Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (11 page)

“One day, the old hobgoblin invented a mirror,” she says, and those cold auroral fires burn brightly in the twin voids of her pupils. Red, then blue, then green, and then back to red again; I can plainly hear them crackle in the sky above the boarding house on Gar Fish Street. “A mirror with this peculiarity – that every good thing reflected in its surface shrank away almost to nothing.”

I set the tin cup down upon my bed, and for the third time I say to her,
It is a sympathetic stone,
as I have always heard there is magic contained within the number three. In my palm, the licorice-coloured cobble quivers and transforms into a crude sort of dagger. Many days or nights later, when these grim and fabulous events have run their course and I have weighted her corpse with an anvil and a burlap bag filled with rusted horseshoes, I shall ponder the question of her relationship with the stone. Or the stone’s relationship with her. If, for instance, it is as Coleridge’s murdered albatross, some cross she has been condemned to bear in penance for all eternity, acting out this marionette performance down countless centuries. I will draw no conclusions to satisfy me, nor will I find any sense in any fraction of it, but, still, I will lay awake nights, turning the question over and over in my persistent, gin-addled mind. But I think, in contradiction to the evidence of her fear, the tremble in her snowy voice, the northern lights blazing in her eyes, that she was
glad
when we were done (and here I surrender to more a truthful, more comforting
past
tense, for that day
has
come and gone). Perhaps she was permitted some brief period of oblivion between one haunting and the next, and so I’d granted her exhausted spirit an interval of rest, a respite from the trials and horrors of her damnation. Without speaking another word, I rose from the bed and drove the stone dagger deep into her chest just beneath the sternum, then twisted it sharply up and to the right, that the blade might find and pierce her heart. Her lips parted and a trickle of something dark which was not blood leaked from her mouth and spattered on my hand and the floor between us. In her grey eyes, the polar fires were extinguished, and she did not so much seem to fall at my feet as
flow
downward, as though her body had never been anything more substantial than water held forever but one degree below freezing. In my hand, the stone was only a stone again, still bearing those indecipherable runes or glyphs, the same ones I might have glimpsed, dreaming, carved into a granite menhir. And for the first time since she came to me, all those months ago, I felt warm, genuinely warm. But it is late, and the candle by which I have put down on paper these strange occurrences – being possibly nothing greater than a confession or the ramblings of a lunatic – has melted to little more than a puddle of beeswax and a guttering scrap of blackened wick. So I will not trouble myself with the details of how it was I removed her body from my room and the boarding house. However, I will add that I placed the peculiar,
sympathetic
stone inside her mouth, which was then sewn shut with a needle and thread I borrowed from the wife of my landlord. I told her simply that my socks had worn almost through and needed darning. I have considered leaving this place, before I am utterly bereft of even the price of a train ticket. I’ve looked at my maps and considered traveling north to Coos Bay, or inland to Salem or Pendleton. I might even go so far as Seattle. I have thought, too, that I might find gainful employment as a geologist in a mining camp. In the wild places, men are not so concerned with a woman’s indiscretions, or so I have been led to believe.

THE CRYOMANCER’S DAUGHTER

(MURDER BALLAD NO. 3)

The story presages many stories I’d yet to write, including the Cherry Creek tales and even
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir.
Its obvious inspiration is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” I’d intended to set several stories in the town where all the streets are named for fish, but, so far, there’s only this one.

The Ammonite Violin 

(Murder Ballad No. 4)

If he were ever to try to write this story, he would not know where to begin. It’s that sort of a story, so fraught with unlikely things, so perfectly turned and filled with such wicked artifice and contrivances that readers would look away, unable to suspend their disbelief even for a page. But he will never try to write it, because he is not a poet, or a novelist, or a man who writes short stories for the newsstand pulp magazines. He is a collector. Or, as he thinks of himself, a Collector. He has never dared to think of himself as
The
Collector, as he is not without an ounce or two of modesty, and there must surely be those out there who are far better than he, shadow men, and maybe shadow women, too, haunting a busy, forgetful world that is only aware of its phantoms when one or another of them slips up and is exposed to flashing cameras and prison cells. Then people will stare, and maybe, for a time, there is horror and fear in their dull, wet eyes, but they soon enough forget again. They are busy people, after all, and they have lives to live, and jobs to show up for five days a week, and bills to pay, and secret nightmares all their own, and in their world there is very little
time
for phantoms.

He lives in a small house in a small town near the sea, for the only time the Collector is ever truly at peace is when he is in the presence of the sea. Even collecting has never brought him to that complete and utter peace, the quiet which finally fills him whenever there is only the crash of waves against a granite jetty and the saltwater mists to breathe in and hold in his lungs like opium fumes. He would love the sea, were she a woman. And sometimes he imagines her so, a wild and beautiful woman clothed all in blue and green, trailing sand and mussels in her wake. Her grey eyes would contain hurricanes, and her voice would be the lonely toll of bell buoys and the cries of gulls and a December wind scraping itself raw against the shore. But, he thinks, were the sea but a women, and were she his lover, then he would
have
her, as he is a Collector and
must
have all those things he loves, so that no one else might ever have them. He must draw them to him and keep them safe from a blind and busy world that cannot even comprehend its phantoms. And having her, he would lose her, and he would never again know the peace which only she can bring.

He has two specialties, this Collector. There are some who are perfectly content with only one, and he has never thought any less of them for it. But he has two, because, so long as he can recall, there has been this dual fascination, and he never saw the point in forsaking one for the other. Not if he might have them both and yet be a richer man for sharing his devotion between the two. They are his two mistresses, and neither has ever condemned his polyamorous heart. Like the sea, who is
not
his mistress, but only his constant savior, they understand who and what and
why
he is, and that he would be somehow diminished, perhaps even undone, were he forced to devote himself wholly to the one or the other. The first of the two is his vast collection of fossilized ammonites, gathered up from the quarries and ocean-side cliffs and the stony, barren places of half the globe’s nations. The second are all the young women he has murdered by suffocation,
always
by suffocation, for that is how the sea would kill, how the sea
does
kill, usually, and in taking life he would ever pay tribute and honor that first mother of the world.

That first Collector.

He has never had to explain his collecting of suffocations, of the deaths of suffocated girls, as it is such a commonplace thing, and a secret collection, besides. But he has frequently found it necessary to explain to some acquaintance or another, someone who thinks that she or he
knows
the Collector, about the ammonites. The ammonites are not a secret and, it would seem, neither are they commonplace. It is simple enough to say that they are mollusks, a subdivision of the Cephalopoda, kin to the octopus and cuttlefish and squid, but possessing exquisite shells, not unlike another living cousin, the chambered nautilus. It is less easy to say that they became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, along with most dinosaurs, or that they first appear in the fossil record in early Devonian times, as this only leads to the need to explain the Cretaceous and Devonian. Often, when asked that question,
What is an ammonite?,
he will change the subject. Or he will sidestep the truth of his collection, talking only of mathematics, and the geometry of the ancient Greeks, and how one arrives at the Golden Curve. Ammonites, he knows, are one of the sea’s many exquisite expressions of that logarithmic spiral, but he does not bother to explain that part, keeping it back for himself. And, sometimes, he talks about the horns of Ammon, an Egyptian god of the air, or, if he is feeling especially impatient and annoyed by the question, he limits his response to a description of the Ammonites from the
Book of Mormon
, how they embraced the god of the Nephites and so came to know peace. He is not a Mormon, of course, as he has use of only a single deity, who is the sea and who kindly grants him peace when he can no longer bear the clamor in his head or the far more terrible clamor of mankind.

On this hazy winter day, he has returned to his small house from a very long walk along a favorite beach, as there was a great need to clear his head. He has made a steaming cup of Red Zinger tea with a few drops of honey and sits now in the room that has become the gallery for the best of his ammonites, oak shelves and glass display cases filled with their graceful planispiral or heteromorph curves, a thousand fragile aragonite bodies transformed by time and geochemistry into mere silica or pyrite or some other permineralization. He sits at his desk, sipping his tea and glancing occasionally at some beloved specimen or another –
this
one from South Dakota, or
that
one from the banks of the Volga River in Russia, or one of the
many
that have come from Whitby, England. And then he looks back to the desktop and the violin case lying open in front of him, crimson silk to cradle this newest and perhaps most precious of all the items which he has yet collected in his lifetime, the single miraculous piece which belongs strictly in neither one gallery nor the other. The piece which will at last form a bridge, he believes, allowing his two collections to remain distinct, but also affording a tangible transition between them.

The keystone,
he thinks.
Yes, you will be my keystone.
But he knows, too, that the violin will be something more than that, that he has devised it to serve as something far grander than a token unification of the two halves of his delight. It will be a tool, a mediator or go-between in an act which may, he hopes, transcend collecting in its simplest sense. It has only just arrived today, special delivery, from the Belgian luthier to whom the Collector had hesitantly entrusted its birth.

“It must be done
precisely
as I have said,” he told the violin-maker, four months ago, when he flew to Hotton to hand-deliver a substantial portion of the materials from which the instrument would be constructed. “You may not deviate in any significant way from these instructions.”

“Yes,” the luthier replied, “I understand. I understand completely.” A man who appreciates discretion, the Belgian violin-maker, so there were no inconvenient questions asked, no prying inquiries as to
why,
and what’s more, he’d even known something about ammonites beforehand.

“No substitutions,” the Collector said firmly, just in case it needed to be stated one last time.

“No substitutions of any sort,” replied the luthier.

“And the back must be carved – ”

“I understand,” the violin-maker assured him. “I have the sketches, and I will follow them exactly.”

“And the pegs – ”

“Will be precisely as we have discussed.”

And so the collector paid the luthier half the price of the commission, the other half due upon delivery, and he took a six a.m. flight back across the wide Atlantic to New England and his small house in the small town near the sea. And he has waited, hardly daring to
half
believe that the violin-maker would, in fact, get it all right. Indeed – for men are ever at war with their hearts and minds and innermost demons – some infinitesimal scrap of the Collector has even
hoped
that there
would
be a mistake, the most trifling portion of his plan ignored, or the violin finished and perfect but then lost in transit, and so the whole plot ruined. For it is no small thing, what the Collector has set in motion, and having always considered himself a very wise and sober man, he suspects that he understands fully the consequences he would suffer should he be discovered by lesser men who have no regard for the ocean and her needs. Men who cannot see the flesh and blood phantoms walking among them in broad daylight, much less be bothered to pay tithes which are long overdue to a goddess who has cradled them all, each and every one, through the innumerable twists and turns of evolution’s crucible, for three and a half thousand million years.

But there has been no mistake, and, if anything, the violin-maker can be faulted only in the complete sublimation of his craft to the will of his customer. In every way, this is the instrument the Collector asked him to make, and the varnish gleams faintly in the light from the display cases. The top is carved from spruce, and four small ammonites have been set into the wood –
Xipheroceras
from Jurassic rocks exposed along the Dorset Coast at Lyme Regis – two inlaid on the upper bout, two on the lower. He found the fossils himself, many years ago, and they are as perfectly preserved an example of their genus as he has yet seen anywhere, for any price. The violin’s neck has been fashioned from maple, as is so often the tradition, and, likewise, the fingerboard is the customary ebony. However, the scroll has been formed from a fifth ammonite, and the Collector knows it is a far more perfect logarithmic spiral than any volute that could have ever been hacked from out a block of wood. In his mind, the five ammonites form the points of a pentacle. The luthier used maple for the back and ribs, and when the Collector turns the violin over, he’s greeted by the intricate bas-relief he requested, faithfully reproduced from his own drawings – a great octopus, the ravenous devilfish of so many sea legends, and the maze of its eight tentacles makes a looping, tangled interweave.

As for the pegs and bridge, the chinrest and tailpiece, all these have been carved from the bits of bone he provided the luthier. They seem no more than antique ivory, the stolen tusks of an elephant, say, or a walrus, or the tooth of a sperm whale, perhaps. The Collector also provided the dried gut for the five strings, and when the violin-maker pointed out that they would not be nearly so durable as good stranded steel, that they would be much more likely to break and harder to keep in tune, the Collector told him that the instrument would be played only once and so these matters were of very little concern. For the bow, the luthier was given strands of hair which the Collector told him had come from the tail of a gelding, a fine grey horse from Kentucky thoroughbred stock. He’d even ordered a special rosin, and so the sap of an Aleppo pine was supplemented with a vial of oil he’d left in the care of the violin-maker.

And now, four long months later, the Collector is rewarded for all his painstaking designs, rewarded or damned, if indeed there is some distinction between the two, and the instrument he holds is more beautiful than he’d ever dared to imagine it could be.

The Collector finishes his tea, pausing for a moment to lick the commingled flavors of hibiscus and rosehips, honey and lemon-grass, from his thin, chapped lips. Then he closes the violin case and locks it, before writing a second, final check to the Belgian luthier. He slips it into an envelope bearing the violin-maker’s name and the address of the shop on the rue de Centre in Hotton. The check will go out in the morning’s mail, along with other checks for the gas, telephone, and electric bills, and a handwritten letter on lilac-scented stationary, addressed to a Brooklyn violinist. When he is done with these chores, the Collector sits there at the desk in his gallery, one hand resting lightly on the violin case, his face marred by an unaccustomed smile and his eyes filling up with the gluttonous wonder of so many precious things brought together in one room, content in the certain knowledge that they belong to him and will never belong to anyone else.

The violinist would never write this story, either. Words have never come easily for her. Sometimes, it seems she does not even think in words, but only in notes of music. When the lilac-scented letter arrives, she reads it several times over, then does what it asks of her, because she can’t imagine what else she would do. She buys a ticket, and the next day she takes the train through Connecticut and Rhode Island and Massachusetts until, finally, she comes to a small town on a rocky spit of land very near the sea. She has never cared for the sea, as it has seemed always to her some awful, insoluble mystery, not so very different from the awful, insoluble mystery of death. Even before the loss of her sister, the violinist avoided the sea when possible. She loathes the taste of fish and lobster and of clams, and the smell of the ocean, too, which reminds her of raw sewage. She has often dreamt of drowning and of slimy things with bulging black eyes, eyes as empty as night, that have slithered up from abyssal depths to drag her back down with them to lightless plains of silt and diatomaceous ooze or to the ruins of haunted, sunken cities. But those are
only
dreams, and they do her only the bloodless harm that comes from dreams, and she has lived long enough to understand that she has worse things to fear than the sea.

She takes a taxi from the train depot, and it ferries her through the town and over a murky river winding between empty warehouses and rotting docks, a few fishing boats stranded at low tide, and then to a small house painted the color of sunflowers or canary feathers. The address on the mailbox matches the address on the lilac-scented letter, so she pays the driver, and he leaves her there. Then she stands in the driveway, watching the yellow house, which has begun to seem a disquieting shade of yellow, or only a shade of yellow made disquieting because there is so much of it all in one place. It’s almost twilight, and she shivers, wishing she’d thought to wear a cardigan under her coat, and then a porch light comes on and there’s a man waving to her.