And The Sea Called Her Name(11)

I left the container in the sink and returned to the truck to retrieve the last of the groceries. The air was cool and picked at my flannel shirt as well as the tops of the pines that bordered Harold’s yard. As I was pulling the last bag from the truck bed, I heard the old man himself call out to me from his porch. I hadn’t seen him in well over a week and had meant to call his son to see if he had gone on a trip or been hospitalized again by the pneumonia that had afflicted him the prior winter.

“Harold, where’ve you been? We were starting to worry about you,” I said as I approached the porch. Harold sat, reclined in one of his chairs, a steaming cup of coffee on the table at his elbow. His white hair, normally in slight disarray, had been trimmed and combed, and I noticed the jacket he wore appeared to be new.

“Went and visited my daughter down in South Carolina. She and her husband were goin’ ta’ come here but they got waylaid by his job. He’s a good man, but a lawyer, so I’m not overly certain he’s completely human.”

I laughed, shifting the grocery bag from one hand to the other. “Well, I’m glad you got a trip under your belt before winter showed up. Don’t think it’ll be long now before it snows.”

He regarded the skies like a weatherman studying a barometric pressure reading. “Be a day or so and we’ll be gettin’ a storm. Not snow yet but wind’n rain for sure.” Over the years I had come to trust Harold’s predictions when it came to the weather. The old timers had something that the forecasters could never attain with their technology and weather models. It was as if time bestowed gifts to certain people when they reached a definite age, secrets that were normally out of reach becoming knowledge after so many years alive. “You and that pretty wife a yours should stop by soon, cook me up somethin’ off your boat there. I got a nice bottle of Cabernet that my daughter gave me and the doc said not to have more’n one glass at a sittin’.”

“We might take you up on that,” I said, starting to sidle away. “Give me a shout tomorrow if you figure out a night that would work good.”

“Any night’s good for me,” he called as I strode toward our house. “Ain’t got no one waitin’ on me but the reaper, an he can sit an spin for all I care.”

I laughed and threw a final wave over my shoulder as I made my way up our walk. I chuckled, stepping into the house, making a note to tell Del we’d have to bring dinner to the old man sometime this week. Del made a mean blueberry pie and we still had some frozen from the hours of picking I’d done in August.

I stepped into the kitchen, opening my mouth to ask Del which night she thought would work best to visit Harold, and stopped.

Del was standing at the sink. Her hands pressed to her mouth.

Her jaws worked, feverishly chewing. I could see the muscles in her cheek bulging each time she bit down. For a moment I thought she was having some kind of seizure or that something had happened while I was outside. She had fallen maybe and the baby had been hurt inside her. I took a step forward, reaching out, terrified to look down at the floor, knowing somehow that I would see blood there, pooled beneath her, running from her in a torrent of life that would never be.

There are sights that a person can witness that will not fit within the normal boundaries of consciousness or recognition. To put it simply, there are limits to the human mind that horror can surpass, and when it does, there is nothing but the void of madness waiting beyond.

Something was moving between Del’s lips. Squirming.

For a brief moment I thought it was her tongue, but then I saw the glossy blackness, the wet movement I always attributed to sea life, and a tentacle wriggled free between two of her fingers.

“Del, what the hell are you doing?” I said. She neither looked at me nor broke her gaze out the window. Her teeth ground together with a wet crunching.

I stepped forward and in that instant something let loose. It seemed like a physical presence had relinquished its grip on the room and fled, leaving the air cleaner and lighter. Del’s eyes narrowed and she turned her head toward me, her glazed stare slowly clearing.

Her mouth opened and the partially chewed squid fell out into her hands. It was a mangled, slimy mess of slick skin and broken tentacles. One limb death-flailed and wrapped around her little finger. Del’s jaw worked and her fingers opened, the writhing squid dropping free to the floor with a wet plop. The scream that burst from her was a rending of sanity, a shriek so full of repulsion and abhorrence that I flinched.