Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (22 page)

And over and over, he saw her in dreams as the fantastic mermaid she had never become—never would, so long as the sea endured. She was pearl-bellied, with the deeply cleft tail of a siren, spangled green as a flapper’s glass-beaded dress; she was blue-skinned and orange-scaled, flaunting as a tropical wrasse; she was rayed and spined like a lionfish, carrying in human hands a pair of scallop shells written closely with the laws of the undersea, tiny snail-tracks that glimmered and changed as he tried to read along. She was the young woman he knew best from photographs, laughing in studio apartments, her hair as dark and tousling as bracken. She was cradling the crescent moon in a dripping web of algae to her breast. He woke each time with a hard knot of anger in his chest: fought with his siblings, fought with his father, cut class one morning in early November and walked all the way to Pinole Point, imagining he could feel the fault lines of the continent grating and shifting beneath his feet as he crossed from autumn-dry tall grass to salt-marsh sedge and pickleweed reddening like Indian paintbrush. He watched the water until late afternoon, but only terns and plovers came to meet him at the edge of the mirror-blue waves. The bus to Richmond came late and he took the BART home.

He knew the sacrifices, the scriptures, the rites that marked the year as casually and surely as his father’s side of the calendar: Purim, Pesach, Tisha b’Av, the Days of Awe. He was not sure how much any of them helped. At school, his teachers treated him with uncomfortable sympathy; at home, Ron Penders who had married his wife once with wine and seven blessings and once with cups of seawater and blood refused to sit shiva for a woman who would never die. Beth spent hours in the upstairs bathroom as if something of her mother still resonated there within the pale blue walls and the white cast iron. Garen hoarded her books of marine biology and papered the wall above his bed with painstakingly hand-copied anatomies. Anson told his dreams to none of them.

To Solange Adair, for the first time to anyone, he said, “No. Not for real. I’ve never dreamed of any of them.”

All that spring and into summer, as he stayed on after the semester’s end with a part-time job at the Boston Book Annex and a jerry-rigged bedroom in a triple-decker firetrap in Brighton, he visited the rowhouse on Pinckney Street with the other sea-strays who came and went in her home as though it were their own: claw-fingered, solitary Isobel Wardie Lau, whose father was older than the destruction of Akrotiri; stargazing Lelian Perry, whose sea-thirst had sprung up halfway through a law scholarship to the University of Chicago; and Tony Woodhouse, a talkative, cagey Tufts student with a night-shift pallor and bottle-brush black hair, dressed perpetually in T-shirts for Boston bands he was just too young to have seen. He was wearing one for Salem 66 the first time Anson saw him, folded like a piece of elastic into the narrow-cushioned window niche with a pamphlet copy of Swinburne’s “By the North Sea.” The night he fell asleep on Anson’s floor, he was advertising Mission of Burma.
You’re different,
he had pronounced before the three beers and half a bong caught up with him, sprawled like a starfish on carpet the color of the rain-stained walls. One finger pointing at Anson, as though he were making a note for himself in the morning:
You don’t hear it calling.

Only slightly less buzzed, Anson had snorted,
No, I hear you talking, man, and you’re pretty loud,
and the conversation had drifted away with the grey wash of dawn and Anson needing to pull himself piecemeal out of bed in order to shelve pop art and poetry at the Annex. If anyone else at Solange’s agreed with Tony’s observation, they never told him. He liked to think it would not have mattered. There was a sea-smell in the house now, familiar as a shadow.

And then in June it ended, as suddenly and firmly as it had begun. Under the full moon of the solstice, it was Solange Adair’s time to go down to the sea with the blood of fishes and the blood of humanity painted on her brow and her palms, anointing each stickle and barbel and sharp-edged fin as the waves churned against the sea-chewed stubs of piers and spilled between the tumbled granite boulders of Innsmouth’s long-abandoned quarry, paving the tide’s road for the land-sprung soul to follow, and the witch-lights haloed the low black spine of the reef. With one arm around Isobel’s shoulders, Anson felt her claws tensing through his shirt where her arm circled his waist and said nothing, even when she drew blood; he could not tell if she shook with sorrow or eagerness, the moon like mercury in her eyes. Tony was a stranger in a good shirt and a tweed jacket, for once not slouching. In the driftwood light of the shore fires, the bracelet coiling on Lelian’s wrist ran against his dark skin like a meltwater of pearls. She made the same noise as his mother as the waters took her in and he did not know if it was a sound of pain or welcome this time, either.

He went home to Oakland the next summer, carrying among his dorm-room possessions three books from Solange’s library and an oil painting from 1919, a Vorticist’s ocean in harsh malachite and the salt-white of tumbled bone. He did not dream, then or ever, of Solange Adair.

§

 “My father,” Gorgo said, into the afternoon quiet. “He left me a book.”

In the shadow of her hood, her face looked alien again, all eyes and curves of colorless shell. Much to Anson’s surprise, Tony had left her clothes after all, in a grocery bag in the bedroom with an illegible note hand-markered on the side. They looked like secondhand potluck, but the label-less black jeans fit well enough and once she had sorted out a red-and-white Breton-striped shirt and a dark hoodie from the wad of T-shirts and underthings, the fierce springiness with which she moved—bathrobe slung over one arm, rejected clothes bequeathed to the already chaotic bed—left him slightly taken aback, as if a barnacled rock on the seafloor had suddenly split a mouth open and lunged for its prey. Her feet were still bare, the bones as visible in them as the rays in a fin. She had disdained the Neighborhoods T-shirt, which made Anson smile. She did not look any more enthused about the situation, resting on the farther arm of the couch with her toes curled into a gap between cushions, but they had drunk enough tea to require heating another kettle, and eventually Anson had offered the contents of his backpack to her, mostly a choice of canned soups and the most plausible-looking of the refrigerated sandwiches. Making lunch in an unfamiliar kitchen gave him a moment of postgraduate vertigo, never mind that he had not taken classes since Bush’s first term of office. Tuna salad and tomato soup later, he stacked the plates in the sink and settled into the armchair drawn cater-corner to the couch to read. However closely he was supposed to watch Gorgo, he did not think it extended to ignoring an unexpected shelf of DAW paperbacks.

“He died six years ago. A friend of the family had to track me down to tell me. I hadn’t seen him since the divorce. Which wasn’t so much a divorce as my mother finally throwing all his stuff out into the street and screaming that if he said one more thing about taking me down to the sea in my time, she was calling the cops and taking her chances with a restraining order.” Her voice hardened in mimicry of a dialogue she must have heard in too many variations, intractable as oil and sea. “
I told you everything when we married. I never lied to you. This flesh, it’s temporary. When the changes of the life to come begin, then you’ll see who I really am. Who I always was all along, underneath.
Which was her cue to tell him to call his doctors, until she gave up and started calling his doctors herself, at which point she generally found out he’d never filled any of his prescriptions and usually missed most of his appointments. Rinse, repeat, fuck that shit. A month after she kicked him out, we moved. I never”—sardonically for the cliché, but he saw how her pale throat tightened—“saw him again.”

Toward the end of their time in the charmed space of Pinckney Street, Anson had sat all afternoon on a loft bed with Isobel, neither of them speaking as she rested her head in his lap and played the same track from Rachel’s
The Sea and the Bells
over and over again. Fabulous as a unicorn, twenty years old and already lashless and browless, the bones of her skull warping beneath her skin like the grinding drift of tectonic plates, her father’s blood nearly bursting her veins in its eagerness to reach the sea. Her mother had gone willingly to a bride-bed of rockweed and clamshells and borne her much-wanted sea-child in a haze of antipsychotics, already dissociating at the smells of salt and blood; her scars had nearly healed in nine months, but they shocked the obstetrician anyway. He thought of his father patiently sponging his wife’s shedding skin with seawater and the herbs she had gathered or bought herself, still human enough that the slowness of the changes ached where a sudden transformation would have soothed.

Anson closed
Merlin’s Mirror
and asked gently, “When did he go down?”

“He didn’t.” Gorgo gave him a narrow grey smile. “He died of cancer first. CTCL—cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. First you break out in a rash, then it turns out the rash is malignant, then it metastasizes and then you die. He didn’t see a doctor until it was way too late; he thought it was the changes coming on. He’d been waiting his entire life for the sea to come and cleanse him and take him away and it never did. I’ll never even know if it would have. You can live years with that kind of cancer, but only if you notice that you’ve got it. And he didn’t exactly trust doctors, anyway. He always thought they’d see something strange in him and—I don’t even, dissect him, institutionalize him, whatever you worry about if you’re a fucked-up fish-person. He had a couple of diagnoses, my mother said. He didn’t write about any of
that
.”

At Anson’s querying look, she explained, “He’d written a journal for me. He started it with the time he was thirteen and dreamed of the moon. I think the oldest parts must have been right after I was born; it was in years of different handwriting and he’d gone back and edited some of it later. He wrote down the litanies, as many of them as he could remember, prayers and observances and even some of the instructions for sacrifice, even though there’s no way he could have participated in one. He was born in Sheboygan—I looked it up after he’d died. Waite was his mother’s name. He changed it sometime before meeting my mother, which was maybe the one unambiguously nice thing he did for me. I had a crappy enough childhood without having to deal with
Szajewicz
.”

She spelled it for him with a notecard and a pen from his backpack: small, neat, hard-pressed handwriting, half-print. The diffident noise he made in response was a direct inheritance from his father.

“My grandmother’s name was Zychlinsky.”

“Fine, maybe that works in hippie country. The point is, I didn’t know till he was dead. My mother didn’t know. And he just kept fucking
being
like that. Parts of the book were like a memoir. He worked in a cannery in Alaska, way out on the peninsula by the Aleutian Islands. He had some kind of job on an oil rig off Newfoundland. He never went to Innsmouth, or if he did, he didn’t say anything about it. But he tried once, in 1968 or ’69, to talk to one of the men who’d been part of the original investigation, a retired prohi agent named Julius Harvey. The guy not only wouldn’t let him in, he called the cops and my father spent a night in jail in Queens for getting in a fight with the arresting officer.” Briefly, Gorgo looked away to the window, where gulls were roosting on the asphalt shingles of the house across the street. “After that was a page explaining how to curse an enemy of the deep cities with the hunger of the moon and the indifference of the sun and the desire of the abyss. On the facing page was a design like a maze or a fishing weir, to be drawn with the entrails of a young shark and the dried egg cases of a whelk and a knife boiled with sea salt—he put an asterisk at the center without saying what it stood for. Then he went back to talking about how much he was looking forward to seeing me in my true form, in the endless days beneath the water. He never dated any of the entries. I don’t know how old I was then.”

Tony had not mentioned a book, or anything other than a woman with a name he recognized. “What happened to it—your father’s journal?”

Gorgo opened one hand, fleetingly boneless as anemones. “I brought it with me when I came here. According to your cousin, I didn’t have it, or my clothes, or my duffel bag, when he found me. I didn’t have a room for the night; I didn’t have anything except what I took to the beach with me. So either it’s down by the rocks or the sea’s got it.” Her voice was the cool edge he remembered, daring him to respond with any emotion. “You want to go look for it? Sea air’ll do us both good.”

Anson said instead, “Why did you come here?”

He had wanted to ask her for hours; now that he had, he was thinking of Lelian with his long wrists and his soft natural hair, kneeling at the marshy edge of the Atlantic to touch his fingers to the sky reflecting like faience between stems of cordgrass and say, in a wonderment so close to pain that Anson almost did not want to look at him,
It’s singing.
Tony in his indefatigable denim jacket, leaning on the rail of the Summer Street Bridge to watch the moon jellies blooming in the cloudy green water, some July past when he still had hair for the harbor breeze to tousle.
You can’t imagine what it looked like at its height. I’ve been shown it and I can’t imagine. It was any fishing port at the turn of the century and it was a beacon, like the Windward Islands were before it. Like a bell sounding, Y’ha-nthlei resounding with it. Strong as the scars left where two worlds meet.
Meredith murmuring sleepily from the other side of a well-worn feather pillow
, Just as well. I’d follow you down and then where would you be?

“What did you think you were going to find? Innsmouth was scattered in 1928—it was camouflaged as a bootlegging bust, but it was a tiny little genocide, right here in the heart of open-minded Massachusetts. They took people away. The government wouldn’t say where, but we know most of them never made it down to the sea. They burned the church. They burned
books
. Supposedly they even tried to dynamite the reef, though that might just be newspaper exaggerations of the time—it’s not like there are a lot of reliable records between the federal cover-up and the razing of the town, everything but sowing the ground with salt. So whatever there was of a centralized religion of Dagon, it all precipitated out to less-than-half-breeds like my family, who were far enough from the epicenter of Innsmouth that the Bureau of Investigation didn’t come knocking at their doors to ask if it could maybe measure their skulls and borrow their family heirlooms, thank you. Or my cousin Tony, whose great-grandparents got the hell out of town in the middle of the night and never came back in their lifetimes; that was their grandchildren or
their
children, decades later, banking that there was no one left in Gloucester or Ipswich or Newburyport who would recognize the old look outside of urban legends—
and the fish-people’ll get you if you don’t watch out!
Generations dying land-stranded to keep the secret, or simply because they didn’t know what to do when they started to change. There are true-bred half-deep now and do you know how old they are? My age, maybe. That’s how long it took to reestablish the old ways with Y’ha-nthlei. Or so my mother told us, before she went down.” Suddenly exhausted, he trailed off, “It’s not like she talks to me these days.” From the way the silence rang in the room, he was afraid he had been shouting.