Whisper to Me(4)

Deep breath.

Another.

Apart from that, the only people on the beach were a couple of runners and a kid flying a kite shaped like Olaf from Frozen.

Whatever the reason for the ocean pulling away, it’s one of my favorite things, the way the long piers with the amusement park on them have gotten stranded on the wide, wide beach, barnacled struts resting on dry land—the way you can walk around them and under them, into the dark spaces.

The shadow of Pier One was behind and to the left of me; it was almost like I could feel the cool of it. I walked toward the gull with my sketchbook under my arm, two HB pencils in my pocket.

If you didn’t know already, which you do, you would guess from this that I was not the most popular kid at Oakwood High School. I mean, sketching dead birds is not what gets you voted homecoming queen. And of course there was the pi?ata thing. I might tell you about that later.

Anyway, I’m delaying.

Here’s what started everything:

I was getting closer to the seagull now, and I could see that there were crabs eating it. Hermit crabs, some of them. People think hermit crabs are cute, but I can’t think of anything creepier. Some dead thing’s shell, with legs poking out of it. Scuttling. Feeding on corpses. Living in a borrowed skin of death.

When you see them eating a bird, it gives you a whole different idea of them.

Then, I saw movement a little farther out, where you get that sheen of thin water between the surf and the dry sand. I realized there were more crabs down there, and one or two were making their way from the gull to something else. As if it was more tempting.

You know when someone has left a door open and you feel the draft? I felt something like that, only inside. I knew whatever it was the crabs were interested in, half-submerged, washed up on shore, could not be anything good.

The water was making a soft sound, like it was hushing me because it had something important to say.

I turned and squinted at the sun. A cloud was just passing over it, and it was turning orange already, low above the buildings of town, nearly sunset. Then I walked a little closer. It sounds stupid, but I remember having a very conscious thought, which was, oh, so this is what people mean when they use the word “dread.”

But it wasn’t so bad—I saw as I approached that it was just a sneaker, one of those ankle-high basketball shoes. It was standing upright in the shallow, foamy water.

I took another step.

Gulls swooped in the air above me, calling, calling my name it almost seemed, Cassie, Cassie, Cassie.

I saw bone, glowing white, inside the shoe.





There was a foot in there.

An actual, severed foot. I could see a glimpse of flesh, purple as canned cat food, the bone protruding from it. You heard about the foot, of course, everyone did, but I don’t think I ever told you it was me who found it.

In a movie, I would have gagged or shrieked. I don’t think I did either of those things: I just stood there, staring.

And at first, I didn’t even think about the Houdini Killer, I didn’t see that it might be connected. The truth is that the first word that crossed my mind was an ancient Greek one:

Sparagmos.

It means: the act of tearing a person or an animal to pieces, usually for sacrificial purposes. The followers of Dionysus were big on it. The reason this word crossed my mind is that I am a weirdo and a freak and the public library is like my second home. But then, knowing you, I didn’t need to tell you any of that.

So I looked at the man’s foot, in the shoe, on the beach, and I thought of sparagmos. I was remembering Orpheus, being ripped to shreds by furious Thracian women.

You know the story, probably. Orpheus could charm all creatures and even objects with his music, and because of this and his beauty, he was much desired by almost all women he encountered. Yet after his wife, Eurydice, died, he forswore all others, and this so incensed the women who surrounded him that they began to throw rocks and stones at him. But the rocks and stones loved Orpheus’s music, and they would not harm him; they turned away at the last. And so the women took him with their hands, and tore his body apart.

That’s the version I like best anyway.

I looked at the foot in the sneaker, thinking of that story, like, here was the Chuck Taylor shoe of a vacationer who was just too good at karaoke and his friends had ripped him apart. I figured it was very unlikely that whoever it came from had been torn to pieces by Thracian women. I was thinking lucidly and crazily at the same time, and the weird thing was that I knew it—it was like there was a part of me standing outside myself, observing me.

I took out my cell phone, and I dialed 911. I said, “There’s a human foot on the beach and I don’t think it belongs to Orpheus.” At least, that’s what they told me I said, later. I don’t remember doing it.

Then I guess I must have fainted—which is exactly what would happen in a movie—because the next thing I can remember I was in a squad car. They took me to the station and asked me questions and gave me very sweet coffee with lots of sugar and cream in it, and I’ll get to all that later because it’s important. But, for now, two observations:



1. Looking back, I think maybe seeing the severed foot, plus some associated memories to do with blood and bone, caused some kind of psychotic break pretty much straight away. The clue is that I was looking at a body part and all I could think about was Greek myth. Which probably partly explains all the really terrible things that happened soon after.