Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (50 page)

He likes numbers and corporate acronyms. But he is handsome.

He looks at her closely. “The great thing about the Melges is it only takes two crewmemebers.” He raises his eyebrows and waggles them at her comically. “So whaddya say?”

She sits in her chair, holding the napkin in her lap, staring at him.

“I’m sorry? What?”

“Sailing. Will you come with me?”

It takes a long moment, but she’s confident that the horror washing over her doesn’t spill onto her face.

“I’m not good in situations like that.”

He grins at her, stabs a bit of chicken with his fork and pops it in his mouth.

“You’d be surprised at how easy it all is.” He lowers his eyes. “And I’ll be there to guide you the whole time.”

“You mean, tonight?”

He nods and his smile is gone, replaced with a nervous expression that is ill-suited to his good looks.

“We pick a star and sail straight on till morning.”

The thought of being out on the dark swell of ocean in a boat makes her shudder. His expression crumbles.

“It’s cold in here,” she says, taking his hand and hoping it explains her goosebumps. “I was thinking maybe we could go back to my place.”

∇

Before, at the restaurant, he’d been forceful. He ordered for Maebe, and was absolutely adamant that the sommelier was tipped amply. He put his arm around her on the walk back to the car. It made her sad, the role he wanted to play, that picture of modern American manhood. He talked of movies, and school and told jokes that she didn’t understand, truly, but she smiled anyway.

But now, at her house, the little bungalow within a stone’s throw of the beach, he’s unsure of himself. He gulps down the drink she gives him, whiskey, and doesn’t quite know what to do with his body in such a small space.

She gives him another drink and he looks at her pictures.

“This your husband?” He holds up an ornate silver frame that had been on the bookcase.

“No. My brother.”

“Oh? What does he do?”

“He went down to the sea.” She tilts her head at the small cameo on the wall. “There’s my husband. Aaron.”

The man looks at the photo, her dead husband staring back at him, and he remains there for a long while but eventually, as if he’s making a decision, he turns and goes to sit on the sofa, next to Maebe. He drapes his arm over her shoulder, tugging her in, pressing his side against her.

He smells of tallow and whiskey and a whiff of the restaurant they’d just come from so it’s not unpleasant when she kisses him. At first it’s chaste, a simple pressing of the lips together and she has a moment’s worry that he’ll go no further, but soon he’s exploring her mouth with his tongue, her chest with his hands.

When he’s hard, she tugs him by the hand up from the couch into the bedroom.

His naked body bristles and she’s fascinated by the perfect triangle of hair on his chest trailing down to his sex. His fingers and tongue feel good on her skin and his cock, pressing so hard against her, feels almost hot to the touch.

But he wants to please her. He traces kisses down to her center, to between her legs. He smiles up at her, his mouth above her most delicate spot, and she cups his face with her hands but eventually lets him go and he splits her open with his tongue.

It has been so long.

When her lips part, it feels like some seal has been broken and the sea is gushing forth past the seawall, flooding the whole world, and she tilts her head back and closes her eyes.

The sensations rise and crest and she feels like she’s on a raft lost on the face of the dark, infinitesimal and wave-tossed, while something far below in the unseen depths rises, approaching the surface.

She gasps and locks her fingers in his blond hair. He draws up and away, his face glistening. He’s on his knees when he grasps her legs and pulls her toward him. She’s wide open when he takes his sex in hand, pausing before her portal.

It has been too long.

He doesn’t see the shadow that comes into the bedroom and brings the hammer across the back of his skull with a dull crack. Maebe feels an instant of regret that Laura couldn’t have waited a few moments longer.

∇

They go down to the sea, the sisters, dragging the naked man between them. He still breathes but his head is distended and blood darkens his back.

At the shore, Laura withdraws the knife and cuts him, twice, on each side of his genitals, slicing deep into his inner thighs. When the tendons are severed, his legs swing outward, splayed like a frog’s legs, and blood pours into the surf.

They drag him as far as they can into the waves.

It’s only a short wait for Aaron to come in from the sea. He and his brothers walk slowly, waves crashing around them. They’re bloated and lantern-eyed, wrapped in skeins of bladderwrack and luminous in the light coming from the moon.

Aaron opens his mouth and water pours from his sodden lungs and looks at the man bleeding out into the waves. He turns to Maebe, slowly.

“Seabride,” he says, his black tongue working like an eel in his mouth. “He comes.”

Out beyond the breakers, the ocean rises and Maebe worries that there’s been an earthquake calving huge tsunamis to drench the world in darkness. The sea swells and a massive shape broaches the surface and for a vertiginous moment, Maebe thinks that a shelf of land has cracked and been wrenched away from the plate of earth that makes the surface of her world, tipped on end from unstoppable tectonic forces. It rises, spanning miles and miles, up to the sky, blotting out the stars, the moon. She looks down at the man, the man who’d been with her in bed. He’d had a handsome face and kissed her so sweet.

Aaron’s eyes blink like yellow lights being shuttered and he takes her hand in his cold, dead one. A tremendous wave crashes into them, pushing Maebe and Laura back a few steps but not swaying the men at all.

Her mouth tastes of salt and blood now and the man from the visitor’s bureau is gone, his body carried away on the surf.

“He comes.”

They watch the sea rise.

∇

The Doom that Came to Innsmouth

Brian McNaughton

We need not dust off the history of our nation’s dealings with the Indians to find examples of genocide nor even go so far from our doorsteps as Montgomery, Alabama, to see instances of racism. Right here in our own state of Massachusetts, in February of 1928, agents of the U. S. Treasury and Justice Departments perpetrated crimes worthy of Nazi Germany against a powerless minority of our citizens…. When the dust of this jack-booted invasion had settled, no citizens [of Innsmouth, Massachusetts] were found guilty of any crime but the desire to live their peaceful lives in privacy and raise their children in the faith of their fathers. The mass internments and confiscations have never been plausibly explained or legally justified nor has compensation ever been so much as attempted to the innocent victims of this official hooliganism.

—Sen John F. Kennedy,

Commencement Address

to the Class of 1959 at

Miskatonic University,

Arkham, Mass.

G
randma had been a bootlegger, according to a family joke that we didn’t share with her when we visited the nursing-home.

I did… once. “Is it true that you got busted by Eliot Ness, Grandma?” I asked, wise-ass kid that I was. She started carrying on about “Loch Ness,” and getting very worked up, because that place was important to her religion.

“You got a golden crown waiting for you there, Joe, a crown that outshines the sun,” she croaked in her liquid way, a way that nobody but me understood half the time. Even when I got the words, I wasn’t always sure what they meant.

My name isn’t “Joe,” by the way, it’s Bob, Bob Smith, but she always got me confused with her brother that she adored, Joe Sargent, long ago passed over. Ignored or even mocked by the bitchy attendants who kept her strapped in her bed, she clung to a pathetic scrap of pride that her brother—or I—used to drive a dinky bus in Massachusetts that connected the Back of Beyond with the Middle of Nowhere.

She thought it was a big deal that he had been allowed to hobnob with “outside folk.” Her religion had been dead set against contact with non-believers, and only a few special people were allowed to “swim beyond the school,” as she called any travel outside of Innsmouth. She bitterly regretted that she had been forced to swim way beyond the school and, what with one thing and another, never swam back.

Her life was pretty dismal. She was brought up in the strict cult that owned her hometown, not much of a town at its best, but she’d loved it. She never recovered from the shock when the Feds invaded and trashed her birthplace. Mom theorized that it was a Prohibition raid that got out of hand when some deputies recruited from nearby towns grabbed the chance to express their prejudice against Innsmouth people. They roughed them up a lot, I guess, but to hear Grandma tell it, they herded people into cellars and set fire to the houses, then opened up with tommy-guns on anyone who tried to escape. But this was the United States of America, after all, and I was sure she had confused real events with movies about Nazis.

They sent her to a camp in Oklahoma, where she said a lot of people died of “separation from the Great Mother,” which meant they missed the ocean. Swimming was a sacrament to these people.

Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited the mess when he came into office in 1932 and was reportedly horrified, although he had bigger problems on his mind at the time. Even though a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Marcus Allen Coolidge, tried to prevent or delay their release, the president just closed the camp with as little fuss as possible, leaving the inmates to find their own way home. I guess having a few hundred more bums on the road during the Great Depression seemed preferable to letting J. Edgar Hoover run a concentration camp.

Funny thing about that: Grandma insisted that Hoover had Innsmouth blood, that he had “the look,” and that he persecuted his own people because they reminded him of a heritage he rejected, But she was always claiming famous people as “really one of us,” Gloria Swanson and Edward G. Robinson, for instance. The only famous person she claimed to be certain about was Albert Fish, a cannibal and serial child-killer who went to the electric-chair in 1936.

She tried to make her way back east by hopping freight-trains, a pretty rough way for a woman to get around, though not all that uncommon in those days. It was not the most direct way to get anywhere, and with stops at jails and hobo-jungles, with detours that took her from Louisiana to Minnesota, she finally gave up when she got to Seattle. It was the wrong side of the continent, she said, but it was near an ocean.

There she met a fisherman named Newman, a bastard who married Grandma for no other reason than the universal superstition that her people had a way with fish. You can say “Innsmouth” to a trawlerman from Norway or Japan and, if he’s old enough, you’ll get a startled look of recognition, even though he usually doesn’t want to talk about it. Newman used to take her along on his boat as a good-luck charm. When he didn’t catch anything, he would beat her.

Grandma started to go round the bend after Mom was born, but it was fifteen years before Newman put her away. Mom left home not long after, and I was twelve years old before she made an effort to locate her mother and visit her.

I nagged her into doing it, because I have always been intensely curious about my roots. As far back as I can remember, I felt different from other people. I used to daydream about the magnificent welcome l would get when my real parents—the King and Queen of Mars, maybe—tracked me down. I had night-time dreams of flying, or maybe swimming, through the stupendous galleries of a twilight city like nothing I had even heard about on earth. I believe I had those dreams even before I was exposed to some of Grandma’s wilder ravings.

For Mom, the reunion was shattering. “God, she’s ugly! And she’s crazy as a bedbug.” Mom shivered with loathing. “And she smells.” She cried all the way home on the bus. Later I would sometimes catch her looking at me in a strange way, as if trying to decide whether I was starting to take after Grandma.

She wanted nothing more to do with her mother. I believed she would have forbidden me to visit her if I asked, so I never asked. Knowing I was different, I learned early to protect my secrets and wriggle around the rules made for other people. In case you think I’m bragging, nobody even suspected me when I finally helped her escape, to say nothing of other things I’ve managed to get away with. But in those days I got to see Grandma once or twice a month by making up stories or skipping school to walk and hitchhike my way to the nursing-home, which was way out near Issaquah.

I didn’t think she was ugly, I thought she was beautiful, so sleek and graceful in her old-fashioned way. Her huge eyes would transfigure her face when she talked about her home and her beliefs and seemed actually to be gazing on the vasty deep. I didn’t think she was completely crazy, either, not when her stories raised echoes from my own dreams. As for smelling bad, that was the fault of the attendants, but I would raise hell whenever I went there until they cleaned her up and tended the sores from her restraints. Even when I was a kid, people knew I meant business when I looked at them in a certain way.

Since I was so different from other people, it stood to reason that my religion must be different from theirs, so I embraced Grandma’s. I only wish I’d listened harder and understood more, and that Grandma’s ordeal hadn’t left her so confused. The story about the beautiful princess sleeping under the sea, waiting for me to wake her with the stones and the baptism, fueled my teen-age masturbation fantasies. I hated to consider the possibility that this was all wrong, that Grandma had mixed up her religion with the story of Sleeping Beauty.

Even though I searched every library and old bookshop in Washington and Oregon, even though I wrote dozens of letters to professors and churchmen, I never found any solid information about the beliefs and practices of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Maybe there just weren’t any more Dagonites.