Lullabies for Suffering

by Caroline Kepnes et al.

  As I was expecting, the ocean is also full of monsters. Giant whales. The kraken. Enormous sharks. Strange serpents. Evil mermaids. Various beasts and blobs that live in the remote darkness near the ocean floor or that hide in the pitch-black trenches no human has ever seen. The list goes on and on. Then there are also beasts that belong to certain cultures, that have only been seen in certain spots and most say belong to the realm of dreams. There are strange turtles that kill, monstrous jellyfish, dangerous octopi, and fish big enough to swallow boats. None of them were what I was looking for.

  I was about to quit when I found something that made me keep reading: the Qalupalik. I made a copy of what I read so you could see it and know that your old man isn’t crazy. The chunk below is of poor quality because the machine was running out of toner, but I thought it was important. Anyway, here’s what the book I was reading, Underwater Demons: A Bestiary of the World’s Oceanic Monsters, by Marcus Matthew, said about the Qalupalik:

  In Inuit culture, the Qalupalik is a human-like creature that lives in the sea. The humanoid fish is said to possess long hair, green or grey skin, and elongated fingers that end in long, sharp fingernails. According to Inuit mythology, the Qalupaliks like to inhabit reefs near human settlements. The creatures wear an amautik, which is a handmade pouch Inuit parents use to carry small children while working or during the day. The purpose of the amautik is as simple as it sinister: the Qalupaliks use it to take away children who disobey their parents. According to legend, the Qalupaliks eat the children. However, there are many rumors and even a few poems that talk about the Qalupaliks coming ashore to trade with the locals.

  While it is generally understood and accepted by the academic community that the narrative is one used to prevent children from wandering off alone and playing by themselves near the water, certain members of the academic community point to the fact that the Inuit have a long history of disappearances and a high rate of child mortality, especially in coastal settlements. While this is far from enough evidence to support the existence of some humanoid water creature that devours children, Inuit songs, stories, poems, and mythology give the Qalupalik a privileged position and the creature is seen as something to be avoided at all costs, even by adults with no children.

  That was something. Humanoid creatures that lived near reefs and took children away from time to time. It wasn’t an exact match, especially because the Qalupaliks were rumored to have hair on their heads but, as I said, it was enough to keep me going with my research. Half an hour later, I found this:

  Just like a few other cultures across the world, the Scottish also have a humanoid resident of the deep that is known to interact with humans on water and, occasionally, on land. In Scottish mythology, Selkies, or Selkie fowk, which roughly translates to “seal folk” or “seal people,” are mythological beings capable of therianthropy, which is the mythological ability to metamorphose into animals. In the case of Selkies, they change from seal to human form by shedding their skin and then from human to something akin to a skinny seal with arms whenever they enter the water again. They are said to inhabit reefs near human settlements and to use their abilities to walk on land to interact with humans.

  I had enough to pique my interest and to let me know I was on the right path, so I kept reading. The book gave me versions of humanoid creatures inhabiting reefs near places where people lived all across the planet. These creatures were possibly the Qalupaliks or Selkies, but the drug-laden bodies they were feeding on had mutated them into something new. These things I called Profundos.

  Knowing that other cultures had some version of it made it all better and worse at the same time. The worst thing about it was that the descriptions were eerily similar: green or grey skin, long fingers, batrachian features, and the ability to move around on land.

  Without meaning to, I finished Matthews’ book. I took a break after and went to get a sandwich from the university’s cafeteria after telling the librarian to hold my books for me.

  I ate, but I can’t remember what was between those two pieces of bread. The information in my head was too much to process. I kept having the same revelation when I stopped focusing on one thing and looked at the bigger picture: humans have been sharing their lives with residents of the reefs seemingly forever. We have tried to get rid of them before, but we’ve never managed to.

  It was almost time to go home, but I wanted more. I wanted one last look at some books that could add a tiny piece to the crazy puzzle I was putting together.

  The first book I scanned after lunch yielded nothing except rehashed entries about some of the creatures in Matthews’ book. The second contained a bomb.

  Karla Ocasio, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, had turned her dissertation of a small town in Massachusetts into a book: Drowning the Truth: How the Government Destroyed a Town and its Residents.

  I’m running out of time—there is so much to say, but with each sentence, it feels like I’m being watched closer—so I’ll just leave you with the gist of the book:

  Innsmouth was a coastal town in Massachusetts founded in 1643. The town was known for shipbuilding before the American Revolution. Unfortunately, like many other towns, Innsmouth did not survive the shift to other types of businesses and a new way of living destroyed the town. Young people left in search of new opportunities and the residents that stayed behind became reclusive. According to the book, a series of disappearances led authorities to the town. All official records of what was seen in Innsmouth are sealed, but three weeks after launching an investigation, the government took over and used explosives to detonate the reefs that sat a few hundred feet in front of the town. But the story doesn’t end there. After they destroyed the reef, many of the folks who were living in the town were taken away by Federal agents. They never came back. However, there are no arrest records or proof that anyone from Innsmouth was incarcerated or forced to move elsewhere. They simply disappeared. The fact that they bombed the shit out of the reef and felt the need to throw people in government vehicles and make them vanish is more than enough to convince me that something terrible was going on, something they didn’t want the public to know about. I knew what those somethings looked like. The things I’d seen were descendants of those that had survived the bombing in Massachusetts. Or maybe they were the same. I had no idea how long those things lived.

  Knowledge is weird, Angelica. One thing you will learn in life is that knowledge always comes to you fragmented, so it always feels incomplete, always leads to more questions. How well you get to understand something often depends on your ability to take pieces of information and build a puzzle to get a clearer picture of what you’re dealing with. That is one skill academia tries to give you. It was the one element of being in college that I enjoyed. Seeing things come together is almost magical. It makes you feel like you can see the real world right underneath the false one. Unfortunately, not everything you see is good. This was one of those instances. I took pieces of folklore from around the world and observed a few patterns. They made me uncomfortable. If what they suggested was true, then anyone living near a reef anywhere around the world could potentially be dangerously close to creatures that have been around as long as we have. Hell, perhaps they even preceded us. The point is that the history of Innsmouth felt like the missing piece of the puzzle. There was something out there, just beyond the reef. It was something that had been around for a very long time. It also apparently possessed enough power to scare the government of the United States of America so bad that they decided to use bombs to deal with the situation.

  The second thing you should know about knowledge is that it’s often not comforting. Knowing things is scary. Understanding how the world works is something incredibly depressing. Seeing the inner working of society will make you see institutionalized racism everywhere. It will show you how misogyny is alive and well. It will show you how all of us who aren’t rich are cogs in a system that’s incredibly oppressive. It will show you that syst
em has been designed to prevent us from moving up on the social ladder. You will learn that privilege is basically the idea that something isn’t a damn problem because it doesn’t affect you personally. Anyway, I digress. I need you to have answers, I want to finish everything I have to say. I’m starting to panic and want to put in here all the life lessons I might not get to teach you. Let me get back to my damn story before something happens and you never hear the end.

  As you can imagine, my first reaction was thinking I need to get the hell off the island. Our beautiful country is 100 miles long by 35 miles wide. San Juan, where you were born, is like a finger sticking out into the ocean. We are all surrounded by water. If there is something in that water, we can’t escape it. Oceans. Rivers. Even lakes. From what I’d learned from the rest of Matthew’s book, there were also instances of humanoid creatures inhabiting bodies of water inland. In other words, I was fucked unless I moved to the moon. I had no money to go anywhere. Yeah, I know, I’m coming back to money again, but that’s how it goes for poor people. Lack of money is at the core of most of our problems. I had no money to run away. I would never leave you and your mom alone and there was no way I could explain my situation to your mother. Every time I considered it, the image of that creature hanging out outside our house came back to me. The only thing I knew for sure was that I needed to get a gun.

  My first thought was to call Marco. If anyone could get me a gun in a hurry it was him. He picked up on the second ring.

  “Yeah?”

  “Marco, it’s me, Adam.”

  “Did you hear about Ronny?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about Ronny.”

  “Ah…so why are you calling then?”

  “I’m calling you because I need a fucking gun, but now I want to know why you asked me about Ronny, man.”

  “I’m…I’m sorry I got you into this, Adam,” he said. “I had no idea it would turn out the way it did.”

  “It’s too late to be sorry. What I need now is a big fucking gun, not an apology. What happened to Ronny?”

  “Ronny’s dead.”

  Two words and my world shook a bit, the edges blurring under the weight of Marco’s revelation.

  “Dead?”

  My question was stupid. Marco hadn’t stuttered. Still, some part of my brain wanted confirmation, as if Marco would suddenly crack up and tell me he was bullshitting. Instead, I got details. Details I wish I hadn’t gotten.

  “He wouldn’t pick up his phone so I sent someone to check on him. Someone had broken into his home. My man found him next to the bed. His body had been opened. Whoever did it took most of his organs. The guy I sent ran out, scared shitless, then he realized how fucking crazy he would sound if he came to me with that story, so he went back inside and used his phone to make a video.”

  That’s all I needed to know. That’s more than I wanted to know. I could picture Ronny looking out his window and seeing a figure in a long coat in the opposite side of the road, looking at his house in the middle of the night. Once again, fear’s cold fingers grabbed the back of my neck and tried to squeeze me to death.

  “I saw the video, Adam,” Marco said, making me jump when he unexpectedly broke the silence. “There were these…things inside him. They looked like large black tadpoles with teeth. They were wriggling around, eating him from the inside, eating whatever was left of him. When my guy went to leave the place he saw a purple chunk of guts on the floor. This guy isn’t a fucking doctor or anything but he thinks it was a liver. He said it looked like the liver his mother used to cook. Guy’s a tough son of a bitch, but he said what he saw, and the memory of the liver’s smell as it cooked, finally got to him. He vomited. Then he cried.”

  “So these things that came for Ronny. They attacked him at the beach, we killed them, and now they somehow still got him. They got him on land. What the fuck are we going to do now?”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m getting the fuck outta here for a while. I have enough good people here. I can run this shit from my phone for a week or two. I hope this thing blows over. I’m done dealing with those fish people or whatever the fuck they are.”

  “I hear you, man, but I don’t have that option. I’m broke. I have a family to protect. I have to stay here. I need dope for a week and I need a gun. The least you can do for me is hook me up, man. I was there with Ronny. They saw me. They saw my face. I…I’ve seen one of them hanging out in front of my house.”

  Marco’s silence was pregnant with guilt, but I was sure he was also debating whether he should help me or if he should hang up the phone and never answer my calls again.

  “Sure, I’ll give you some smack and I’ll give you a gun, but you need to know that a gun won’t do a damn thing. You think Ronny didn’t have a fucking gun?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. My brain was jumping between the horrific images Marco was putting into my head and the all-consuming need for a fix. I knew heroin would make some of the fear go away. Then I asked myself the most fucked up question of all—what if they could smell the heroin inside me? What if the poison coming out in my sweat smelled like lunch to them? What if eating me wasn’t just the Profundos getting their revenge, but getting their fix?

  “I hear you, Marco, but I need some kind of protection. I need a gun.”

  “My plane leaves at five thirty. Meet me at our spot in an hour.”

  Then he hung up.

  I ran home to get a fix after the phone call. The hit almost knocked me out, but something stopped me from nodding out. It was your mother’s voice yelling at me from the second floor. She said we needed diapers and formula and wanted to know what the hell I was up to. She sounded more worried than angry. I ran out of the house, jumped in my car, and drove away. Explaining was not an option at that point.

  Fifty minutes later I showed up at our usual spot and Marco’s car was already there. He had the windows up, but I could see a dark silhouette behind the wheel. He seemed to be taking a nap. I walked up to the car and touched my knuckles to the glass. He didn’t react.

  Any smart person would have seen Marco’s lack of a reaction and left the place, gotten back in their car, and hauled ass out of that parking lot. But I was not smart at that time because I was high, so I did none of those. Instead, I reached for the handle and opened the door.

  Marco’s face was frozen in horror. He was slumped on the driver’s seat. A huge cavity opened up just below his sternum and went all the way down to his genitals, which were missing. I’m not a physician, but I could tell his lungs and stomach had been removed. Same with his intestines. The cavity was making a sound. I couldn’t help but lean in closer. Sitting in his lap, more or less where his testicles should have been, there was a puddle of black goo. Inside the black mush, round things were swimming that looked like tadpoles with very large heads and fully formed teeth. They had no eyes. They wriggled around as if trying to rip tiny chunks of flesh from the massive wound they swam inside of.

  I slammed the door and looked around. It was still light out. They had done all of that in the light of day while people could see. If you haven’t seen these types of strange things on these streets, you haven’t lived here long enough. Then I remembered the gun, so I opened the door again. There was a gun in the passenger’s seat. I leaned over Marco’s body, which was more of an empty husk, and grabbed it. I shut the door again, walked to my car, got in, and sped all the way home.

  I thought being home was going to comfort me somewhat. I really thought that seeing you and your mom was going to ground me, that it was going to take the fear down a few notches and center me. It didn’t. Protecting both of you was still my main goal, but now I had no idea how I was going to do that. Two men were dead, and they were both more dangerous than I was. My nightmares came back, yet my eyes were wide open. Visions of those things feasting on your flesh invaded my brain and made me feel lightheaded with anxiety. I pulled the gun and thought about what my next step should be. You tossed about in
your crib as the sun painted the sky purple. I couldn’t stick around and I knew it.

  You know those times when you know exactly what’s going to happen but you go through the motions anyway? I had one of those moments. I went to the kitchen and looked out the window. The figure I knew would be standing on the opposite sidewalk was there as expected. I ran upstairs and kissed your soft, small head. I knew what I needed to do.

  An hour later I was pulling into the parking lot of a cheap motel in Condado, El Tropical. It was very close to Old San Juan and La Perla. I checked in with the bag I usually take to work, went to my room, and sat on the bed with the gun I’d taken from Marco’s car in my hands. It felt heavy and solid. I knew it could spit death whenever I wanted it to, but even that brought me no comfort. Then I remembered that my laptop was in the bag along with the copies I’d made at the library. That’s when I started writing this.

  I write this to tell you that I love you and that no matter what goes down you and your mother were—are—the best things in my life. I write to tell you I’m sorry that I wasn’t strong enough to stop using junk when you came into this world. I swear I tried my best given the circumstances, but not everyone has the power to do things like that. Hopefully, you’ll never have to find out if you have what it takes.

  I write this hoping it will show you that I’m not a bad man, just did some bad things. Some dumb things. We all make mistakes. Mine just happened to be bigger, more expensive, and infinitely more dangerous than the mistakes of most others.

  I also write this to give you a few lessons, to show you a few things about life that I learned the hard way and that I wish someone had told me about. I write this to tell you that life is unfair and painful, but that it’s also beautiful and full of happy moments that make all the bullshit worth it. Holding you in my arms is something I wouldn’t change for the universe. Kissing the top of your soft head felt like a tiny miracle every time, and I would go through everything I’ve gone through a million more times if it meant kissing your head even just one more night, if it meant holding you against me for one more minute.