by Michael Shea
“Hey,” said Toby, his voice already pitched low though the house was a quarter-mile off. “If we’re snoopin in their yard, I’m gonna stay well back and under cover. You think we want them calling the cops?”
“OK. Good. So. Let’s go…see what we can see.”
They set off upslope through the grass, circling wide around to the rear of the property. It was a beautiful night. A fresh wind licked the pale grass like a great cat’s tongue, and the Bay was a vast burnished blade of black steel. The rising moon had washed out only half of a sky thick with stars. There was something impalpable in the air tonight. On the loose like a pack of invisible beasts. A craziness. A kind of hilarity.
As they hooked back up the slope, they began to see the back of the Robideau residence. The glass walls and doors that fronted the terrace were all lit up, colorful light was spilling out of them…a tumult of shapes moved within. There was a party going on inside.
The sneaking trio moved up to a knoll above and to the right of the terrace. The plantings up here hadn’t quite filled out and gave them good cover they could see through.
“Can you believe that?” hissed Toby. None of them could. They gaped as at a miracle.
The pool was finished, and full of sparkling water!
Chrome ladders, black-tiled borders, white-tiled deck surrounded it. The water lapped gently in the wind and sparkled.
“How the hell did they do that?” Don’s amazed eyes looked stark white in the shadows. And Daryl inwardly agreed that this alone was almost miraculous.
“Look,” hissed Toby. “That’s whatsername, Amy.”
Wearing a black bathing suit, Amy Robideau slipped out of one of the smaller doors opening onto the terrace. She hurried towards the pool, unnoticed by the party within doors. It seemed she was a temporary fugitive from her own festivity.
∴
Amy would be in and out in three minutes. She didn’t care if anyone spotted her doing it, in fact thought it might be fun if she were spotted. People could admire her new tan.
It was just that she had to feel the silkenness of it, that water in her new pool. How had Mike Love managed it? It was a miracle! She hadn’t told her friends that this would be a swimming party, because she didn’t know the pool was actually finished till they got home early this evening. She would gladly have shared it with her friends, but things being as they were, she couldn’t deny herself one little secret baptism. They probably would notice her doing this—they’d ask each other where she went to, they’d see her out here. Would come out. A great laugh. She’d explain, and they’d see her Côte d’Azure tan…
She aligned her toes on the pool’s glossy black rim, but before she could jump in she just had to stand and admire for a moment. Just look at what Mike had accomplished! All this tiling! And how had he gotten the water like this? The water was truly amazing—so limpid, but at the same time so textured with little cross-currents, so veiny with exquisite snaky little filaments of bubbles. He must have installed some new kind of sitz or jacuzzi pump.
Amy felt that slightly thick-throated pleasure of possessing something unusual, enviable. This silvery-shuddery stuff wasn’t just water, it was the kind of water only some people could afford. A prize possession, rich and strange.
She’d meant to be quiet and discreet about jumping in, but her pool roused a mad glee in her, and she decided to do a cannonball, splash this water high and wide across the terrace, bring her friends out to see.
Amy was buffed and treadmill-tough. She got a good strong spring from her cyclist’s thighs and arced out over the water, hoisted and hugged her knees, remembered to jerk her shoulders backwards as she entered, to snap her waterspout high and far.
But strange! No splash! No waterspout thudding up behind her.
She slowed to a perfect stasis about three feet under. Hung perfectly fixed in the water, neither bouyant nor sinking, just hanging!
She’d never had water hold her like this. It was silken. A delicate, velvety support against every square centimeter of her body’s surface. She hung astonished at this novelty for three slow heartbeats, forgetting that she wished to rise and breathe.
But then she was rising. The water was rising, contracting itself like a giant fist and towering up from the pool’s bottom. She was rising like a bubble suspended within this surging liquescent tower.
She hung there, fifteen feet above the rim of the pool, was aware that she had not breathed for a while, was aware of moonlight filtering down into her crystal cocoon.
She looked down (how slowly her eyes moved!) and, far beneath her, the pool itself seemed different…where were the tiles? The deck? There was nothing but a cement hole down there!
But now Amy was moving. She was plunging silkenly forward and downward. Her liquid tower was toppling across the terrace. She looked dreamingly around her as she toppled and she saw, behind the oleanders, three strange men standing, staring up at her in awe. Blue-collar types they looked like, a little scary…what were they doing in her plantings at night?
But she was plunging across the terrace now…here came the glass doors, flanked by their glass walls. There was everybody partying inside, more and more of them turning amazed and seeing her now. There was Milly, there was…Rick? Suddenly, her eyesight seemed to be dissolving…here came the doors, the glass wall…
∴
Like gaping zombies, Daryl, Don, and Toby stepped out of the oleander. They staggered to the edge of the terrace. They weren’t trying to interfere, they just couldn’t help themselves. They were six eyeballs, that’s all there was to them. They were accomplishing the first part of their mission. They were seeing.
The liquid mass, in rising from the pool, had stripped it. Had been it. Chrome ladders, tiled rim, tiled deck—all melted into the towering liquid. Only the bare, unpainted concrete pit of a pool remained behind when the great crystalline mollusk swelled across the terrace, Amy Robideau hanging in its forefront like an amazed mahout who’d sunk inside the flesh of his huge mount. Her body was becoming smoky, its outlines growing vaguer…
Just before impact with the glass, the fluid split into two wings, and as it did, Amy herself divided, snatched into two cloudy halves as, with a whack of ruptured glass, the wings of the wave poured into the house.
At that impact, most of the party was already gaping out at the glittery tsunami’s onrush. How slow they all seemed, all those happy people! Seeing what was coming, but no one moving, all of them freezing as the crystal seethe poured ten feet high along the walls, speedily embracing the entire crowd, while the central mass demolished the doors and the whole pool came inside.
The house was an undersea grotto, everyone floating off the floor, their startled faces so slow to change expression, to turn to wonder. Their rolling eyes asked each other What is this? Is this not strange?
It was a suspended, sub-aqueous party now. Everyone’s torpid gestures of astonishment seemed gestures of acclaim, of dawning rapture. Their martini glasses floated out of their loosening fingers, their garments billowed like tidal life in the gentle currents of a primordial sea.
And then there began a blossoming of their flesh. It clouded from their heads, their faces swelling out of focus, each face becoming an organic nimbus as slow-expanding as a nova to a telescopic eye…
And soon, soon after that, their bones leaked like smoke from their sleeves and their collars and pantlegs, but still they all moved, their clothes continued boogying together for a while, still roughly assembled to the shapes of their vanished bodies. A relaxed party of Tasteful Casuals…
And then, convulsively, the fluid contracted. The three men, at some instinct, recoiled in panic back into the plantings. The living liquid surged from the frames of shattered doors and walls. It swelled up into a huge crested slug as it poured back across the terrace. Though still translucent, it seemed a more sinewy liquid now, its moonlit crest showing a bubbly texture that bunched and flexed like snake-muscle.
At the pool’s bri
nk it paused and arched up high, higher, a giant, transpicuous nematode whose outlines melted endlessly, yet never lost their shape.
It dove upon a little drain-grate in the pool’s bottom. Its whole length poured into the smooth pit and, with a wonderful concentric rippling, its heaped mass swiftly diminished through that slight aperture to the Underground…
At the last, its shrinking ripples were much darker, its substance black as tar, a pool of tar muscling into the earth.
It was gone.
On wooden legs the three men lurched back out across the terrace. They gazed upon the remnant of the party: a snowstorm of glass shards across the floor; empty clothes, empty glasses everywhere.
It seemed the three of them would stand there forever, struggling to absorb the absolute reality of these strange remnants.
Until they remembered the reality of something else, something that moved beneath them through these hills.
They left the way they had come, downslope through the moonsilvered grass, and then back up towards the road. The night wind made the grass whisper against their legs and made all three feel—as if for the first time in their lives—the vastness of the night sky.
“Daryl,” said Don. It didn’t quite sound like his voice. “Who told you about this?”
They kept climbing in silence while Daryl sifted through all he knew, and all he didn’t. They had reached the car again before he answered.
“I’m gonna lay it all out to you. I’m not saying it’ll make sense. I’m just going to share what I know, including what I know about shoggoths.”
• THE BATTERY •
The Battery had actually been one, once. It was perched on a little spur of hills outthrust from an otherwise wide-beached Southern coast. Two centuries ago, this original Battery stood at the entry of a minor port—a bay now silted in and overgrown a hundred years.
That structure’s sizeable pentagon of stone and its ten guns had commanded the inlet from a good twenty yards’ elevation. Its dereliction led, by the turn of the twentieth century, to its being filled with stony rubble and capped with concrete to platform a new enterprise, commercial rather than military. Foundationed on its martial bones, the Haven of Health was a grand three stories high and—daring for its time—an hexagonal structure. It catered to the rich for a few decades, mineral baths, high colonics, medicine-ball workouts, but it did not long survive the Crash.
Not till the mid-Thirties did a new building sprout, a swank roadhouse. It was still higher-platformed than the Haven by its use of her foundation beneath its own. A rich bootlegger built it and named it for its deepest old bones: The Battery. This structure expressed Ricky Tomasi’s impulse for flair and was roughly octagonal: a one-story sprawl of contiguous pie-slice lounges and dance-rooms. It overlooked the Atlantic from a good ninety feet above the waves.
Though in decay since the last quarter of the twentieth century, this structure had been minimally maintained by faceless titleholders, who rented out small, crudely remodeled units for storage and dwellings.
As the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to its close, only two of the rentals were occupied—by two couples who inhabited opposite sides of the rambling structure. They had first gotten to know each other through shared problems with the septic system every couple months or so. The men (to whose gender plumbing problems have immemorially fallen) met first. They would stand looking out over the densely overgrown leechfield, and Ray Stone would say to Nolo Ceja, “Easy, I tell you it’s all the old stonework. Old foundations under the ground here. They should never’ve built on this site.”
With four decades dividing their ages, Nolo at first thought his tall gaunt elder to be somewhat vague and strange. Like Ray’s calling him “Easy.” When first introduced, Ray had remarked, “‘Nolo’—unusual name.”
The solid young man had smiled and said, “It’s Spanish, short for Manolo. But my old man used to joke that it’s short for No lo hize—I didn’t do it!” Somehow Ray had remembered only the hize, and called him Easy…though Nolo had decided that Easy actually sounded pretty cool.
He would answer Ray’s strange notion of stonework by waving his arm at the tangled slope. “The damn thing just needs to be bulldozed, Ray. If the soil’s turned it would absorb. I keep telling Scampi that.”
Ray would shake his head, as if Nolo just didn’t understand. “That stonework is old down there, Easy. Older than you can imagine…” It made Nolo wonder if he and his amiable neighbor were always on the same page.
Yet the third or fourth time they stood pondering the field, Nolo shared an odd thought of his own about the jungled leechfield. “It’s funny, but it doesn’t really smell like sewage. It smells like…the sea.” And stood thinking how foolish this must sound, since but fifty yards behind them the whole Atlantic foamed to the shore below their promontory.
Staring intently at him, Ray said, “Yes, a dead sea. Some black, subterranean reach of it, festering in darkness…”
“That’s…that’s right.” And laughed uneasily at betraying his surprise.
Ray smiled. “You know, why don’t the two of you come over one night? Have some barbecue?”
That winter was a stormy one, the sea hammering their promontory with foamy fists that exploded halfway up the cliff, the ocean greedy for the earth they perched on. By March, you could say spring had come, but only because the drenching, gale-blown downpours alternated with sapphire skies where towering flotillas of white cloud scudded before the wind. Every day indoors Nolo and Adrienne navigated their own little seas of Internet, where Nolo’s website business was beginning to grow, and Adrienne’s editing service was doing well. On weekends when the gales abated, they went over to Ray and Estella’s apartment for barbecue on the older couple’s canopied and flagstoned patio.
The older pair, it seemed, sailed an even larger digital sea. Seven monitors peopled their cozy living room, all seven always lit—an “international info-network” of which they were the “East Coast mavens.” Vague about the info they trafficked in, they kept the unsleeping screens draped with Estella’s gauzy scarves when the Cejas visited, but this discretion never chilled the camaraderie. Bach and Mozart—faintly overheard from each other’s distant dwellings—had been ambassadors of their first acquaintance, and music always regaled their get-togethers, as did the Stones’ lively recollections of their travels, which seemed to have taken them everywhere on earth.
On a Saturday morning, all wind, sun, and sweeping cloud-shadows, Nolo drove his rattly old Volvo the twenty miles back from town, pleased to have another barbecue to look forward to that night.
He found Scampi’s Eldorado and a van pulled up to one of the larger units, midway between his and Ray’s. Plump Scampi, dark-suited, was combing back his well-oiled black hair, something Nolo considered a nervous trait, performed, for example, when Nolo asked him about the septic system.
“New tenant, Mr. Scampi?” The unit’s door was open, and someone was using a power saw inside.
“That’s right, Mr. Ceja. Very quiet. Single man. Indian fella I think, I mean like from India. Very quiet.”
Unusually emphatic on this point, Nolo thought. “Well, I’m glad you’re here. Got your receipt book?”
Normally decisive in such transactions, Scampi seemed distracted, and when a hammering commenced in the unit, he botched his receipt and had to write a new one. Looking up, Nolo saw that the unseen workman was sealing one of the two front windows from inside with a sheet of plywood. Strange…
“Ta-da!”
Adrienne looked up from her screen at grinning Nolo in the doorway, his arms spread in self-presentation. Broad-cheeked and small-chinned, Adrienne’s sly smile showed more of the Arabic than the Cherokee in her. “A check,” she said.
“Two checks. Paid the rent.”
“Come to my arms!—but just lemme finish this page…”
Adrienne was built solidly, just like Nolo. Because lovemaking made her hungry, she often went for a run afterw
ards to avoid snacking. “It’s two hours to dark,” Nolo called from the shower, “and lookin’ like rain again!”
“One hour max!” Knotting her track shoes. “You make the sangria!”
It did cloud over as she thudded down the country two-lane—no shoulder to speak of, but damn little traffic either. The road rose and sank gently between walls of trees. Her soles hammered the pavement, the gusts shouldering her this way and that. Wind-crazed crows flustered up from the canopy, swooped zig and zag, and dove back in again.
Rare spears of slant sun soon wholly surrendered to unbroken gray cloud-rack like woolly mammoths in a sky-swallowing stampede. The glorious storm-energy swept Adrienne along.
Something big topped a far rise, dove from sight, then surged up the next rise, big in its shape and its noise above the wind. A dirty van, hauling a trailer full of tools, came at her mid-road, unregarding, and she leapt to a narrow shoulder, dodging it. Two big shapes in front, blank faces in bulky profile.
Those motherfuckers! And where else could they be heading but the Battery?
But back home an hour later…there was no sign of any van.
∴
Rain rattled on the canopy, savory smoke tendriled up from the grill, and the Goldberg Variations stitched the wet night’s noise with silver embroidery. Their feet toasting by two electric space-heaters, Estella Stone described the Giant’s Causeway to the Cejas, while Ray basted the meat. “When you travel through Ireland,” she told them, “you feel that this whole wonderful world was built by giants. That all of it’s architecture.” A lean woman, almost as tall as Ray, the architecture of Estella’s own strong face was lovely in its age, jaw and cheekbones elegantly lathed.
Her glances at her husband underlined his abstraction this evening. Though always more talkative than he, tonight she seemed to be masking his silence, and perhaps also an unease of her own. Sipping sangria after dinner, Nolo caught the flicker of Ray’s glance into the living room, and some startlement at what he saw. He went inside and was heard keyboarding fiercely.