CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Postcards from the King of Tides

Caitlín R. Kiernan’s short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Love in Vein II, Dark Terrors 2 and 3, Dark of the Night, White of the Moon, Silver Birch, Blood Moon, Darkside, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Best New Horror.

Her first novel, Silk, was published in 1998 and has so far received both the International Horror Guild and Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage awards for best first novel. She also writes the graphic novel series The Dreaming for DC Comics/Vertigo. A collection of her short fiction, Tales of Pain and Wonder, is forthcoming from Gauntlet Publications, and her second novel, Trilobite, will appear from Penguin/Roc. The author also publishes her own irregular newsletter, Salmagundi, and her official website is http://www.negia.net/~pandora, which she shares with Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust.

As Kiernan reveals, “I think that the ocean has always affected me the way that outer space affects a lot of people - that same dizzying sense of awe at the vastness of it, at the unknown. A lot of my childhood was spent by the sea, and it was always fascinating and terrifying at the same time. It still is.

“In ‘Postcards from the King of Tides’, the main thing I wanted to do was communicate these feelings about the sea, in particular, the way that my first visit to the Pacific coast of Oregon and northern California affected me. There aren’t many things I love as much as the sea, but there aren’t many things that frighten me as much, either. The title was suggested by George Darley’s poem, ‘The Rebellion of the Waters’ (1822).”

H

ere’s the scene: The three dark children, three souls past twenty but still adrift in the jaggedsmooth limbo of childhoods extended by chance and choice and circumstance, their clothes impeccable rags of night sewn with thread the color of ravens and anthracite; two of them fair, a boy and a girl and the stain of protracted innocence strongest on them; the third a mean scrap of girlflesh with a blacklipped smile and a heart to make holes in the resolve of the most jaded nihilist but still as much a child as her companions. And she sits behind the wheel of the old car, her sagegrey eyes straight ahead of her, matching their laughter with seething determination and annoyance, and there’s brightdark music, and the forest flowing around them, older times ten hundred than anything else alive.

The winding, long drive back from Seattle, almost two days now, and Highway 101 has become this narrow asphalt snake curving and recurving through the redwood wilderness and they’re still not even as far as San Francisco. Probably won’t see the city before dark, Tam thinks, headachy behind the wheel and her black sunglasses because she doesn’t trust either of the twins to drive. Neither Lark nor Crispin have their licenses, and it’s not even her car; Magwitch’s piece-of-shit Chevrolet Impala, antique ‘70s junk heap that might have been the murky green of cold pea soup a long, long time ago. Now it’s mostly rust and bondo and one off-white door on the driver’s side. A thousand bumper stickers to hold it all together.

“Oooh,” Lark whispers, awevoiced, as she cranes her neck to see through the trees rushing past, the craggy coast visible in brief glimpses between their trunks and branches. Her head stuck out the window, the wind whipping at her fine, silkwhite hair and Tam thinks how she looks like a dog, a stupid, slobbering dog, just before Crispin says, “You look like a dog.” He tries hard to sound disgusted with that last word, but Tam suspects he’s just as giddy, just as enchanted by the Pacific rain forest, as his sister (if they truly are brother and sister; Tam doesn’t know, not for sure, doesn’t know that anyone else does either, for that matter).

“You’ll get bugs in your teeth,” he says. “Bugs are gonna fly right straight down your throat and lay their eggs in your stomach.”

Lark’s response is nothing more or less than another chorus of “ooohs” and “ahhhs” as they round a tight bend, rush through a break in the tree line and the world ends there, drops suddenly away to the mercy of a silveryellowgrey sea that seems to go on forever, blending at some far-off and indefinite point with the almost colorless sky. There’s a sunbright smudge up there, but sinking slowly westward, and Tam looks at the clock on the dash again. It’s always twenty minutes fast, but still, it’ll be dark a long time before they reach San Francisco.

Tam punches the cigarette lighter with one carefully-manicured index finger, nail the color of an oil slick, and turns up the music already blaring from the Impala’s tape deck. Lark takes that as her cue to start singing, howling along to “Black Planet”, and the mostly bald tires squeal just a little as Tam takes the curve ten miles an hour above the speed limit. A moment in the cloudfiltered sun, blinding after the gloom, before the tree shadows swallow the car whole again. The cigarette lighter pops out, and Tam steals a glance at herself in the rearview mirror as she lights a Marlboro: yesterday’s eyeliner and she’s chewed off most of her lipstick, a black smudge on her right cheek. Her eyes a little bleary, a little red with swollen capillaries, but the ephedrine tablets she took two hours ago, two crimson tablets from a bottle she bought at a truck stop back in Oregon, are still doing their job and she’s wider than awake.

“Will you sit the fuck down, Lark, before you make me have a goddamn wreck and kill us all? Please?” she says, smoky words from her faded lips and Lark stops singing, pulls her head back inside and Crispin sticks his tongue out at her, fleshpink flick of I-told-you-so reproach. Lark puts her pointy, black boots on the dash, presses herself into the duct-taped upholstery, and doesn’t say a word.

They spent the night before in Eugene and then headed west, followed the meandering river valleys all the way down to the sea before turning south toward home. Almost a week now since the three of them left Los Angeles, just Tam and the twins because Maggie couldn’t get off work, but he’d told them to go anyway; she didn’t really want to go without him, knew that Lark and Crispin would drive her nuts without Magwitch around, but the tour wasn’t coming through L.A. or even San Francisco. So she went without too much persuading, they went, and it worked out better than she’d expected, really, at least until today.

At least until Golden Beach, only thirty or forty miles north of the California state line and Crispin spotted the swan neck of a Brachiosaurus towering above shaggy hemlock branches and he immediately started begging her to stop, even promised that he wouldn’t ask her to play the P.J. Harvey tape anymore if she’d Please Just Stop and let him see. So they lost an hour at The Prehistoric Gardens, actually paid money to get in and then spent a whole fucking hour wandering around seventy acres of drippywet trees, listening to Crispin prattle on about the life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs and things like dinosaurs, tourist-trap monstrosities built sometime in the 1950s, skeletons of steel and wood hidden somewhere beneath sleek skins of wire mesh and cement.

“They don’t even look real,” Tam said, as Crispin vamped in front of a scowling stegosaur while Lark rummaged around in her purse for her tiny Instamatic camera.

“Well, they look real enough to me,” he replied and Lark just shrugged, a suspiciously complicit and not-at-all-helpful sort of shrug. Tam frowned a little harder, no bottom to a frown like hers, and “You are really such a fucking geek, Crispy,” she said under her breath but plenty loud enough the twins could hear.

“Don’t call him that,” Lark snapped, defensive sister voice, and then she found her camera somewhere in the vast, blackbeaded bag and aimed it at the pretty boy and the unhappy-looking stegosaur. But, “A geeky name for a geeky boy,” Tam sneered, as Lark took his picture; Crispin winked at her, then, and he was off again, running fast to see the Pteranodon or the Ankylosaurus. Tam looked down at her wristwatch and up at the sky and, finding no solace in either, she followed zombie Hansel and zombie Gretel away through the trees.

After The Prehistoric Gardens, it was Lark’s turn, of course, her infallible logic that it wasn’t fair to stop for Crispin and then not stop for her and, anyway, all she wanted was to have her picture taken beside one of the giant redwoods. Hardly even inside the national park and she already had that shitty little camera out again, sneaky rectangle of woodgrain plastic and Hello Kitty stickers.

And because it was easier to just pull the fuck over than listen to her snivel and pout all the way to San Francisco, the car bounced off the highway into a small turnaround, rolled over a shallow ditch and across crunchsnapping twigs; Lark’s door was open before Tarn even shifted the Impala into park and Crispin piled out of the back seat after her. And then, insult to inconvenience, they made Tam take the photograph: the pair of them, arm in arm and wickedsmug grins on their matching faces, a mat of dry, cinnamon needles beneath their boots and the boles of the great sequoias rising up behind them, primeval frame of ferns and underbrush snarl all around.

Tam sighed loud and breathed in a mouthful of air so clean it hurt her Angeleno lungs and she wished she had a cigarette, then Just get it the fuck over with, she thought, sternpatient thought for herself. But she made sure to aim the camera just low enough to cut the tops off both their heads in the photo.

Halfway back to the car, a small squeal of surprise and delight from Lark and “What?” Crispin said, “What is it?” Lark stooped and picked up something from the rough bed of redwood needles.

“Just get in the goddamned car, okay?” Tam begged, but Lark wasn’t listening, held her discovery cut for Crispin to see, presented for his approval. He made a face that was equal parts disgust and alarm and took a step away from Lark and the pale yellow thing in her hands.

“Yuck,” he said, “Put it back down, Lark, before it bites you or stings you or something.”

“Oh, it’s only a banana slug, you big sissy,” she said and frowned like she was trying to impersonate Tam. “See? It can’t hurt you,” and she stuck it right under Crispin’s nose.

“Gagh,” he moaned, “It’s huge,” and he headed for the car, climbed into the back seat and hid in the shadows.

“It’s only a banana slug,” Lark said again. “I’m gonna keep him for a pet and name him Chiquita.”

“You’re going to put down the worm and get back in the fucking car,” Tam said, standing at the back fender and rattling Magwitch’s key ring in one hand like a particularly noisy pair of dice. “Either that, Lark, or I’m going to leave your skinny ass standing out here with the bears.”

“And the sasquatches!” Crispin shouted from inside the car and Tam silenced him with a glare through the rear windshield.

“Jesus, Tam, it’s not gonna hurt anything. Really. I’ll put it in my purse, okay? It’s not gonna hurt anything if it’s inside my purse, right?” But Tam narrowed her mascara smudgy eyes and jabbed a finger at the ground, at the needle-littered space between herself and Lark.

“You’re going to put the motherfucking worm down, on the ground,” she growled, “and then you’re going to get back in the motherfucking car.”

Lark didn’t move, stared stubbornly down at the fat slug as it crawled cautiously over her right palm, leaving a wide trail of sparkling slime on her skin. “No,” she said.

“Now, Lark.”

“No,” she repeated, glanced up at Tam through the cascade of her white bangs. “It won’t hurt anything.”

Just two short, quick steps and Tam was on top of her, almost a head taller anyway and her teeth bared like all the grizzly bears and sasquatches in the world. “Stop!” Lark screeched. “Crispin, make her stop!” She tried too late to turn and run away, but Tam already had what she wanted, had already snatched it squirming from Lark’s sticky hands and Chiquita the banana slug went sailing off into the trees. It landed somewhere among the ferns and mossrotting logs with a very small but audible thump.

“Now,” Tam said, smiling and wiping slug slime off her hand onto the front of Lark’s black Switchblade Symphony t-shirt. “Get in the car. Pretty please.”

And for a moment, time it took Tam to get behind the wheel and rev the engine a couple of times, Lark stood, staring silent toward the spot in the woods where the slug had come down. She might have cried, if she hadn’t known that Tam really would leave her stranded there. The third rev brought a big puff of charcoalsoot exhaust from the Impala’s noisy muffler and Lark was already opening the passenger-side door, already slipping in beside Tam.

She was quiet for a while, staring out at the forest and the stingy glimpses of rocky coastline, still close enough to tears that Tam could see the wet shimmer in the windowtrapped reflection of her blue eyes.

So the highway carries them south, between the ocean and the weathered western slopes of the Klamath Mountains, over rocks from the time of Crispin’s dinosaurs, rocks laid down in warm and serpent-haunted seas; out of the protected cathedral stands of virgin redwood into hills and gorges where the sequoias are forced to rub branches with less privileged trees, mere Douglas fir and hemlock and oak. And gradually their view of the narrowdark beaches becomes more frequent, the toweringsharp headlands setting them one from another like sedimentary parentheses.

Tam driving fast, fast as she dares, not so much worried about cops and speeding tickets as losing control in one of the hairpin curves and plunging ass-over-tits into the fucking scenery, taking a dive off one of the narrow bridges and it’s two hundred feet straight down. She chain smokes and has started playing harder music, digging through the shoe box full of pirated cassettes for Nine Inch Nails and Front 242, The Sisters and Nitzer Ebb, all the stuff that Lark and Crispin would probably be whining like drowning kittens about if they didn’t know how pissed off she was already. And then the car starts making a sound like someone’s tossed a bucket of nails beneath the hood and the temp light flashes on, screw you Tam, here’s some more shit to fuck up your wonderful, fucking afternoon by the fucking sea.

“It’s not supposed to do that, is it?” Crispin asks, back seat coy, and she really wants to turn around, stick a finger through one of his eyes until she hits brain.

“No, Einstein,” she says instead, “It’s not supposed to do that. Now shut up,” settling for such a weak little jab instead of fresh frontal lobe beneath her nails. The motor spits up a final, grinding cough and dies, leaves her coasting, drifting into the breakdown lane. Pavement traded for rough and pinging gravel and Tam lets the right fender scrape along the guardrail almost twenty feet before she stomps the brakes, the smallest possible fraction of her rage expressed in the squeal of metal against metal; when the Impala has finally stopped moving, she puts on the emergency brake and shifts into park, turns on the hazard lights.

“We can’t just stop here,” Lark says, and she sounds scared, almost, staring out at the sun beginning to set above the endless Pacific horizon. “I mean, there isn’t even a here to stop at. And before long it’ll be getting dark …”

“Yeah, well, you tell that to Magwitch’s fine hunk of Detroit dogshit here, babycakes,” and Tam opens her door, slams it closed behind her and leaves the twins staring at each other in silent, astonished panic.

Lark tries to open her door, then, but it’s pressed smack up against the guardrail and there’s not enough room to squeeze out, just three or four scant inches and that’s not even space for her waif’s boneangle shoulders. So she slides her butt across the faded, green naugahyde, accidentally knocks the box of tapes over and they spill in a plasticloud clatter across the seat and into the floorboard. She sits behind the wheel while Crispin climbs over from the back seat. Tam’s standing in front of the car now, staring furiously down at the hood, and Crispin whispers, “If you let off the brake now, maybe we could run over her,” and Lark reaches beneath the dash like maybe it’s not such a bad idea, but she only pulls the hood release.

“She’d live, probably,” Lark says, and “Yeah,” Crispin says, and begins to gather up the scattered cassettes and return them to the dingy shoe box.

The twins sit together on the guardrail while Tam curses the traitorous, steamhissing car, curses her ignorance of wires and rubber belts and radiators, and curses absent Magwitch for owning the crappy old Impala in the first place.

“He said it runs hot sometimes, and to just let it cool off,” Crispin says hopefully and she shuts him up with a razorshard glance. So he holds Lark’s hand and stares at a bright patch of California poppies growing on the other side of the rail, a tangerineorange puddle of blossoms waving heavy, calyx heads in the salt and evergreen breeze. A few minutes more and Lark and Crispin both grow bored with Tam’s too-familiar indignation, tiresome rerun of a hundred other tantrums, and they slip away together into the flowers.

“It’s probably not as bad as she’s making it out to be,” Crispin says, picking a poppy and slipping the sapbleeding stem behind Lark’s right ear. “It just needs to cool off.”

“Yeah,” she says, “Probably,” but not sounding reassured at all, and stares down the precarious steep slope toward the beach, sand the cinder color of cold apocalypse below the grey shale and sandstone bluff. She also picks a poppy and puts it in Crispin’s hair, tucks it behind his left ear, so they match again. “I want to look for sea shells,” she says “and driftwood,” and she points at a narrow trail just past the poppies. Crispin looks back at Tam once, her black hair wild in the wind, her face in her hands like maybe she’s even crying, and then he follows Lark.

Mostly just mussels, long shells darker than the beach, curved and flaking like diseased toenails, but Lark puts a few in her purse, anyway. Crispin finds a single crab claw, almost as orange as the poppies in their hair with an airbrush hint of blue, and she keeps that too. The driftwood is more plentiful, but all the really good pieces are gigantic, the warped and polished bones of great trees washed down from the mountains and scattered about here, shattered skeletons beyond repair. They walk on warm sand and a thick mat of sequoia bark and spindletwigs, fleshy scraps of kelp, follow the flotsam to a stream running down to meet the gently crashing sea, shallowwide interface of saltwater and fresh. Overhead, seagulls wheel and protest the intrusion; the craggy rocks just offshore are covered with their watchful numbers, powdergrey feathers, white feathers, beaks for snatching fish. And pecking eyes, Lark thinks. They squawk and stare and she gives them the finger, one nail chewed down to the quick and most of the black polish flaked away.

Crispin bends and lets the stream gurgle about his pale hands. It’s filled with polished stones, muted olive and bottle green pebbles rounded by their centuries in the cold water. He puts one finger to his lips and licks it cautiously and “Sweet,” he says. “It’s very sweet.”

“What’s that?” Lark says and he looks up, across the stream at a windstunted stand of firs on the other side and there’s a sign there, almost as big as a roadside billboard sign and just as gaudy, but no way anyone could see this from the highway. A great sign of planks painted white and lettered crimson, artful, scrolling letters that spell out, “ALIVE AND UNTAMED! MONSTERS AND MYSTERIES OF NEPTUNE’S BOSOM!” and below, in slightly smaller script, “MERMAIDS AND MIRACLES! THE GREAT SEA SERPENT! MANEATERS AND DEVILFISH!”

“Someone likes exclamation points,” Lark says, but Crispin’s already halfway across the stream, walking on the knobby stones protruding from the water and she follows him, both arms out for balance like a trapeze acrobat. “Wait,” she calls to him, and he pauses, reluctant, until she catches up.

The old house trailer sits a little way up the slope from the beach, just far enough that it’s safe from the high tides. Lark and Crispin stand side by side, holding hands tight, and stare up at it, lips parted and eyes wide enough to divulge a hint of their mutual surprise. Lark’s left boot is wet where she missed a stone and her foot went into the stream, and the water’s beginning to seep past leather straps and buckles, through her hose, but she doesn’t notice, or it doesn’t matter, because this is that unexpected. This old husk of sunbleached aluminum walls, corrugated metal skin draped in mopgrey folds of fishing net, so much netting it’s hard to see that the trailer underneath might once have been blue. Like something a giant fisherman dragged up from the sea, and finally, realizing what he had, this inedible hunk of rubbish, he left it here for the gulls and the weather to take care of.

“Wow,” Lark whispers, and Crispin turns, looks over his shoulder to see if maybe Tam has given up on the car and come looking for them. But there’s only the beach, and the waves, and the birds. The air that smells like dead fish and salt wind, and Crispin asks, “You wanna go see?”

“There might be a phone,” Larks says, still whispering. “If there’s a phone we could call someone to fix the car.”

“Yeah,” Crispin replies, like they really need an excuse beyond their curiosity. And there are more signs leading up to the trailer, splinternail bread crumbs teasing them to take the next step, and the next, and the next after that: “THE MOUTH THAT SWALLOWED JONAH!” and “ETERNAL LEVIATHAN AND CHARYBDIS REVEALED!” As they get close they can see other things in the sandy rind of yard surrounding the trailer, the rusting hulks of outboard motors and a ship’s wheel nailed to a post, broken lobster cages and the ivory white jaws of sharks strung up to dry like toothy laundry. There are huge plywood and canvas facades leaned or hammered against the trailer, one on either side of the narrow door and both taller than the roof: garish seascapes with whitefanged sea monsters breaking the surface, acrylic foam and spray, flailing fins like Japanese fans of flesh and wire, eyes like angry, boiling hemorrhages.

A sudden gust off the beach, then, and they both have to stop and cover their eyes against the blowing sand. The wind clatters and whistles around all the things in the yard, tugs at the sideshow canvases. “Maybe we should go back now,” Lark says when the wind has gone, and she brushes sand from her clothes and hair. “She’ll wonder where we’ve gone …”

“Yeah,” Crispin says, his voice grown thin and distant, distracted, and “Maybe,” he says, but they’re both still climbing, past the hand-lettered signs and into the ring of junk. Crispin pauses before the shark jaws, yawning cartilage jaws on nylon fishing line and he runs the tip of one finger lightly across rows of gleaming, serrate triangles, only a little more pressure and he could draw blood.

And then the door of the trailer creaks open and the man is standing in the dark space, not what either expected if only because they hadn’t known what to expect. A tall man, gangly knees and elbows through threadbare clothes, pants and shirt the same faded khaki; bony wrists from buttoned sleeves too short for his long arms, arthritis swollen knuckles on his wide hands. Lark makes a uneasy sound when she sees him and Crispin jerks his hand away from the shark’s jaw, sneakchild caught in the cookie jar startled, and snags a pinkie, soft skin torn by dentine and he leaves a crimson gleaming drop of himself behind.

“You be careful there, boy,” the man says with a voice like water sloshing in a rocky place. “That’s Carcharodon carcharias herself hanging there and her ghost is just as hungry as her belly ever was. You’ve given her a taste of blood and she’ll remember now …”

“Our car broke down,” Lark says to the man, looking up at his face for the first time since the door opened. “And we saw the signs …” She points back down the hill without looking away from the man, his cloudy eyes that seem too big for his skull, odd, forwardsloping skull with more of an underbite than she ever thought possible and a wormpink wrinkle where his lower lip should be, nothing at all for the upper. Eyes set too far apart, wide nostrils too far apart and a scraggly bit of grey beard perched on the end of his sharp chin. Lank hair to his shoulders and almost as grey as the scrap of beard.

“Do you want to see inside, then?” he asks, that watery voice, and Lark and Crispin both look back toward the signs, the little stream cutting the beach in half. There’s no evidence of Tam anywhere.

“Does it cost money?” Crispin asks, glances tentatively out at the man from underneath the white shock of hair hiding half his face.

“Not if you ain’t got any,” the man replies and blinks once, vellum lids fast across those bulging eyes.

“It’s getting late and our car’s broken down,” Lark says and the man makes a noise that might be a sigh or might be a cough. “It don’t take long,” he says and smiles, shows crooked teeth the color of nicotine stains.

“And you’ve got all the things that those signs say in there?” Crispin asks, one eyebrow cocked, eager, excited doubt, and the man shrugs.

“If it’s free, I don’t expect you’ll be asking for your money back,” as if that’s an answer, but enough for Crispin and he nods his head and steps toward the door, away from the shark jaws. But Lark grabs his hand, anxious grab that says “Wait,” without using any words, and when he looks at her, eyes that say, “This isn’t like the dinosaurs, whatever it is, this isn’t plaster and plywood,” and so he smiles for her, flashes comfort and confidence.

“It’ll be something cool,” he says. “Better than listening to Tam bitch at us about the car, at least.”

So she smiles back at him, small and nervous smile and she squeezes his hand a little harder.

“Come on, if you’re coming,” the man says. “I’m letting in the flies, standing here with the door wide open.”

“Yeah,” Crispin says. “We’re coming,” and the man holds the door for them, steps to one side, and the trailer swallows them like a hungry, metal whale.

Inside, and the air is chilly and smells like fish and stagnant saltwater, mildew, and there’s the faintest rotten odor somewhere underneath, dead thing washed up and swelling on the sand. Crispin and Lark pause while the man pulls the door shut behind them, shuts them in, shuts the world out. “Do you live in here?” Lark asks, still squeezing Crispin’s hand, and the old man turns around, the tall old man with his billygoat beard and looking down on the twins now as he scratches at the scaly, dry skin on his neck.

“I have myself a cot in the back, and a hot plate,” he replies and Lark nods; her eyes are adjusting to the dim light leaking in through the dirty windowpanes and she can see the flakes of dead skin, dislodged and floating slowly down to settle on the dirty linoleum floor of the trailer.

The length of the trailer has been lined with wooden shelves and huge glass tanks and there are sounds to match the smells, wet sounds, the constant bubble of aquarium pumps, water filters, occasional, furtive splashes.

“Wonders from the blackest depths,” the old man sighs, wheezes, sicklytired imitation of a carnie barker’s spiel, and “Jewels and nightmares plucked from Davy Jones’ Locker, washed up on the shores of the Seven Seas …”

The old man is interrupted by a violent fit of coughing and Crispin steps up to the nearest shelf, a collection of jars, dozens and dozens of jars filled with murky ethanol or formalin, formaldehyde weakteabrown and the things that float lifelessly inside: scales and spines, oystergrey flesh and lidless, unseeing eyes like pickled grapes. Labels on the jars, identities in a spideryfine handwriting, and the paper so old and yellow he knows that it would crumble at his most careful touch.

The old man clears his throat, loud, phlegmy rattle and he spits into a shadowmoist corner.

“Secrets from the world’s museums, from Mr. Charles Darwin’s own cabinets, scooped from the sea off Montevideo in eighteen hundred and thirty-two …”

“Is that an octopus?” Lark asks and the twins both stare into one of the larger jars, three or four gallons and a warty lump inside, a bloom of tentacles squashed against the glass like something wanting out. Crispin presses the tip of one finger to the glass, traces the outline of a single, dimewide suction cup.

The old man coughs again, throaty raw hack, produces a wadded and wrinkled, snotstained handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wipes at his wide mouth with it.

“That, boy, is the larva of the Kraken, the greatest of the cephalopods, Viking-bane, ten strangling arms to hale dragon ships beneath the waves.” And then the old man clears his throat, and, in a different voice, barker turned poet, recites, “ ‘Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep / The Kraken sleepeth …’ “

“Tennyson,” Lark says and the old man nods, pleased.

Crispin leans closer, squints through the gloom and dusty glass, the clouded preserving fluids, and now he can see something dark and sharp like a parrot’s beak nested at the center of the rubbery molluskflower. But then they’re being hurried along, past all the unexamined jars, and here’s the next stop on the old man’s tour.

Beneath a bell jar, the taxidermied head and arms and torso of a monkey sewn onto the dried tail of a fish, the stitches plain to see, but he tells them it’s a baby mermaid, netted near the coast of Java a hundred years ago.

“It’s just half an old, dead monkey with a fish tail stuck on,” Crispin says, impertinent, already tiring of these moldy, fabricated wonders. “See?” and he points at the stitches in case Lark hasn’t noticed them for herself.

The old man makes an annoyed sound, not quite anger, but impatience, certainly, and he moves them quickly along, this time to a huge fish tank, plateglass sides so overgrown with algae there’s no seeing what’s inside, just mossygreen like siren hair that sways in whatever dull currents the aquarium’s pump is making.

“I can’t see anything at all in there,” Crispin says, as Lark looks nervously back past the mermaid toward the trailer door. But Crispin stands on his toes, peers over the edge of the tank, and “You need to put some snails in there,” he says. “To eat some of that shit so people can see …”

“This one has no name, no proper name,” the old man croaks through his snotclogged throat. “No legend. This one was scraped off the hull of a Russian whaler with the shipworms and barnacles and on Midsummer’s Eve, put an ear to the glass and you’ll hear it singing in the language of riptides and typhoons.”

And something seems to move, then, maybe, beyond the emerald scum, feathery red gillflutter or a thousand jointed legs the color of a burn and Crispin jumps, steps away from the glass and lets go of Lark’s hand. Smug grin on the old man’s long face to show his yellowed teeth, and he makes a barking noise like seals or laughing.

“You go back, if you’re getting scared,” the old man says and Lark looks like that’s all she wants in the world right now, to be out of the trailer, back on the beach and headed up the cliff to the Impala. But Crispin takes her hand again, this very same boy that’s afraid of banana slugs but something here he has to see, something he has to prove to himself or to the self-satisfied old man and “What’s next, sea monkeys?” he asks, defiant, mock brave.

“Right here,” the old man says, pointing to something more like a cage than a tank. “The spawn of the great sea serpent and a Chinese water dragon,” planks and chicken wire on the floor, almost as tall as the twins and Crispin drags Lark along toward it. “Tam will be looking for us, won’t she?” she asks, but he ignores her, stares instead into the enclosure. There’s muddy straw on the bottom and motionless coils of gold and chocolatebrown muscle.

“Jesus, it’s just a stupid python, Lark. See? It’s not even as big as the one that Alexandra used to have. What a rip-off…” and then he stops, because the snake moves, shifts its chainlink bulk and now he can see its head, the tiny horns above its pearlbead eyes, and further back, a single, stubby flap of meat along one side of its body that beats nervously at the air a moment and then lies still against the filthy straw.

“There’s something wrong with it, Crispin, that’s all,” Lark says, argument to convince herself, and the old man says, “She can crush a full-grown pig in those coils, or a man,” and he pauses for the drama, then adds, resuming his confident barker cadence, sly voice to draw midway crowds - “Kept inside a secret Buddhist monastery on the Yangtze and worshipped for a century, and all the sacrificial children she could eat,” he says.

The flipper thing on its side moves again, vestigial limb rustle against the straw, and the snake flicks a tongue the color of gangrene and draws its head slowly back into its coils, retreating, hiding from their sight or the dim trailer light or both; “Wonders from the blackest depths,” the old man whispers, “Mysteries of the deep, spoils of the abyss,” and Lark is all but begging, now. “Please, Crispin. We should go,” but her voice almost lost in the burbling murmur of aquarium filters.

Crispin’s hand about her wrist like a steel police cuff, and she thinks, How much more can there be, how much can this awful little trailer hold? When she looks back the way they’ve come, past the snake-thing’s cage and the green tank and the phony mermaid, past all the jars, it seems a long, long way; the dizzying impression that the trailer’s somehow bigger inside than out and she shivers, realizes that she’s sweating, clammy coldsweat in tiny salt beads on her upper lip, across her forehead and leaking into her eyes. How much more? but there’s at least one more, and they step past a plastic shower curtain, slick blue plastic printed with cartoon sea horses and starfish and turtles, to stand before the final exhibit in the old man’s shabby menagerie.

“Dredged from the bottom of Eel Canyon off Humboldt Bay, hauled up five hundred fathoms through water so inky black and cold it might be the very moment before Creation itself,” and Crispin is staring at something Lark can’t see, squinting into the last tank; cold pools about Lark’s ankles, one dry and one still wet from the stream, sudden, tangible chill that gathers itself like the old man’s words of cold, or heavy air spilling from an open freezer door.

“And this was just a scrap, boy, a shred ripped from the haunches or seaweed-crusted skull of a behemoth…”

“I can’t see anything,” Crispin says, and then, “Oh. Oh shit. Oh, Jesus …”

Lark realizes where the cold is coming from, that it’s pouring out from under the shower curtain and she slips her sweatgreased hand free of Crispin’s grasp. He doesn’t even seem to notice, can’t seem to stop staring into the murky, ill-lit tank that towers over them, fills the rear of the trailer from wall to wall.

“And maybe,” the old man says, bending very close and he’s almost whispering to Crispin now, secrets and suspicions for the boy twin and no one else. “Maybe it’s growing itself a whole new body in there, a whole new organism from that stolen bit of flesh, like the arm of a starfish that gets torn off …”

Lark touches the folds of the curtain and the cold presses back from the other side. Cold that would burn her hand if she left it there, lingered long enough. She glances back at the old man and Crispin to be sure they’re not watching, because she knows this must be forbidden, something she’s not meant to see. And then she pulls one corner of the shower curtain aside, and that terrible cold flows out, washes over her like a living wave of arctic breath and a neglected cat box smell and another, sharper odor like cabbage left too long at the bottom of a refrigerator.

“Fuck,” Crispin says behind her. “No fucking way,” and the old man is reciting Tennyson again.

“There hath he lain for ages, and will lie/Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,/Until the latter fire shall heat the deep…”

There is dark behind the shower curtain, dark like a wall, solid as the cold, and again, that vertigo sense of a vast space held somehow inside the little trailer, that this blackness might go on for miles. That she could step behind the curtain and spend her life wandering lost in the alwaysnight collected here.

“… Then once by man and angels to be seen,” the old man says, somewhere back there in the World, where there is simple light and warmth, “In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.”

Far off, in the dark, there are wet sounds, something breaking the surface of water that has lain so still so long and she can feel its eyes on her then, eyes made to see where light is a fairy tale and the sun a murmured heresy. The sound of something vast and sinuous coming slowly through the water toward her and Crispin says, “It moved, didn’t it? Jesus, it fucking moved in there.”

It’s so close now, Lark thinks. It’s so close and this is the worst place in the world and I should be scared, I should be scared shitless.

“Sometimes it moves,” the old man says. “In its sleep, sometimes it moves.”

Lark steps over the threshold, the thin, tightrope line between the trailer and this place, ducks her head beneath the shower curtain and the smell is stronger than ever now. It gags her and she covers her mouth with one hand, another step and the curtain will close behind her and there will be nothing but this perfect, absolute cold and darkness and her and the thing swimming through the black. Not really water in there, she knows, just black to hide it from the prying, jealous light - and then Crispin has her hand again, is pulling her back into the blinding glare of the trailer and the shower curtain falls closed with an unforgiving, disappointed shoosh. The old man and his fishlong face is staring at her, his rheumy, accusing eyes, and “That was not for you, girl,” he says. “I did not show you that…”

She almost resists, wrenches her hand free of Crispin’s and slips back behind the curtain before anyone can stop her, the only possible release from the sudden emptyhollow feeling eating her up inside, like waking from a dream of Heaven or someone dead alive again, the glimpse of anything so pure and then it’s yanked away. But Crispin is stronger and the old man is blocking the way, anyhow, grizzled Cerberus standing guard before the aquamarine plastic, a faint string of drool at one corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Lark,” Crispin says to her. “We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t ever have come in here.”

The look in the old man’s eyes says he’s right and already the dream is fading, whatever she might have seen or heard already bleeding away in the last, watercolor dregs of daylight getting into the trailer.

“I’m sorry,” Crispin says as they pass the shriveled mermaid and he pushes the door open, not so far back after all, “I didn’t want you to think I was afraid.”

And “No,” she says, “No,” doesn’t know what to say next, but it doesn’t really matter, because they’re stumbling together down the trailer’s concrete block steps, their feet in the sand again, and the air is filled with gentle twilight and the screaming of gulls.

*

Tam has been standing by the stream for half an hour, at least that long since she wandered down to the beach looking for the twins, after the black man in the pick-up truck stopped and fixed the broken fan belt, used an old pair of pantyhose from the back seat of the Impala and then refilled the radiator. “You take it easy, now, and that oughta hold far as San Francisco,” he said, but then she couldn’t find Lark or Crispin. Her throat hurts from calling them, near dark now and she’s been standing here where their footprints end at the edge of the water, shouting their names. Getting angrier, getting fucking scared, the relief that the car’s running again melting away, deserting her for visions of the twins drowned or the twins lost or the twins raped and murdered.

Twice she started across the stream, one foot out and plenty enough stones between her and the other side to cross without getting her feet wet, and twice she stopped. Thought that she glimpsed dark shapes moving just below the surface, undulating forms like the wings of stingrays or the tentacles of an octopus or squid, black and eellong things darting between the rocks. And never mind that the water is crystal clear and couldn’t possibly be more than a few inches deep. Never mind she knows it’s really nothing more than shadow tricks and the last glimmers of the setting sun caught in the rippling water. These apprehensions too instinctual, the thought of what might be waiting for her if she slipped, sharp teeth eager for stray ankles, anxiety all but too deep to question, and so she’s stood here, feeling stupid, calling them like she was their goddamn mother.

She looks up again and there they are, almost stumbling down the hill, the steep dirt path leading down from the creepy old trailer, Crispin in the lead and dragging Lark along, a cloud of dust trailing out behind them. When they reach the stream they don’t even bother with the stepping stones, just splash their way straight across, splashing her in the bargain.

“Motherfucker” Tam says and steps backwards onto drier sand. “Will you please watch what the fuck you’re doing? Shit …” But neither of them says a word, stand breathless at the edge of the stream, the low bank carved into the sand by the water; Crispin stares down at his soggy Docs and Lark glances nervously back toward the trailer on the hill.

“Where the hell have you two bozos been? Didn’t you hear me calling you? I’m fucking hoarse from calling you.”

“An old man,” Lark gasps, wheezes the words out, and before she can say anything else Crispin says, “A sideshow, Tam, that’s all,” speaking quickly like he’s afraid of what Lark will say if he doesn’t, what she might have been about to say. “Just some crazy old guy with a sort of a sideshow.”

“Jesus,” Tam sighs, pissytired sigh that she hopes sounds the way she feels and she reaches out and plucks a wilted poppy from Crispin’s hair, tosses it to the sand at their feet. “That figures, you know? That just fucking figures. Next time, Magwitch comes or your asses stay home,” and she turns her back on them, then, heading up the beach toward the car. She only stops once, turns around to be sure they’re following and they are, close behind and their arms tight around one another’s shoulders as if they couldn’t make it alone. The twins’ faces are hidden in shadow, night-shrouded, and behind them, the sea has turned a cold, silvery indigo and stretches away to meet the rising stars.