Monstrous Beauty (24 page)

Hester unfolded a little and shook her head to indicate that she didn’t understand. The creature reached out curiously to touch Hester’s hair, which was floating behind her, still clasped by Peter’s shell barrette. The creature’s hair was thick, white, and drifting in a halo around her head. Her skin was pale, and Hester couldn’t help but notice how beautiful her nude body was, how perfect her breasts were, and how natural it seemed for her to be unclothed. Hester felt clumsy in her shorts, shirt, and underwear.

Syrenka,
the creature had said. Where had Hester heard that word before?

The creature moved closer, cocking her head at different angles to study Hester’s face, as if she thought she knew her but was now unsure. She touched Hester’s chin to lift it. She was gentle and inquisitive, and as Hester grew used to her attention, her body unfurled. When the creature wasn’t swimming, her movements seemed deliberate and slow, and they were beginning to have a mesmerizing effect.

“Syrenka,” the creature said again, with an odd mix of certainty and confusion.

Then suddenly Hester knew. Syrenka was a person. Ezra had called her Syrenka.

Hester opened her mouth to see if she could speak. “I am not Syrenka,” she said, too loud and much too slowly, as if she had a mouth full of caramel. She pointed to herself and said, “Hester.” The H disappeared in the water.

“Needa,” the creature said, pointing to herself. And then she spoke in English with a lively look in her eye. “I think … you are Syrenka.”

“No. But you’re not the first to say that I look like her…” Hester glanced up toward the surface and pointed. “I have to go back.”

“You look nothing like Syrenka,” Needa said, shaking her head as if it were a silly notion. Her hair billowed gracefully as she did. She touched Hester’s chest. “Except inside.”

Hester stared at her, dumbfounded. When she found her voice she asked, “Why am I alive?”

Needa understood the question, and a mischievous smile spread across her face, showing razor-sharp teeth. “Because you are Syrenka.” She put her arm delicately around Hester’s waist. “Come now, Noo’kas wants you.”

“Wait!” Hester said, but it was too late. She had been swept up, and with vigorous pumps of Needa’s tail they were skimming the ocean floor. She had to close her mouth and duck her head to reduce the drag.

They rose over the hulk of a sunken metal ship, darkly rusted, with a downy sort of sea lanugo covering its surface and fish darting in and out of its many holes. They passed boulders and human debris—an outboard motor, broken lobster traps, and hundreds of bottles and cans. Another sea creature joined them, swimming alongside, unable to resist reaching for Hester’s hair. Her fingers had sharp, ridged nails. Hester pushed her hand away, careful not to get close to the fins on her wrists.

They slowed as they passed over an area fenced in on four sides with the intertwined masts of many ships. Inside the pen there were children’s toys and mangled parts of playgrounds, including a largely intact but rusted swing set and half of a seesaw. There was a slimy red and yellow ride-in plastic car just like the one Sam had as a toddler, and decomposing wooden cribs and bassinets. The pen was staged as a nursery, right down to baby bottles full of sea glass, dishes, spoons, and dozens of faded, cracked rubber pacifiers. But most unusual were the hundreds of dolls—of every imaginable size and shape. There were plastic dolls, dolls with ceramic heads and stuffed bodies, wooden dolls, homemade dolls, headless bodies with round tummies, loose arms and legs, and many disembodied heads weighted down on the trays of high chairs and the surfaces of a dresser and a table. It seemed that every doll that had ever been dropped overboard by a child, or lost in a stream or storm drain, had found its way to this faux nursery. The creature who had been swimming alongside them lingered for a moment to arrange a bassinet that had been tipped by the currents. Hester looked back as she finished tenderly tucking in an eyeless doll and swam to rejoin them.

Hester wondered what time it was. She had something to do on the surface that she couldn’t quite remember. She was about to ask Needa something, but the question eluded her—and now they had come upon an immense shelf of rock on the ocean floor, littered with a mountain of debris. Hester strained her eyes to see what it was composed of as they approached.

They entered a pathway through the mountain, and she saw that the walls of debris on either side of her contained hundreds of thousands of lost human objects—all of them metallic, some still shiny and glittery, others dull and black.

“Noo’kas’s treasure,” Needa said as they slowed. “If you find anything on the sea floor, you must take it to her. If she does not want it, you may keep it.”

“I … I can’t stay,” Hester protested.

The pathway widened into an open-water “room” surrounded by mounds of treasure. Noo’kas was piled in an oversized, elaborately carved, dark wooden chair, which had lion heads on the armrests and lion claws at the end of each exquisitely turned leg. The seat was upholstered with ragged fabric that had once been luxurious velvet, of a color Hester couldn’t see with her monochromatic vision. It had to have been the closest thing to a throne that had ever fallen into the ocean.

Noo’kas was large—taller and broader than the dozens of females that swam in attendance upon her. She had rolls of fat on her body and lumpy, pendulous breasts that hung below her waist, but an oddly skeletal face and head. Her nose had worn away to only vestigial pits where nostrils might have been if she had been human, and her ears had decayed to show three holes on each side of her head—two small and one large. Her eyes had sunk deep into her skull so that they appeared from every angle to be dark and shadowed. Her head was nearly bald, with patches of flaking scales and sparse, stringy strands of hair that sagged lifelessly the full length of her body. She was festooned with blackened silver jewelry: multiple tangled necklaces; long pendants; bracelets; rings on every finger; and four or five Native silver-link concha belts with turquoise and onyx stones, all hooked together to circle her massive girth just once. Something about her seemed vaguely familiar to Hester: she had seen an image of her before but she couldn’t quite place it. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to shape the memory from the clouds in her mind, but it wouldn’t come.

Needa deposited Hester before the throne so that her feet lightly touched the ground. She passed her lips by Hester’s ear, saying in a low voice, “Bow.” She herself lay facedown on the rock shelf, reaching her arms forward in supplication to Noo’kas, and then rose and swam backward into the ring of beautiful attendants. Hester reached a tentative hand out to Needa as she receded, to keep her from leaving her there alone, but Needa frowned and tipped her head once, coaxing her manners. Hester turned to Noo’kas and bent at the waist, taking the opportunity to pull her shirt down in the front and tuck it into her shorts so it wouldn’t float up in her face.

“You might have paid your respects sooner.” Noo’kas’s voice rumbled at such a low frequency that Hester felt the vibrations burst like bubbles through her body.

“Do you mean me?” She looked around to see if there was anyone else.

“Of course I do, vile creature.”

Hester stood up straight and glared at the hag in the shadowed recess of her eyes. “I don’t even know you.”

“Tell me who you think you are.”

“I’m … I’m…” She looked to Needa for help, but Needa turned away. She had called her Syrenka. Was that her name? Her mind was hazy. “I’m not sure.”

“How old do you think you are?”

“I think … seventeen?” She looked at the ground, searching her thoughts for something to hold on to.
What day was it?

“Wrong. You are ancient. Tell me…” She motioned to Hester’s belly. “Has that human body borne offspring?”

She was dizzy and forgetful, but she knew that she resented the tone of voice.

“What kind of question is that? Why should I answer you? No! I won’t—I will never have a child!”
But look, she had answered the question! She had divulged her most private thought. Where was her will?

“Syrenka yearned to give Ezra a child, and look how you squander her body.”

“This is
my
body! I am not Syrenka!” Hester felt an ache in her chest. The name Ezra meant something to her, but she couldn’t remember what exactly.

The sea hag raised a single finger. Her attendants surrounded her, lifting her massive form slowly from the throne until, semi-reclined in their arms, she traveled under their power. They took her to Hester and circled her, while Noo’kas considered her from every angle.

Suddenly the hag burst into thunderous laughter—her own private joke. The fish that were grooming the barnacles and lice from her body darted away. The attendants tittered, chirping like porpoises. They took her close to Hester, so that she could lean her bony face forward.

“Semiramis … that’s what I’ll call you,” she said, as if affectionately. And then she announced to the audience, “Semiramis was the daughter of the fish goddess, Atargatis. And the inventress of the
chastity belt
.”

There was more chirping, and the sound of thousands of throaty clicks, which had the effect of hearty applause.

“Semiramis! Semiramis!” the attendants chanted quietly.

Hester shook her head, scowling.
Stop,
she thought, but she didn’t have the courage to say it aloud.

Noo’kas lifted her open hand, waiting. An attendant hastily swam away and returned with a thin spear, placing it in her mistress’s palm.

Hester watched, mesmerized, as Noo’kas raised the spear and muttered an incomprehensible incantation. She removed a scale from her fin and impaled it on the tip of the spear, forcing it down toward the shaft.

No,
Hester thought.

Something shook awake inside her. She had to escape. She turned and tried to push off the floor of the shelf, to swim up and away.

The spear glided smoothly through the water and pierced the back of Hester’s right thigh. She curled to the side in agony, her body sinking slowly to the ground. She screamed and reached back to pull the blade out. Blood trailed in smokelike plumes from the wound. An attendant retrieved the spear.

“Semiramis! Semiramis!” the attendants chanted.

“Why…?” Hester cried. She half crawled, half floated using her hands and her left leg, trailing her right leg behind her, which felt both dead and on fire. The blood was in a cloud around her now. She saw Needa among the attendants and reached her arm out, pleading.
Help me
, she mouthed. Needa shook her head, but her brow was furrowed with something like pity. The attendant put the spear in Noo’kas’s waiting hand. She plucked another scale from her tail, secured it to the spear, and with obvious pleasure, took aim.

Hester pulled herself frantically along the sea shelf, looking for an opening in the mountain of treasure. Even as she did, she knew it was hopeless. She was incapacitated, and the attendants could swim like dolphins. Escape was impossible. She was going to die on the ocean floor, with hundreds of sea women watching the sport.

The spear entered her left calf like a hot iron. She fell flat, and as her cheek hit the floor, a cloud of silt and blood mushroomed around her. Before she blacked out, before her body mercifully took her conscious pain away, her eyes rested on an object at the base of the treasure. It was a hip flask, sterling silver once, but now overgrown with green-black algae. The engraved monogram was not quite obscured: MMM. Something stirred inside her—a memory of her past, a connection to her life on land. Through the swirling cloud of sand she reached out a trembling hand and gripped the flask tightly, bringing it to her heart.

Chapter 38

W
HEN SHE AWOKE
she was lying on a bed of kelp. Needa was applying an ointment of gelatinous mucus to her wounds, which were inexplicably closed. Scar tissue had formed around the holes—the skin looked thin and striated and white, as if she had been burned. The scab in the center of each wound had almost disappeared. Another creature hovered nearby, watching critically, or perhaps standing guard.

“How long have I been here?” Hester asked.

Needa smiled at her. “Hello, Hester. Do not be anxious; you have just arrived.”

The guard said to Needa, “Noo’kas prefers the name Semiramis.”

Needa’s lips tightened. She motioned to the other. “This is Weeku.”

“But … the wounds have already healed,” Hester said. “It should take weeks … or … or
never
while they’re in salt water. I should be bleeding to death!”

“I am sorry you were frightened. Truly I am. It is against the rules to explain the process ahead of time. If you had known how easily we can heal the wounds, perhaps you would not have fought to save yourself. Noo’kas has so little to entertain her now…”

Hester couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “She could have killed me! And it hurt like hell.”

Weeku spoke up. “Death was unlikely; Noo’kas has excellent aim. You will soon forget the pain—it lasts for almost no time.”

Time.
“What time is it?” Hester blurted. She pushed onto her elbows, trying to sit up.

Weeku said, “Time means nothing. Soon it will mean nothing to you.”

“I’m supposed to be somewhere…” She had forgotten where, but it felt urgent.

Needa eased her back down. “Here. Noo’kas requires you to stay here.”

“My legs are tingling. They’ve fallen asleep.”

“They have begun their transformation. It is slow. It does not hurt. We will bind them to complete the process. The skin will fuse, and then the bones. But first, now that you are awake, Noo’kas wants you. She has never asked to see an initiate before the transformation is accomplished. She is quite taken with you.”

Hester shook her head. “Are you saying … Are my legs becoming…?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t! Needa, I’m not—”

“You belong here,” Weeku said sternly.

“I belong here?”

“Yes.”