“No... no. Says here it’s a mystery. ‘Local biologists stumped,’ it says. Hey,” he smiled and looked up. “So how many places have their own, local biologist?”
“I... I don’t know,” she said softly. “Do you think we should let him swim?”
“Come again?”
“The baby, should we let him near the water?”
* * *
Eileen had wanted to leave their “filthy” city for years. Actually it was “those filthy people” she’d wanted to leave. Ironic that she insisted they remain at The Shores to have the baby, where the water was so polluted she was afraid to walk closer than fifty feet or so, and even then she held her swollen belly protectively and averted her face. After coming to this decision so reluctantly, she had no intention of going anywhere until it had come to completion. Scott supposed it was some sort of nesting instinct, but he found it completely unexpected from her. He himself didn’t want her to walk there, but he would have been hard-pressed to explain why.
Even though Scott couldn’t work, or couldn’t bring himself to, they still had some savings, and Eileen had inheritance from her parents, so they’d be okay for at least a year or so. Scott couldn’t imagine living much past the baby’s birth. Not that he was sure he was going to die—he just couldn’t imagine living.
The Shores was a lonely place past the tourist season. People they did business with every day—the grocer, the pharmacist, the manager of the beachfront cabin they’d moved to—had grown noticeably less friendly once Scott and Eileen revealed their plans. “Gets pretty cold and windy, especially if you’re not used to it, especially if you’re pregnant,” the pharmacist had said when filling Scott’s prescription of painkillers. “Don’t know that I’d want to put my wife through that.”
“We’re not likely to have everything you’re going to need,” the grocer had added several hours later. “See, I order in limited quantity, because I usually know who my customers are going to be.”
Only the withered and palsied doctor they’d found to guide Eileen through the pregnancy seemed friendly at all, but his garrulousness seemed to have more to do with Eileen’s forthcoming “miracle of birth” than with the patient herself. “The cells, they’re dividing, multiplying even as we speak. Amazing, isn’t it!” He touched her exposed belly with thin fingers that shook and skittered about like a spider’s legs on glass. “Right about now the little one has a webbed-looking hand, no different from what a pig’s foot looks like, about this stage. And imagine, a few weeks back they both had fins.” Scott watched anxiously as the doctor poked and prodded some more, then suddenly thrust his wrinkled ear up to Eileen’s belly. “You can almost hear the little fellow say, ‘I’m no pig, Doctor Linden! At least I don’t think I am!’” He laughed. “Actually, he has no idea what he is right now, and who knows, maybe he’ll fool us all!”
“Well, I hardly think so,” Eileen offered, gently easing herself away from the doctor’s head.
“What I’m saying, dear lady, is that the little one’s body is in flux right now. If you were to observe this new face closely you would see a countenance of barely controlled chaos, fiercely set against the imposed orders of our everyday world. The nose must migrate from somewhere atop the head. The mouth and jaws travel out of the brachial arches. The eyes lie at the sides of his head like his cousin’s, the fish. They creep up front in stealth, as if ashamed to declare their difference. The ears, why, who knows what songs they hear, songs that we...”
“Is she healthy, doctor?” Scott interrupted.
“Well, I can’t say now if it’s a she or a he, but perhaps with the ultrasound...”
“My wife, doctor. Is my wife okay?”
Dr. Linden looked up at Eileen’s face quizzically, as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, I imagine she is,” he replied.
* * *
They always walked back from the doctor’s office through the small street of shops, because Eileen insisted that some exercise was good for her pregnancy. Scott was doubtful; she looked pale, especially against this backdrop of dark, burnt-looking wooden structures, but she would not be dissuaded. Nor would she pause by any structure for a breather. Now and then they would see someone—usually a fisherman in his rubber slicker—but this was increasingly rare. There were no CLOSED or OPEN signs in any of the doors, although Scott sometimes could detect yellowish light in the distant recesses of a shop or two. He supposed the locals just knew, and strangers had to find out.
By mid-afternoon each day an artificial twilight had set in, due to cloud cover rolling in from the bay. He hurried her along as fast as he thought safe. Once the clouds came in, everything smelled like rotting fish.
Around her sixth month of pregnancy, they started finding the eggs. “Eggs” was what Eileen called them, and that was what she’d convinced herself they were, but Scott had serious doubts. They seemed too large, and too deliberate. “Someone makes these things, honey, or several someones do. Look, that one has a signature on it.” He tugged on the object, jarring it loose from the sandy stretch in front of their cabin where they’d discovered it the previous day. It was heavier than it looked, another detail convincing him they were either carved or manufactured, perhaps part of some local festival. No doubt the locals worked on these things all year, in their garages and basements, bringing them out at a preordained time of the year, planting them like the objects of a giant’s Easter egg hunt. He’d ask the manager of the cabins for confirmation, if he could ever find the fellow—they hadn’t seen him in weeks.
The egg-shaped object had an odd centre of gravity. It shifted under his hands and he had to struggle to control it. Dangerously off-balance, he bumped into Eileen, almost knocking her down. “God, I’m sorry.” He wheezed, and ridiculously felt on the verge of tears. “There, see? A signature.” He played his fingers over the back of the egg where a line of squiggles had been pressed into its surface.
“Are you sure that’s a signature, hon? It’s pretty hard to read.”
“You saw Dr. Linden’s handwriting on your prescription didn’t you? No better than this. In fact it looks damned similar, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one he made.”
“If you’re right about the local celebration.”
“Well, celebration or not, someone is making these things. Now look at that one over there.” He led her over to a bend in the gravel and shell road that wound through the spare trees behind the cabins. “Look at all that decorative filigree. You can’t tell me that’s random chance at work. Besides this one’s a little bigger, and shaped a bit differently.” He bent and placed her hand on the pattern. She jerked back as if shocked.
“It feels weird,” she said, looking around nervously. “I see a few more over by those trees. I wonder how many of these things there are, anyway.”
“Just a few, I think. I mean, how many locals can there be? Full-time residents of The Shores? Not more than three dozen, I would think.”
* * *
But the number of “eggs” they found around the cabin and especially on their daily walks down the beach doubled, doubled again, and doubled again. Eileen stopped mentioning them, and after awhile even stopped looking at them as far as Scott could tell.
Scott could look at little else. The round tops of the eggs made a knobbed carpet from the back of the beach up the grassy slope to the rocks beyond, and he could see a scattering wedged precariously on the high cliffs above. Sometimes they had to veer out of the way of some glacier-like encroachment of eggs onto the beach, stepping into the mossy edges of the water more than once. He did so with trepidation; Eileen simply marched on with no change in expression.