Cthulhurotica (12 page)

They were not seen for several days.

When they sailed for Syracuse, they looked out over the side of the ship at the dark surface of the water, his arm protectively encircling her, and he tried to imagine the strange shapes that slithered and slept and oozed beneath its depths. He shivered a bit, and was glad that the ship was as large as it was, and as well fortified against storm and rock as it could be.

She felt him shiver. “You have nothing to fear from the others while you are with me,” she whispered.

“Because they are … our family?”

“And because they can no longer abide the sound of barking dogs. The racket is fearsome carried under water. I have warned them off before, Scylla-skinned, and the lesson is now well learned.”

“What is there yet to see, in Syracuse and beyond?” he asked, realizing that the ship had little to fear from Scylla while she stood tucked beneath his arm. “Is there still a whirlpool, a Charbydis, to fear, in the Strait of Messina? Do we have a reason to sail through the strait and beyond?”

“There is still Charbydis, and as to what she is, I’ll let you see for yourself. But, as to what lies beyond the strait, if you remember your Homer, you will recall that my own isle lies beyond, Aeaea. There I have a house and cave, my eternal home, where I retire between the lifetimes that I choose to live skin-stolen. I’d like you to see it. I’d like to remember us there, wrapped in each other’s arms and other appendages, as I wait there in the centuries to come, immortal and alone.”

And this was what captured Dennis’s imagination, as he set aside the translation and its mad tale of the witch and the old Ionian philosopher-scientist. How many lives had she lived since, and in what skins? How long had she waited, alone?

Most scholars agreed that Aeaea was no longer an isle, but a peninsula off the Italian coast, in the salt marshes, in a place now called Mount Circeo on Cape Circaeum, bearing her name. Surely others had searched these spaces, and the caves there and on the nearby island of Ponza. But, he felt compelled to search as well.

Dennis left behind his scholarship, his father, the comforts of the city and its technologies, and all that he had been taught about skepticism and reason. He tattooed the back of his hand with the Orphic egg (a silver egg wrapped in a serpentine tentacle) in the hopes that it formed some kind of mark of initiation.

Eventually he found a cave that others had overlooked, or, perhaps more likely, he was permitted to see that which had been veiled to others. He found the grotto, and the beautiful woman reclining within.

As he approached, seeing only her top half, he did not know if this was her Thracian skin, or her Scylla skin, or some other skin. Beneath the water line, she could be hairy mouths and tentacles.

But he still went to her.

“You came,” she said.

“Are you Circe?” he asked.

She nodded, still half submerged, and reached up with one hand to caress his face as he knelt beside the pool. “You found my story.”

“Not I, but others. I read the translation.”

“I have written that story every two hundred years or so, different versions, each a faithful account of my adventures with the men of each age who have come to bear me company, and hid the papyrus, the papers, in necropoli and other old places. Perhaps one day in the far future, they will read of you and I, and it will inspire another young man to seek me out.”

“You are a fisher of scholars,” he said with a laugh.

“I cast my net,” she acknowledged with an ageless smile.

“You’ve caught me,” he said. “I am yours.”

“Are you ready to join me in this pool, knowing what I might be, beneath this water?”

He nodded, and began to unbutton his shirt, eager to find out.

One hairy mouth slipped out of the water and rubbed its furry head against his leg, where he knelt. He petted it, slick and soft, and traced its moist lips with one finger. She sighed in pleasure, and the sound purred and pulsed from all of her mouths at once, above and below the water. As she wrapped him in her arms, in her tentacles, in her nether mouths, he heard his own heart beating like a mad drum and her moaning cries echoed through the cave like the thin monotonous piping of a Phrygian flute.

Lovecraftian Love
by Galen Dara

Nathan Crowder
THE FISHWIVES OF SEAN BROLLY

The bottle’s neck in Steven’s hand was slick with sweat and blood, and his brow was knit with concentration in the stale motel air. He leaned back to let the table lamp shine down on his work. With a critical eye, he surveyed the cuts.
Close
, he thought.
Close but still not right
. Maintaining an erection would be difficult at best. Steven adjusted his position. As he examined his canvas, he licked a drop of salty sweat from his upper lip.
There
, he thought. He brought the broken glass to bear. With the whisper of parting flesh, he felt turgidity return.
Yes. This will do just fine.

“Steve, unlock the damn car.”

Steven jolted awake in the stuffy womb of the rental car to see his wife, Linda, pounding on the driver’s side window. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to hide an unexpected hard-on.

He had been dreaming of Brolly’s fishwives again. Ever since he and Linda had arrived in Grayce Point, North Carolina, he had seen them. Each time he closed his eyes, the women were there, tempting him.

Linda shouted again, veins visible in her neck from anger. “Steven, the door!”

Steven scrambled to comply. Intense pressure from her editor had made Linda more intolerable than usual lately. Any way he could keep her happy was to his advantage. Her door swung open, letting in the muted roar and salty breeze of the incoming tide across the desolate tidal flats. The last book’s success had earned her a big advance, and big expectations. Linda had sold her publishers on another historical fiction novel based on the notorious wrecker Sean Brolly. She knew little more than a story told by her grandmother about the subject. The new book required research, and that required a few weeks in North Carolina. The story’s birthplace was a stone’s throw from historic Roanoke, on one of its less-scenic islands, soaking in the grisly details.

Steven had to go. He was Linda’s personal assistant as much as her husband, if not more. He brushed a lock of fine, windblown hair from her face, hoping to mute her anger with his apparent cheer. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

She batted his hand away with a sigh. “I found the site of the stilt huts out on the flats. The posts are almost rotted away – I bet they only get below the water at extreme high tides. But I had no luck tracking down graves along the surrounding shore.”

“So maybe they weren’t buried,” Steven suggested, nursing his stung hand as well as stung ego. It fit at least one of the legends about the fishwives of Sean Brolly. Spawn of several generations of incestuous relations, the women of the Brolly clan were said to be just as blood thirsty as their husband/father. While Sean merited a historical marker in town, ten feet from where he was hung, there was no definitive answer for what happened to the women. If they were buried, no one knew where.

Some said that the women were killed where they stood, the bodies set to the torch.

Another legend was heard from a rum-soaked old mariner at the dock four days ago. The fishwives of Sean Brolly were monstrous, inhuman, and the townspeople who fell upon them forced Sean’s progeny out into the ocean, pockets filled with rocks and sewn shut.

While Linda loved the more macabre version, she was unlikely to use it in her book. The mariner’s account, told in wafts of sour breath, involved the worship of forgotten gods and ritual sacrifice, not the kind of thing her editor was looking for. No, she would likely stick to having the women killed and tossed on a bonfire.
Nothing like a good human pyre for sales
, she had said.

The way her eyes sparkled at the thought turned Steven’s stomach, just as the mariner’s description of the wives stirred something else in him. Monstrous, he had said, their affinity for the ocean and its unforgiving god visible upon them like a shroud of sin. He would say no more, his eyes like a storm every time Linda brought the subject around to the Brolly women again. He eventually limped away, pulling his stocking cap down low over his rat’s nest of white hair as he vanished into the salty evening fog. They never saw him again, but Steven doubted they would get much more information. There was something in the way the old man had clammed up – something in Steven’s eyes, perhaps.

That night, the fishwives of Sean Brolly visited Steven in his dreams. Their dark hair was heavy with musky brine, their eyes wide, bulging on either side of narrow noses. In the muted sunset of his dream, their skin was grayish-green, their bellies white, glistening like raw oysters. Their bare backs were rough, scaly to the touch. There was nothing attractive about them, and as they first slid from the murky waters of the mudflats, he was revolted. Paralyzed in dream terror, he watched them advance down the length of the warped pier, a scent of bitter fermentation preceding them.

When their cold, grasping fingers began assailing the buttons of his shirt, his pants, he felt powerless to stop them. Insistent, slimy hands proceeded to touch him in ways his own wife’s had not for years, and his revulsion gave way to base animal lust. Their hungry grasp clutched wetly at him, tracking sticky lines down his torso, up his thighs. Strong, clammy fingers tugged at his manhood, stirred it to life. It was not real, he reasoned, only the dream result of constant frustrations. By the time their foul, black tongues snaked past his lips with a taste of seafood past its prime, he no longer resisted. Inhibitions lost, he gave in to their needs, their hungers.

The dreams continued, pulling him down into increasingly depraved visions of lust whenever he closed his eyes to sleep. He felt his waking and dreaming lives becoming disjointed, and wasn’t certain that he cared.

“Steven! Are you listening to me?”

He turned his attention to Linda. They were in the parking lot of the seaside motel. Steven didn’t remember the drive from the tidal flats, and memory of the briny stench faded beneath the rose soap smell of Linda’s skin. “Sorry. Drifted off.”

“For fuck’s sake. You’re supposed to be taking notes.” She waited for him to fish out his notebook. Once he opened to a blank page, she started in with the tone she reserved for children and idiots. Linda knew he hated it, that pedantic way of reinforcing that she was a success and that he was nobody. “Tomorrow, I need to go see the wreckage of the two ships out on the rocks. Book a charter boat for me. Meanwhile, I want you to search the local newspaper archives for accounts of Brolly’s trial.”

He wrote it down and returned the notebook to his rough, canvas over-shirt.

“And hide your boner before you get out,” she added. “It’s disgusting.”

How would you know, you harridan
, he thought, already missing the wet caress of cold hands.
You haven’t seen it for months.

The fishwives were waiting when Steven fell asleep. The touch of countless cold hands drained him of warmth and left electric fire in their wake. There were no less than a half-dozen women, the range of ages shocking had they not been figments. Light, sticky tracery of fingertips turned rough, scratching to raise a slow seep of chilled blood. Hands tore at him seemingly at random until he was drained, then wrote strange symbols in his flesh with their gnarled fingernails. Though spent, he felt desire building to new heights with every drop of blood they drew from him, the slow oozing of his essence replaced by energetic spurts of red as his heart raced. He no longer feared their freakishness – he reveled in it.

Steven woke before the alarm went off, sheets sticky with the evidence of his nocturnal escapades. He slipped off to the shower and scrubbed with the pale, unscented motel soap. Fully clothed atop the ripe sheets to avoid Linda’s discovery of his night, he shook her gently awake. “The water’s hot if you want a shower, and I’ll have your boat chartered by the time you get out.”

She grumbled but rolled from the bed without cogent argument. True to his word, he arranged a boat to take her to where Sean Brolly had lured two doomed ships aground over a hundred years ago, stealing the cargo and killing everyone on board.

Steven had already found the library on their first day in town, and resolved to spend all day within the dusty stale air of the periodical room. They ate a quick breakfast across the street, not speaking as usual. Maple syrup on his waffle brought to mind the night before; blood, seawater, and unknown viscous fluids. Linda had a lot on her mind, a lot of irons in the fire and didn’t mind his silence. It wasn’t as if Steven was doing anything worth hearing about. He wanted to talk about the fishwives, but realized it would provoke angry questions, recriminations. Silence was better.

Steven wasn’t sure when his relationship with Linda had turned sour. It might have been when he lost his job right as her career skyrocketed. Sure, she could support him, but “could” was very different than “should.” It fostered a certain kind of dependence, along with a resentment that poisoned the simplest of interactions. He was no longer Steven Haight, ad agency executive; he was the husband of thriller novelist Linda Haight.