The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea

FODDER’S JIG ^{LEE THOMAS}

Leaving my office on a cool autumn evening, I nearly collided with a woman dancing on the sidewalk. She wore a navy blue skirt-suit designed too narrowly for her plus-sized frame, and she moved in spasms as if in the throes of a standing seizure. Her hands flew into the air and then thrust toward the ground, pulling her shoulders with them until she bowed as low as her ample midriff would allow. Remaining bent at the waist, she launched her arms back and upward as if mimicking wings, all the while stomping her feet–left, right, left, left, right–against the sidewalk. She whipped into an upright position and glared at me. Though I considered the possibility the woman had missed a text changing the time or place of whatever flash mob she’d intended to join, I came to the more likely conclusion that the dancer was just plain crazy. Dilated pupils, black portals into a demented nothingness, noted neither me nor the real world I inhabited. After a beat of absolute motionless, the woman grunted a series of nonsensical phrases, directing them my way and sending me back several steps as the blunt syllables wormed into my head. She restarted her frantic, tribal dance while a meager crowd gathered around. Several members of the ad hoc audience had their phones out, but they were using the devices to record the performance. Admittedly, the spectacle was entrancing in its ferocity and unlikeliness, but the woman needed help, and no one seemed willing to offer it. I took out my phone and dialed for emergency, but the moment the operator came on the line, the woman’s dance ended.

When her limbs ceased their bizarre choreography, she looked around with clear eyes, seeming genuinely confused. A skinny kid with a scraggly beard that reached the military beret atop the image of Che Guevara on his T-shirt fell into a fit of laughter and clapped his hands viciously. Others in the crowd picked up the applause. The woman appeared terrified and rushed into the building.

Within a week, the dancers were all over the news. Most of the reports came from cities along the Gulf Coast, but a few trickled in from landlocked towns. Message boards and wiki pages filled with information about the afflicted and offered uninformed, often ridiculous speculation regarding the cause of what was being called “Boogie Fever.” One callous jokester set the video of an elderly man thrusting and stomping and contorting his emaciated form in the middle of a road to the Benny Hill theme song. The clip went viral: over a million hits in three days.

For many of the afflicted, dancing was the first symptom.

Three months later, I stood in the living room of the condominium I’d shared for a bit less than a year with a man named George Caldwell. George called the apartment his “divorce shack.” In reality, the place was a spacious and beautiful condo with a view overlooking Galveston Bay, and though it may have fallen short of the manse he’d spent thirty years of his life paying off, most people wouldn’t have complained.

The morning had all but vanished as I packed a few remaining mementoes and the items of clothing I considered necessary. My suitcase and two small boxes waited by the door. I procrastinated, checked drawers and cupboards, sifted through the closets one last time. I wouldn’t be coming back to this place.

Memories of George filled the apartment like the morning light, suffusing the rooms, pinging with painful glare from shiny surfaces. Before the dancing and the seizures, before the horrifying news reports, and the night he’d walked in a trance to meet thirty-six others on the sandy shore of Galveston Bay, I’d shared this home with a handsome, gruff, good-natured man, who would never again walk across its polished oak floors.

A remembrance of scotch set my tongue to tingling. The scent of his cologne momentarily filled my nose.

A marble-and-glass table ran across the center of the floor-to-ceiling window opening onto the patio and overlooking the bay. At the table, I placed a set of keys, George’s set, on a brochure for the trip he and I would never take. I reminded myself to contact the cruise line to inform them we would not be sailing from Amsterdam to Budapest on their luxury liner, and then I wondered if it was even necessary.

None of the cruise lines would stay in business. Civilians were avoiding the water these days.

The brochure held my attention. Covered in dust, it was like a funeral program, memorializing a future that was never going to happen. I’d looked forward to traveling with George. I’d looked forward to everything with him.

We met online through a hook-up app two years before the Emergence. George’s profile was typical for a “discreet” married man. No pictures of his face. No real information save for his sexual endowment and the things he liked to do with it. Our first meeting tracked a predictable course: an awkward “Hello,” followed by frenzied groping and undressing. After sex, we both rinsed off and engaged in a little more conversation-sans eye contact. Then, George presented me with a hurried “Let’s do this again,” before he fled my house, stumbling over the threshold as he dashed for the Mercedes he’d parked around the corner.

I chanced a look outside and saw the bay. The surface glittered under the early morning sun. The twinkling touch of sunlight on the surface would have been beautiful under different circumstances. But I could only see glimmering blades, metal shards. Teeth.

After that first visit, I didn’t expect to hear from George Caldwell again, but he surprised me. Sort of. The next couple of months, he visited sporadically. Our encounters were mostly physical. He was a married man of standing in the community, and I was a drive thru: convenient, quick, fundamentally satisfying, but a pleasure he felt embarrassed for indulging.

Three months in, he began staying longer. Brief chats evolved into actual conversations. I found out about the man and his life, which revolved around a perpetually dissatisfied wife, a spoiled son who had grown into an unbearable adult, and an obvious, if muted, depression. He admired me. He envied me. He asked me to spend a weekend with him in Austin.

I said no.

At that point in my life, I wasn’t looking to train a sixty-three-year-old closet case. I’d come out in the late 70s, survived the 80s, and had spent the next twenty years with a quiet, though pleasant, alcoholic named Calvin, whose liver finally disintegrated the year after we’d retired to Galveston.

The other issue, which I found to be the more significant reason to avoid a weekend retreat with George, was the fact that ever since our first meeting, I’d spent far too much time thinking about him. In the days between George’s visits, I swung from whimsical notions of how we would spend our next meeting to outright fury every time he had to cancel. At the center of these fluctuating emotions was sadness. Or maybe melancholy was a better word. I understood the cliché, even as I lived it: hopelessly pining for a married man. I’d started loving him too quickly, and that was not a thing to be encouraged, considering our situation.

Closing my eyes against another view of the disconcerting bay, I turned from the window and stepped to the center of the room. When the doorbell rang, I flinched.

I couldn’t imagine who would be at the door. Maybe it was the real estate agent, though I doubted it. She’d agreed to swing by, “If I can.” Her disinterest was understandable.

No one wanted to live near the water now.

“It’s happening all along the coast,” I call to George.

On the evening news a video clip of a little girl with a purple butterfly barrette in her blonde hair fills the screen. The child is dancing the same tribal dance I had witnessed only a few days before. The video comes from Holly Beach, Louisiana. An anchorwoman with silky black hair appears following the clip, and she says that more than a dozen incidents have been witnessed in the past week. She smiles and expresses her certainty that “Boogie Fever” is just the latest cultural meme, no different from Planking or the Mannequin Challenge.

George walks through the room with a glass of scotch, the flavor of which I’d never enjoyed until I tasted it on his tongue. He is naked, as is usually the case when he is home. A devotion to nudity is one of the many lifestyle changes George has adopted since leaving his wife. His body is burly and well shaped, having far more to do with genetics than any devotion to exercise. We go to the gym three days a week, and while I earn sweat on the treadmill and weights, George frequently chooses to lounge in the steam room until I am finished.

“What’s happening along the gulf?” he asks, taking a moment to pause in front of the window to gaze over the nighttime bay.

“This dancing thing,” I say. “Like that woman outside my office.”

“People will do anything for attention,” he says. “Why is something like that even on the news? The economy is going to shit again; protests and riots are springing up every other day; and two nights ago, about thirty people walked to a beach in Bermuda and vanished. Any one of those things strikes me as considerably more relevant than a bunch of idiots wiggling their asses for a camera.”

“Wait, Bermuda?”

He sips his scotch. “These people–police think it’s around twenty or thirty of them–just got up in the middle of the night, walked out of their homes, and disappeared. Loved ones reported a bunch of missing persons, and the authorities tracked several of them to a cove. They found footprints and some personal items, but no people. Bermuda isn’t a big island. I went there on business a few times. You can’t really hide there.”

“They could have chartered a boat.”

“Not likely,” George says. “The missing persons weren’t part of a social club. In fact, two of them were just visiting the island. They had no connections to anyone there.”

I don’t have a response to that.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m going to bed. I have to meet the lawyers in the morning. Time to see what else Eugie thinks she’s entitled to for having me pay her bills for thirty years.”

George doesn’t sound bitter. He sounds exhausted. The divorce proceedings have dragged on far longer than he’d expected. He’d made it clear he wasn’t going to put up much of a fight. He accepts the divorce as his fault, his problem, despite years of unhappiness on both sides of that bed. He just wants out, but Eugie’s lawyers are gouging deep, too deep.

“You go on in,” I say. “It’s still early.”

“I don’t think so,” George says, crossing to the sofa where I sit. “You are vital to my reason for going to bed early.”

He bends over, carefully balancing his glass so his whisky doesn’t slosh, and he kisses me hard.

I opened the door of the apartment to find a middle-aged man standing in the hallway. My throat grew tight and my breath lodged in the constriction. A chill blossomed on my neck and then rapidly vanished as I reconciled the man before me with the man I’d momentarily imagined him to be.

Barry Caldwell resembled his father so much that if the younger man were to slap a gray wig on his head, the two could have passed for twins, as long as you didn’t look below the neck. Whereas George’s physique had remained well proportioned and firm, Barry’s didn’t stand a chance against his indulgences and his sloth. I found it a shame that such a handsome face should rest on a body that might have been sketched by Dr. Seuss.

According to George’s description of the man, they were in all other ways quite different. Our awkward meeting at the reading of George’s will did nothing but support this notion.

“You’re here,” Barry said. His voice projected annoyance and indignation, as if I were the one intruding in his home. “We need to talk about my dad.”

My shoe sinks in the sand, sending me off balance and into George’s thick shoulder. He laughs and wraps an arm around me for support. He gently knocks the side of his head into mine, a display of affection I always found strange.

“After they found that whatever-it-is down here, I got curious,” he says. “Weird fucking things.”

“You mean the carcass that washed up last week?”

“Globsters,” George says. “They call them globsters on the news. I don’t think you can call them carcasses. No one’s sure they’re actually animals, at least not whole animals. They’re like giant tongues or something. No eyes or mouths, just large chunks of smooth meat.”

“What did it look like up close?” I ask, feeling a twinge of jealousy that he’s found adventure on his own. We’d waited a long time to be together, really together; I want to share important moments. Every one of them.

“Like I said, just a wad of pale blue meat, about the size of a dolphin. Gulls swarmed the thing. Apparently, they find globster extremely tasty. I watched for a bit, but then this group of people in blue polo shirts showed up with tackle boxes. I guess they were with Fish and Wildlife or something. They put on surgical masks and did their best to shoo away the gulls so they could get a better look at the thing.”

George’s phone buzzes in his pocket. A cold, salty gust pushes in off the gulf as he draws the phone from his jacket. He sneers at what he finds on the screen.

“Eugie has started calling again.”

“I thought she insisted all communications go through your lawyers?”

“Apparently, that only applies to me.” George knocks his head against mine again. “She’s getting nearly everything. I can’t imagine what she wants now. But we’re going to be living on peanut butter sandwiches if this keeps up.”

“We discussed this,” I say.

“I know, sweetheart. It’s just going to take some adjustment.”

“We’ll be fine,” I say.

He slides around in front of me and kisses me hard on the mouth. “I know that.”

We continue along the beach, and George barks out a startling laugh. “God, I almost forgot the smell.”

“Eugie’s smell?” I ask.

“No, though I could tell you stories.”

“Please don’t.”

“No, I mean the globster. Jesus, I’ve never encountered anything so rank in my life. It was like someone made a gas out of fish rot and seaweed and bombed the entire beach with it. I had to have been twenty yards away from the thing, and the shit got in my throat. I gagged half the afternoon.”

I released a grumble of distaste.

“Didn’t bother the mosquitoes any. The little bastards were everywhere.”

George likes to swear. Eugie had forbidden it. For thirty-two years, “darn” and “gosh” were the expletives Eugie allowed her husband. Now, he showers the world in vulgarities: another freedom of which he takes full advantage.

Without invitation, George’s son entered the apartment. He tromped through the living room like it was a hotel lobby. His presence struck me as wholly wrong. He didn’t belong among George’s things, among our things. This place was a sanctuary, and Barry was a marauding force.

He’d been calling for a week, ever since the reading of his father’s will. I had no interest in speaking with him. George had told me enough about his son, about the privileged boy who could never quite make life work for himself, to know we’d clash. I’d endured his sneers in the lawyer’s office, along with the glares of disgust from his mother. A chasm of status and finance had separated me from this aggressive tribe, but even gone, George remained a bridge, spanning the gap.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“I told you, we need to talk about my dad.”

“What’s left to say?” I asked.

He knew what had happened to George. Everyone knew.

Barry walked to the table by the window and lifted the set of keys.

“Are you going to sell the place?” he asked.

“Who’d buy it? The Gulf Coast is a ghost town. People have been evacuating since… that night. I’ve alerted the bank that George is deceased. They’ll take it over and claim a loss with the government.”

“Where are you going to live?”

“Far from here.”

Barry crossed to the bedroom and pushed open the door. He stepped over the threshold and then stepped back.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked, outraged.

“Just wanted to see the place,” he said. “Dad never had me over. Not once. That’s not right. A family all split up like that. It’s a nasty thing. Bad business, all of it. I’ve stopped by a few times this week. You were never here, or you weren’t answering the door. Whatever. Just wanted to see it. It’s not bad.”

“The bank would probably give you a good deal on it.”

He chuckled. “Nah. My wife and I moved in with Mom. Beautiful house. Incredible house. My boyhood home. Of course, Mom’s under a lot of stress right now. Real bad. Dad’s will was a shock to her. To everyone, really.”

George had left substantial assets to me. One evening after we’d first moved in together, he’d set me on the sofa and performed a presentation, regarding the contents of his will, as if he were attempting to sell the proposal to a board of directors. The numbers shocked me, as they represented a financial security I’d never imagined, but even before George delivered the caveat-“The divorce is going to change all of these numbers dramatically.”-I recognized his bequest, while sweet, was fundamentally symbolic. He wanted to show me how important I was to his life.

Even so, he’d been a responsible man. A good man. He hadn’t been neglectful of his family.

“He accounted for both of you in his will. In fact, he was extremely generous.”

“I’d expect you to see it that way. Of course you would.” Barry’s tone was critical. It was harsh, and more than ever, I wanted him out of George’s home.

I wake in the early morning hours, startled and terrified to find George bent over my side of the bed. His face hovers a few inches from mine, and from his throat, a guttural and explosive chant emerges as if he is denouncing me in a violent foreign language. I roll away to George’s side of the bed. The sheets press too hot against my skin. His attention follows. Blank eyes. Hardened expression. Growling and grinding words that have no place in civilized language. I say his name. Shout it. Beg him to snap out of whatever nightmare he is attempting to vocalize, but the chant continues for another full minute.

Then, his posture changes, and he is standing tall and rigid. His arms rise above his head as if he’s celebrating a touchdown and his feet stamp–left, right, left, left, right.

By the time his eyes clear and his face slackens, I am in tears. I don’t know if this is a stroke or dementia or some mental instability that stress has ignited, but it scares the hell out of me.

His eyes grow focused. His features soften. He stands upright and scratches the back of his head and says, “Hey, that’s my side of the bed.”

I didn’t want to talk about George’s estate, not with his son. George had made his last wishes clear. Even his lawyer, who was not above editorializing–making his own displeasure with George’s late-in-life behavior known through head shakes, shrugs, and shaded provisos–admitted that the will was a binding document. Though he did comfort Barry Caldwell and his mother with the word “Contest,” on more than one occasion.

“When did Dad get sick?” Barry asked.

“About a month before… before the beach,” I said.

“So, he spent a month just dancing around this place?”

“That’s not how the virus works,” I said, wishing I could think of a chore to accomplish, so that I could busy myself rather than stand before Barry’s arrogant gaze. But I’d already packed everything of value, at least everything I valued. Despite a compulsion to throw the man out on his ass, I didn’t. He’d been tracking me with a purpose, and until I knew what it was and how to address that purpose, I’d endure him. “It was sporadic. I only saw George in seizure a couple of times.”

Barry retraced his steps to the bedroom and then paused by the fireplace. He looked at the pattern of wrought iron vines on the screen and the mesh wires joining them. Then his head cocked to the side so he could peer at the bedroom door. “And you’re not worried?” he asked.

“Worried? What more could happen?”

“I’d be worried. I’d be shitting myself. You could have caught it.”

“It’s not a cold, Barry.”

“Yeah, but they’re saying it can be sexually transmitted, right? A bunch of reports. Lots of ’em. They’re coming out all the time.”

For a moment, the lie achieved its goal. Steel shards of panic jabbed my neck and abdomen. But the deceit held only a transient power. I’d been thorough in my research.

“And it’s not like you’d know you were sick unless someone told you,” he continued. “The victims never remember their seizures.”

He eyed me with a blatant fabrication of concern and stepped closer to the fireplace. I allowed him a moment to enjoy his petty jab, seeing the remarks for what they were. A tormentor’s lies. A fiction he hoped would infect and linger and sting. It was the shitty move of a bested bully.

When he turned to face me, he was smirking. Perhaps he was attempting a sympathetic smile. Perhaps not. Wolves often looked as if they were grinning as they circled prey.

“Thank you for your concern,” I said. “But your father and I fucked a lot, Barry. I didn’t catch anything.”

Barry’s taunting smile disappeared. His eyes clouded as his mind attempted to process information I imagine it had struggled to deny, or at least disregard as an irrelevant abstraction. Unfortunately, his befuddlement and my satisfaction were both momentary.

“It’s funny, right?” Barry asked, the grim smile returned to his lips. “How they were all synched up?”

“Excuse me?”

“The way they all danced at the exact same time, even though they were spread out all over the city? Hell, all along the Gulf, as far as anyone knows. It’s like someone pushed a button and bang, all these people dropped what they were doing and got their grooves on. You have to admit, it’s kind of funny.”

No, I didn’t have to admit that. There was nothing funny in the primal choreography, not even when it was set to the Benny Hill theme song.

“You know, one guy went missing. Disappeared. Everyone thought he was dead but he showed up a couple days later,” Barry continued. “He wanted attention. He was a lonely old guy. Real lonely. Pathetic. And he figured he could climb on the bandwagon and suck some sympathy out of his family. Cruel thing to do. Nasty thing.”

“George didn’t need anyone’s sympathy.”

“No,” Barry admitted, “but maybe he needed something else.”

“I’m not sure what you’re implying, but if you have doubts, you can speak to the police. I provided all of the information on George’s behavior and his recent medical history to them.”

“Yeah, his medical history,” Barry says. “Well that’s a funny thing. I spoke to his doctor. He hadn’t seen Dad in months.”

The window is open, allowing a salt-scented breeze to wash over our bodies. I’m on the bed, and my heart still races from exertion. George’s head rests on my belly, facing away from me. He gets his hair cut once a week and the horizon of silver drawing along the deeply tanned neck fascinates me with its precision. His stubble pokes agreeably on my skin as he turns his head to kiss my stomach.

He draws a finger from my navel to my cock. “You’re sticky,” he says. This makes him chuckle.

“Don’t forget the neurologist tomorrow.”

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing,” he says. “I was sleepwalking.”

“You were doing more than walking. And stop that.”

“No,” George mutters, now drawing patterns in the semen on my belly. “I’m playing.”

“You’re a strange man, George Caldwell.”

“Probably.”

“This is serious.”

“Maybe.”

“You could be sick.”

“I’m not.” He stops tracing circles in the fluid on my skin.

“Look, I know it’s frightening. No one knows exactly what this illness does long term, but you have to accept this. We need to explore treatments. You can’t hide behind denial.”

“This isn’t denial,” George whispers. “This is fucking survival.”

“You think you have a better chance without medical attention?”

“Sweetheart, if Eugie finds out about this, it’s over,” George says. “This isn’t some crap like West Nile. This affects the mind. It affects my behavior. I’m not actually divorced yet, which makes Eugie my next of kin. She would be able to have me declared incompetent and then take over my life. And even if I lucked out and found a judge who took the divorce into account, Eugie would just recruit my kid. The doctors don’t know enough right now. Yes, maybe it started with those things on the beach, but if there’s any doubt, they could attribute all of my actions for the past year or years to this.”

“The courts would never…”

“One judge, sweetheart,” George says emphatically. “All it would take is one bible-clutching judge to make the decision, and believe me, this town is swimming in them. They could take everything. They could take me, and I am not going to spend the last years of my life playing with crayons in an institution. I want to be with you. I want our life.”

“I had no idea.”

“You’ve been spared the barbarity of the privileged. Why do you think I asked to see your doctor and not mine?”

“I didn’t think about it.”

“My doctor is part of Eugie’s circle. My lawyer is part of her circle. These people play dirty, and nothing brings them together faster than the opportunity to destroy a life. So, I am not sick. I do not have the Gibbet Virus. I’m of perfectly sound body and mind.”

“George asked to see my doctor.”

“Interesting,” Barry said, as if he were a detective whose suspicions were being realized.

“He had it,” I told Barry. “After his first seizure, I insisted he see a doctor. He asked to see mine. I have the paperwork. I had to file it with the police. This was before the CDC even had a webpage about it, though by this time, they had a less ridiculous name for the sickness: Gibbet Virus.”

“Because of that island.”

“Yes. But no one knew anything. They don’t know much now.”

“They’ve connected the virus to the unidentified masses that have been washing up along the coast,” Barry said. “Mosquitoes are feeding on the things and spreading the disease like they do with West Nile and Zika.”

I didn’t correct him, not even his mispronunciation of Zika. Barry’s information was old.

In the weeks following George’s first seizure, I’d used research as a shelter from concern and ultimately grief. I had pages and pages of information about the virus, the globsters, and the Emergence in manila folders packed into my suitcase. Video clips and online articles choked my laptop’s hard drive.

The CDC had tracked the virus’s path from the globsters to the gulls that fed on them. The virus was metabolized by the gulls, where it incubated in their blood streams. Then mosquitoes entered the vector, transmitting the virus from birds to human beings. But while they could trace the virus’s path, they had no idea how it worked.

What kind of infection created spontaneous spasms that looked more like tribal choreography than epileptic fit? What kind of disease caused the afflicted to chant an ugly and indecipherable language at the top of their lungs? What sickness summoned thirty-seven people to the water’s edge, where they waited to die?

The earliest visual evidence of the Gibbet Virus I can find precedes the Bermuda incident by a month. I sit at the dining room table, gathering information, staring at the screen of my laptop.

The video clip was shot in Cuba. Two men sit on the hood of a vintage ’62 Plymouth, smoking cigarettes and smiling. One looks into the sky and says something in Spanish. The other breaks up laughing and slaps him on the shoulder. In the background and far to the left of these men, a woman in a pale blue dress stomps the concrete of a recessed doorway. Shadow engulfs her, washing out the specifics of her face, but the familiar, violent jig is apparent through the gloom.

I follow links and fill my search engine with key words. I gather data as if it were the ingredients for a cure. I don’t even notice George when he enters the room.

“We could get out of town,” he says, sipping from his drink.

“Should you be drinking?” I ask. “Until we know more about this, you need to be careful.”

“Bullshit,” George says.

“But your immune system might be compromised, or the virus could affect the liver.”

“Don’t care,” George says. “I spent my whole life following rules, and I’m still fucked. Now, what do you think about getting out of town?”

“I suppose I could get time off work.”

“No,” George says. “I’m not talking about a vacation. I’m talking about moving. If I’m here, then someone could see me… acting up. Maybe we could sell our places, head north. I just keep thinking my family is going to find out. It scares the shit out of me. I can’t even function.”

“I can’t retire,” I say. “Not for another couple of years at least.”

“We’ll find jobs.”

“At our ages?”

“Well, I don’t know!” George shouts and throws his arms wide, sloshing whisky over the lip of his glass. “Am I supposed to just hide in here all day, waiting to see what new atrocity is lurking around the corner?” He sits on the arm of the sofa, staring at the splash of liquid pooling on the floor. “I suppose I could go by myself.”

The suggestion creates a painful vibration in my ribs. He doesn’t mean to be cruel. I know it.

“Don’t say that.”

“This fucking world,” George says. “I’m finally happy and then this. I thought Eugie would be my downfall, maybe Barry, but a fucking mosquito?”

“If you want to move, really want to do it, we’ll find a way. We can go anywhere you want.”

“I don’t care where,” George says.

“Then let’s leave,” I say. “Let’s get in the car and drive. We’ll head north until we find a place.”

“If you’re serious, I’ll need time to make arrangements,” George says. His mood is not bright, but the darkest edges are off of it. “I can’t just vanish or Eugie will release a squad of investigators to find me so the divorce proceedings aren’t inconvenienced.”

“Tell me when, and I’ll be ready.”

“A couple of days? I have an old friend who owns a B&B in Colorado. We’ll be okay there until we have a plan.”

Barry crossed to the dining table, a table George and I rarely used for anything as we tended to eat on the sofa in front of the television. He grasped the back of a chair upholstered in fawn-colored suede and shook his head.

“He shouldn’t have kept this from us. We’re his family. Family is everything.”

“He was embarrassed,” I said. “Once they had identified the virus, and we knew his seizure wasn’t a one-time event, he didn’t want to leave the apartment. Then after the people vanished at Holly Beach, George started to panic. Families of the missing came forward. They talked about the dancing and the chanting. It was the first connection between the Gibbet Virus and the disappearances. It hit him extremely hard.”

“We should have been told,” Barry said, rocking his belly against the back of the dining chair as if attempting to discreetly hump the piece of furniture. “We would have gotten him the help he needed. We’d have gotten him great doctors. The best doctors. He wouldn’t have just been walking around waiting for that thing to come along. He’d be alive right now, and my mother wouldn’t have to worry about her future.”

George had been right about his family. They would have declared him unstable and likely would have institutionalized him. He was their golden goose, and he’d gotten out of the pen. The sickening unease I’d felt since Barry’s arrival intensified. Hot and cold static avalanched from my face to my stomach and a tremor ran through my muscles. He was accusing me of negligence, incompetence, but this wasn’t the grief of a mourning child, it was the disgust of a disappointed heir.

This privileged brat couldn’t imagine what I’d lost with George. Why should he? To him, his father was an old piece of furniture, something to stick away in a basement or attic until it could be sold at auction. He didn’t understand the losses of aging. He couldn’t be bothered to see how amazing it was to actually gain something so late in life, something so important.

Everything I knew about growing old told me I would lose and lose, and then I would die. My body had changed. My cells refused to repair themselves; they became bungling and languid. My senses changed, became less than they were. The world looked different. It sounded different. It felt different. Everything was harder and colder to the touch. I accepted these losses as natural, as part of my flawed human existence.

But to gain something, to find someone at this stage of my life?

It was unexpected, because nothing I’d witnessed had prepared me for it. How could I expect the bloated trust-funder to understand exactly how precious George had been to me?

I couldn’t, and I knew I couldn’t, and I knew I shouldn’t have to.

“I’ve told you what you need to know,” I said.

Barry continued to hump the back of the chair. “You haven’t told me anything. Nothing that can be proven.”

“You are welcome to speak with the authorities, but right now, I’m mourning the man I loved, and I find it completely fucked up for you to come into my home and accuse me of… What exactly do you think I did?”

He shrugged and looked away. “You let him die,” Barry said.

His tone was so dismissive, so much like a teenager’s response of “Whatever,” that I wanted to punch him in the face. He gave up on the chair and turned back to the window.

“Is this where it happened?” he asked, gesturing to the beach beyond the glass.

The enthralled crowd ambles in a line over the gulf, appearing like saviors walking on water beneath a radiant moon. Amid the perfume of salted air, a deeper, fouler odor rises: the rot of fish; the pulsing stink of seaweed. Straining my vision, I note a glow drawing a path into the gulf, like a mesh of pale white wires. This mesh provides a bridge, over which the throng slowly march.

I shook my head. Sudden misery clotted in my throat, and I squeezed my lips tightly to keep from making a sound. Tears coated my eyes. Pointing to the south, I managed to say, “About half a mile.”

“But you have no proof he was there. He could be in the Bahamas.”

“He was there,” I said. A plea began to chant in my mind: don’t make me say this, don’t make me.

“None of the witnesses could definitively identify my father as one of the victims. Not one. I’ve asked them.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I can.”

The information startled Barry. “What?”

“I saw him on the beach. I saw that thing in the water. I watched George die.”

My panic as I search the apartment is venom, stinging and spreading through my system as I shout George’s name. He never came to bed. He was planning our escape from Galveston and was making a list of people he needed to contact and a set of talking points to keep his story straight. He tells me to get some rest, but I can’t sleep. After thirty minutes, I get up and join him at the dining room table, where I notice he is still dressed. He’s so consumed with his plans that he’s forgotten to indulge his nudity. We chat until he shoos me off so he can concentrate.

An hour later, I again climb out of bed. But George isn’t at the table. He isn’t anywhere in the apartment.

I throw on clothes and run into the hall, but it is empty and quiet. My mind babbles in static bursts, like a radio picking up desperate cries. We had talked about this. This was a possibility we’d considered.

In the grip of the Gibbet Virus, George could enter a trance and wander off. I’d found material about Bermuda and Holly Beach, suggesting the Gibbet Virus could be connected to the vanishing crowds. It struck me as unlikely when he’d suggested it, but I’d learned to take George’s paranoia seriously, if only to keep him grounded.

His cell phone. I call and get voice mail. I call again and again. The device is useless.

Except it isn’t.

At George’s insistence, we’d linked his phone to mine with a tracking application. If he has the phone, if it is receiving a signal, I can find him.

I run down the beach, the distance between the small blue dot on my cell’s screen and another green dot slowly diminishing. In the distance, I see people. They trudge through the sand, smudges in the night. At first I count only three, but as I draw closer to the light swath of sand, I make out so many more.

They converge from the west and north and south. They walk in unison, like robots programmed to a lazy march. Left. Right. Left. Right. Already a large group has gathered at the water’s edge. Their chant pummels the air. The violent syllables share no pitch, but the cadence is matched precisely. It is a tone-deaf chorus, casting their voices at the waves.

And I see George at the water’s edge. He has not reached the entranced throng. He is still thirty yards away from the growing crowd.

I catch up and move in front of him to block his path but he marches into me. His eyes are blank. His throat rumbles with the indecipherable mantra. I struggle with him, but he continues toward the gathering at the water’s edge.

With tears turning cold against my eyes, I punch him in the jaw, and then I tackle him, wrestle him to the sand. George grunts beneath me, voicing the primal chant. Wet, pasty sand grinds into my elbows and forearms.

As I attempt to soothe him, assuring him everything will be okay, the gulf itself rises up.

An enormous blister forms on the water. It forces waves to crash with greater force against the shore on either side of the entranced brigade. The blister keeps growing, but I can’t see what creates it. Maybe I see movement under the water; I can’t be sure. Violent waves crash over George and me, and as I splutter and blow the stinging salt water from my nose, the thing breaches the surface of the gulf.

Far down the beach on the other side of the entranced crowd, another witness screams. More shouts, only a handful really, climb into the air.

It rises, long and flat like the crushed fuselage of an airplane surfacing after years below the waves. The thing is transparent, as if its skin is cellophane encasing the enormous white organs throbbing inside it. My first thought is that it is a species of whale, but I’m quickly convinced it is something different. Something new or extremely old. Spines and lumps cover its back. Triangular fins like those of a giant manta ray lay out like sandbars eighty feet to either side of the bulbous, distorted body. Long black slits run near the center of the face. I see no eyes anywhere on it.

And there are lesser creatures, like crabs with beaked heads, scurrying over the clear, wet tissue. Their pointed legs jab into the meat of the thing for purchase as they panic in the chill night air. One of them skitters down the clear face of the monstrosity and plucks a vaguely glowing gelatinous wad, maybe a jellyfish, from between the black trenches, before racing back over the crown to vanish amid the protuberances and bristles.

As the water settles, the entranced begin to walk into the water, but they don’t submerge. They tread near the surface on a bizarre, glowing mesh, walking toward the monstrous creature as if being summoned. Their chant continues.

Maybe I have caught the virus from George, and this is the kind of horrifying thing he sees when he falls into his trances. Perhaps what plays out before me is not an example of mysterious nature, but rather an amalgam of sickening pieces, cobbled together by my infected mind.

Except it’s not, and I know it’s not.

Barry’s eyes grew wide as I described the Emergence. Certainly he’d seen the video clip one witness had captured that night, but the clip would be a pale, flat fiction compared to an eyewitness account.

“Then, George went crazy. He punched me and kneed my body and convulsed like he was attached to a live wire. I couldn’t hold him down. I tried so hard to keep him with me, but I failed. During the struggle he managed to kick my knee. I didn’t even notice the pain until I tried to stand. I fell on my face and started to crawl after him but I wasn’t fast enough.

“George made it to the bridge just before it broke the surf. The mesh rose into the air, but remained level. Beneath the rising bridge, the water again swelled as the creature notched its head back, like a ship in the final stages of sinking. Its lower jaw emerged from the waves then. Scooped like a canoe, only ten times the size, the creature’s mouth became apparent, and with this came the realization that the marchers who shared George’s affliction walked steadily over this nightmare’s tongue.

“I screamed. I think everyone who wasn’t infected screamed. I’m not sure. I was so focused on George.

“The glowing mesh bridge began to fray at the end and curl skyward behind your father. Filaments pulled away and whipped violently against the purple-black horizon. The crab-like creatures moved in a wave over the bulbous back to swarm the top of the creature’s head, driving their appendages into the face for purchase.

“Then the end of the bridge, the part that lingered near the beach, came fully apart. It unwove, or unraveled. Something. I don’t know. The ends began to snap through the night like a collection of glowing lashes. The bridge bucked upward, sending everyone flying, and the cords creating it came apart completely.

“As the victims fell toward the waiting jaw, the wiry filaments of tongue lashed them. But these strands didn’t just wound. They severed, slicing off limbs and opening torsos. I tried to keep my eyes on him, but George… h-he… remained whole for only a second. Half of his head vanished in a spray of blood, and then he came apart completely. The mechanical hiss of the whipping cords filled the night, but the creature’s food made no sound. Before the first piece of meat hit the thing’s mouth, the people that had marched over the gulf had been reduced to insignificant shreds.

“Standing on the mound of the creature’s face, the lesser crab-like creatures scurried about for bits of meat and drops of fluid cast off by the whipping threads.

“The tongue rewove itself and then retracted quickly into the mouth. Inside the mouth, a long, pale blue wad of tissue streaked through with purple veins rode the interior of the cheek like a blister. It was one of the globsters George had seen.”

During the story’s telling, I’d wandered the room. When it was complete, I found myself near the front door. I stepped to the wall and leaned against if for support as I struggled with the weight that had settled in my chest.

“Did you tell the police?”

“Yes,” I said. My voice cracked, breaking the syllable in two. “I told them.”

“No,” Barry said, shaking his head. “I’ve read every article about that night. You were never quoted.”

“I was one of six witnesses. I didn’t want to talk about what happened, and the other five did. The media didn’t need me.”

“It’s a shame,” Barry said. “You could have banked a fortune if you’d have filmed the Emergence with your phone,” He sounded disappointed, yet smug, as if under the same circumstances he would have succeeded in making a bankable clip from the atrocity. “The only other video is garbage. The guy caught about three seconds of the monster before he started screaming and running off. Can’t see much of anything except the water swelling up and flooding the beach. Stupid fuck.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Stupid.”

We’d witnessed the emergence, or perhaps reemergence, of a life form that could produce spores containing a commutable virus, a virus that appeared to act as some kind of link between its monstrous source and the people it infected. Through this link, the creature could manipulate human behavior, summoning hordes of men and women to its waiting mouth. And this idiot could only think of photo opps and bank accounts.

And it occurred to me in that moment, that while I didn’t know exactly what Barry wanted, the man might not know either. The erratic path he’d taken through the conversation and the non-sequiturs suggested flailing and grasping, a struggle to remain in control. But he had no control here.

When he finally got to his point, it came as no surprise.

“We’re going to fight you on the will,” Barry said.

“I figured you would,” I replied. “You’ll be happy to know I don’t intend to fight back. Make a reasonable counter offer, something that shows even a modicum of respect for your father’s wishes, and I’ll sign off on it.”

“Really?” Barry asked. “Just like that?”

“Yes,” I said. “Your father and I had a lot in common, including the desire to have you and your mother out of our lives forever.”

After a bout of pointless outrage, Barry finally left. I said goodbye to George’s divorce shack and carried the suitcase and boxes to my car. Driving across town, my temper settled and the rage heating my face lessened. I’d never sold my house, though I hadn’t spent more than the occasional minute there since moving in with George. After the Emergence, I was grateful to have a place at the center of the island, away from the water. With the sound of Barry Caldwell’s voice still infecting my ears, I couldn’t wait to be back among my things.

I trudged to the door and inserted the key. The door opened onto gloom. Gray light and black shadows filled the room like heaped corpses reduced to char and ash. The shapes in the room made no sense. Tears smeared the chiaroscuro and I pressed back against the closed door, exhaling deeply as if the air in my lungs was the weight that held me back and not grief.

Reliving that night ruined me. Picturing George on the tongue of that unfathomable creature, blankly marching toward its gullet, played in a loop behind my eyes. The Benny Hill theme accompanied it, only the tune had been slowed to a moaning dirge, every beat in time with George’s footsteps, and those of the other fodder, crossing the beast’s tongue.

At the bedroom door, I wiped my eyes and took several deep breaths.

Some lies are told to protect the ones we love. Others are told to protect ourselves. The lie I’d told Barry Caldwell was both.

Pushing the door open, I forced a smile to my lips and stepped inside.

On the bed, George turned his head to me. He’d never reached the creature’s tongue the night of the Emergence. He’d walked to the beach. He’d struggled. Those things were true, but he’d never gotten away from me. I’d never have let him.

The leather cuffs at his wrists and ankles had held. His gag remained firmly in place. Eyes squinted against the meager, though unexpected light. Then they grew wide.

I sat on the edge of the bed and ran the back of my hand down the side of George’s cheek. Leaning over, I knocked my head lightly against his.

“They won’t come looking for you,” I said. “They’ll offer me a fraction of your estate when they contest the will, and I’ll take it.”

He squeezed his eyes closed and tears spilled down his cheek to pool against my thumbs. Gently, I removed the gag, and he sobbed softly.

“Thank you for this,” he said. “Can we go now?”

“The movers will meet us in Denver. Then we’ll go into the mountains. We’ll disappear.”

The deception had been his idea. In death, his family could no longer hope to control him. His family would get the bulk of his estate, and that’s the only closure they required. With all the disbelief and chaos surrounding the Emergence, and with no conflicting testimony from witnesses, the authorities had accepted my story with little more than a nod.

Now, we could disappear. We could build something new without the accumulation of his life littering our happiness. We’d decided to move far away from the Gulf, from all connected masses of water.

The Emergences were becoming more frequent, and those afflicted with Gibbet’s remained at risk. The victims still blacked out. They still wandered, requiring constant observation or restraint. They still danced.

“So, we’re okay?” George asked.

His hopeful eyes lost their life and turned hard. The grunting chant bubbled low in his throat, and I managed to get the gag in place before the violent syllables bellowed forth. I pulled away from him, but kept one hand on his cheek as he ranted into the muffling fabric.

“We’re okay,” I told him. “We’re just fine.”