Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Not bothering to remove her clothes, she drops down on her bed, leaving one foot on the floor — she can’t remember if that truly prevents a hangover or if it’s an old wives’ tale — and squeezes her eyes shut. The gray lure of sleep begins to tug.

“Mommy?”

The word cuts blade-sharp through the haze of alcohol, and Tess struggles to sit, her eyelids at war with her intention. Her arms and legs tingle, then her limbs elongate, her fingers and toes deform, her abdomen expands, and a slimy, brackish taste slicks her tongue. She gags, staggers from the bedroom into the bathroom, her body a peculiar, heavy weight to bear, and makes it — barely.

The alcohol and the two slices of pizza she had for dinner come up with a burning rush; she retches again and again until nothing’s left but bile, and then again until even that’s gone. She runs frantic hands over her arms and legs and torso to find everything the way it’s supposed to be and rests her head on the edge of the bathtub, breathing hard.

She flushes the toilet and hears, “Mommy,” this time from the chaos of the Coriolis swirl.

“Emily?”

An unintelligible voice — too deep, too big , to be Emily’s — mumbles something Tess can’t grasp; black clouds of octopus ink coalesce in her eyes, and she slips to the floor into darkness.

“Hair of the dog?” Vicky says with a smile.

Tess shudders. “Oh, god, no.” She half-sits, half-collapses into a lawn chair and holds her water bottle against her forehead. “How much did we drink?”

Vicky shrugs. “Enough to make you laugh. Hell, you even flirted with the pizza boy.”

Tess’s cheeks warm. “Ugh, there’s a reason I don’t drink like that.”

“Plenty of reasons why I do,” Vicky says, her lips set into a grapefruit twist. “I lost a daughter, too, a long time ago. I was going to bring it up last night, but what’s the point? We were having a good time and you seemed happy.”

“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise. So, what happened to my daughter?” She lights a cigarette, exhales sharply. “Her boyfriend.”

Tess gnaws on a cuticle.

“He beat her. She hid the bruises from me, but I knew something was wrong, and when she finally got the gumption up to leave him, he came after her. And I wasn’t there to protect her.” Vicky takes a long swallow from her glass. “The bastard got his a couple years later. Got jumped in prison after he mouthed off to the wrong guy. Still didn’t bring Crystal back, though.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. For both of us. And for the record, I don’t think you were lying about what you saw that night. Depression, my ass. Anyone who met Emily even once would know that child didn’t have a depressed bone in her body. Damn fool doctors don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time.”

“Thank you.” Tess touches her water bottle to her forehead again, thinks about what she saw—

(the shape in the water)

—and didn’t—

(the shape)

—see.

“Hell, at least your story doesn’t make you a cliché or a stereotype. Never sure which one is the right word, but either way, had to be some truth before the word made sense, right?”

Tess can only nod in reply. She closes her eyes; in the shadows there the waves recede, and Emily walks into the space they left behind, and Tess almost remembers what her daughter said.

Tess wakes and she’s cold, wet, standing in the shower. Although the faucet is set to hot, the water pouring down is ice, her skin is bright pink, and there’s a thickness in her head as though she’s been listening to someone speak for hours or for days. Her nightgown is plastered against a protruding belly; she blinks, and it’s gone. Her fingers distort, turning too long with jagged fingernails that resemble lobster claws, but the image proves no more real than her stomach; when she reaches for the faucet, her hands are fine.

“Mommy?”

With a grimace, she shuts off the water. Leaves the nightgown dripping on the edge of the tub and curls up in bed, shivering. Disoriented. Scared. She hasn’t walked in her sleep since she was a child.

Is this some sort of involuntary penance for thinking Emily was sleepwalking that night, even though she’d never done it before? Tess followed her, remembering how her mother always said waking up a sleepwalker was a bad thing, curious to see where she’d go, and she was only a few paces behind her. More than close enough to keep her safe.

When Emily approached the beach, Tess took her arm, intending to turn her back around, but Emily pulled free and kept walking, heading across the sand toward the water. And then the world changed, became a rubber band stretching Tess into one place and Emily into another with a huge distance between them.

As before a tsunami, the waves pulled back and they kept receding, the sea folding back on itself to reveal an endless stretch of wet sand littered with fish trapped in the throes of death, driftwood, and tangled clumps of seaweed. Tess screamed her throat raw, but Emily kept walking, and no matter how fast Tess ran, Emily remained out of reach. Between her screams, Tess heard Emily say a word (and why the hell can’t she remember what Emily said?), and then the waves curled into their rightful place again and Emily was gone. In the space between, did Tess see a shape, an unknowable being, deep inside the water? Her mouth yearns to say no; her mind says an emphatic yes.

Even if the police didn’t believe her, she saw something . It wasn’t an optical illusion, as one police officer suggested, not unkindly. The media shitstorm and the blame from the legions of armchair detectives seems a distant dream now. The press was all too willing to give up when they realized Tess didn’t make a good subject; she wouldn’t answer their questions, wouldn’t get mad and curse them out, wouldn’t tear her hair and break down in hysterics. Not in front of them anyway.

Two steaming coffee mugs in hand, Tess pads downstairs, knocks on Vicky’s door with her elbow. After she refills their cups a second time, Tess scrubs her face with her hands, clears her throat, and says, “I keep hearing Emily. Every time I turn on the water, I hear her saying Mommy .” She fiddles with the drawstring on her pants, hating the quiet desperation of her words and wishing she could take them back, inhale them like cigarette smoke.

Vicky takes several sips of her coffee before she answers in a soft voice. “Well . . . You’re trying to move on and you’re feeling guilty about it, and Emily disappeared in the water so it makes sense you’d hear her like that.”

“But it sounds so much like her.”

Vicky leans forward. Fixes Tess’s gaze with her own. “For a couple years, I used to see Crystal all the time. Once, I even followed a girl nearly a mile because I was convinced it was my baby. And I identified Crystal’s body, I knew she was dead, but I knew it up here.” She taps her forehead. “I didn’t know it here.” A second tap, to her chest. “Once my heart caught up, it stopped. You’ll get through this part of it, too.”

“Right now, I don’t feel like I will. Not today or tomorrow or forever.”

“But you will. One day you won’t hear her, and then a little while later you’ll realize you haven’t heard her, and then a little while after that, you’ll realize you don’t need to hear her anywhere but in here.” She touches her chest again.

Tess wants to believe her, but her fingers curl in and her fingernails leave half-moon bruises in her palms.

“Mommy?”

Tess’s head snaps around, the washcloth falls from her hand. She places her palms on the porcelain, bends over the sink. Takes a shuddering breath. No one there, no one there, she thinks, but another sound emerges from the water, an evocative yet inhuman voice, one she knows she’s heard before – no. She had too much to drink that night. She heard nothing then and hears nothing now.