The Sea of Ash (2 page)

"I wrapped my coat about her
and guided her back to my house, away from the spitting clouds and the
sprawling Atlantic. Fortunately there were few other houses between the beach
and my dwelling. I was generally up and about before any neighbors stirred,
thus, we traveled unwitnessed."

The heavy rain waited until they
were secure inside the Queen Anne. It hummed on the roof of the porch and
tinkered at the windows. Albert seated the woman on the sofa in his parlor and
provided her with towels, but she simply sat there, damp and staring.

The doctor speculated that she was
dazed, or perhaps mentally defective, though he tended to doubt the latter.
There was a certain something in her eyes, a quality that even he, with his
gift for language, was hard pressed to describe. It made him think of the eyes
of soldiers back in France, the eyes of those who had seen too much horror, but
unlike them, she had made a peace with the horror.

Albert told her his name and asked
if she remembered what hers was. She gave no response. He asked if she would
allow him to dry her, seeing as she had not made any effort. No response came,
so he sat beside her and gently toweled her as best he could. This made him
feel awkward.

"Can you tell me anything
about yourself? Anything at all? Do you recall anything about how you ended up
on the beach? Did someone hurt you? Were you in a boat?"

The visitor remained mute,
inscrutable.

"I'd like to examine you, if
that would be all right?"

Pond fetched his bag and went
about his inspection. The woman was relaxed and compliant and did not even
shudder when he placed the cold stethoscope to her bare chest. He did not
detect any obvious injury; in fact, she seemed a healthy specimen. Only when he
tried to have a look inside her mouth did she react, turning her head away and
squinting her eyes. Albert apologized and withdrew.

After the check-up Dr. Pond made
tea. He had helped the visitor into his bathrobe and even put a pair of his
socks on her feet. They fit loosely, like shedding skin.

"Rather than refer to her
exclusively as 'she' and 'the woman' (in my journal) I have decided to call her
Arabella," Pond wrote. Further... "Certainly it occurred to me that I
should alert the authorities, and I wondered if there were concerned loved ones
out searching for this poor lost creature. Still, I made no effort to announce
my find. The motivation behind my actions, or lack of action, remains a mystery
to me. My intentions were by no means nefarious. I am, after all, a
gentleman."

Arabella ignored every form of
nourishment offered to her, although she did open the front of her robe, dip a
finger into a cup of hot tea, and trace a small circle around her navel.

I step out of the car and take
several pictures of the house. I have gone so far as to contact the present
owners, explaining that I am retracing the steps of Dr. Albert Pond, but
they've shown no interest in allowing me inside the structure. Very
disappointing.

It is May now, as it was then, but
today the air is warm and bright, and one is tempted to believe that the world
is only what we know of it... Streets and homes, jobs, schools, television
programs, celebrities, sports, fashions, products, technology, politics and
cultures. Familiar, numbing religions. Science. How easy it would be to be
blanketed and blinded by these things, but I refuse that luxury, just as Albert
Pond refused it.

The rain had continued into the
night. It blew in off the shore and wrapped wet arms around the house. Albert
gently urged his guest up the stairs and put her to bed. He covered her and
then sat in the rocking chair nearby, watching her sleep -- the dark eyes
behind dark lashes, the pale rosebud lips compressed, the winsome face framed
in mussed black hair. Perhaps her recall would be improved in the morning, he
hoped.

Albert left a candle burning; the
hushed light replaced the room with exaggerated shadow. Arabella's face was
slack, and her lips parted slightly, the light glimmering softly on her teeth.
The doctor remained curious as to why she had averted her head when he had
attempted to examine her mouth. He rose up slowly from the creaky rocker and
crept closer.

"Ever so carefully I parted
her lips with my fingers and there found the most curious anomaly. Her teeth,
both upper and lower, were neat rows of small white petrified trilobites."

Trilobites, for those unfamiliar,
were prehistoric arthropods that populated the oceans of the Paleozoic Period.
Like crabs and insects, they sported exoskeletons, their shape roughly evoking
an oval with multiple small legs ranked beneath, as with a horseshoe crab. The
bodies were rather flat, segmented, with furrows that divided the back armor
into three distinct lobes. Many fossilized examples still exist.

Pond stared until the woman's eyes
began to flicker, then he backed away. He paced for what must have been hours,
his mind racing, speculating, reaching for the comforting scientific
explanation that would not come.

Perhaps she was of North African
origin and the fossils were some form of ritual embellishment that had been
hammered into her gums. Yes, that seemed reasonable enough, after all, there
were various tribes on that continent that indulged in body modification, elongated
necks, tattoos, pierced cheeks and nostrils, raised scarring, and lips
manipulated to hold decorative disks in place. Maybe some enterprising sideshow
entrepreneur was bringing her to America to dazzle audiences -- COME SEE THE
FOSSIL-MOUTHED GIRL -- but lost her to the waves and currents.

It still did not seem to add up. If
she were in fact from Africa, even the North, or the Middle East, then how
could her skin be so uncommonly pale? He had never seen Irish flesh or
Scandinavian flesh so white.

Exhausted from pacing, from
thinking, and from the long, eventful day, Albert returned to the rocking chair
and eventually dozed off.

Dr. Pond dreamt of a rising grey
temple, older than the Parthenon, younger than trilobites. It came up through
the mist, dripping, dangling slippery black sea-wrack like remnants of a net
that failed to confine it. Water gurgled down the stone steps out of the great
stone orifice. Moonlight shone within.

He woke in the morning half-light of
his chamber and immediately looked to the bed. Arabella was gone, the covers
disrupted. Alarmed, the man got up from the noisy rocker and walked out into
the hall. He saw that the bathroom door was ajar and his robe, which Arabella
had been wearing, was flopped on the floor.

"Hello," he called.

He moved to the door, gave an
obligatory knock, then peered in at a startling scene. The woman was reclining
in a tub full of water, asleep or dead, her legs open and crooked over opposite
sides of the tub. A newborn child, pale as its mother, floated face down and
motionless.

Pond dashed to the tub and grabbed
the baby out of the water -- both the water and the small body were cold. He
gasped when he flipped the baby over and saw what it had for a face.

To quote his journal: "A
seashell was set in place where the child's features ought to have been. It was
a scallop shell, evenly ribbed, dull white in color, but for a slight mossy
hue. It measured three and a half inches by three and three-eighths inches. The
shell was embedded. Flesh framed the outermost edges fastening the mask in
place."

The baby was dead, obviously, and
while stunned, Pond had the presence of mind to place it on the floor and turn
his attention to Arabella. She was alive. Her eyes had opened, and she was
watching him impassively. He fired questions at her. Was she all right? Where
had the baby come from? Had she left the house to retrieve it from somewhere?
Was the baby hers?

She actually nodded in response to
the last inquiry.

The man was more than perplexed. While
the babe looked newly born, the mother, if she were indeed the mother, had
shown no obvious signs of being pregnant. Certainly he'd seen patients whose
pregnancies were nearly undetectable to the eye, but they tended to be heavier
specimens than this. Besides, there was no blood in the water, no placenta, no
umbilical cord.

Albert helped Arabella out of the
cold tub, dried her and again put her in his robe before leading her back to
bed. She allowed him to examine her, and still there were none of the expected
indications that she had given birth.

"I'd like you to remain in
bed, if you would," he told her. "Do you understand?"

No response.

Arabella closed her dark eyes. So
far she had exhibited no interest in the child. Then again, he had no idea how
much time she had spent with it, not knowing when she had vacated the bed. It
was possible that she had passed hours with the corpse. Satisfied that she was
content to stay put, Pond hurried back to the bathroom, wrapped the baby in a
blanket, and took it downstairs to his examination office, placing it on the
table.

He weighed, measured and
photographed the body. But for the seashell, it was a conventionally formed
infant male with a trace of fine dark hair spiraling out from the crown of its
head. Eager to see the features beneath the shell, he took up a scalpel and
bent in close.

"It made no sense to me how
the rim of flesh could have formed around the edges of the shell...it certainly
appeared to be a natural growth of skin, but the child would have had to be
alive for such a thing to occur. Flesh does not regenerate in the dead, after
all. Even upon close inspection I noted no air holes in the shell, so the poor
creature would have been suffocated by the mask; again, suffocation equals
death, and death precludes skin growth. Had someone stitched the border? Not
likely. While I'd once seen a sideshow mermaid which was created by stitching
together the upper body of a mummified monkey and the tail end of a dried fish,
this phenomenon struck me as genuine."

Pond carefully cut the thin
connecting membrane and pried the scallop shell free. He found no features
underneath. No eyes, no nose, no mouth, only a circular black hole. The orifice
was smooth and bloodless and deep. It was so deep that even with his face
pressed to the maw he could see no bottom...no brain, no muscle, no bones.

"Impossible," he said.

Albert took a ruler and lowered it
into the darkness. It met no resistance. He took up his flashlight and shone it
down, but the darkness stretched farther than the beam. He dropped in a coin
and waited for it to hit the end of the tunnel, which it did, eventually,
making a soft distant splashing sound.

Normally a steady man, Dr. Pond
was trembling when he hurried down to his workshop in the cellar. He tore tins
off shelves, scattering nails and tools, fumbling and cursing until at last he
found a reel of neglected fishing line and a sinker weight.

Back in the exam room, he stood
above the baby with its crater and lowered the line in. "It seemed to go
forever," he wrote, "and I was aware of a briny clamminess that rose
up against my face."

The line struck bottom at last.
Pond marked a point on the line indicating where the opening began and then
pulled up the rest and measured it. The hole in the baby's face had a depth of
sixty feet.

Pond collapsed in a chair and held
his head in his hands. His heart raced at a dizzying rate, and cold sweat
beaded his forehead.