A Lovecraftian tale about a chance encounter on a beach in Maine.
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“There’s the
old woman the hot dog vendor was telling me about.” Luke Dorsey raised a well-tanned arm to point down the beach.
His girlfriend, Linna, raised her head. “She looks
like a nut,” she said, in a disinterested fashion, gazing at the woman over
the top of her sunglasses. Then she
turned away, lying back down on her beach towel, and closed her eyes.
Luke
followed the old woman with his eyes as she pushed her cart through the sand,
approaching them. She was small,
heavyset, with a hunched posture that made her look like a wizened old
turtle. Despite the heat, she was
wearing several layers, including a bright red plaid flannel shirt, a checkered
head-scarf, knee socks, and a linen dress that was currently gray but had
probably started out white. She wore
thick glasses, and as she got closer, Luke saw that her mouth was hanging open
a little, revealing crooked, yellowed teeth.
The creaking of the cart wheels mingled with wheezing breaths and
occasional grunts of exertion as the cart stuck in the loose sand.
Luke got up,
stretched lazily, and walked toward her.
“Hey,” he
said, as he got close enough to peer into her cart. It was filled with seashells.
She gazed at
him, the magnification of her spectacles giving her a goggle-eyed look. “Yeah?” Her voice was thick with
suspicion.
“I was told
you sell shells to collectors.”
“Yeah.”
Okay, it was almost a cliché that the people in Maine don’t tend to
like tourists, but it was hard to believe this attitude sold souvenirs. Even so, he smiled, and said, “I’m a collector.”
She looked
him up and down. “You don’t look like
one.”
“What does a
collector look like?”
She didn’t
answer for a moment, then looked out at the waves curling into the shore,
battering themselves into foamy fragments, then receding back out into the
bottle-green ocean. Gulls keened and
kited in the salt-smelling air.
[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joe Shlabotnik from Forest Hills, Queens, USA, Higgins Beach, Maine, CC BY 2.0]
But she
turned back, slowly, and said, “Whatever they look like, ain’t like you.”
“Well, I am one.” Luke felt needled by
her scorn. He reached into her cart, and
picked up a long, tapered shell with a rosy orange interior and a coronet of
points on one end. “Busycon carica,” he said.
“Put that
down,” she snarled at him.
“Whoa.” He set the shell back into the cart.
“Cool your jets. I was just
trying to prove to you that I know what I’m talking about.”
“Heh,” she
spat out. “Just ‘cause you know some
fancy-pants names. You stand there in
your swim trunks with your bleached-blond hair and that tattoo on your shoulder
and you think you can impress me.”
“I’m not
trying to impress you. I want to see
what you have for sale. I don’t give a
shit if I impress you or not.”
“No? Well, if you don’t impress me, I don’t sell you nothin’.”
“Seems like
it’d be hard to make a living, if that’s your attitude.” Luke raised a
wry eyebrow.
“Don’t need
to worry about that. The
lord will provide.”
“Yeah.” Luke thought of various other snide comments he could add, but decided
that if he wanted any chance at all of purchasing some of her shells, he’d be
better off refraining from any of them.
“So, suppose I do want to buy some of your shells. What do I need to do to impress you?”
“Start out
by not pretending you know a damn thing.”
“How do you
know what I know?” he said, feeling needled again. When he’d seen her approaching, he had
immediately put her into categories: Poor. Uneducated.
Gullible. Easily manipulated.
But now, he was unaccountably on the
defensive, and it looked like the last assessment, at least, might have to be
revised.
“I could
tell the minute you walked up. You
figure since you have lots of book-learnin’ about the names of things, that
tells you what they are. That means you know them. People like you don’t ever get inside of things. They don’t bother, so they go through their
whole lives, with their bits o’ knowledge, and die never knowing how much more
there is.”
“Can you
tell me more, then?” Luke was immediately surprised at himself for
asking the question.
She gave him
another up-and-down look, and said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “Oh,
yeah. I could tell you more. A lot
more. More’n you want to know, I’d
wager.”
“Okay.” He tried not to smile. “Go for it.
Tell me something I don’t already know.”
She
grinned. It wasn’t a nice grin, and not
just because of the condition of her teeth.
Luke recoiled a little. Despite
the heat, a ripple of chill passed across his skin, and he felt goosebumps
stand out on the backs of his arms.
“Scoff all
you like,” she said. “You’ll see. You’ll find out sooner or later, whether I
tell you or not.”
“No,
really. I’m listening. What do you know that’s so special?”
She looked
at him again, for a long time, as if she were evaluating him, then back out to
sea, as if she were looking for something.
After a moment, she gestured at him with one wrinkled hand, and leaned
toward him. “World’s gonna end soon,”
she said, in a conspiratorial whisper.
“Like
Judgment Day?” He frowned, stifling a laugh at the last minute.
“You could
call it that,” she said. “But them
religious types, they’re gonna be as surprised as the rest of ‘em when it
happens. It’s gonna come from where they
don’t expect it. Not from the sky, but
from the sea.”
“What’s
going to come?”
“The Deep
Ones. They been bidin’ their time. But time’s about up.”
“The Deep
Ones? You mean… like in H. P.
Lovecraft?”
Her eyebrows
drew together. “You know Lovecraft?”
“Of course I
know Lovecraft. I’m from
Providence. I read everything he wrote,
back when I was in high school. Trippy
stuff.”
She scowled
at him. “That’s about what I’d’a guessed
somebody like you would think.”
“You think
different, then?”
“You’ll
think different, too, soon.” She looked
up at him with a defiant glare.
“Because of
the Deep Ones.”
She stared
at him for a moment, her lips tight shut, and then she seemed to come to a
decision. “Lovecraft knew a little. More’n most, I’ll grant him
that. He knew enough to sell it as
fiction, disguise it as fancy stories, but not enough to keep his goddamn mouth
shut. He’d’a been better off if he had.” She gave him a knowing look. “Lovecraft died a young man, you know.”
“I didn’t
know that.”
“Only
forty-six. That’s young. That’s extremely
young. They said as it was
cancer. Wasn’t no cancer. It was on account of the fact that too many
people was figurin’ it out, because o’ what he wrote. He was gettin’ too close to the truth,
gettin’ too close to revealing things he shouldn’t reveal.”
“So they
killed him.”
“Not the
Deep Ones, young man,” she said. “They
has minions among us. Spies. Not all of ‘em is human. So the Deep Ones don’t need to come up on
land to do little things like takin’ care o’ someone as is causing trouble. They got minions as’ll do it for ‘em.”
“Are you one
of the minions?”
Her scowl
changed to a canny look. “Mayhap I am, and mayhap I ain’t. Either way, you’d be well-off to get away
from the sea soon. Far away.”
“I don’t
know how I’d convince my girlfriend.” Luke made a vague gesture back toward Linna, still asleep on her beach towel. “She likes living near the ocean.”
“You’ll be
thinkin’ of something other than your girlfriend, when they come for you. Old Obed Marsh knew. You read your Lovecraft, you probably know
that name.”
“He was the
old ship’s captain, in The Shadow Over Innsmouth.”
“That’s
right. Old Obed, he wasn’t one of ‘em,
but he knew. He left behind human women,
took one o’ them to his bed
instead. So the bloodline runs down his
progeny, to this very day.”
“And you’re
saying that’s not fiction.”
She
snorted. “You’d be better off if it was,
young man.”
Luke stared
at her. She stared back. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he said,
his voice quiet. “A descendant of Obed
Marsh?”
“Mayhap I
am,” she said again. “And mayhap I
ain’t.”
They stood
there, silent, for several minutes. The
tide had come in some since he’d walked up to her, and the cold, foaming water
curled around Luke’s bare feet, like searching fingers tugging at him. He shivered a little.
“If you’re
one of them, why are you making a living selling shells?”
“They
provide for my needs,” she said, and Luke had the curious feeling that they didn’t refer to the seashells.
“They do?”
“Yes, they
do. Enough for me to get by on, till times
change. And they persist. This time of tribulation will end soon
enough. I can abide as long as they need
me to.”
“And as for
the rest of us?”
“It’ll be
serve or die. Best make your choice
now.” She reached out and patted his
shoulder. Her hand was ice cold, despite
the heat and how much clothing she was wearing.
“Good thing you run into me, and asked the right questions. Might have a fighting chance.” She reached into her cart, and fished around
for a moment, and then picked up something and pressed it into his hand.
“Here,” she said. “Take this. May come in handy. Show it to them as is comin’. Might buy you some favor.”
He looked
down into his hand. He was expecting to
see a shell, but it was a small, flat greenish stone, marbled and flecked with
what looked like gold.
“Thanks,” he
said, a little dubiously.
“Don’t tell
‘em you got it from me. And best you buy
a shell or two, in case we’re bein’ watched.
You never know.”
Luke reached
into the pocket of his swim trunks, and pulled out a small zippered pouch, from
which he extracted two rumpled dollar bills, and handed them to the old woman.
“Pick
yourself out a couple you like.” She
looked out to sea again, and far out, leaping in the surf, were several
dolphins. She nudged Luke’s arm, and
then gestured out toward them with her chin.
“See,” she said. “Told ya.”
“Those are
dolphins.” Luke smiled, picking up a cowrie and a whelk shell from
the cart.
“Names
again. That’s what you call ‘em. Not what they call themselves.” She picked up
the handle of the cart, and pushed it, creaking, down the beach. “Don’t lose what I gave ya,” she said without turning around, as she trudged away.
“Unless you plan on movin’ to Iowa.
But remember, even there, they got rivers and lakes. All water connects.”
Luke looked
down at the stone, still in his palm, and then out toward the ocean. A single dolphin had come up into the
shallows, perhaps only twenty feet from where Luke was standing, now ankle-deep
in seawater. The dolphin was treading
water, its body moving with a fluttery, sinuous grace, holding its silvery
bullet-shaped head above the waves, the dark glossy eyes looking right into
Luke’s. Luke stared at it for a
moment. Then, with a quick volley of
clicks and whistles, it dropped beneath the water, and was gone.
