And The Sea Called Her Name(15)

But I did. I did.

I spotted her as soon as I crested the rise. She was a deeper shadow among the swirling water within the cove. She wore the thin, cotton pants and t-shirt I’d dressed her in the night before and she stood with her back to me, the water reaching nearly to her hips.

“Del!” I screamed her name as I ran down the path that stretched to the beach, her form disappearing behind a tall rock that the trail wound around. When I stepped onto the soft sand she was even further out, the rolling waves washing against her bulging stomach. “Del!” I didn’t break stride, the sand giving way beneath my feet, the rain and wind shoving me back. She didn’t seem to hear me as she took another step. But that was wrong. She hadn’t stepped, she had glided deeper into the water.

Even though there was something elementally wrong about how she moved, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t have stopped as much as I could have forced the sea away from her, away from us. It was only when my feet touched the water that she finally looked back.

She was so pale it looked as if she had lost all the blood in her body. She was translucent, shimmering there in the shadowed waves, blue veins and vessels teeming in her white skin. And her eyes. They were full of something that scared me more than anything had since the beginning of our dual descent.

Her eyes brimmed with regret.

“Stop, Jason!” She put up a hand and I obeyed because there was power in her voice. The diminutive tone she normally spoke in was gone and I could even hear the rasp of her tongue through the tempest surrounding us. “I’m sorry,” she said, tears springing from her eyes and mixing with the rain. “It made me! It made me!”

And she changed then.

Her outstretched hand thinned and something moved beneath her skin. It was as if she were a living casing harboring something else. Her fingertips flowed together, joining into a fleshy mass that bent and twisted how a human hand never should. Her spine arched in pain and she tipped her head back, her mouth opening as if to cry out to the sky. And that was when it emerged.

The tips of something, of many somethings, poked and prodded into the open air past her teeth. Her jaw gaped wider to accommodate the tentacles. And as I watched, the water darkened around her waist and a thousand black appendages appeared from where her legs had been. She hadn’t been walking at all; she was being carried by what her lower half had become.

Her mouth split along the edges of her lips and the face that I had looked at a hundred thousand times—kissed, caressed—broke apart as her true form was revealed. It was a blackened carapace of shiny flesh that emerged. Many folds rimmed with red fluttered in the soaking air. Gills, I thought wildly as the borders of my sanity began to fray. Her skin continued to slough off in the water like an insubstantial sheet peeling away, and more of her body was exposed. A gelatinous substance, mucousy and gray, covered her back between spiny fins that looked poisonous in the stormy light. The tendrils rising from the water around her pricked and preened the fins until they stood out like smoky sails. Del’s chest and belly were now flat and I realized that there had never been a child. It was only her, the true her, becoming what I saw now.

A low bellow that I felt more than heard, rippled through the air and Del’s mouth opened in a gash of needled teeth, their rows too many to count lining her cavernous throat.

And her eyes. Her beautiful gray eyes that had captivated me were now the pools of darkness that I’d witnessed that day looking out at the sea with longing. They held none of the softness and love of before.

I screamed then. I know I did, though I don’t remember it. I do know I raked trails of flesh from my face with my fingernails because to this day I bear the scars, and fell to my knees in the surf that roiled around me. I knew then that there was nothing left to do but scream and die in the sea because what I had seen wasn’t something a human mind or heart could ever accept. There was no swallowing the immensity of it. I sobbed something then, surely her name, and that was when the sea moved.

It began to rise a hundred yards out from the cove. It bulged, something surging beneath it so vast and powerful that the ocean itself seemed to be giving it precedence to the tide. The water rushed away from me, receding with the thing’s birth, and I watched, dumbstruck, as it emerged.

It was darker than the eye of midnight, its skin glistening as the water rolled away from it. It rose, shunting the sea aside as its tentacles, easily two-hundred feet long, their number beyond counting, thrashed the air. It body was torpedo-shaped, two slits on its closest end blasting air and mucus in a wave of air that smelled of dead things decaying in some forgotten place. A hundred, or a thousand, fins spread from its sides between the tentacles, shaking off garlands of seaweed and two hooked barbs that wouldn’t have fit on my boat appeared, shining white in bright contrast to its black body near its front. A great flap of skin slid back and a single eye easily fifty-feet in diameter gazed down with liquid malevolence. I still cannot say what color it was since there’s no name for it any language. It was painted of malice and age, and of some horrible, ancient knowledge. I was pinned beneath its stare, its utter and tangible hatred so thick it choked me.