We Are Providence Redux

I had a friend of mine read this a little while back and he noted the writing style and tone shift near the end of the story (as well as giving me some other notable suggestions). He was indeed correct, I wrote the first 3/4 of the story about 2 years before the ending as I didn’t have a proper ending for it until more recently. So, I took some time and reworked the whole story, it’s about half again longer and I think it reads better. That said, realize that the Sol Survivors chapters being posted are considered first drafts and will also, most likely be updated at some point.

We Are Providence

“Life is indeed comic, and the joke is on me.” My name is Scott Attwell and I am the author of that quote, or rather the purloiner, which tells you everything you need to know about where I am in life.

I have survived family tragedy, career collapse (twice), a spiritual journey that took me through four religions and deposited me firmly nowhere, and a house fire. An actual house fire. I did not burn the house down myself, which I feel is important to clarify, because by that point in my life people had started to assume. After all of that, I moved to Providence, Rhode Island: a quaint little city where the old world meets the new, and where the only thing more twisted than the cobblestone streets turned out to be me. The one constant had been Erika, the love of my life, my partner of a decade. I say had been. Well. Let me go back a little.

“Scott, my man, what do you think about living in Providence?” Abeo asked me with a smile as we sat in Jaques Café, a quaint little coffee shop downcity along the Providence River. Abeo was a coworker at one of my aforementioned career upheavals who I reached out to as a resident of this bite sized state.

I looked out the window at the view of the city overlooking the Providence River just before it flowed on its way towards the harbor. A wind gently rippled the surface of the water at the bases of the many iron braziers that lined the center of the river. “I like it so far” I replied after a sip of coffee. “Still soaking it in, it seems pretty cool. The history, from what I know, is very interesting, and it looks like there’s a lot to do. It may take a bit to get settled with so much going on.” I continued to look out at the view of all the old buildings, with a blend of more modern like a spattering of Architectural history. Many had murals painted on them that were works of art deserved of museums. “I will say though that there is a… an odd vibe going on here.”

“Odd, yes” Abeo responded with a chuckle, “quite peculiar I suppose. There are a lot of creatives, artists, and misfits here, I’m sure you, my friend Scott, you’ll fit right in.” His demeanor shifted a bit as he placed his coffee cup down. “I, on the other hand, am moving away.”

“Why,” I asked, “you grew up here didn’t you?”

“Most of my life in Rhode Island, though not in Providence.” Abeo looked out the window, seeming to not focus on anything, “It’s time. It’s small, maybe too small. Everyone is all up in your business all the time, everyone knows what everyone else is up to.”

We were silent for a moment. Looking out the window to the city outside a peculiar fellow caught my eye. He was a fairly large man in an ill-fitting brown business suit with a briefcase that swung wildly with his gait. A gait that was awkward, more of a shamble than a walk, with one leg dragging slightly. He was completely clean shaven with little round sunglasses that were a little too small on his puffy, sweat sheened face.

There must have been a trick of the sun, I thought, because at one point it seemed that the dark lenses of his sunglasses darted a look towards me like they were eyes of their own, like there were enormous black eyes that shifted behind glass that itself was not tinted but clear. I hurriedly looked away and made a point to not look back up as he determinedly lumbered by.

“Well,” I said, restarting myself, “we’ll see if this city can crack me out of my reclusive shell. I am, after all, the guy who has found the perfect relationship with a girl who lives two states away.”

Abeo burst out laughing, loud enough that the couple at the next table glanced over. “Haha, SCOTT, my man! That is either the most romantic thing I have ever heard or the most convenient!” He pointed at me like he’d caught me in something. “I’m going with convenient.”

“Both,” I said, “definitely both.”

“Ha, I’ll drink to that.” We clinked coffee mugs. The rest of our conversation was just about our plans for the near future, and we wished each other luck in our goals as we paid for our checks and parted.

It was a beautiful May Sunday, so I decided to take a walk around the city to acclimate myself to the sights. Erika would be up for a visit on Friday, so that gave me the rest of the week to get the apartment in order. I walked through the war memorials in Memorial Park along South Main Street, then back across the river to walk up and down the streets from Weybosset to Washington, admiring all the distinct old architecture preserved in this small city. It was refreshing to see a distinct lack of franchise storefronts aside from the various national banks and the obligatory Dunkins and Starbucks. There were a lot of unique storefronts that included new and used books stores, craft stores, an actual shoe repairman next to a little oddity called the Innsmouth Arts and Sciences, as well as a bevy of little restaurants and bars that I knew I’d have to frequent if money allowed.

After walking through Kennedy Square past the iconic Industrial Trust “Superman” building, I wandered into Burnside Park and walked amidst the families that were also enjoying the weather. My phone vibrated in my pocket and I looked to see Erika returning my call from the previous night. It’s generally a 50/50 shot if she’ll answer her phone when I call. I decided to have a seat on a vacant bench by the Carrie Brown Memorial Fountain and swiped to answer.

“You know you’re the only person who’s calls I answer, right?”

“Hahahah, that makes me special.” She pauses “Hey, are you out?”

“Just wandering the town, seeing what there is to see.”

“Nice, looking forward to seeing your new place.”

“Yeah, it will still be a mess by the time you get up here, but I have a spare room I’m just going to cram stuff in to make it look like the rest of the place is tidy… ish.”

“No worries, is there anything you need me to bring?”

“Just you. And my birthday presents. I want presents and you, here, in that order.”

“Babe.”

“I’m kidding. Presents first though.”

She laughed. “I should have everything finished well before Friday. I think.” A brief pause, and I could hear the particular quality of her trying not to sound as pleased with herself as she was. “I found a lot more than I expected on one side of your family. A lot less on the other, which is honestly the more interesting part.”

“Hmmm, sounds mysterious. Is it something like that 23andMe test you gave me for Christmas, that just turned out kinda weird?”

“Inconclusive,” she corrected, “and no. This is actual documentation. Well, up to a point.” She let that sit just long enough to be annoying. “You’ll have to wait.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“Little bit, yeah.”

“So, what’s the plan for the weekend, what are we doing?”

There was a pause on my end that lasted slightly too long. “I’ve seen a lot of cool places to check out, restaurants, bars. I’ll have a look online when I get back, see if there’s anything going on.”

“So, no plan.”

“A framework. A strong framework.”

“Uh huh. Ok babe, just let me know. I’ll see you Friday.”

“See you Friday, Love.”

I sat for another minute by the fountain, watching the water, before heading back through the park towards home.

On the way through the rest of the park, I noticed a young homeless man with patchy hair working the path for handouts. He moved humbly between people, head and eyes low, only glancing up briefly to locate his next mark. When our paths were about to cross, however, he looked up at me and something shifted in his expression, a flash of recognition, like he knew me. Like he’d been expecting me. He rose smoothly to his full height with his arms spread wide. “MY DUUUUUDE!!!” he exclaimed with a broad smile and then continued past me like we were old friends reunited.

I kept walking, glancing back over my shoulder. He was walking backwards away from me, still grinning, still watching. The smile was wider than it had any right to be, and his teeth were long and grey, though oddly without rot. His eyes were the strangest part, the iris as dark as the pupil, giving them a solid black quality that his chaotic energy made harder to look at directly. He nearly backed into a woman with a stroller before I turned around and quickened my pace.

My first thought, if I’m being honest, was to wonder if I looked homeless. It happens more than I’d like to admit. I have one of those faces that apparently belongs to someone everyone knows. But the more I walked the less that explanation covered it. The suited man from the café window drifted back into my mind uninvited, those black lenses that hadn’t seemed like lenses at all.

I walked faster.

Back at the apartment I closed the door behind me, turned the deadbolt, and leaned against it for a moment in the particular silence that only your own four walls can provide. I let out a long breath. Outside was a lot. Providence was a lot. I was an introvert who had just moved to a city that apparently had opinions about me specifically, and I needed a minute.

The two strange encounters floated back up to the surface of my thoughts. The suited man’s lenses. The homeless man’s teeth. The way both of them had seemed to, well. I turned it over once, decided it was a new city and I was tired and overstimulated, and filed it firmly under ‘Providence Is Weird’, Noted. A perfectly reasonable conclusion.

I pushed off the door and surveyed my apartment.

Boxes everywhere. A kettle that could be in any one of six of them. A home bar in promising but early stages of assembly. The spare room already quietly threatening to become a permanent storage unit. I put on some music, found the kettle on the third attempt, and got on with the business of being home.

The next few days were spent mostly at home, which suited me fine. There was plenty to do without going anywhere, boxes to unpack, a home bar to coax into existence, and a spare room that needed to look like a conscious design choice rather than evidence of a man in crisis. Even if I’d wanted to venture out, the apartment had a reasonable claim on my time. I told myself that.

As I looked online for things to do for Erika’s visit, I ate from local takeouts trying to find the best Thai, Chinese, and Pizza. I made reservations at Hemenway’s and Providence Oyster Bar for local seafood and an intriguing place called the Red Door that is able to make everything gluten free on request for Erika’s fragile gut flora. I tagged a couple of bars like The Eddy and Royal Bobcat as well to hit the seemingly vast cocktail scene.

In my search for events, I found that the coming weekend would be the first of several events held throughout the year called Waterfire. On special weekends the city lights hundreds of braziers on fire down the center of Providence’s three rivers when the tides are right. It seemed like the thing to do, so my job was done, a great weekend was in sight. Maybe, I thought, I could finally take a breath and enjoy life again.

Erika arrived on Friday afternoon with a small gift bag and way more luggage than one weekend away would dictate. I took the bulk of it, naturally, navigating the narrow stairs of the 19th century house up to my floor in shifts while she followed behind with her purse and the gift bag. “Gotta have options,” she said, which was all the explanation I was going to get.

I gave her the two cent tour, which didn’t take long. She took in the living room with the diplomatic generosity of someone whose own apartment regularly looked like an estate sale in progress. “It’s cozy,” she said, which I accepted graciously. Her eyes landed on the home bar taking shape in the corner and her expression shifted into something more genuinely approving. “Ok, now we’re talking.”

“Sazerac?”

“Obviously.”

We settled in while I mixed the drinks, the familiar ritual of it feeling like something solid after a week of newness. When I handed her the glass she took a sip, exhaled, and looked moderately less like someone who had just driven through Connecticut.

After a little while she reached into the gift bag. “Here,” she said, producing a small box wrapped in black paper. “Just put the last touches on this morning.” Underneath the wrapping was a wooden box containing a series of old photographs and a binder. The binder laid out a genealogy of my family lines, my father’s traced all the way back to 14th century Britain, the photographs correlating with ancestors in his line, some dating to the mid 1800s. It was an amazingly deep dive that I could have spent hours poring over at that very moment were it not for our plans for the evening.

“I really couldn’t find much on your mother’s side,” Erika said, though her tone was more animated than apologetic. She flipped through the binder to a nearly empty section. “Which is honestly the more interesting problem. Your father’s line was easy, Germans and British leave paper trails everywhere. But Zotykiv,” she said the name like she’d been turning it over for weeks, “I couldn’t find anything. No records, no origin, nothing until your great grandfather shows up at Ellis Island in 1928.” She found the page and turned it towards me. “Then he settles in Constable Hook, New Jersey.”

“Mom always said he probably fled Stalin’s purges, that they likely spelled the name wrong at immigration.”

“That’s the thing though,” Erika said, leaning forward slightly, “I looked for phonetically similar Ukrainian names. There aren’t any. Not even close.” She paused, letting that sit. “The name doesn’t appear to exist before he walked off that boat.”

We were both quiet for a moment.

“Huh,” I said, which was the best I had.

“I have one more lead I’m following but I’m waiting on some information. I’ll update the binder when I know more, maybe by Christmas?” She nodded towards my phone. “You should reinstall the 23andMe app in the meantime. The databases update constantly, new population data gets added all the time. It might resolve now?”

“I’ll have to remember my password,” I said. “Besides, I probably just didn’t swab properly. The FAQ said that could cause an inconclusive result.”

Erika gave me a look that said she did not think that was what had caused the inconclusive result, but she let it go. “Just reinstall it, babe.”

I shrugged and found the app on my phone and hit ‘install’ as she continued, “Oh, and one more thing.” Erika rummaged through one of her bags with the focused energy of someone who had packed for every conceivable occasion and knew exactly which bag this was in. She produced a Ziplock baggie of small, oddly shaped chocolate cubes and held it up next to her smile. “No pressure, but, shrooms?”

I looked at the bag. I looked at her. I thought about the year I’d had, the years before that, the house fire, the general trajectory of my existence up to this particular Friday evening in Providence.

“Why the hell not,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s my birthday,” I said, as if that explained anything, which apparently it did. She grinned and tossed me the bag.

A short while later, after working through the initial nausea that the chocolates announced themselves with, we headed out into the city. My legs felt lighter with every block, my head settling into a mix of hyper clarity and quiet euphoria. Erika walked beside me drinking in everything, the buildings, the murals, the people, the whole city coming through the psilocybin like a signal finally tuned to the right frequency.

The atmosphere downcity was festive, it was a beautiful spring day, and everyone was out for Cinco de Mayo. The shops all had their wares out for sale on the sidewalk and the crowd was full of brightly clothed on-goers. Bands were playing on just about every corner and the smell of a variety of foods wafted through the air. I was easily caught up in all of the commotion until Erika grabbed my arm tightly.

I turned to look as she was just staring around with wide, unblinking eyes, my arm in her clutching hands. “Hey, you o.k.?” I asked, guiding her to the steps of the Beneficent Congregational Church to sit down.

With large pupils, she slowly looked at me and responded with a very loud whisper, “I think I underestimated the strength of these edibles, how are you feeling?”

“Great body high, you?”

“Overstimulated, I think I’d like to be away from all of this for a bit, just a bit.” She looked up at the church doors behind us, slowly whispering so the church didn’t hear her, “This church is breathing on me”.

Luckily, I knew just the spot to get away from everyone in the heart of Providence. In a very short time we were sitting against the ancient tree in the cemetery of Saint John’s Cathedral, its branches reaching over us, around us, shading us and protecting us like an old grandmother’s soul while we coasted through the high. The city noise fell away to almost nothing. I just enjoyed being with her, the particular quality of her company in the quiet, the way we didn’t need to fill the silence with anything.

Her phone buzzed once. She read it, her expression shifting into something I couldn’t quite read before smoothing back out. Then it buzzed again. And again.

“Everything ok?” I asked, without much urgency behind it.

“Yeah,” she said, and put the phone face down on her knee. She looked up into the branches above us. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

I let it go. The tree was very old and the light through the leaves was extraordinary and it was my birthday. Some things could wait.

The light through the branches began to change, the gold of late afternoon going amber, then deeper. Somewhere out beyond the cemetery walls the city was still going, the last of the Cinco de Mayo crowd winding down, the music fading. I was comfortable where I was but I watched Erika and when she shifted and looked around with clear eyes I took it as the signal.

“Ready?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I need to find a bathroom.”

There was a bar just across the street that obliged. I waited outside, watching the sky darken over the rooftops, the first suggestion of woodsmoke finding me on the breeze. The braziers were lighting.

She came back quieter than she’d gone in. I put it down to the psilocybin settling, that particular soft deflation as it releases its hold. She smiled when she saw me, which was enough.

We crossed toward the river and heard it before we saw it. The music had changed completely. Where the afternoon had been all brass and percussion and color, this was something else entirely, slow and dark and ancient feeling, neoclassical and haunting, carried over the water on speakers strung along the riverbanks. The braziers burned in a long chain down the center of the Providence River, their reflections pulling apart and reforming on the current. The crowd moved differently here, slower, drawn to the water like something instinctive.

“Wow,” Erika said quietly.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

We walked along the river slowly, drawn by the fires and the music. The water was black at night, the kind of black that has depth to it, lit only by the shifting glow of the braziers above. The reflections broke and reformed constantly on the current, bright against dark, never settling. It was beautiful and slightly wrong in a way I couldn’t articulate and decided not to try.

I was watching the water when I saw it. A pale, fleshy shape moving slowly beneath the surface, large enough to displace the reflection above it. My heart did something unpleasant. I blinked and it was gone, or deep enough to be invisible again.

“Erika,” I said. “Did you see that?”

“See what, babe?”

“In the water. There was something, a shape, pale, pretty big.”

She looked at the river, then back at me with a slow smile. “Weren’t you bragging earlier about not getting any visuals?”

“I know, I know. I think it might have been a manatee or something.”

“A manatee.” She looked at me like I’d just gotten off the short bus. “Really.”

“There was one in the river a few years back apparently, it made the news.”

“Scott.”

“I’m just saying it’s not impossible.”

She looked at me for a moment with the particular patience of someone who had eaten the same mushrooms and was not currently seeing manatees. “Ok babe,” she said.

We kept walking. I kept telling myself it was the psilocybin, that last trailing edge of it making the water look like it had intentions. That was the thing about psychedelics, they didn’t always leave cleanly. Sometimes they left a residue, a slight wrongness around the edges of things that took a while to fully resolve.

I almost believed it.

The suited man from the café drifted back through my thoughts uninvited, those black lenses that hadn’t seemed like lenses. The homeless man in the park with his too wide smile and his dark irises. Erika coming back from the bathroom quieter than she’d gone in, reading her phone with an expression I hadn’t been able to name. The shape in the water.

I was connecting things that didn’t connect. That was the paranoia talking, the come down, the unfamiliar city and the unfamiliar darkness and the fire on the water doing things to my head. I was fine. We were fine. It was my birthday and Providence was weird and I was fine.

I was working pretty hard to be fine.

“Oh,” Erika said, brightening beside me. “I’m getting a Del’s. You want one?”

The Del’s cart was just ahead, a small warm island of normalcy in the flickering dark. “Yeah,” I said, grateful for something concrete to look at. “Regular lemon.”

“Watermelon for me.” She trotted ahead towards the cart and I turned back to the river, hands in my pockets, watching the fire on the water.

And something looked back.

Just at the surface, two dark shapes breaking the black water, catching the firelight. Not reflecting it, just catching it, the way eyes do. They were fixed on me with a stillness that the current around them couldn’t disturb, and whatever was behind them knew me in a way that stopped my breathing completely. Not recognition. Something older than recognition.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look away.

A cup of yellow frozen lemonade entered my entire field of vision.

“I got watermelon and you regular lemon,” Erika said. “You ok?”

The cup was between me and the water. I took it. I looked back at the river.

Nothing. Just fire on black water, breaking and reforming, never settling.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just getting waves from the shrooms still.”

I took a long sip of the frozen lemonade and did not look at the water again.

“Erika, do you ever think about the soul of a city? What makes a place like this tick?”

She looked at me, and then out at the water, the fires, the old buildings lining the riverbank. “What do you mean?”

I gestured at all of it. “All this history. Providence was built on fire and water, the rivers were the lifeblood of the whole area, trading ships coming up from the harbor. The Gaspee was burned right out there in the bay, over a year before the Boston Tea Party, one of the first real acts of revolution against the British. It’s all still here, you can feel it. What if a city like this has a spirit of its own, some kind of consciousness that comes from everything that happened in it?”

Erika was quiet for a moment in the way that meant she was actually thinking about it rather than just waiting to respond. “You know most people assume ancient cultures had these vast pantheons, gods for everything, hundreds of them. But that’s mostly a Roman and Greek thing that we projected backwards onto everyone else. Most pagan cultures were much more local than that. Regional spirits, deities tied to a specific river, a specific hill, a specific people.”

She paused and glanced at me. “You actually want to hear this or are you humoring me?”

“Erika, everything you say is considerably more interesting because you’re pretty.”

She looked at me for a moment with something I couldn’t quite name, something that wasn’t quite the eye roll I was expecting. It passed quickly. “Scott.”

“I’m listening. Local gods, specific to a place.”

“Right. And some of them traveled with their people when they migrated. Carried with them, basically. But some of them didn’t. Some of them stayed tied to the land, or the water, waiting.” She paused, looking out at the river. “Waiting for their people to come back, or for new ones to arrive.”

I slurped the last of my Dell’s and turned that over. “So what does that mean for somewhere like Providence? Everyone who built this city came from somewhere else. Though I suppose they did bring their god with them, Christianity came to the new world with the colonists.”

Erika looked at me with something quiet behind her eyes. “Right. And if one god can travel with its faithful, so can another.”

The music shifted into something lower and slower over the water. Neither of us said anything for a moment. Somewhere beneath the nearest brazier something broke the surface and was gone.

“No offense to the Wiccans who think their grandmothers handed it down in an unbroken chain of continuous secret practice from a romanticized history of utopian paganism.”

“Some offense to the Wiccans,” Erika said, and the moment passed.

“Some offense to the Wiccans,” I agreed.

Erika’s smile faded. She looked at me for a moment with that careful expression she got when she was choosing every word before she said it. “Scott, there’s something I need to show you. The rest of your birthday present.” She turned and started walking away from the crowds and the fire, towards the bay, and I fell into step beside her.

Ahead of us, maybe a hundred yards down the path, a cluster of figures sat huddled against the low wall by the pedestrian bridge, covered in blankets despite the warmth of the evening. I noted them and filed them, keeping half an eye on the distance between us.

“Erika, what’s going on?”

She was quiet for a few steps. When she spoke her voice was careful and a half pitch higher than usual, the way it got when she was holding something in. “When we were at the cathedral. The texts I got.” She paused. “I’ve been following a lead on your mother’s side. The last lead. I reached out to some genealogical archives, some community databases.” Another pause. “It triggered something I wasn’t expecting.”

“What kind of something?”

“I’m getting there.” She took a breath and I could see her finding the steadier ground of the historical facts, her voice levelling out slightly. “Your great grandfather. The Zotykiv records. I told you I couldn’t find the name anywhere before Ellis Island.”

“Right.”

“I found it. Or rather, it found me.” She glanced at me and then away. “The name doesn’t come from Ukraine, Scott. It comes from a place called Innsmouth. A town on the coast of Massachusetts.”

I knew the name. It snagged on something in my memory without quite attaching to anything. “Innsmouth.”

“A small fishing community. Largely abandoned after a federal raid in 1928, the same year your great grandfather arrived at Ellis Island.” She said it the way she said everything historical, precisely and without decoration, but her hands were clasped together in front of her and her knuckles were pale. “The Navy was involved. Most of the town’s population was either imprisoned or disappeared entirely. The ones who got out,” she paused, “scattered.”

Ahead of us the huddled figures were stirring beneath their blankets. I watched them and kept my voice low. “Erika, there are some people up ahead, I don’t know if we should -”

“I know,” she said, without looking up. “Just, keep walking. Please.”

I looked at her. Her jaw was set. I kept walking.

“The records I found, the texts I received tonight, they fill in what I couldn’t find before. Your family were part of the Innsmouth community. Your great grandfather didn’t flee Stalin, Scott. He fled the Navy.” She stopped for just a moment, collected herself, kept going. “He came to Providence because others had already come here. Because Providence has a harbor and rivers that run deep and because something was already here waiting.” Her voice caught slightly on the last word. “Something that travelled with them.”

The figures ahead had shed their blankets now and were rising slowly, moving in our direction. My hand went instinctively towards Erika’s arm. There were more of them than I had first counted, eight, ten, more emerging from the shadows by the bridge. The smell of brine hit me before I could make out their faces in the dark.

“Erika, we need to-”

“You should check your 23andMe,” she said, her voice breaking slightly at the edges. “I reset your password to your name, all lowercase. My inquiries, the archives I contacted when I was looking for information, it triggered them to, they submitted their own DNA to the database and now it-” She stopped. Her eyes were wet. “They SWAM here, Scott. From Innsmouth. They swam down the coastline and they made Providence their home and they have been here ever since and they are,” she exhaled, “they are your family.”

The figures were close now, phones out, screens glowing in the dark. I could see their faces.

I could see their faces.

They turned their phones towards me, one by one, and even without opening the app I could see the screens from where I stood. 23andMe. Genetic Match. Genetic Match. Genetic Match.

The smell of brine and seaweed was overwhelming. Somewhere behind us the Waterfire music moved across the water, low and dark and ancient.

Erika took both of my hands in hers and looked up at me, tears running freely now, and I understood that she had been dreading this moment since the cathedral, maybe longer, and that she had chosen every single word of this walk with the care of someone who loved me and had no idea how to say what she was saying.

“Scott,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“They call themselves the Deep Ones,” Erika said, but her voice was coming from somewhere far away because my mind had finally caught up with my eyes.

They were close enough now to see clearly and I wished they weren’t. Most of them wore the kind of ordinary clothes that people wear when they are trying not to be noticed, damp at the hems, salt stained. But their faces. Some of them were almost human, almost, and that was the worst part. Mouths a fraction too wide, eyes too large and too dark, skin with a sheen to it that wasn’t quite right in the firelight. And then others, further back in the group, where the almost wasn’t doing as much work, where the fish had won more ground, and my brain kept reaching for something human in each face and finding just enough to make the rest of it worse.

They moved past Erika without touching her and surrounded me, phones held up, screens facing outward. 23andMe. Genetic Match. Genetic Match. Genetic Match. More than I could count.

I grabbed Erika’s hand. “Erika, we need to go, right now, we need to-”

She didn’t move. She held my hand with both of hers and looked up at me and I saw it then, in her eyes. Sadness and a little revulsion. Not at them.

“Scott,” she said carefully. “They’re your family.”

“No,” I said, with considerably more confidence than I felt.

“They’ve been here the whole time. Waiting.” Her voice was fracturing at the edges. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know when I started looking, I didn’t know what I was going to find, I didn’t know that they would-” She stopped. Reset. “I love you. I need you to know that first, but everything’s different now. I can’t-”

“Erika-”

Cold hands closed around my arms from behind, more than two, pulling me backwards towards the water. I dug my heels in.

“What about us?” I managed. “What about you, what about-”

“I can’t go with you Scott.” The tears were running freely now, her voice climbing in pitch, each word chosen like it was the last safe stone in a river crossing. “I’m not, I don’t, this isn’t,” she exhaled. “I love you. But I can’t. It’s not you.” A sound that was almost a laugh escaped her. “It’s, uh, it’s not you, it’s me?”

“ERIKA!!”

The hands pulled harder. My feet left the ground. I fought with everything I had, which turned out to be considerably less than what they had, and the dark water came up to meet me faster than seemed fair.

The last thing I saw above the surface was Erika, standing at the river’s edge, her arms wrapped around herself, her face a thing I will not describe because I don’t want to.

And then the river closed over my head and the world went very quiet.

Somewhere in the deep, in a place that was older than the city above it and darker than the water around it, something spoke. Not in words exactly, or not in any language I had learned, but in something that went around language entirely and arrived already understood.

Welcome, son of Zotykiv. Child of Dagon.

And something in me, something I had not known was there, answered.

 

There are things that happen to a person that no amount of self-awareness can make funny. I’ve been working on it.

It has been some time now and I am adjusting, which is a generous way of putting it. Dagon is, I will give him this, a generous god. The Deep Ones want for nothing, his gifts coming up from the deep in the form of worked gold and green metal and figures and crowns of a craftsmanship that no living surface artist could replicate, and I suppose I am not a surface anything anymore so I should stop thinking of it that way.

Abeo was right, everyone here knows everyone else’s business, it turns out that’s just what happens when you’re all connected by something ancient and aquatic and somewhat beyond the usual social frameworks.

I think about Erika. More than is probably healthy, though I suppose the metric for healthy has shifted somewhat. I have thought about going to see her, bringing her trinkets and gifts of Dagon’s gold. I think about it more than I think about anything else, if I’m being honest, and I always will. But I know what I look like now. I know what I smell like to a human nose, and Erika’s is particularly sensitive. I know what she saw beginning to happen in my face in the firelight by the river, that moment of recognition before the Deep Ones closed in, the thing she saw that I couldn’t yet see in myself.

I don’t know if I could bear to see that look of revulsion on her face again.