Death by Water Read online

  “The abyssopelagic zone is aphotic, meaning no light penetrates that deep,” I read to my grandfather from the book I had checked out at the library. The cover was faded and soft with wear, the pages filled with illustrations of the ocean, of alien creatures, horror movie creatures: dragonfish, vampire squid, goblin shark. Fish with teeth. “Imagine if you could swim down with her and see all that.”

  “She comes from a very different world than we do, I’ll tell you that,” said Grandpa, wagging his finger in a way that told me he was about to impart some old-man wisdom. “We must always try to meet people from different worlds. If you don’t, you’ll never learn anything new.”

  My grandfather, too, seemed to come from a different world—one that I could never visit, an irrecoverable world, and he was right, because he taught me about things, like love, even if he taught them sideways.

  “What are you two reading about?” my mother asked as she peered over my shoulder in a way I always hated, like she was spying on me.

  “Where the mermaid lives.”

  I’ll never forget the way she yanked me away from the dining table, up to my bedroom, put her finger in my face, and told me sharply I was not to listen to my grandfather’s stories. “If you indulge him, he’ll only get worse. I know your imagination gets away from you, but you can’t believe his nonsense.”

  “What if it isn’t nonsense?”

  She looked at me scornfully.

  “It is nonsense. He’s an irrational old man who barely knows up from down, and I won’t have you follow him down that rabbit hole. Stop enabling him.” It was only later that I understood the crack in her voice. Here I thought she was just being a cold bitch, but really, when I look back now, I realize her voice was so hard and brittle because she was terrified that more and more of her father was going to slip away into the ether, that she would lose him before he was physically gone. I know because that’s how I felt, years later, when my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Gradually she forgot my name, lost track of where she lived, looked around familiar places with childish bewilderment. It was a slow, cold, remorseless metaphysical death. But of course I didn’t comprehend that when I was a kid. All I felt was the fire of teenage spite at adults who behave callously because they can, because they’re adults, not because they’re human beings with their own complex inner lives that I couldn’t yet fathom.

  The following Monday was gray and oppressively humid; a fine mist of almost-rain hung suspended in the air, and Grandpa had gone out without me.

  I thought he might include me now that he had told me the truth, for I believed at that point that it must be the truth after all, no matter what my mother tried to convince me, and, thinking we might go out mermaid hunting together, I actually geared up—put on my rainboots, teased through my jackets to find one that was waterproof. But Grandpa went out on his own, leaving as surreptitiously as the wind, so what did I do?

  I followed him.

  I followed him into the sodden, heavy afternoon, keeping enough distance between us that he wouldn’t turn around and see me.

  You know why I didn’t go up to him, why I followed in secret? Because he didn’t invite me along. The pain of betrayal unfolded in me like a ripe flower, and I followed, feeling small and inadequate.

  He paused to peer in every puddle, in every puddle finding nothing, and we continued in this way for, oh, maybe an hour, weaving through marshy grass and narrow winding switchback streets that sloped into rainwater seas, before he stopped at a dirty creek on the edge of a wooded hill. At one end, the gaping black mouth of a sewer outfall disgorged a slow stream of brown water into the abysmal brook.

  Rolling up his pants and removing his shoes, Grandpa waded into the shallow water, which came up just over his spider-veined calves, and made his way to the dark orifice, gateway to an underground realm of sewage, decay, and magic.

  He called echoingly into the dank throat of the tunnel. By now I was cold and tired. The light gray of afternoon was sinking into a darker, duskier gray of secret twilight. It was time to bring Grandpa back, I thought—or, my anger having long since chilled to a wet, muddy, dull and uncaring resentment, maybe I should just leave him here, leave him to rot in the sewers.

  Then she arrived.

  At first she was just a dark shape swimming out of the tunnel, swimming from darkness into the muted tones of overcast evening: a woman rising slowly out of the water, long black hair like seaweed struggling down her shoulders, naked from the waist up—water glistening on her pale, almost silvery breasts. They embraced. Grandpa’s back hitched and shuddered with tears of grief, joy, relief, and when her bony arms twined around him, caressed his back, I saw long pointed fingers like crab claws, the skin turning silvery-black as the talons tapered to their points.

  They were too distracted to notice me creeping closer, close enough to see her face—pearlescent, with cheekbones sharp enough to cut flesh.

  “I knew it! I knew it, I knew it was you. But—why did you have to abandon me?” Grandpa croaked. “I looked everywhere for you.”

  “I was waiting,” she said in a dreamy voice like sunshine sparkling on seashells, like dark music. “Waiting for the right time.”

  “Thank God you’re here,” my grandfather murmured. “You’re real. I thought I was going—crazy.”

  She began humming rather than reply, and the sound took on ethereal tones, warbled as if coming through water. I might have closed my eyes and fallen asleep to the tune but that she stopped suddenly, leaving us with harsh silence. What made her stop?

  She had seen me.

  From over my grandfather’s shoulder, her eyes snapped to me: two round silver fish-eyes, cold with blank inhumanity. Slowly her black lips peeled back in a wide curved expression that looked like a grin but wasn’t—no, it was an inverted grin, upside-down and terrible—to reveal rows of jagged needle-like teeth that reminded me of the stupid hungry mouth of an anglerfish.

  Still holding on to him, she began to sink into the water, bringing Grandpa with her, and what was even worse, somehow, was that he didn’t fight; he let her drag him down; perhaps he wanted to go with her into the dark forgetful depths where he could pretend not to remember the love he still felt for my grandmother, the pain he still felt over her absence. Together, they disappeared into the murky water.

  After tearing off my rainboots and throwing my jacket behind me, I waded in after them. The creek should have been maybe three feet at its deepest, but when I looked down I saw them far below me, maybe ten feet down, vanishing into an impossibly vast greenish abyss, the mermaid’s arms still wrapped tightly around my grandfather.

  I dove.

  The dirty water burned my eyes as I fought my way down. If words could travel through water, I would have shouted for my grandfather to break him out of the spell she had over him, which was not love, I could see that now, it was love’s wicked cousin, the bastard child of jealousy and lust.

  My chest ached, desperate for breath, suffocating, and still they were too far below me, and still the burn in my eyes, this time from tears, and still the belief I could catch up to them if only—if only I could swim faster—but we were deep, too deep, and I would have to retreat to the surface soon, which was high above now, nearly lost in the darkening water.

  The last glance I had of my grandfather—finally he looked up and saw me swimming above them, a moment that seemed to clear his head, and he tried to swim up to me but the mermaid gripped him more tightly, still grinning that cavernous sharp-toothed not-grin, and for the first time I noticed her tail, long silvery and slimy, tapering slowly but never quite reaching a point, a tail that vanished into the abyss far below them, impossibly long, and in the moment after my grandfather and I locked eyes for the last time and I saw the apology within them, and the fear, a great dark shape rose up from the end of the mermaid’s tail, a behemoth of darkness that unhinged its monstrous jaws to envelop the two creatures sucked quickly, now, toward it, sucked away into the mindless ra
vening abyss.

  When I broke the surface, gasping and shuddering, I stood in the creek for long moments sucking rotten air, deliriously convincing myself I would dive back again as soon as I caught my breath. But when I did, I discovered that the creek was only a few feet deep; even in the middle, it came up only as far as my waist. There was nothing down there. He was gone.

  In the years that followed, I always kept an eye out for him, just in case—in fish tanks, in puddles, in ponds. Still, I knew I wouldn’t find him. I knew where she had taken him: to the deepest part of the ocean.

  So that was where I went.

  As you can guess, that particular fascination, obsession, call it what you will—it never left me. Lately I’ve been studying abyssal zone ecosystems in a submarine stationed 20,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific, where there is no light and nothing remotely familiar, only the freakish bioluminescent creatures that glide through the somnolent deep.

  A few hours ago I saw something outside the window of the sub…something familiar. Something that’s got me all strung out again.

  It was my grandfather. Pale, his nearly translucent skin glowing with ghostlight, made visible in the black emptiness—floating dreamily past, gazing in at me with round silver eyes, his pale fleshy legs replaced by a long, long tail.

  I shouldn’t have done it, I know, but I put on a diving suit and went out against protocol, swam out into the black silent abyss, the weight of thousands of tons of water crushing down on me. He drifted out of sight, and I followed deeper, surrounded by the pale snowfall of the deep sea, the excretions of the world above falling forever.

  When I looked back, I couldn’t see the sub anymore.

  He had lured me out into the vast darkness of the ocean with only the small light on my helmet to guide me through the nothing, with only the light of his luminous skin to draw me forward like an untethered astronaut floating through space. But I had to see him again, to know that he was real, to know that I wasn’t going—well, crazy.

  Even after half a lifetime of studying, I realize, in the end, that I still don’t know anything. What do I really know of the mysteries in the endless deep? What do I know of death? All I have is you, whoever you are, the person in my head, my imagination, and who knows where that will lead me this time—what dark impossible corridors of madness might lie at the bottom of the sea where the hungry giants live?

  YOU WILL COME TO NO HARM IN WATER

  by Lucy Taylor

  “Lillian, we’re going to miss the plane.”

  Martin Wallace tapped his Rolex while his wife perused a display case in Bobby Twin Elks Loan and Pawn just west of Albuquerque. “That one, please,” she said to the elderly Navajo behind the counter, “let me see it.”

  The old man rummaged in the case and handed her a white medallion with a hole drilled near the top to accommodate a leather cord. Lillian asked what it was made from.

  “Bone. Whale maybe.”

  She turned it over several times, her face rapt with the kind of child-like delight Martin had once found charming.

  He paced the aisle. “Lillian, we have to leave.”

  “Just a moment.”

  He was starting to wonder if she were actually trying to make them miss their flight and what other evasive tactics she might use to spoil their trip. His trip, really. An idea of a second honeymoon to renew the spark in their rocky five-year marriage and forestall any ideas of divorce she might secretly be harboring. He’d found the number for a high-priced divorce lawyer and some incriminating texts from same. The discovery had shocked and angered him; he’d thought Lillian too needy to instigate divorce. And though he said nothing, this changed things, made him rethink his long-range plans for their marriage.

  Now, as she dillydallied, he clenched his fists in frustration. How she vexed him, this handsome woman with vivid azure eyes, a foxy face and, in his astute opinion, an insufficient chin. Her habitual expression of uncertainty put him in mind of some small prey animal peeking fearfully out of its den with an eye to predators. One of those women requiring a male escort through life, who felt the need of a man to protect and cherish her. That he’d been chosen for this role he found a source of never-ending irony.

  Now she flashed a winning smile he made no effort to return and showed him the medallion.

  “It was meant for me to find here, don’t you think?”

  “Undoubtedly,” he said. “You should buy it.”

  And although he found the object singularly unattractive, he understood why his wife, who had a superstitious bent, would want to own it. On one side, inked into the bone in the manner of scrimshaw, was written in ant-sized script a promise Lillian would probably like to tattoo on her heart, “You Will Come to No Harm in Water,” and on the reverse, a primitive rendition of a fish skeleton against a background of an ever-narrowing spiral. Above the curved lines representing ribs, a single bulbous eye stared out with malevolent intent. Unlike the skeleton it belonged to, the eye seemed alive and menacing.

  He gave the item back to Lillian, then wiped his hand discreetly on his jeans.

  She put the medallion around her neck and trotted over to admire herself in a mirror. An unease crept over Martin that he tried to dispel with the sound of his own voice. He asked the Navajo how he came to acquire the piece.

  “Pawn,” the old man said, regarding Martin as one might a poorly made reproduction of an ancient Anasazi pot. “Spanish girl come in, said her grandpa was a fisherman in the Gulf and wore this all the time. When he died, she found it in his tackle box. Told me she’d come back for it one day, but that was years ago. I knew she never would.”

  “Gramps didn’t drown, I hope?” said Martin as Lillian shot him a look. He slid his arm through hers, guiding her toward the door and into the bright, scalding day. Over her shoulder she called back to the shopkeep, “You don’t know what this means to me! I’m terrified of water and where we’re headed is in the middle of the ocean.”

  Well, not exactly the middle, but close enough, he thought, when they were belted in, the Southwest jet taxiing on the runway while Lillian death-gripped the armrests. He pried one hand loose, squeezed it reassuringly and put her fingers to his lips. Her skin smelled of lavender hand lotion, yet somehow, beneath the fragrance, a subtle foulness clung, the faint stench of rotting sea life.

  When he forced himself to kiss her fingers, he felt his stomach clench. “It’s going to be a wonderful trip,” he said, more to himself than her. “A new beginning for us both. You’ll see.”

  Her eyes were tightly shut and she didn’t respond. He felt an unexpected flicker of desire as the old, eroticized resentments rose in him along with his cock.

  He’d been in love with her once, he was sure of it. When they’d met at a New Age church in Santa Fe—her seeking the kind of solace some find in sex or spirituality or a lurid combination of the two, his ambitions simpler, to find an easy mark—he’d recognized her name and experienced an almost orgasmic shivering. The heir to an ice cream empire, her family name was plastered on tubs of Marsha-Mellow and Chunky Cherub around the world, her father a sickly octogenarian unlikely to last out the year. And she, a made-to-order prize beset with wealth and phobias.

  But now the bloom was off the Chocolate Cherry, frail zombie-Daddy still clinging to shreds of life, their marriage more a series of staged skits between bouts of heavy drinking on Lillian’s part and cruel, covert punishments on his. Nothing so vulgar as physical violence, of course. He preferred a more nuanced approach, tormenting her with silence, making her fret and guess about how she had displeased him. With the threat of divorce looming, however, he’d decided to reverse course and become again the loving spouse, to deluge her with hot sex and mindfuckery, to unbalance her completely. To that end, he’d found a jewel of a tropical island, one of those semi-private ones frequented by the über-rich where Lillian was most at home. Add to that a barge-sized bed, strong drink spilled into goblets the size of cannonballs, and bouts of mad, inebriat
ed sex. How better to reignite marital passion and regain her trust.

  But her fear of the water was a minor problem.

  She’d confessed this fear soon after they were married, when he’d suggested a South Pacific cruise. Wishing to explore her weaknesses for later use, he’d peppered her with questions. “Did you watch someone drown or almost drown yourself? Parents pitch you into the deep end of the pool?”

  Her answer had grated on his patience because, like Lillian herself, it was both nonsensical and vague. She’d told him that, as a young child, her parents took her to the tony resort of Sea Island, Georgia.

  “We went out in a glass-bottomed boat,” she’d said. “At first I loved it. Seeing all that underwater life, the bonefish and the barracudas, the bright blue mahi mahi with their big, domed foreheads. It all seemed magical until it changed, and I saw something different. I realized the ocean I thought I knew was only a disguise, a camouflage for something unimaginable and awful, an endless nothingness, a void. I only saw it for a second—that’s all it would allow—but for that instant, it was like looking through a telescope at a secret universe that despises us and means us only harm. I realized this is why the oceans were created. To conceal what’s really underneath. An ocean of the dead.”

  “The nightmares of an over-stimulated child,” he’d said with false assurance, for in truth he found her tale disturbing on so many levels, not least of which that she was clearly mentally unwell. “I know boats. My father had a Chris-Craft Commander he docked in Bimini.” (In truth his father was a petty thief whose entire knowledge of the ocean came from Sea Hunt reruns.) “One day I’m going to take you on a boating trip. It’ll be wonderful, you’ll see!”