Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (34 page)

“It’s silly of you to waste good money on a room,” she says, changing the course of our conversation. “You could stay here with me. I hate the nights when you’re in the village, and I’m alone.”

“Or you could go back with me,” I reply. It’s a familiar sort of futility, this exchange, and we both know our lines by heart, just as we both know the outcome.

“No,” she says, her shark’s smile fading. “You know that I can’t. You know they’d never have me up there,” and she nods in the general direction of the town.

And yes, I do know that, but I’ve never yet told her that I do.

The tide rose up beneath a low red moon and washed across the waterfront. The sturdy wharf was shattered like matchsticks, and boats of various shapes and sizes – dories and jiggers, trollers and Bermuda-rigged schooners – were torn free of their moorings and tossed onto the shivered docks. But there was no storm, no wind, no lashing rain. No thunder and lightning and white spray off the breakers. The air was hot and still that night, and the cloudless sky blazed with the countless pin-prick stars that shine brazenly through the punctured dome of Heaven.

“They say the witch what brought the trouble came from someplace up Amesbury way,” I heard one of the old men tell the others, months and months ago. None of his companions replied, neither nodding their heads in agreement, nor voicing dissent. “I heard she made offerings every month, on the night of the new moon, and I heard she had herself a daughter, though I never learned the girl’s name. Don’t guess it matters, though. And the name of her father, well, ain’t nothing I’ll ever say aloud.”

That night, the cobbled streets and alleyways were fully submerged for long hours. Buildings and houses were lifted clear of their foundations and dashed one against the other. What with no warning of the freakish tide, only a handful of the waterfront’s inhabitants managed to escape the deluge and gain the safety of higher ground. More than two hundred souls perished, and for weeks afterwards the corpses of the drowned continued to wash ashore. Many of the bodies were so badly mangled that they could never be placed with a name or a face and went unclaimed, to be buried in unmarked graves in the village beyond the dunes.

I can no longer hear the whisperers through the thin walls of her shack, so I’ll assume that they’ve gone or have simply had their say and subsequently fallen silent. Possibly, they’re leaning now with their ears pressed close to the corrugated aluminum and rotting clapboard, listening in, hanging on her every syllable, even as my own voice fills them with loathing and jealous spite.

“I’ll have a word with them,” she tells me for the third time. “You should feel as welcome here as any of us.”

The sea swept across the land, and, by the light of that swollen, sanguine moon, grim approximations of humanity moved freely, unimpeded, through the flooded thoroughfares. Sometimes they swam, and sometimes they went about deftly on all fours, and sometimes they shambled clumsily along, as though walking were new to them and not entirely comfortable.

“They weren’t men,” I overheard a boy explaining to his friends. The boy had ginger-colored hair, and he was nine, maybe ten years old at the most. The children were sitting together at the edge of the weedy vacant lot where a traveling carnival sets up three or four times a year.

“Then were they women?” one of the others asked him.

The boy frowned and gravely shook his head. “No. You’re not listening. They weren’t women, neither. They weren’t anything human. But, what I heard said, if you were to take all the stuff gets pulled up in trawler nets – all the hauls of cod and flounder and eel, the dogfish and the skates, the squids and jellyfish and crabs, all of it and whatever else you can conjure – if you took those things, still alive and wriggling, and could mush them up together into the shapes of men and women,
that’s
exactly what walked out of the bay that night.”

“That’s not true,” a girl said indignantly, and the others stared at her. “That’s not true at all. God wouldn’t let things like that run loose.”

The ginger-haired boy shook his head again. “They got different gods than us, gods no one even knows the names for, and that’s who the Amesbury witch was worshipping. Those gods from the bottom of the ocean.”

“Well, I think you’re a liar,” the girl told him. “I think you’re a blasphemer
and
a liar, and, also, I think you’re just making this up to scare us.” And then she stood and stalked away across the weedy lot, leaving the others behind. They all watched her go, and then the ginger-haired boy resumed his tale.

“It gets worse,” he said.

A cold rain has started to fall, and the drops hitting the tin roof sound almost exactly like bacon frying in a skillet. She’s moved away from me and is sitting naked at the edge of the bed, her long legs dangling over the side, her right shoulder braced against the rusted iron headboard. I’m still lying on the damp sheets, staring up at the leaky ceiling, waiting for the water tumbling from the sky to find its way inside. She’ll set jars and cooking pots beneath the worst of the leaks, but there are far too many to bother with them all.

“I can’t stay here forever,” she says. It’s not the first time, but, I admit, those words always take me by surprise. “It’s getting harder being here. Every day, it gets harder on me. I’m so awfully tired, all the time.”

I look away from the ceiling, at her throat and the peculiar welts just below the line of her chin. The swellings first appeared a few weeks back, and the skin there has turned dry and scaly, and has taken on a sickly greyish-yellow hue. Sometimes, there are boils or seeping blisters. When she goes out among the others, she wears the silk scarf I gave her, tied about her neck so that they won’t have to see. So they won’t ask questions she doesn’t want to answer.

“I don’t have to go alone,” she says, but doesn’t turn her head to look at me. “I don’t want to leave you here.”

“I can’t,” I say.

“I know,” she replies.

And this is how it almost always is. I come down from the village, and we make love, and she tells me her dreams, here in this ramshackle cabin out past the dunes and dog roses and the gale-stunted trees. In her dreams, I am always leaving her behind, buying tickets on tramp steamers or signing on with freighters, sailing away to the Ivory Coast or Portugal or Singapore. I can’t begin to recall all the faraway places she’s dreamt me leaving her for. Her nightmares have sent me round and round the globe. But the truth is,
she’s
the one who’s leaving, and soon, before the first snows come.

I know it (though I play her games of transference), and all her apostles know it, too. The ones who have come down from the village and never gone back up the hill again. The vagrants and squatters and winos, the lunatics and true believers, who have turned their backs on the world, but only after it turned its back on them. Destitute and cast away, they found the daughter of the sea, each of them, and the shanty town is dotted with their tawdry, makeshift altars and shrines. She knows precisely what she is to them, even if she won’t admit it. She knows that these lost souls have been blinded by the trials and tribulations of their various, sordid lives, and
she
is the soothing darkness they’ve found. She is the only genuine balm they’ve ever known against the cruel glare of the sun and the moon, which are the unblinking eyes of the gods of all mankind.

She sits there, at the edge of the bed. She is always alone, no matter how near we are, no matter how many apostles crowd around and eavesdrop and plot my demise. She stares at the flapping sheet of plastic tacked up where the windowpane used to be, and I go back to watching the ceiling. A single drop of rainwater gets through the layers of tin and tarpaper shingles and lands on my exposed belly.

She laughs softly. She doesn’t laugh very often anymore, and I shut my eyes and listen to the rain.

“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be, when they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea,” she whispers, and then laughs again.

I take the bait, because I almost always take the bait.

“But the snail replied ‘Too far, too far!’ and gave a look askance,” I say, quoting Lewis Carroll, and she doesn’t laugh. She starts to scratch at the welts below her chin, then stops herself.

“In the halls of my mother,” she says, “there is such silence, such absolute and immemorial peace. In that hallowed place, the mind can be still. There is serenity, finally, and an end to all sickness and fear.” She pauses and looks at the floor, at the careless scatter of empty tin cans and empty bottles and bones picked clean. “But,” she continues, “it will be lonely down there, without you. It will be something even worse than lonely.”

I don’t reply, and in a moment, she gets to her feet and goes to stand by the door.

FISH BRIDE (1970)

Readers and reviewers have considered this an Innsmouth story, and I suppose that’s reasonable. It even appeared in Steve Jones’
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth
(2013). However, I would argue that the greater inspiration was Lovecraft’s 1936 “collaboration” with R. H. Barlow, “The Night Ocean.” In the end, though, it’s a love story for Panthalassa’s changelings, and I dedicate it to everyone who was unable to follow me down.

The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean

The building’s elevator is busted, and so I’ve had to drag my ass up twelve flights of stairs. Her apartment is smaller and more tawdry than I expected, but I’m not entirely sure I could say what I thought I’d find at the top of all those stairs. I don’t know this part of Manhattan very well, this ugly wedge of buildings one block over from South Street and Roosevelt Drive and the ferry terminal. She keeps reminding me that if I look out the window (there’s only one), I can see the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems a great source of pride, that she has a view of the bridge and the East River. The apartment is too hot, filled with soggy heat pouring off the radiators, and there are so many unpleasant odors competing for my attention that I’d be hard pressed to assign any one of them priority over the rest. Mildew. Dust. Stale cigarette smoke. Better I say the apartment smells shut away, and leave it at that. The place is crammed wall to wall with threadbare, dust-skimmed antiques, the tattered refuse of Victorian and Edwardian bygones. I have trouble imagining how she navigates the clutter in her wheelchair, which is something of an antique itself. I compliment the Tiffany lamps, all of which appear not to be reproductions and are in considerably better shape than most of the other furnishings. She smiles, revealing dentures stained by nicotine and neglect. At least, I assume they’re dentures. She switches on one of the table lamps, its shade a circlet of stained-glass dragonflies, and tells me it was a Christmas gift from a playwright. He’s dead now, she says. She tells me his name, but it’s no one I’ve ever heard of, and I admit this to her. Her yellow-brown smile doesn’t waver.

“Nobody remembers him. He was
very
avant-garde,” she says. “No one understood what he was trying to say. But obscurity was precious to him. It pained him terribly, that so few ever understood that about his work.”

I nod, once or twice or three times, I don’t know, and it hardly matters. Her thin fingers glide across the lampshade, leaving furrows in the accumulated dust, and now I can see that the dragonflies have wings the color of amber, and their abdomens and thoraces are a deep cobalt blue. They all have eyes like poisonous crimson berries. She asks me to please have a seat and apologizes for not having offered one sooner. She motions to an armchair near the lamp, and also to a chaise lounge a few feet farther away. Both are upholstered with the same faded floral brocade. I choose the armchair and am hardly surprised to discover that all the springs are shot. I sink several inches into the chair, and my knees jut upwards, towards the water-stained plaster ceiling.

“Will you mind if I tape our conversation?” I ask, opening my briefcase, and she stares at me for a moment, as though she hasn’t quite understood the question. By way of explanation, I remove the tiny Olympus digital recorder and hold it up for her to see. “Well, it doesn’t actually use audio tapes,” I add.

“I don’t mind,” she tells me. “It must be much simpler than having to write down everything you hear, everything someone says. Probably, you do not even know shorthand.”

“Much simpler,” I say and switch the recorder on. “We can shut it off anytime you like, of course. Just say the word.” I lay the recorder in the table, near the base of the dragonfly lamp.

“That’s very considerate,” she says. “That’s very kind of you.”

And it occurs to me how much she, like the apartment, differs from whatever I might have expected to find. This isn’t
Sunset Boulevard,
Norma Desmond and her shuffling cadre of “waxwork” acquaintances. There’s nothing of the grotesque or Gothic – even that
Hollywood
Gothic – about her. Despite the advance and ravages of ninety-four years, her green eyes are bright and clear. Neither her voice nor hands tremble, and only the old wheelchair stands as any indication of infirmity. She sits up very straight, and whenever she speaks, tends to move her hands about, as though possessed of more energy and excitement than words alone can convey. She’s wearing only a little makeup, some pale lipstick and a hint of rouge on her high cheekbones, and her long grey hair is pulled back in a single braid. There’s an easy grace about her. Watching by the light of the dragonfly lamp and the light coming in through the single window, it occurs to me that she is showing me
her
face and not some mask of counterfeit youth. Only the stained teeth (or dentures) betray any hint of the decay I’d anticipated and steeled myself against. Indeed, if not for the rank smell of the apartment, and the oppressive heat, there would be nothing particularly unpleasant about being here with her.

I retrieve a stenographer’s pad from my briefcase, then close it and set it on the floor near my feet. I tell her that I haven’t written out a lot of questions, that I prefer to allow interviews to unfold more organically, like conversations, and this seems to please her.

“I don’t go in for the usual brand of interrogation,” I say. “Too forced. Too weighted by the journalist’s own agenda.”

“So, you think of yourself as a journalist?” she asks, and I tell her yes, usually.

“Well, I haven’t done this in such a very long time,” she replies, straightening her skirt. “I hope you’ll understand if I’m a little rusty. I don’t often talk about those days, or the pictures. It was all so very long ago.”

“Still,” I say, “you must have fond memories.”

“Must I now?” she asks, and before I can think of an answer, she says, “There are only memories, young man, and, yes, most of them are not so bad, and some are even rather agreeable. But there are many things I’ve tried to forget. Every life must be like that, wouldn’t you say?”

“To some extent,” I reply.

She sighs, as if I haven’t understood at all, and her eyes wander up to a painting on the wall behind me. I hardly noticed it when I sat down, but now I turn my head for a better view.

When I ask, “Is that one of the originals?” she nods, her smile widening by almost imperceptible degrees, and she points at the painting of a mermaid.

“Yes,” she says. “The only one I have. Oh, I’ve got a few lithographs. I have prints or photographs of them all, but this is the only one of the genuine paintings I own.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say, and that isn’t idle flattery. The mermaid paintings are the reason that I’ve come to New York City and tracked her to the tawdry little hovel by the river. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an original up close, but it is the first time outside a museum gallery. There’s one hanging in Newport, at the National Museum of American Illustration. I’ve seen it, and also the one at the Art Institute of Chicago, and one other, the mermaid in the permanent collection of the Society of Illustrators here in Manhattan. But there are more than thirty documented, and most of them I’ve only seen reproduced in books and folios. Frankly, I wonder if this painting’s existence is very widely known, and how long it’s been since anyone but the model, sitting here in her wheelchair, has admired it. I’ve read all the artist’s surviving journals and correspondence (including the letters to his model), and I know that there are at least ten mermaid paintings that remain unaccounted for. I assume this must be one of them.

“Wow,” I gasp, unable to look away from the painting. “I mean, it’s amazing.”

“It’s the very last one he did, you know,” she says. “He wanted me to have it. If someone offered me a million dollars, I still wouldn’t part with it.”

I glance at her, then back to the painting. “More likely, they’d offer you ten million,” I tell her, and she laughs. It might easily be mistaken for the laugh of a much younger woman.

“Wouldn’t make any difference if they did,” she says. “He gave it to me, and I’ll never part with it. Not ever. He named this one
Regarding the Shore from Whale Rock,
and that was my idea, the title. He often asked me to name them. At least half their titles, I thought up for him.” And I already know this; it’s in his letters.

The painting occupies a large, narrow canvas, easily four feet tall by two feet wide – somewhat too large for this wall, really – held inside an ornately carved frame. The frame has been stained dark as mahogany, though I’m sure it’s made from something far less costly; here and there, where the varnish has been scratched or chipped, I can see the blond wood showing through. But I don’t doubt that the painting is authentic, despite numerous compositional deviations, all of which are immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the mermaid series. For instance, in contravention to his usual approach, the siren has been placed in the foreground, and also somewhat to the right. And, more importantly, she’s facing away from the viewer. Buoyed by rough waves, she holds her arms outstretched to either side, as if to say, “Let me enfold you,” while her long hair flows around her like a dense tangle of kelp, and the mermaid gazes towards land and a whitewashed lighthouse perched on a granite promontory. The rocky coastline is familiar, some wild place he’d found in Massachusetts or Maine or Rhode Island. The viewer might be fooled into thinking this is only a painting of a woman swimming in the sea, as so little of her is showing above the waterline. She might be mistaken for a suicide, taking a final glimpse of the rugged strand before slipping below the surface. But, if one looks only a little closer, the patches of red-orange scales flecking her arms are unmistakable, and there are living creatures caught up in the snarls of her black hair: tiny crabs and brittle stars, the twisting shapes of strange oceanic worms and a gasping, wide-eyed fish of some sort, suffocating in the air.

“That was the last one he did,” she says again.

It’s hard to take my eyes off the painting, and I’m already wondering if she will permit me to get a few shots of it before I leave.

“It’s not in any of the catalogs,” I say. “It’s not mentioned anywhere in his papers or the literature.”

“No, it wouldn’t be. It was our secret,” she replies. “After all those years working together, he wanted to give me something special, and so he did this last one and then never showed it to anyone else. I had it framed when I came back from Europe in forty-six, after the war. For years, it was rolled up in a cardboard tube, rolled up and swaddled in muslin, kept on the top shelf of a friend’s closet. A mutual friend, actually, who admired him greatly, though I never showed her this painting.”

I finally manage to look away from the canvas, turning back towards the woman sitting up straight in her wheelchair. She looks very pleased at my surprise, and I ask her the first question that comes to mind.

“Has
anyone
else ever seen it. Besides me?”

“Certainly,” she says. “It’s been hanging right there for the past twenty years, and I
do
occasionally have visitors, every now and then. I’m not a complete recluse. Not quite yet.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you were.”

And she’s still staring up at the painting, and the impression I have is that she hasn’t paused to
look
at it closely for a long time. It’s as though she’s suddenly
noticing
it and probably couldn’t recall the last time that she did. Sure, it’s a fact of her everyday landscape, another component of the crowded reliquary of her apartment. But, like the Tiffany dragonfly lamp given her by that forgotten playwright, I suspect she rarely ever pauses to consider it.

Watching her as she peers so intently at the painting looming up behind me and the threadbare brocade chair where I sit, I’m struck once more by those green eyes of hers. They’re the same green eyes the artist gave to every incarnation of his mermaid, and they seem to me even brighter than they did before, and not the least bit dimmed by age. They are like some subtle marriage of emerald and jade and shallow saltwater, brought to life by unknown alchemies. They give me a greater appreciation of the painter, that he so perfectly conveyed her eyes, deftly communicating the complexities of iris and sclera, cornea and retina and pupil. That anyone could have the talent required to transfer these precise and complex hues into mere oils and acrylics.

“How did it begin?” I ask, predictably enough. Of course, the artist wrote repeatedly of the mermaids’ genesis. I even found a 1967 dissertation on the subject hidden away in the stacks at Harvard. But I’m pretty sure no one has ever bothered to ask the model. Gradually, and, I think, reluctantly, her green eyes drift away from the canvas and back to me.

“It’s not as if that’s a secret,” she says. “I believe he even told a couple of the magazine reporters about the dreams. One in Paris, and maybe one here in New York, too. He often spoke with me about his dreams. They were always so vivid, and he wrote them down. He painted them, whenever he could. Just as he painted the mermaids.”

I glance over at the recorder lying on the table and wish that I’d waited until later on to ask that particular question. It should have been placed somewhere towards the end, not right at the front. I’m definitely off my game today, and it’s not only the heat from the radiators making me sweat. I’ve been disarmed, unbalanced, first by
Regarding the Shore from Whale Rock,
and then by having looked so deeply into her eyes. I clear my throat, and she asks if I’d like a glass of water or maybe a cold A & W cream soda. I thank her, but shake my head no.

“I’m fine,” I say, “but thank you.”

“It can get awfully stuffy in here,” she says and glances down at the dingy Persian rug that covers almost the entire floor. This is the first time since she let me through the door that I’ve seen her frown.

“Honestly, it’s not so bad,” I insist, failing to sound the least bit honest.

“Why, there are days,” she says, “it’s like being in a sauna. Or a damned tropical jungle, Tahiti or Brazil or someplace like that, and it’s a wonder I don’t start hearing parrots and monkeys. But it helps with the pain, usually more than the pills do.”

And here’s the one thing she was adamant that we not discuss, the childhood injury that left her crippled. She’s told me how she has always loathed writers and critics who tried to draw a parallel between the mermaids and her paralysis. “Don’t even bring it up,” she warned on the phone, almost a week ago, and I assured her that I wouldn’t. Only, now
she’s
brought it up. I sit very still in the broken-down armchair, there beneath the last painting, waiting to see what she’ll say next. I try hard to clear my head and focus and to decide what question on the short list scribbled in my steno pad might steer the interview back on course.