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A wet
black crescent of a beach, formed of smooth, dark rocks,
polished and rounded by the tide; the waves here are quiet,
the sky is dark, though the sun brightens a patch of it and
makes a silver circle, like a mirror that doesn't show, just
shines. The fishing people who live in this harbor will
tell of how hands and feet wash up on this shore, and the
little crabs that scuttle in the hollows, shells kelp green
with watercolor blooms of blue, search the gaps and hollows
between the stones for dead-stranded mussels and flesh
turned white and flaky under blue nails. They do not know
where the lost limbs come from, or why they come here.
There is a monster in a deep sea cave at the end of the
beach, but he, they agree, is very careful with his meals
and he eats all he takes.
When the
monster rests, and when the tide is out, you can hear his
breathing, syncopated with the sound of the waves. No one
says what he looks like, if they've seen him. At night, he
gives off light like a miniature, flickering sun, and
sailors can see his cave for miles. Some people think that
the hands and feet come from ships that wreck out in the
shoals, their navigations ruined by the light, but no one
has seen a wreck in many years. No one has seen a ship in
many years.
Dannay has
not seen her pretty boy in many days. She went to the house
where his parents live, they like her, but the last they saw
of him was early Monday morning when he went out in his boat
with his nets. His own boat, his own nets, he was proud.
Dannay was proud of him, too. Everyone was.
Dannay
asked her friends; they had been closer before she caught
her boy's pretty eye, but they were close, closer now than
they had been for most of a year, Dannay noticed. They
wrapped her arms in sympathy like kelp strands, but they
knew nothing, and their looks and arms around her shoulders
made the girl want to panic. She fought that panic, a girl
of the sea needs to know how, the water is a good place to
die and panic is the sea's best accomplice in murder. She
knows this and she won. She took a round mirror from her
mother's chest and a lantern from the wall, because the
night her pretty boy left was also the night the light of
the monster took to prowling in the dunes.
The sea is
a murderer, and the sea is, so they say, possessed with a
spirit like that of a woman. Dannay's pretty boy could have
caught the sea's eye. Dannay's pretty boy could be giving a
hand or a foot to the beach. He could have caught the eye of
a selkie girl with silver hair that fell to her heels and a
silver coat that she could wrap around and swim the waves
faster than her pretty boy's little boat could ever go.
They lived on the islands just far enough out that you
cannot see them from the shore. Dannay's boy was better
than them, sea and selkie, she was certain; her boy was
clever as well as pretty, tough as well as clever. The sea
might take him one day, but in a storm, or in the chill of
winter and the selkies never cared for humayn'ts; they grew
so old and gray and spotted skin so fast in selkie eyes.
There were
other towns along the coast, one to the north who shared
their monster, one to the south that didn't. Dannay had
never been, but she did not need to go to a town to know
there were girls in those towns, ones that might be prettier
than her, cleverer, fewer freckles, longer hair. Her
friends said so, but because they were jealous; maybe they
could not see it, but Dannay did. It had to be the
monster. The monster or her boy was coming home. These
were the only reasonable choices. Dannay was willing to
prove it.
The stones
are hard going. Large enough to bruise the feet, small
enough to shift under any weight, wet and smooth but heavy.
They gnaw at Dannay's shoes, grind at her feet. The waves
come in, high tide, loud enough on the stones to drown out
the sound of the monster's breath. The crabs that eat the
remains dodge the waves and the skinny legged, sage colored
birds that eat them. The cave doesn't look like a cave from
this angle; it doesn't look like anything, just anonymous,
sooty rock at the far edge of the beach, but everyone knows
where the monster lives. Warriors have come out, some who
can sweat swords of esoteric metals out of their bodies.
They do not come back to town, but the monster always does.
They say
the monster is afraid of the dark, which is why he carries
light with him, everywhere he goes. They say, if you could
get him in darkness, then you might be able to kill him, but
no one has. Most people, even the monster's closest
neighbors, don't know how he keeps his light on. The ones
who find out tend not to survive the learning, but you
should have already guessed that.
The
monster's doorstep is close to the tide line, close enough
that it must flood at times when the sea is high. There is
a lip of rock, almost too high for Dannay to boost herself
over that lies just inside the opening, and from there, the
cave slopes gently down and back a few yards before turning
a sharp right to a steep slope into bright, flickering
lights. Dannay hears a gobbling, slurping sound. A wet,
dull tear, a wet slap, a deep low crunch. Her gorge rises.
She pushes it back down, keeps her teeth locked together.
The monster is taking his meal.
Dannay
would leave, but the waves are lapping up against the lip at
the mouth of the cave, now. She would leave, but nothing is
proven. She sees the faces of her friends in sympathy. She
sees the face of the girl she saw driving the wagon through
town a year ago, and how her hair caught the light of the
sun and held it like a crown. She sees the sleek bay seals,
watching the cave-mouth from the rocks beyond with their
black eyes. She turns back to the earth and her back to the
sea. She turns the first corner.
The sounds
of eating, the tooth noises, the tongue noises, lip noises,
they are louder, but not yet loud. The cave curls downward
like heavy smoke, hollowed out with hundreds of alcoves,
floor to ceiling, each filled with a lamp or lantern.
Blue-green kerosene quivers in their reservoirs with the
movement of the earth and the sounds of the feasting below.
Dannay looks at them, at her own lantern that she will not
need, but dares not blow out for fear that what they say
about the monster and darkness is true. She wonders what he
does when the cave does flood. She wonders how he keeps the
lamps and lanterns filled, where he gets them, where he gets
his wicks and fuel. The cave slopes down to another sharp
turn. The flames of the lanterns and lamps flicker as she
passes, when before they had been still.
The
monster does not see with light; he feels with fire, or
tastes, like a snake tongue. The flames flicker; he must
know she is here. Dannay would leave now, but the water is
spilling over the lip, now, and to do so, she would have to
swim. She would leave but she cannot make herself go
slowly, and if she runs, her passage might douse one of the
flames, and then he would be at her. She descends, she
turns the corner.
The slope
becomes steep and long, the ceiling high; there are
thousands of lamps, here, cut glass and crystal, brass,
lamps of quality and cost, lamps that Dannay has never seen,
cannot guess at the price and cannot guess why a person
would be moved to pay so much for something that sheds
light. Again, the cave descends and turns sharp to the
right, where the light seems to have broken into jagged
pieces of color. Down below, the sounds of the meal are
louder still, not quite loud, but enough that Dannay, if
there were any words in her throat, would have to talk over
the sound. The flames bend toward her; those ahead lean
into her coming, and those behind flicker at her leaving.
Dannay moves slowly, and in her mind she holds the image of
lobster pots.
Dannay
would leave now, but there's a thin stream in the middle of
the cave, flowing down, and she knows that the waves are
starting to push into the cave. She would leave but the
flames in the lamps have turned against her like the barbs
in a fish hook. She knows that pulling against them will
tear her. Dannay begins to cry, and her hand on her own
lamp begins to shake, but she descends and turns the corner.
The ground
here is very steep and Dannay has to steady herself with her
hand on the wall, or lean back to touch the floor behind her
to make her way down. Here, there are lamps like she has
never seen. Shades made with cut stained glass, blue, green
and red; lamps painted with the faces of children and
angels, lamps with tin shades cut with the shapes of demons
and flames that spin as the hot air rises and cast
shadows. The cave descends like a smooth, stone staircase
to a landing that again hooks to the right. The sound of
the monster's meal is loud now, too loud for Dannay to hear
anything else. The sound of the eating, and the broken
fragments of color and spinning shadows cut into Dannay.
They remind her of a bird's crop. There is a space at the
landing, an empty alcove, just large enough for a lantern,
plain and rusted among the wonders that spin and break the
light into bad, dark rainbows in the earth.
Dannay
could leave now. These lights do not feel for her. The
stream of water seems to have stopped or dried. It is hot
down here and the air is dry. Danny would leave now, but
the sight of the empty alcove, for some reason, offends her,
and that offense, somehow, that lack of symmetry runs deeper
than the fear. She places the lantern in its space and
pulls the round mirror from her pocket.
The
monster takes his meal just around the corner. The level
floor of the cave, the volume of the sounds, the smell of
blood, they tell her that. Dannay leans against the stone
of the wall and feels the pulse of the monster through it.
She reaches out, her thumb and her forefinger clutching the
mirror.
In her
mind, comes the image of it slipping through her fingers and
falling with a crash to the earth. Seven years' bad luck,
and the monster turns and runs her down in his larder. She
forces her hand not to make this happen.
She cranes
the hand out. She sees nothing but lights. Candles stacked
on candles, all of them burning high and bright like little
howls at the ceiling of the cavern. She reaches out further
and sees still more, banks of them like in a church, like a
kelp bed, dense and swaying. She stretches until she can
feel her shoulder crack and sees a flash of pale skin. A
young man's chest, a nipple, a ripple of ribs and stomach
muscles, and a mess of wet red and shining white below. She
sees it turn, manipulated by a force invisible to her
mirror.
What she
sees has no arms, no belly, nothing below, no head. It
tumbles over and over, diminishing in the grip of something
she only ever sees as the flash of an angle. There is
nothing there she recognizes for certain. It could be her
pretty boy. Now, now she prays it's not. She gives him to
the selkies and the girl with the sun in her hair and her
friends to share, one on each day of the week. She gives
him to the sea.
Dannay
could turn this corner and see for herself. There might be
proof here in the monster's chamber among the candles that
do not seem to melt. She puts the mirror in her pocket.
Her pretty boy has run off with another, or else he will be
home. If the selkies have him, they will tire of him when
he is old. She will be old then, too, her children grown,
her husband gone into the pyre never knowing he was her
second choice, never suspecting for a single day. Maybe
they would be together then. She climbs and she turns the
deepest corner.
If the
girl with the sun in her hair has him, maybe she can keep
him, and maybe she cannot. What she can't keep, Dannay
can't and what neither girl can keep, Dannay thinks, is
probably not worth keeping. What neither can keep is
probably a rake and a cad. She turns the corner in the
middle, where the sounds of the monster and the sounds of
the sea are equal.
If the sea
has him, then Dannay will cry for him, and maybe he will
taste her tears among the salt water and think of her.
Dannay will live, because the sea may as well be God; if the
sea decides, then Dannay will abide by it. She can't do
otherwise. She turns the last corner.
Dannay
climbs to where she can see the mouth of the cave, to where
the alcoves begin. She hears the barking of the seals, and
how they sound like human voices from the echoes of the
cave. Dannay remembers, for the first time in months, that
there are boy selkies, just as many as girls and she smiles.
The last
lantern sits and gutters in the sea breezes. Dannay
remembers a game she played with her brothers and sisters
once when her dad was at sea and her mom was visiting their
grandma near the end. They all sat in the dark house around
the table and one candle waiting for the child who was it to
blow the candle out and try to catch them in the dark. Like
all the best games, this was not you can play when your
parents are around. Like all the best games, it ended in
misdeeds that could not be hidden and sore switchings.
Dannay
lifts up the shade on the last lantern and holds her breath.
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