Caitlín Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

I came again and again and again.

Orgasm is too insufficient a word.

She held me tightly in arms the same bottle-blue as her eyes had once been, hands and webbed fingers and arms dappled with scales and photophores that glowed another shade of blue to illuminate the abyssal gloom of my bedroom, which must have sunk as deeply as anything has ever sunken. Her chitin claws drew welts on my breasts and face. Her lionfish spines impaled my heart and lungs.

She drew me down.

“Promise,” she whispered with that lipless mouth. “Promise me, when we are done here.”

And I did promise, barely half-understanding the pledge I’d made. I’d have promised her I’d fight my way through all the hells in which I’d never believed. I’d have promised her every remaining day of my life, had she asked.

“You are my savior,” she whispered, coiling and uncoiling. “You are the end of my captivity.”

“I love you,” I told her.

“I’m wicked. Remember?”

“Then I love your wickedness, and I’ll be wicked, too. I’ll become an abomination.”

“There’s not an ounce of wickedness in you, India Morgan Phelps, and I’ll not put it there.”

“If you leave me,” I said. “You leave me, I’ll die,” and I was trying so hard not to sob, but there were tears on my cheeks, tears instantly lost to the ocean filling my bedroom. “I’ll drown if you ever leave me.”

“No, Imp,” she replied, her voice all kelp and bladderwrack. “You’re not the girl who drowns. Not in this story you’re writing. You’re the girl who learns to swim.”

“I want to believe you.”

“Oh, WinterIndia, everything I’ve ever told you or ever will tell you is a lie, but this , this one thing is true.” (I don’t tell her I would one day write those words and put them in her mouth in a story titled “Werewolf Smile.”)

She kissed me again, tasting all of brine, and her lips the lips of l’Inconnue de la Seine.

And then I began to sing. It was my song, and my song alone, never voiced since the dawn of time. It was everything I was, had been, might be. I swelled with song, and I sang.

“Like the fortune cookie said, ‘Don’t stop now,’ ” Imp typed. “You’re almost at the end of it.”

It’s true. There’s not that much more left to tell, though, possibly, what remains may be the most important part of the ghost story. I could draw it out, perhaps. There is so much more I haven’t told, moments that transpired between myself and Eva Canning, and I could sit here and record all of them that I can remember. That would take many days more, many pages more. Even though there’s not that much more left to tell. I have the time, I suppose. Still unemployed, I have quite a lot of time on my hands. So, yeah, I could draw it out, how I was seduced and romanced by my mermaid (who never was a wolf), my lover who would be a melusine, a daughter of Phorcys, the Siren of Millville trapped in the Blackstone River ages ago by a hurricane, who would be all these things and innumerable things more. In her way, and in my way, she bewitched me as surely as Circe, though her tinctures worked on my eyes and mind. The physical transformations she worked all upon herself.

Early one morning—and I cannot say how many days had passed since she’d crossed the threshold, since Abalyn had left, only that we’d remained in the apartment all that time. I had no need of food, or no need beyond whatever was already in the pantry and the fridge. So, early one morning in August I woke, and I was alone in the bed. The sheets were only sheets. All her anemones had melted away again. They came and went as they wished, or as she summoned and dismissed them. There were only the sheets, which smelled of sweat and sex and, so, faintly of the sea. I’d been dreaming of the day that Abalyn and I had gone to the river and seen nothing much at all, only in the dream, we did see something. I won’t say what. What is not important. I woke from the dream, and lay blinking, immediately aware that Eva wasn’t there beside me. I slept in her arms, or her in mine. We curled fetal as any unborn beast in one another’s arms. We wrapped ourselves together as though all we were depended on those embraces.

“Eva?” I whispered, sleepily.

“Good morning, India Morgan,” she said. She was at the bedroom window again, looking out at the sky, which was only just beginning to brighten. She wasn’t naked this time. She’d put on her silky red dress, but was barefoot. The dawn light painted her pale face a muted shade of ginger. Ginger or butterscotch. The wolf Eva who never existed, she’d had butterscotch eyes. I considered that maybe the light came from within her, as much as it reflected off her. She stood very straight. She didn’t look over her shoulder at me as she spoke. There was no iridescence remaining about her, and she only looked like any thin, pale woman. She was no longer unearthly, and I thought, The spell is broken. I thought, Perhaps whatever happens from here on, it’s my choice and my choice alone.

This might have been true. Sometimes now, knowing what I know, I prefer to believe otherwise.

“You should put something on,” she said, words soft as velvet. “I need you to take me to the sea today. We need to leave soon. I’ve put it off too long already.”

I found no reason to doubt any of this. In every way, it seemed entirely sensible. I’d seen the sort of being she was, and borne witness to her magic, and of course she needed to be near the sea. I got up, found a cleanish pair of panties and mismatched socks (one argyle, one black and white stripes), cargo shorts, and a khaki tank top that Abalyn had left behind. I know now, and knew then, that I should have felt a pang of…something…seeing the tank top, but I didn’t. I simply slipped it on.

I was tying my tennis shoes when she asked if I was hungry, if I needed breakfast before we left. I told her no, I wasn’t hungry, though I was.

“Do you know Moonstone Beach?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Been there lots.” In the summer, you can only walk a narrow strip of Moonstone Beach, because it used to be a nude beach, until 1989 or so when the US Fish and Wildlife people declared it a refuge for endangered piping plovers. From April to mid-September, you can’t go where the plovers nest. They are tiny gray-white birds with black bands around their throats and between their eyes. They dash about the sand, pecking at whatever they eat, worms or bugs or whatever.

“Then we’ll go to Moonstone Beach.” And then she was talking about the January twelve winters before, when a tank barge and a tug both ran aground there. The barge spilled more than eight hundred thousand gallons of toxic heating oil into Block Island Sound and onto the beach. The name of the barge was North Cape , and the tug was named Scandia , and, during a storm, they’d run afoul of the rocks in the shallows just offshore. Both Trustom and Card ponds were contaminated by the spill—two salt ponds bordering the beach—and Moonstone was littered with the corpses of tens of millions of poisoned seabirds, lobsters, surf clams, and starfish. Anything that could be poisoned and was washed up onto the beach. People saved some of the birds. You can’t save a poisoned lobster.

You really have no notion how delightful…

“It was a massacre,” Eva said, and there was an unmistakable trace of bitterness in her voice. “She doesn’t forget these things. Maybe people do. Maybe the birds come back and shellfish come back, and no one tells tourists what happened here. But the sea remembers. The memory of the sea encompasses eons.”

I tell her how I found a trilobite fossil out on Conanicut Island when I was a kid. “It was sort of smooshed up, though, because the shale metamorphosed, got turned to slate…,” and then I realized I was prattling and trailed off.