The Book of Cthulhu

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife

John Hornor Jacobs

In the afternoon, when the café and the cobbled lane beside the quay empties until the ships come back in, she stands in her apron among the tables and stares out past the seawall, beyond the rocky shore tangled with bladderwrack and snarls of trawler’s nylon nets, to the sea.

Flights of gulls wheel and bank in a grey sky while a trio of boys yell good-natured profanity at each other as they roust an upturned skiff from the shore, flip it, and push it into the foam.

“Maebe, here comes Lancelot from the visitor’s bureau,” Laura says through the open window, hands full of dishes but standing in the interior dining area. Laura’s wide face gleams in the low half-light of the afternoon, and she gives a grin to Maebe that is as playful as it is lurid.

“Now’s the time. And he is handsome.”

Maebe follows Laura’s gaze down the lane, past the bright confections of trinket and t-shirt shops, past the tourists wearing garish shirts adorned with flowers that only bloom under the brighter sun of latitudes thousands of miles away.

The man from the visitor’s bureau grins at Maebe and waves. When he gets close enough, he calls her name.

She waits.

He orders a Diet Coke and a salad with grilled chicken and sits with his back to the quay, so he can watch her, watch the way her body moves under her clothes, the heaviness of her hips, the sway of her breasts.

“Sit with me.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

He’s blond and lean and has the light, translucent fluff that shows where the razor didn’t touch, high on his cheek. He wears white tennis shoes with no socks, khakis, and his collar up in a way that makes her want to cry for his desperation. He’s a creature of sun and surf and boarding schools. He loves to sail.

“Sit with me.”

Laura grins from inside and shuffles off to dump dishes in the sink. Maebe sits with the man, looking beyond him to the boys and their skiff. They have moved out past the breakers and now the skiff bobs on the great face of sea.

“I love this weather. Gusty. You’ll be at the regatta this weekend?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not really interested in sailing.”

He smiles as if this is the most amusing thing he’s ever heard. He looks at her hand. The one with the wedding-band.

“You’ve worn that as long as I’ve known you.”

“I was married. It’s hard to forget.”

He sits, silent, sipping his drink. But he doesn’t look upset by her statement, just curious and wanting to let the matter pass, like a cloud scuttling across the face of sun.

But she looks at him and says, “He went down to the sea.”

The man smiles, again, at her antiquated way of saying death by drowning.

“Will you meet me tonight?”

Maebe stands and goes into the dim interior of the café and gets his salad. He’s still smiling when she places it in front of him and smoothes her apron. She sits again and turns her face back toward the lane, the seawall.

He eats with the exuberance of the young. When he’s done, he wipes the corners of his mouth with a napkin and says, “You won’t meet me?”

He’s asked every day for the last two weeks and Maebe has always replied the same way. “No, thank you. But you’re very kind to ask.”

The boys in their skiff have disappeared, out beyond everything she knows. The gunmetal clouds shift, and a pillar of sunlight breaks on the surface of the sea, shattering into a million bits. And then it is gone.

It has been too long.

Laura leers at her from inside the café.

“Yes,” Maebe says, and takes his hand. “I’d love to see you. Let me give you my address.”

∇

He takes her to a restaurant down the coast and pushes the escargot and coq au vin possibly because he likes it and possibly because he thinks he should. She dips the restaurant’s crusty bread into the escargot’s garlic butter and it tastes like grease and ashes on her tongue. She shoves the food around on her plate with a fork and drinks expensive wine from an oversized glass.

“Most sailors love the Melges 24 class because of its speed and performance but weekenders love the simplicity. It’s so easy to sail.” Despite the pomp and ceremony of the French restaurant, he had ordered a beer and drank it from the bottle. He winked at her when the waiter scowled and said, “Hey, it’s good beer! Microbrewery.”

“So, you go every weekend?” she asks.

“Yah, pair runs. Me and Walter. Have you met him? We’ve just been sponsored by Trident Sails—I pulled a few strings through the ICVB—so this weekend’s regatta means a lot to both of us.”

He likes numbers and corporate acronyms. But he is handsome.

He looks at her closely. “The great thing about the Melges is it only takes two crewmemebers.” He raises his eyebrows and waggles them at her comically. “So whaddya say?”

She sits in her chair, holding the napkin in her lap, staring at him.

“I’m sorry? What?”

“Sailing. Will you come with me?”

It takes a long moment, but she’s confident that the horror washing over her doesn’t spill onto her face.

“I’m not good in situations like that.”

He grins at her, stabs a bit of chicken with his fork and pops it in his mouth.

“You’d be surprised at how easy it all is.” He lowers his eyes. “And I’ll be there to guide you the whole time.”

“You mean, tonight?”

He nods and his smile is gone, replaced with a nervous expression that is ill-suited to his good looks.

“We pick a star and sail straight on till morning.”

The thought of being out on the dark swell of ocean in a boat makes her shudder. His expression crumbles.

“It’s cold in here,” she says, taking his hand and hoping it explains her goosebumps. “I was thinking maybe we could go back to my place.”

∇

Before, at the restaurant, he’d been forceful. He ordered for Maebe, and was absolutely adamant that the sommelier was tipped amply. He put his arm around her on the walk back to the car. It made her sad, the role he wanted to play, that picture of modern American manhood. He talked of movies, and school and told jokes that she didn’t understand, truly, but she smiled anyway.

But now, at her house, the little bungalow within a stone’s throw of the beach, he’s unsure of himself. He gulps down the drink she gives him, whiskey, and doesn’t quite know what to do with his body in such a small space.

She gives him another drink and he looks at her pictures.

“This your husband?” He holds up an ornate silver frame that had been on the bookcase.

“No. My brother.”

“Oh? What does he do?”

“He went down to the sea.” She tilts her head at the small cameo on the wall. “There’s my husband. Aaron.”

The man looks at the photo, her dead husband staring back at him, and he remains there for a long while but eventually, as if he’s making a decision, he turns and goes to sit on the sofa, next to Maebe. He drapes his arm over her shoulder, tugging her in, pressing his side against her.

He smells of tallow and whiskey and a whiff of the restaurant they’d just come from so it’s not unpleasant when she kisses him. At first it’s chaste, a simple pressing of the lips together and she has a moment’s worry that he’ll go no further, but soon he’s exploring her mouth with his tongue, her chest with his hands.

When he’s hard, she tugs him by the hand up from the couch into the bedroom.

His naked body bristles and she’s fascinated by the perfect triangle of hair on his chest trailing down to his sex. His fingers and tongue feel good on her skin and his cock, pressing so hard against her, feels almost hot to the touch.

But he wants to please her. He traces kisses down to her center, to between her legs. He smiles up at her, his mouth above her most delicate spot, and she cups his face with her hands but eventually lets him go and he splits her open with his tongue.

It has been so long.

When her lips part, it feels like some seal has been broken and the sea is gushing forth past the seawall, flooding the whole world, and she tilts her head back and closes her eyes.

The sensations rise and crest and she feels like she’s on a raft lost on the face of the dark, infinitesimal and wave-tossed, while something far below in the unseen depths rises, approaching the surface.

She gasps and locks her fingers in his blond hair. He draws up and away, his face glistening. He’s on his knees when he grasps her legs and pulls her toward him. She’s wide open when he takes his sex in hand, pausing before her portal.

It has been too long.

He doesn’t see the shadow that comes into the bedroom and brings the hammer across the back of his skull with a dull crack. Maebe feels an instant of regret that Laura couldn’t have waited a few moments longer.

∇

They go down to the sea, the sisters, dragging the naked man between them. He still breathes but his head is distended and blood darkens his back.

At the shore, Laura withdraws the knife and cuts him, twice, on each side of his genitals, slicing deep into his inner thighs. When the tendons are severed, his legs swing outward, splayed like a frog’s legs, and blood pours into the surf.

They drag him as far as they can into the waves.

It’s only a short wait for Aaron to come in from the sea. He and his brothers walk slowly, waves crashing around them. They’re bloated and lantern-eyed, wrapped in skeins of bladderwrack and luminous in the light coming from the moon.

Aaron opens his mouth and water pours from his sodden lungs and looks at the man bleeding out into the waves. He turns to Maebe, slowly.

“Seabride,” he says, his black tongue working like an eel in his mouth. “He comes.”

Out beyond the breakers, the ocean rises and Maebe worries that there’s been an earthquake calving huge tsunamis to drench the world in darkness. The sea swells and a massive shape broaches the surface and for a vertiginous moment, Maebe thinks that a shelf of land has cracked and been wrenched away from the plate of earth that makes the surface of her world, tipped on end from unstoppable tectonic forces. It rises, spanning miles and miles, up to the sky, blotting out the stars, the moon. She looks down at the man, the man who’d been with her in bed. He’d had a handsome face and kissed her so sweet.

Aaron’s eyes blink like yellow lights being shuttered and he takes her hand in his cold, dead one. A tremendous wave crashes into them, pushing Maebe and Laura back a few steps but not swaying the men at all.

Her mouth tastes of salt and blood now and the man from the visitor’s bureau is gone, his body carried away on the surf.

“He comes.”

They watch the sea rise.

∇