Girl at the Bottom of the Sea (10 page)

“Syrena!” she cried to the mermaid. Surely Syrena wouldn't be scared of a deranged oyster, even a supersized one. Syrena had battled sharks! She would rescue her. “Syrena!” she cried again—and the oyster slid a stretch of slime into her mouth, grasping and steadying her tongue.

“No use hollering,” Kishka said. “You're just going to give me a headache. The acoustics in this place, oy vey.”

Sophie struggled to raise her head, and she could just make out the outline of her grandmother. Kishka ashed her cigarette from atop her perch on the great pearl. Sophie grasped the terrible tentacle that was lassoing her tongue, and with all her might she tugged it free. She gagged on the taste the thing left behind, alarmed at how quickly the oyster had wrapped itself around her wrists, binding them.

“Nana!” Sophie gasped.

“Oh, don't ‘Nana' me,” Kishka snapped. The oyster shell was filling with the smoke from her cigarette, and Sophie choked a little on it.

“You had your chance to be a granddaughter,” Kishka continued, taking a long drag off the long cigarette. In the smoky haze, Sophie squinted. The cigarette looked like it was half a foot long. Half a foot long and growing by the second. With every inhalation, the evil thing stretched further toward Sophie. Its nauseous stink and glowing orange tip slid so close Sophie could feel its heat on her face.

“Oh, you had your chance,” Kishka half sang. “You could have been my little duckling, my little helper. You could have been just a sweet girl who minded her own business. Or you could have been mine. My special assistant. Sophie, the things we could have
done
together!” Kishka tapped the end of her cigarette, and a wall of ash fell inches away from Sophie's lap, sizzling in the wetness of the oyster. “Instead, I'm stuck with your sister. Dumb as a post, less of a pet than a goldfish.”

It was exhausting to struggle against the sticky meat of the oyster, but every time she tried to rest, the thing increased its hold on her. She could feel it tugging at the pouch on her hip, knotted to her belt loop and full of charms from her aunt Hennie. Hennie the Winter Witch, Hennie the good. But Hennie would be no help to her here, at the bottom of the sea, a place without seasons. Sophie twisted her hips, thwarting the thing's grasp. She took a gulp of air and sputtered into a cough.

“Oh, is this bothering you, my dear?' Kishka looked at her cigarette with a bemused expression. “You know, I really
should
quit. A terrible habit. Here.” The cigarette shrank back to normal size with Kishka's final drag, and Sophie watched with horror as her grandmother stubbed the burning tip out on the palm of her hand and tossed it behind her. She clapped her hands together, brushing the ash away.

“Things don't
hurt
me, Sophie. Something you should think about.” Kishka looked down at Sophie, smirking. The oyster muck, whatever it was—for by now Sophie knew she'd been terribly tricked, and that of course oysters did not grow to such sizes, nor produce such majestic pearls—had attached itself to her talisman, blotting out the blue light as it slimed over the sea glass. Sophie should have known from the start that this was her grandmother. A glamour, a treacherous illusion.

“You know, I used to beat myself up, Sophie,” the woman began. “For years, for years, I've been furious with myself about this. To be so powerful, and still, goodness escapes me. I just can't seem to see it.
It's my giant blind spot. Now, evil, I see. Evil, I understand. Give me a war, give me a famine, give me that any day. I see it, I feed it, it feeds me. I'm happy. But goodness—it's like it doesn't exist. So I hope. I make my best guesses. Take your mother. You remember her?”

“Of course,” Sophie sputtered. The oyster was climbing the cord of her talisman like a vine climbing a trellis.

“‘Of course.' The woman who raised you! Well, I couldn't be sure, the way you just
abandoned
her in Chelsea, with so many terrible things happening. I thought you were maybe trying to put her out of your mind.”

“Of course not! I love my mother!”

“‘Love.'” Kishka chuckled. “Now, sometimes I don't see love because I'm too hateful, but sometimes, Sophia, I don't see love because it isn't there. You do not love your mother. Nor do you love your sister, that wasteling. You love nothing.”

“I do!” Sophie cried, twitching her whole body in a vain attempt to shake the crawling slime from her talisman. It was wrapped around the whole cord now, and slowly climbing up her neck, as if it would lift it off her body. “No!” Sophie shouted, both at the oyster and at her grandmother, whose movements she could feel within her, deep in her heart, the place where all her feelings lived, the good and the bad. The place where her love for her mother was, and the place where her anger and disappointment lived, too. The place where a long-lost, primal love for her sister lived, a love formed in the womb but stolen soon after. She could feel Kishka's mind scraping at it, like she was
trying to pick a lock. “No!” she cried, and brought the hard wall inside her up around her heart. If only she had such a mechanism to protect her body from the oyster. As her talisman floated above her face she opened her mouth and clamped her teeth around it.

“Well, if you think your mother disappointed you, imagine how I feel!” Kishka scoffed. “So much magic I have,
eons
of it, and not a bit gets passed on to her. I can't help but feel that it's her own fault. There's something wrong with a creature who can't glean even a bit of magic from one so powerful as myself.” Kishka sighed. “And then you came along. You, and that other one. I couldn't tell you apart, but then all humans look the same to me. You were just little squirming things, all squirmed up together. Sucking each other's fingers, doing all those grotesque things babies do.” Kishka shuddered, and Sophie felt tears spring to her eyes. She bit down harder on the oyster-covered cord of her talisman, biting against the sadness. Her sister. Once they had loved each other, in the simple way only twin baby sisters could. They had been created together, two from one. Was that sad ache she had lived with for so long, so constant she had almost ceased to feel it, the feeling of her twin torn from her heart?

“I knew I couldn't strike out three times,” Kishka said. “I knew one of you had the magic. But it was so good, I could hardly see it. Then you started with the salt, tipping over the saltshaker and licking it off the table. And I knew you were the one.”

Kishka slid down off the pearl, walking through the muck to where Sophie was struggling. Of course the oyster didn't cling to Kishka, not
at all. Her open-toed sandals moved easily through it. She stroked her granddaughter's head gently.

“Your mother tried to trick me, you know. She tried feeding the salt to your sister, too. To confuse me. God, that woman has
no
magic,” Kishka laughed a bitter laugh. “As if I couldn't see the way your sister spat it out, the way you loved it. But she tried, your mother. She almost killed your sister, feeding her salt.” Kishka paused, as if deep in memory. “But that's not how I lost you. It was Hennie who did that.”

“Hennie?” Sophie gurgled through her teeth, trying not to choke on the bits of oyster that fell down her open throat. What
was
this stuff? Was it going to strangle her from the inside?

“She switched you at the last minute, like a damn Boginki. I got your useless, salt-addled sister, and you—you went free.”

Like a muscle flexing, Sophie felt the oyster increase its grip on her talisman, pulling it through her teeth. Like a wild dog she bit harder, shaking the cord like prey.

“When that thing comes off your head, you'll drown,” Kishka said calmly. “It's the only thing letting you breathe down here. All the salt in this water isn't going to help you, my dear. Are you ready to drown?”

Sophie's eyes widened as her grip on the talisman started to fail.

“I hear it's not so bad, as far as human dying goes,” Kishka said. “Peaceful. Like sleeping.” She squinted at the girl. “I bet you haven't had a good night's sleep in a long time, Sophie. Wouldn't it be nice to relax? To just… float away?”

Terror surged through Sophie. She hated the whine that came through her throat as she worked to hold on to her talisman. Such a desperate sound, a whinny. The sound of an animal losing a fight.

“Of course, you could always make my dream come true. Be the granddaughter I've always wanted. It's much, much easier to make a good person bad than to make a bad person good. You'll never get anywhere with me, dearie. But what I could do with you! You could be awful. We could make war together. We could destroy the whole world.”

The talisman rose higher, the sea glass now in the air above Sophie's head, floating like a balloon. Sophie arched her neck, clenching the cord in her teeth.

“Just let down that wall around your heart and show me, Sophie. Show your grandmother you mean it. That you'll work with me, that you'll be my special dearie.”

None of this is real, none of this is real
, Sophie said to herself, her mind frantic inside her head. So if it wasn't a real shell, a real pearl, if the thing sucking at her wasn't a real oyster, what was it? A manifestation of Kishka's mind? She remembered how Hennie had set up the feast to welcome her, the perfumed elixirs and chocolate-chip cookies. And Sophie had blown Hennie away, hadn't she? For once the memory didn't shame her, how in her frustration and confusion, overwhelmed by all she was learning about her history, about her family, she had lashed out against her kindly aunt, destroying her home. This time the memory inspired her. If she could out-magic Hennie, she had to at least try it on her grandmother. She knew Kishka was more powerful
than Hennie, her sister. But Sophie didn't want to drown, and she didn't want to go with her grandmother, to fall down that tunnel of horror and pain, and to
like
it. The thought made Sophie's goodness, her magic, rear up inside of her like a horse. And inside of this magic, Sophie realized, was everything she needed.

First, Sophie would become a shark. Why not? The understanding that she could do this, become something else, a creature as powerful as a
shark
, filled her with such delirious delight that she laughed out loud. And when she laughed, her mouth opened wide, and when her mouth opened wide the talisman began to float away from her, the cord hovering for a moment in the dark space of her mouth.

Then the shark teeth came.

Row upon row of them sliced up through Sophie's gums, piercing the cord between their vicious peaks like a bit of dental floss.

The flicker of shock Kishka felt as her granddaughter morphed into a great white was all it took for her glamour to fizzle, like the plug had been pulled on a giant neon sign. In an instant the oyster was gone, and so was the pearl; the shell was gone, and all the groping, gooey muck. And then Sophie's grandmother was gone. Where she had been sitting, there was not an old woman in a flowered housecoat, but a sea-beast like nothing Sophie had ever seen. It looked like a great, scaled snake with a face sprouting poisoned tentacles long and droopy as a catfish's whiskers. Its eyes were as big as giant clams, and Sophie knew not to look into them. In their depths swirled all the pain of the world, electric and alive. Sophie swam up above the monster and with an instinct she hadn't known before she sunk her razored jaw deep into the neck of the Odmieńce.