Unless it’s morning light, she thinks. Unless it’s morning light, and this is another day entirely. Unless the sun is rising now instead of setting. Julia wonders why she ever assumed it was afternoon, how she can ever again assume anything. And there’s a sound, then, from somewhere behind her, inside the room with her or very close to it; the crisp sound of a ripe melon splitting open, scarlet flesh and black teardrop seeds, sweet red juice, and now the air smells even worse. Fish putrefying under a baking summer sun, beaches strewn with bloated fish-silver bodies as far as the eye can see, beaches littered with everything in the sea heaved up onto the shore, an inexplicable, abyssal vomit, and she closes her eyes again.
“Are you here, Anna?” she whispers. “Can you hear me?”
And something quivers at the edge of her vision, a fluttering darkness deeper than the long shadows in the room, and she ignores the pain and the nausea and rolls over onto her back to see it more clearly. But the thing on the ceiling sees her, too, and it moves quickly towards the sanctuary of a corner; all feathery, trembling gills and swimmerets, and its jointed lobster carapace almost as pale as toadstools, chitin soft and pale, and it scuttles backwards on raw and bleeding human hands. It drips and leaves a spattered trail of itself on the floor as it goes.
She can see the door now, the absolute blackness waiting in the hall through the doorway, and there’s laughter from that direction, a woman’s high, hysterical laugh, but so faint that it can’t possibly be coming from anywhere inside the house.
“Anna,” she calls out again, louder than before, and the laughter abruptly stops, and the thing on the ceiling clicks its needle teeth together.
“She’s gone down, that one,” it mutters. “She’s gone all the way down to Mother Hydra and won’t hear you in a hundred, hundred million years.”
And the laughing begins again, seeping slyly up through the floorboards, through every crack in these moldering plaster walls.
“I saw a something in the sky,” the ceiling crawler whispers from its corner, “No bigger than my fist.”
And the room writhes and spins around her like a kaleidoscope, that tumbling gyre of colored shards, remaking the world, and it wouldn’t matter if there were anything for her to hold onto. She would still fall; no way not to fall with this void devouring even the morning, or the afternoon, whichever, even the colors of the day sliding down that slick gullet.
“I can’t see you,” Anna says, definitely Anna’s voice, though Julia’s never heard her sound this way before: so afraid, so insignificant.
“I can’t see you anywhere,” Julia replies and reaches out (or down or up) into the furious storm that was the house, the maelstrom edges of a collapsing universe, and her arm sinks in up to the elbow. Sinks through into dead-star cold, the cold ooze of the deepest seafloor trench. “Open your eyes,” Anna says, and she’s crying now. “Please, god, open your eyes, Julia.”
But her eyes are open, and she’s standing somewhere far below the house, standing before the woman on the rock, the thing that was a woman once, and part of it can still recall that lost humanity. The part that watches Julia with one eye, the desperate, hate-filled, pale-green eye that hasn’t been lost to the seething ivory crust of barnacles and sea lice that covers half its face. The woman on the great rock in the center of the phosphorescent pool, and then the sea rushes madly into the cavern, surges up and foams around the rusted chains and scales and all the squirming pink-white anemones sprouting from her thighs.
Alone, alone, all all alone,
The woman on the rock raises an arm, her ruined and shell-studded arm, and reaches across the pool towards Julia.
Alone on the wide wide sea
Her long fingers and the webbing grown between them, and Julia leans out across the frothing pool, ice water wrapping itself around her ankles, filling her shoes, as she strains to take the woman’s hand. Straining to reach while the jealous sea rises and falls, rises and falls, threatening her with the bottomless voices of cachalots and typhoons. But the distance between their fingertips doubles, triples, origami space unfolding itself, and the woman’s lips move silently, yellow teeth and pleading, gill-slit lips as mute as the cavern walls.
—murdered his daughter, sacrificed her—
Nothing from those lips but the small and startled creatures nesting in her mouth, not words but a sudden flow of surprised and scuttling legs, the claws and twitching antennae, and a scream that rises from somewhere deeper than the chained woman’s throat, deeper than simple flesh, soulscream spilling out and swelling to fill the cave from wall to wall. This howl that is every moment that she’s spent down here, every damned and salt-raw hour made aural, and Julia feels it in her bones, in the silver amalgam fillings of her teeth.
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
And the little girl sits by the fire in a rocking chair, alone in the front parlor of her father’s big house by the sea, and she reads fairy tales to herself while her father rages somewhere overhead, in the sky or only upstairs, but it makes no difference, in the end. Father of black rags and sour, scowling faces, and she tries not to hear the chanting or the sounds her brother is making again from his attic prison, tries to think of nothing but the Mock Turtle and Alice, the Lobster Quadrille by unsteady lantern light. Don’t look at the windows, she thinks, or Julia tries to warn her. Don’t look at the windows ever again.
Well, there was mystery. Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-Master was an old conger-eel…
An old conjure eel—
Don’t ever look at the windows even when the scarecrow fingers, the dry-grass bundled fingers, are tap-tap-tapping their song upon the glass. And she has seen the women dancing naked by the autumn moon, dancing in the tall moonwashed sheaves, bare feet where her father’s scythe has fallen again and again, every reaping stroke to kill and call the ones that live at the bottom of the pool deep below the house. Calling them up and taunting them and then sending them hungrily back to down to Hell again. Hell or the deep, fire or ice-dark water, and which makes no difference whatsoever in the end.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.
Julia’s still standing at the wave-smoothed edge of the absinthe pool, or she’s only a whispering, insubstantial ghost afraid of parlor windows, smoke-gray ghost muttering from nowhen, from hasn’t-been or never-will-be, and the child turns slowly towards her voice as the hurting thing chained to the rock begins to tear and stretches itself across the widening gulf.
“Julia, please.”
“You will be their queen, in the cities beneath the sea,” the old man says. “When I am not even a memory, child, you will hold them to the depths.”
And they all dead did lie, And a million million slimy things Liv’d on—and so did I…
“Open your eyes,” Anna says, and this time Julia does. All these sights and sounds flicker past like the last frames of a movie, and she’s lying in Anna’s arms, lying on her back in the weedy patch between the car and the brooding, spiteful house.
“I thought you were dead,” Anna says, holding onto her so tightly she can hardly breathe. Anna sounds relieved and frightened and angry all at once, the tears rolling down her sunburned face and dripping off her chin onto Julia’s cheeks.
“You were so goddamn cold. I thought you were dead. I thought I was alone.”