Deep Thing Part Two

Every ounce of my fear told me I should have fired. Should have squeezed the trigger and put my one irreplaceable round into whatever was standing in that doorway.

I didn’t.

I froze.

But not from fear.

The gun stayed up, pointed at the figure in the door, my finger resting back on the guard. Every rational circuit in my brain was screaming at me to shoot, to run, to do anything except stand there with my mouth open like a man watching a car accident in slow motion.

But my hands had stopped shaking.

 

At first, I thought it was the darkness taking shape. A trick of shadow and lightning, my mind already half-gone with grief and whiskey fumes. But then the lightning flashed again, and I saw her.

Pallid grey skin, slick as a dolphin’s, gleaming with seawater or something thicker. She stood in the doorway like a question mark, silhouetted against the storm, and the smell that rolled off her was overwhelming, that brine and copper and something ancient, something that had been at the bottom of the ocean since before men gave names to their fears. It was her scent.

She took a step forward.

The floorboards groaned.

My brain tried to catalogue what I was seeing: the ropes of kelp draped across her shoulders like a shawl, the way her otherwise naked skin seemed to pulse with its own light, the pitch-black eyes that caught no reflection, that seemed to absorb the very idea of light. Her mouth opened, too wide, too many teeth, serrated and gleaming, and a sound emerged that was not quite a voice.

Click-click-krrrt.

The clacking of stones. Like bones breaking underwater.

And yet.

And yet.

The way she tilted her head. The angle of her shoulders. The shape of her, underneath everything wrong and alien and impossible.

“Amelia?”

The word came out as a whisper. A prayer. An accusation.

She took another step toward me and, without deciding to, I set the gun down on the kitchen table. She moved with a fluid grace that was nothing like the way Amelia had moved, and yet everything like it. How do you explain recognition that bypasses reason? How do you describe knowing something in your marrow, in the stupid animal part of your brain that still believes in ghosts and true love and the possibility of miracles?

I knew it was her.

I knew it wasn’t her.

I knew I didn’t care which was true.

“Amelia,” I said again, and this time it wasn’t a question.

She crossed the remaining distance between us, and I met her halfway, arms opening in an embrace that every rational cell in my body screamed against. She was cold. So cold it hurt, like plunging your hands into snow. And wet, not just damp, but wet, like she’d brought the entire ocean with her, like the bay itself was wrapped around my chest, squeezing, drowning me in an embrace I’d spent a month craving.

The smell was overwhelming. Old death and new life, salt and copper, that organic decay that happens in deep water where the sun never reaches. My shirt soaked through instantly, clinging to my skin, and when I pulled back to look at her, my hands came away coated in something slick and clear. The cold coming off her was permeating, bone-deep, the kind that doesn’t leave. I shivered and stared into those black, lightless eyes and searched them for something looking back.

Click-krrrt-click.

Her head tilted, those black eyes fixing on mine with an intensity that was almost hunger. Almost recognition. Almost love?

I cupped her face, her cold, smooth, wrong face, and felt ridges beneath the skin that shouldn’t be there. Felt the way her jaw moved in ways that jaws shouldn’t move. Saw the teeth, row upon row of them, gleaming in the storm-light.

And I smiled.

“I guess you really did change,” I said.

Outside, the storm screamed its approval.

Inside, something that might have been Amelia clicked again, a sound that might have been laughter, or hunger, or the ocean itself learning to speak.

And I stood there, dripping and cold and more alive than I’d felt in thirty-seven days, holding onto a monster that wore the shape of the only thing I’d ever loved.

The gun sat on the kitchen table, loaded with the bullet I wouldn’t need.

Not anymore.

 

I should have pulled away. Should have recognized the danger in those too-many teeth, in those eyes like oil slicks, in the wrongness coming off her in waves, the preternatural presence of something that had crossed a threshold the living weren’t meant to cross, announcing itself to every nerve in my body before my mind understood what my eyes were looking at.

Instead, I leaned in.

My lips met hers, cold, slick with brine, tasting of kelp and copper and something older than salt. For a heartbeat, she was still. Then her hand shot to the back of my head, fingers tangling in my hair with a grip that was almost violent, and her mouth opened against mine.

Pain lanced through my lower lip.

Those teeth, serrated, sharp as broken glass, caught flesh, and I tasted blood mixing with seawater. She pulled back just enough for me to see her tongue, too long, too dark, slide across her lips, collecting the red that dripped there. Her eyes fixed on mine.

Then she lunged.

The force of it drove me backward, my spine hitting the kitchen table before we tumbled to the floor. The gun clattered somewhere behind me. She was on top of me, claws I hadn’t noticed before shredding through my shirt like wrapping paper. I felt the sting of cuts opening across my chest, my shoulders, but the pain was distant, muffled beneath the weight of something else.

Terror. Lust. The two twisted together until I couldn’t tell which was which.

My hands found her skin, that wrong, slick skin, and slid across ridges and valleys that made no anatomical sense. She was cold everywhere, glacier-cold, but somehow burning. Her mouth moved down my neck, and I felt those teeth drag across my throat, not quite breaking skin but promising they could. Promising they would.

Her lips, those strange, oversized lips, moved lower, and I stopped thinking in words.

The teeth scraped. Didn’t go deep.

Just deep enough.

 

Somewhere in the haze of it, the world began to shift.

The lighthouse dissolved around us like ink in rain. The floor became sand, then nothing at all. We were falling, no, sinking, down through layers of black water that pressed against my chest until my lungs screamed.

I couldn’t breathe.

Didn’t need to breathe.

Her arms and legs wrapped around me, constrictor-tight, pulling me deeper into the crushing dark. Underneath the crippling cold was an unexpected new warmth where our bodies folded together, the contrast of sensation unraveling whatever was left of my resistance, maddening, cold and heat and wrong and right wound together until I couldn’t tell where the horror ended and the longing began.

I could see things moving in the periphery of my vision, shapes too large to comprehend, geometries that hurt to perceive. Ancient things. Sleeping things. Things that had been waiting in the deep places since before the continents learned their names.

Her eyes stared into mine, pitch-black and infinite, and I understood that I was drowning.

Not in water.

In her. In whatever she had become.

The pressure was immense. My ribs creaked. My skull felt like it might collapse inward, compressed to the density of diamond. But her grip held me together even as it pulled me apart. We spiraled down through the abyss, two bodies becoming one, flesh and not-flesh, human and not-human.

I saw lights in the darkness. Bioluminescent stars spelling out names I couldn’t pronounce in languages that predated tongues. I saw cities of coral and bone, spires reaching up from trenches so deep they might as well be wounds in the world. I saw her, really her, Amelia standing on a beach I didn’t recognize, walking into surf that glowed with phosphorescence, walking until the water closed over her head and she didn’t come back up.

I’m changing, Justin.

The water filled my lungs.

I let it.

We spun in the current, wrapped around each other like DNA spiraling into new configurations. Her teeth found my shoulder, my neck, my chest. Each bite was a baptism. Each scratch a scripture written in blood and seawater.

I was dying.

I was being born.

I was…

 

Sunlight.

I woke to sunlight.

The bed beneath me was soaked, reeking of brine and aquatic rot. Strands of kelp lay across my chest like the aftermath of a shipwreck. My body ached in ways I didn’t know bodies could ache, deep, bone-level pain mixed with a strange, electric soreness that made me think of live wires and third-degree burns.

I sat up slowly, the room spinning.

The lighthouse. I was in the third-floor sleeping quarters. Morning light streamed through the windows, almost obscenely bright after the storm. I looked down at myself.

Scratches. Dozens of them, crisscrossing my torso like some kind of ritual scarification. Some were shallow, already scabbing over. Others were deeper, still weeping. My lip was swollen where her teeth had caught it, crusted with dried blood.

It hadn’t been a dream.

I stood on shaking legs and moved to the window.

My mind raced, thoughts tumbling over each other in a cascade of panic and hope and something darker I didn’t want to name.

She came back.

She’s not Amelia anymore.

She came back for you.

She could have killed you.

She came back.

I looked at the scratches again. Traced one with a fingertip, a long shallow furrow running from my collarbone to my ribs, and hissed at the sting of it. There were deeper ones. Places where the cuts had wept through the night and dried into dark crusts that pulled and cracked when I moved. My lip throbbed where her teeth had found it. My throat ached in ways I didn’t want to think about too carefully.

She had done this to me.

I should have been furious. Should have been terrified. Every reasonable instinct I possessed was lining up in an orderly queue to inform me that what had happened last night was not survivable a second time, that whatever she was now she was not safe, that the scratches on my chest were a warning written in a language even an idiot could read.

And beneath all of that, underneath the fear and the pain and the raw animal knowledge that I had been in the presence of something that could have unmade me without a second thought, was something else entirely. Something that made the fear worse by existing alongside it.

I wanted her to touch me again.

Not despite the scratches. Not in spite of the teeth and the cold and the wrongness radiating off her like cold from a stone that has never seen sunlight. I wanted it because of those things, which was a thought so profoundly disturbing that I filed it alongside all the other thoughts I wasn’t examining this morning.

I looked at the blood. At the evidence of what had happened, what I’d let happen, what some traitorous part of me was already cataloguing as the most alive I had felt in years, possibly ever, and felt something crack in my chest.

Everything had changed.

And I wasn’t sure anymore whether that terrified me or not, but I knew I had to face it.

I made my way down to the ground floor, still naked, wearing only my wounds. The gun was on the floor where it had fallen, half-buried under a rope of kelp that had no business being on the ground floor of a lighthouse. I picked it up.

My hands worked on autopilot, muscle memory from a thousand range sessions. The weight of it steadied me, I pulled the slide back to inspect it, then let it snap back into place. The round was still in the chamber where I’d left it.

One specific purpose.

But maybe there were others..

I walked through the lighthouse, past the two glasses I’d set out, past the laptop with the emails I’d never sent. I pushed open the door to the platform.

The wind had died. The bay was calm, almost glassy, reflecting the pink and gold of dawn. She didn’t turn as I approached, didn’t acknowledge my presence at all. Just sat there, grey and still and utterly alien in the morning light.

I walked up behind her.

The gun hung at my side, heavy as judgment.

My finger rested on the trigger guard, not quite touching the trigger. Not yet.

What was I going to do?

End whatever nightmare this had become? Put a bullet in the thing that wore Amelia’s gestures like a stolen coat?

Finish the one specific purpose I’d come here to do? One round, one ending, clean and final?

I stood there, paralyzed by the weight of the decision, and checked the chamber yet again, and old, nervous habit. The brass cartridge gleamed in the early light. Still there. Still ready.

Still mine.

She turned her head.

The movement was too fast, too fluid, inhuman in its grace. Those pitch-black eyes fixed on me, on the gun, on the question I was asking with my presence.

Then her lips pulled back.

Teeth. Rows of them, gleaming and sharp.

Was that a smile?

A threat?

An invitation?

She stood in one smooth motion, kelp sliding across her skin like living things, and faced me fully. We stood there, naked with kelp, separated by three feet and an entire ocean of impossible choices.

Then she leaned in and licked my swollen lip.

The pain was exquisite.

My arms folded around her and I pressed my other wounds against her slick skin. She wasn’t as cold, her skin warmed by basking in the sunlight. I held her, hoping the sting would never end.

Before I could move, before I could think, she pulled away and dove off the platform.

The splash was barely audible.

I rushed to the rail and watched her grey form knife through the water with the ease of something born to it. She surfaced twenty feet out, her head breaking the water like a seal’s.

Click-click-krrrt.

The sound carried across the calm water, almost playful.

Then she dove again, her body arcing in a perfect curve before disappearing beneath the surface.

I stood there, searching the water, the gun hanging loose at my side. Seconds stretched. My heart hammered against my ribs, those ribs that still ached with the memory of crushing pressure and impossible depths, and bioluminescent cities I long to see again while wrapped in her body.

She surfaced again, farther out now, and that same clicking carried across the water, closer now, almost like a word.

A call.

A summons.

Then she was gone, swallowed by the bay like she’d never been there at all.

I looked at the gun for a long time. The bay was quiet. The water below was black and deep and patient.

The cartridge caught the morning light as it arced over the rail, turning once, twice, before it hit the surface and was gone. I watched the ripples spread until there was nothing left to watch.

The Colt was empty now.

I’m not entirely sure how that happened.

I let it drop onto the deck chair where she’d been sitting and leaned over the rail.

The water below was black and deep and waiting.

I had known what I needed to do.