked up along the way, he went tumbling before he knew what happened, something damp and slick skidding beneath his bare foot.
His leg torqued one way while the rest of him torqued another. If pain glowed, his knee could have lit the night. No wave had ever flung him more violently than this, than gravity and his own momentum. He juddered down the stairs, sometimes on his hip, sometimes on his rump, every hardwood step another bruise. When he thudded to a stop he had two flights left to go, and scooted the rest of the way on his ass.
Down on the beach he tried to stand but his knee wasn’t having it. He tumbled to the sand, still warm from the day’s sun. He crawled, striving to see through the pink haze of pain, first making out the moon-etched lines of the cliffs ahead, then below them, the suggestion of some lesser mountain that rose up and slouched back toward the sea.
Danny crawled until he found a line of dimples in the sand, footprints, unbroken and resolute. He followed them, dragging his useless leg behind him, hearing nothing but the wheeze of his breath and the crash and retreat of the waves.
He crawled until the pillars and planks of Neptune’s Throne loomed above him, empty now, but darkened with water and draped with robes of seaweed, the air around it rich with a heavy musk of brine. The sand before it was churned to wet clumps and crooked furrows, as if between here and the water’s edge the beach had been plowed by some dragging thing, bristling with appendages, that had tried to walk but was never meant to move on land.
Alongside the disturbance, the line of her steps turned, veering toward the water. He followed these too, scrambling on both elbows and one good knee, until they were no longer dimples but true footprints pressed into the wet sand, heel and arch and five small toes. He scurried ahead, frantic now, as step by step the prints began to change, the impression left by each toe deepening, as though dug by a hooked and spiny claw, with a growth of webbing in between. He followed them to the foaming lip of the sea, where he lost them, her last footprints erased as the water washed across and smoothed the sand blank again.
Still, he floundered onward as the waves battered him head-on, stopping only when he was slapped across the face and shoulder by something solid, heavy as a wet blanket, that clung like a caul. Sputtering, he peeled it away, and when after the longest moments of his life he accepted what the tattered thing was, he had no idea what to do with it. He couldn’t bring himself to pitch it away, couldn’t think of any reason to keep holding on.
If Gail didn’t need her skin anymore, then where on land or sea was it supposed to go?
Out past the breakers, beneath the moon, a gleaming bulbous dome submerged with an elephantine skronk that he felt ripple through the waves and shudder through the sand.
Then he was alone.
He knew the feel of a shore emptied of any other heartbeat than his own.
He retreated far enough to keep from choking, then rolled onto his back to face the stars, exhausted and sweating from the pain. The water surged in and out for a thousand cycles, and a thousand more.
In time he wondered which of the ligaments in his knee were in shreds. ACL, PCL, LCL, MCL … any and all. He surely had a motherfucker of a hamstring tear, as well. Whatever the damage, his career was done even sooner than expected.
By the time he was ready to move again, the sky had lightened to a formless gray. Fog had crept in across the waters, and with it a stinging drizzle of rain. His knee was swollen double and he couldn’t bend his leg, but nothing much hurt by default anymore.
There was dawn enough for him to spy a familiar shape stranded in the channels where the sea met the freshwater stream from the cliffs. He made for it, mocking thing that it was … as complete a carving as he’d seen, even farther along than the ones sunk amid the kelp beds. Or maybe this was one of them, finished along the way.
He knew its shape, knew the face, the hands folded as if in prayer. But he knew nothing of the changes wrought upon the rest of her: the thin, frilled slits at either side of her throat; the fins along each forearm and lower leg. But he did know, and had all along, that she’d smelled of the sea, and tasted of it, too, and that the ocean and its gods knew their own.
She must have known, as well, somewhere inside. Must have cherished the sea even while living in fear that if she ever went out on it, she might not come back. It would never stop wanting her.
He had to admit that this carving—all o
f them—appeared to have been made with love. But love, as Gail had said, on a whole different wavelength.
He rolled the effigy back out into the surf, fighting the wishes of the waves, the most grueling thing he’d ever done. But it was still a log at heart. It floated. The first twenty yards from shore were the hardest, the next hundred a little easier. He clung to this new Gail until he could no longer push off the sandy bottom, then threw his good leg over and across, straddling it like a surfboard and paddling out to sea.
In time, the roar of the breakers faded behind him, until he was left with the quieter slop and splash of a calm sea, as the dim sun rose over his shoulders and began to burn the fog away.
He paddled as far as he could, until he thought he might have just five more good, strong minutes left inside. The ocean yawned deep and dark beneath. He could still breathe, but with one leg, could he kick hard enough to overcome the air in his lungs? Could he reach that threshold that changed everything? He had to believe he could. Forty feet. He only had to make it another forty feet.
Two days ago, he’d spent seven minutes under, and it went like nothing. There had to be meaning in that. Superhumans were popping up everywhere, remember. Something in the air, something in the water. A beautiful time to be alive.
He rolled off the log and made the plunge.
He would find Gail again, or he wouldn’t.
He, too, was ready for another way of life, or he wasn’t.
The ocean would accept him. Or it wouldn’t.
He could still be a part of it either way.
SHIT HAPPENS
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
I was pretty drunk or maybe I’d’ve figured out what was happening a lot sooner. It’d been a hell of a day getting to Long Beach from the east coast, though, kicking off with a bleary-eyed hour in an Uber driven by a guy who ranted about politics the entire way, then two flights separated by a hefty layover, because Shannon, my PA, is obsessed with saving every penny on travel despite—or because of—the fact she’s not going to be the one spending hours wandering an anonymous concourse in the middle of the country, trying and ultimately failing to resist the temptation to kill the time in a bar. Once I’d had a couple/three there it seemed only sensible to keep the buzz going with complementary liquor on the second flight, and so by the time the cab from LAX finally deposited me on the quay beside the boat I was already sailing more than a few sheets close to the wind.