The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Simon Strantzas says of “Alexandra Lost”: “The story may take its title from Leonard Cohen, but it takes its trappings from old Howard Phillips. I found myself thinking of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ and of the essential salts that so many are reduced to in that tale, and I began to wonder about how much salt there was in the world, and the part it played. There’s an inevitability in ‘Alexandra Lost’ as there is in the best of Lovecraft, and a suspicion that we are all cast in a play we don’t know the ending to, and our lines are being written by something beyond our comprehension. I hoped to explore that here, while also drilling into the head of someone who has never been anything but lost. Perhaps it’s that, the sense of never belonging, that cuts most to the heart of Lovecraft. All I can say for sure is it cuts most to the heart of me.”

The author of four collections of weird and strange fiction, including the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press), Simon Strantzas is also the editor of Aickman’s Heirs (Undertow Publications), Shadow’s Edge (Gray Friar Press), and guest editor of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3. His writing has been reprinted in various “best of” anthologies; has been translated into other languages; and has been nominated for the British Fantasy Award. He lives with his wife in Toronto, Ontario.

Alexandra Lost

The sunlight through the windshield bounced and refracted, filling Alexandra Leaving’s eyes with wriggling stars. Leonard drove his Chevrolet across upstate New York with his foot pressed firmly to the floor, and though she pleaded with him to slow down, he met her protests with further, more dangerous weaving. She eventually stopped asking, and instead kept her eyes focused on the map.

“How much longer do you figure before we reach the coast?” he said.

She checked the clock.

“It’s about ten hours from Buffalo, but we hit that traffic so now I have no idea.”

The map in her hands was the most important thing she owned. She clung to it: her tether as she drifted out into the unknown. She would not use a GPS — technology could not be trusted to tell her where she was going. Only a paper map made sense, something on which she could chart their route, drawing for hours before they left. Every hour on the page marked; she knew where they were supposed to be each step of the way. Her father had become lost when she was seven; lost and never found. She was terrified the same might happen to her. Having their journey carefully plotted made her feel safer. But she hadn’t anticipated how fast Leonard would drive, and how that speed would compromise the work she’d done. “We’ll get there faster,” he assured her, but it was impossible — they didn’t have a clear idea where they were. If they missed the ramp to the next highway, she worried they would never realize it and simply drive on forever.

“There’s an end to the highway,” Leonard said, reading her thoughts. “As long as we keep driving we’ll get there. At the end of every highway there’s an ocean waiting to be found.”

She smiled, anxious. For a moment, she forgot how much of a mistake she’d made. For a moment, she remembered why she’d let Leonard take her so far from home. She did it for him. To prove that despite the anxieties and worries that clouded her head, she was good enough for him — even if she didn’t believe it. When he realized she had never seen the ocean, he spontaneously decided he had to take her, and she pretended she was spontaneous enough to go.

“I read this article about a couple who just flew off to Europe for a few months without packing anything but their phones and a charger,” she said, explaining all the research she’d done before they left. She saw his lip quiver, but she wasn’t sure of the cause. “They bought new toothbrushes wherever they went, washed their clothes in strangers’ houses, and just met as many people as they could. It was like there was this whole world of people working together to help them get by. It was surprising.”

“Surprising, how?”

“I don’t know,” she said. She ran her hand over her shorts to dry it. “I guess I asked myself if I’d do the same — if I’d help a stranger like that.”

“I think you probably would.”

She didn’t say anything. She wanted to believe he was right even if it sounded unlikely. But more importantly, she wanted him to continue believing that sort of thing about her. It was important he not know what kind of things dwelt within her head. He wouldn’t understand. No one had ever really understood. Not her father when he was around, and certainly not her mother once he was gone. “My little lost girl” was what he’d called her as he held her tight in his arms. They sat in their warm backyard as the sun set earlier each summer day. “My little lost girl,” he said, and squeezed her the way no one had squeezed her since. And she didn’t know what he meant, not until he was gone. Then she knew the feeling well.

She looked out the window at the passing scenery. She and Leonard had not spoken in some time, and she liked the quiet rhythm of the wheels on the road. Between the Chevrolet and the horizon the grass dipped and sloped upward, and tiny farms dotted the distant landscape. Farther still lay a series of hills obscuring what lay beyond. All she knew of that land was it was occupied by giants. Wind turbines, more that a dozen in a row and sprouting upward, blades moving in slow endless circles. They stood so far away that Alexandra could not fully grasp their enormity.

“You can tell how big they are by their spin,” Leonard said. “If they were closer, the blades would be moving a lot slower. Those turbines are huge — you just can’t tell how huge things are from so far away.”

“I can feel how huge they are, though, if that makes any sense. They make my head loopy.”

They almost missed the ramp onto the interstate. Unending miles of highway banked with forest, giant trees too thick to see between, covered in oranges and reds and golds like a burning sunset. Alexandra felt insignificant beside them, no better than the insects crushed against the Chevrolet’s windshield. When those trunks petered out, she saw, in the distance, the glint of cars moving away.

Her map — she needed to consult her map.

There, the forest was demarcated with a faint brown line, and almost upon it the blue ink of her pen where she’d traced their route onward. She looked from the map, afraid it was too late, and saw the green sign on the shoulder pass in an instant, hanging branches covering its warning. The ramp was imminent.

“Here. You want this exit here!”

“What?” Leonard slurred as though awoken from a dream. Alexandra watched the exiting lanes rush toward them. Panic seized her.

“This is it! This is the ramp. Take it. Take it. Take it.”

Leonard snapped awake, pulled the wheel hard after the marked lanes had already split. A symphony of honks trailed, and the Chevrolet shook from the forces pulling it in multiple directions. Alexandra was flung aside as the car wrenched itself into the proper lane, and as Leonard tried to straighten its path, the tail began to wag. He spun the wheel all the way to the left, then again all the way to the right, trying to keep the car from skidding as the horns blared louder. Back and forth, back and forth, the tail swung until finally, with only a minor tremor, he regained control over the car. He accelerated away from the complaining motorists.

Once safely out of danger, Leonard turned with another grin.

“I hope we didn’t go the wrong way,” he said.

Alexandra did not understand Leonard’s obsession with the ocean. He hadn’t been born on a coast; he had lived in the same small dry town as Alexandra long before she met him. The ocean never arose during their courtship’s early months, and why would it? It was not typical dinner conversation. And yet, he seemed aghast when she reveled in passing that she had never seen the ocean herself. His dumb silence eventually gave way to incredulity, and it was from that point that his dreams became consumed with taking her there.

“Wait until you see it,” he promised. “It’s so immense you’ll feel completely insignificant.”

The idea terrified her.

Water was never something Alexandra was comfortable around. Small amounts of it for cooking and bathing didn’t bother her, but once the bodies became larger — fountains, pools, lakes — her anxiety increased. It wasn’t a phobia — she did not fear water like some feared snakes or spiders — but instead it seemed to whisper to her whenever she was close. The words were too quiet to make out, but they left her with an unfathomable urge to submit herself to it. To walk bare-footed into the waves and let them consume her. Mind. Body. Soul. The water unnerved her because the water wanted her submission, wanted her to lose herself to its power, and the sensation that swirled in her head was as suffocating as any drowning.

They pulled off the interstate for dinner at a small unnamed restaurant, dark branches draping over its burnt-out sign. Alexandra folded her map carefully and placed it in her bag where it would be safe at hand. Leonard watched her, the hint of amusement twitching in his lips, but said nothing. When she stepped from the car Alexandra realized the parking lot was nearly empty, and inside the restaurant, it seemed no more than three of its dark wooden tables were occupied. The rest had places set and menus out, prepared for occupation by a host of souls who would never arrive. When the teenage hostess finally greeted Alexandra and Leonard, her hair tied in a tight bun against the back of her head, Leonard immediately asked where all the customers were. The girl shrugged as she marked their table off her list.

“I guess not as many families are traveling right now since it’s so close to school.”

Leonard nodded, satisfied, but the hostess didn’t wait long enough to see it.

She sat them in a booth by the window. Alexandra saw the western sky and the sun change color like autumn leaves.

“I still can’t believe you’ve never been to the ocean,” Leonard said over his menu, not lifting his eyes from the rows of barbecued meat and pasta. “You’ve never felt the urge? Not even once?”

She shook her head.

“It’s never really been a priority, I guess. I’ve never been much of a traveler.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. I feel like I’d be happy if all I did was travel. You know: get on a plane and hop from one place to another — like that couple in the story you told me about earlier. Maybe stick around for a few days. When I was just out of school, I took a trip around Europe. It was fantastic!”

She nodded, not sure how to explain that she’d never felt the same drive. The idea left her queasy. Already, she felt so lost, so untethered, that the only way she could hang on was to surround herself with the familiar, the comfortable. At home, she knew where her favorite restaurants were, where to get the clothes she liked. At home, she knew how far it was to the office and how long it took her to get back in the evening. At home, she was safe, and the constant gnawing fear that seemed so much worse at night, in the dark, behind her closed eyes — that fear that she was anything but safe, adrift in the void of the unfathomable universe — was a muted shout from deep within. The terrors squirmed inside of her, but she was able to keep them contained.

Leonard couldn’t understand. He clearly enjoyed the sensation.

“What’s great about Europe is how old everything is.” He looked at her, but his eyes saw something more. “We don’t have that same sense of history here. You walk around a European city, you feel part of how ancient everything is. It’s all stood for so long you begin to wonder if it was there before there were people to see it. The old world is so close at hand, yet it’s so distant and unknowable. You walk by buildings with the most beautiful and ornate carvings — even those half in ruin — and they seem so impossible. Yet, there they stand, and have stood through riots, revolts, and marches; man has done so many things by uniting into a single force, both for good and evil. It’s amazing to be in touch with all of that.”

“I’ve always thought about going,” Alexandra lied, “but I’ve just never done it. Maybe one day.”

“We should totally go. I’d love to show you around. I think you’d really get a kick out of it.”

She smiled. Then the waitress arrived with their drinks.

“Are you sure this is right?”

They’d driven for an hour after leaving the restaurant, and in that time traffic had thinned and the dark orange sun had reached the horizon. The encroaching dusk only heightened her panicked anxiety.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We’re still in upstate New York, but I can’t figure out where. Nothing matches the map.” Worries swam in her head in frenzy, and she couldn’t stop herself from feeling she’d made horrendous mistake in her calculation, and her precious map was wrong. If that were true, she truly was adrift, and the feeling of the earth widening around her made her limbs stiffen, her breath wheeze. If Leonard feared the same, his face did not betray it, covered as it was by deepening shadows.

“Maybe it’s time to pull over for the night. We can’t be that far from the coast — maybe a few hours? Let’s stop at a motel and get a new start tomorrow when we have light.”

It took another twenty minutes to find a motel, and by that time the highway was so dark the motel’s glowing red sign shone brighter than the moon. Leonard pulled into the parking lot, and helped Alexandra out of the car. After traveling for so long, she felt unsteady, as though her body was still hurtling forward along the highway, and it took a few steps before she saw the world through human eyes again.

The man behind the counter couldn’t have been more than eighteen, his face spotted and blotched, his curly hair shaved near the temples. He was courteous, but he was bored and tired and went through the motions because he had to. Even when, for her peace of mind if nothing else, Alexandra asked him to show her where on the map the hotel was, he did so with a vague point, and wouldn’t be pressed to do more. He seemed more interested in whatever he’d been doing as they arrived, and when she looked over the reception desk partition while he entered Leonard’s name into the computer, she saw textbooks lying spine-flat beside the phone. The titles were upside down, but the pictures looked like star charts.

“So you do know something about maps. Are you studying astronomy?”

He didn’t bother looking away from the computer screen. He simply and unceremoniously slid his open notebook to cover the page. She looked at Leonard, who shrugged nervously but said nothing to the boy. Alexandra hated herself for backing down. She even thanked the boy when he gave them the key.

Later, in the motel room, she remained fuming at the small wooden desk, trying to retrace the route on her map. All the lines looked the same to her, all the roads feeding into the highway like rivulets. Leonard off-handedly dismissed her unhappiness.

“He was probably worried you were from head office or something, checking to make sure he was doing paid work and not school work.”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking from her map as he buttoned his shirt. “It didn’t feel like that’s what he was worried about.”

“Well, what else could it be?”

She didn’t know. And, she supposed Leonard was right. It didn’t matter. “All that matters is that we’re here, together,” he said. He ran his fingers through her hair and she put down her pen and looked at him. She touched the side of his warm face, felt the stubble scratch her fingers. He took her hand.

The room was small. The only other furniture was the uncomfortable queen-sized bed, and its springs creaked with each small movement. Leonard suggested they move the blankets onto the floor, where it was quieter, and it was lying there that he moved his hand under the front of her nightshirt and placed it on her bare breast. He then lifted himself onto his other arm and placed his mouth over hers.

He tasted of salt, but mixed with the sweetness of his saliva Alexandra didn’t mind. His tongue found hers, invading her mouth tentatively, and the flesh was rough and soft and made the hairs along the back of her neck stand. Her mind drifted for a moment, swaying as though in a dream, and she had to focus herself to remain in the present with Leonard and not recede into her crowded thoughts.

Leonard’s face twisted as he pushed into her, as though willing himself to occupy the same physical space, to join with her on a quantum level. Yet though she bit her lip and arched her back, and though she felt her flesh warm to the point of fire, she felt herself powerlessly being pulled away from him all the same, cast backward into her mind, a powerless witness to events unfolding. Leonard’s breath hitched, his brow knitted, he cried some unintelligible word, and she felt the warmth of him flooding into her, coursing through her body like an violent tide, reaching each extremity. Her fingers vibrated, her scalp raised. Leonard continued thrusting afterward, but she couldn’t tell for how long while lost in her muddled head. When he finally rolled off, out of breath, she had returned to the surface of her thoughts, and felt aching sadness, but she did her best to throttle it as he perched his head on his bent arm and brushed the hair from her face with the other. He said it was so he could see her better, but she saw nothing in the dark.

“Are you enjoying the trip so far?”

“I think so,” she said. “I like that we’re doing it together. I don’t think I could have done it alone.”

It wasn’t until she spoke the words that she realized how true they were. Her father’s leaving had done more to keep her tied down than anything else, and she had succumbed until she was no different than those giant shadows of slow-spinning blades she and Leonard seen fixed to the horizon, in motion yet unmoving. They were the reason she let Leonard take her away from where it was safe. If she didn’t try to rebel against the sickness she felt the farther from home she traveled, he would surely be the next person lost to her. So she followed him into the unknown, with only her thin overdrawn map as protection, and did her best to endure.

Leonard stroked her hair as the two lay in the dark of the motel room. He whispered to her encouragingly, trying to ease her terror, and she struggled to concentrate on what he said and not get lost in her own anxieties.

“I keep thinking about how much you’re going to love the ocean. You’ll absolutely freak when you see it — especially if we take a boat out to watch the whales. I went once before with a— well, she was a girl I knew. It was a few years ago. Anyway, going out on the ocean is a trip, pure and simple.” He paused, uncertain he should continue, giving her a chance to ask about who that other woman was. She wondered how many women he’d taken there, how many before her had there been. But Alexandra was succumbing to the warmth of his touch, and his droning voice. She didn’t want to disturb it by speaking.

“Even if you don’t see any whales, you see all sorts of other crazy things. When I was out there, I just happened to be on the boat with a marine biologist, and she pretty much became the de facto tour guide for us. There was this school of fish . . . Have you ever seen a huge school of fish before? Maybe on television? It was larger than that. It was massive. All those sleek black bodies slicing through the water, all moving as one.” He moved his hand away as if to illustrate the size, but even if it weren’t too dark to see, Alexandra did not open her eyes. “They say the reason a school of fish can react so quickly is because they act together, each fish part of a single super-mind. They’re much more of a hive than bees are, I think. The school stretched out so far I couldn’t see its edges, as though they encompassed the sea — millions of lithe bodies becoming one giant creature beneath the waves — all sharing a single thought, all using a single voice. It was so beautiful. I really hope we get to do that — go out on the water. You have no idea what it’s like!”

Leonard’s disembodied voice continued whispering nonsense to her in the dark. It was warm and comforting, so she let him ramble on as the day’s journey finally found her.

In her dreams, she and Leonard drove the length of an extended highway bridge, flanked on both sides by endless water. The wheels hummed as they passed over the asphalt, so filling the car with volume she heard nothing else. Not the radio, not Leonard beside her, not the black shapes that crested the water’s turbulent surface before submerging once more. She heard nothing but the teeth-gnashing drone. Even her shouts were inaudible over the noise. Lost and panicked, she felt they’d been driving that road forever. They were moving too fast, and when she looked down she saw her own foot pressing the pedal to the floor of the car. Reflexively, she lifted it, and the throbbing in her head intensified in response. The only way to quell her nausea was to press the pedal harder, move faster, burn along the solitary bridge. She looked beside her but the passenger seat was empty; she alone was driving. She alone was crying. And she drove. And drove. And drove.

And she did not wake well rested. She felt drained; her swollen, tired eyes nearly impossible to open. At some point before morning Alexandra had moved into the bed, dragging a single blanket with her, and from beneath it she watched Leonard perform his morning rituals. She rolled her sour tongue and wished she had some water, though the notion of drinking anything made her ill.

“Good morning,” Leonard said. “I’m pretty much ready if you want to hop in the shower now.”

“I think I might lie here a bit longer. I’m not ready to get up yet.”

“Er . . . okay,” he said. “But we’ve got to check-out, so don’t leave it too long.”

“Why? I thought we had until eleven.”

He stopped his preparations to look at her. “What time do you think it is?”

She rolled over and checked the display on her cell phone. The digits didn’t immediately make sense. How could it be nearly half-past ten?

“Why did you let me sleep so long?”

“Let you? How was I supposed to stop you? You wouldn’t budge this morning. That must have been some dream.”

Fragments surfaced in her memory, flashes of that expansive body, the foreboding of what lay ahead. She felt restless and agitated, possessed by a tension nearly at its limit

“Yeah, it was pretty crazy,” she said, then stretched her arms as far as she could and sat up. The discomfort in her head worsened. “Ugh. I feel horrible.”

“Take your shower. You’ll feel better once we eat.”

She rubbed her palms against her face, doubtful.

Out the Chevrolet’s window the trees had returned, though they kept a cautious distance from the highway. Leaves slipped off in the breeze in a steady stream, golds and scarlets in long spiraling chains through the air. Alexandra and Leonard continued eastward, and with each mile traveled the tether Alexandra felt tightening since she awoke, the tether to her home in the dry country, stretched thinner and thinner. Staring out the window, trying to keep her eyes open while her skull tightened, she felt something like a soft pop, and her vision filled with light. Somewhere ahead, somewhere distant, somewhere future, a soft gentle roar echoed. The waves, the surf, the vastness. Leonard was right. There was power in the ocean. She heard its whisper for the first time, urging her onward. Fingers wriggling inside her head.

“How long before we get there?” she asked. Her condition hadn’t improved since waking, but the discomfort had become a dull ache behind her eyes. Her mouth parched, head throbbing, she did her best to hide it from Leonard.

“Only a few hours. Maybe two? You’re the one with the map.”

She nodded and looked down at it, but the brightness of the sun seemed to flare, and no matter how she squinted she couldn’t see the lines she had drawn. Everything was escaping, fluttering into the ether, and no matter how desperately she tried to catch and draw it back they merely slithered through her fingers.

“I know you have everything plotted out,” Leonard said, nodding his head toward her without taking his eyes from the road or the cars he was weaving among, “but it’s amazing how much has come back to me. I remember that hill over there—” He pointed off to the left at a large incline, the peak of which was a new horizon across the cloudless sky; “—and how shadows moved across it. This place, where we are right at this second, is so beyond real that I can barely process it. Some people say there are extra senses? This must be what they’re talking about, because I can sense how much we belong together, on this journey, right now.”

Alexandra nodded, though barely understood him as he continued. The pain rattling through her skull intensified. But instead of dulling and distancing her from reality, it drew the world into sharper focus. The rush of the ocean a hundred miles away echoed in her crowded head, quelling her lifelong displacement and isolation. The car traveled quicker toward the coast, quicker than she’d thought possible, and while Leonard spoke Alexandra’s eyes returned to the over-bright map crumpled in her hands that was coming into focus. The folds condensed the lines she had plotted, shortening the distance between where their trip had begun and their final destination. The truth of the journey slipped into focus, and Alexandra finally understood. Eased of the nag of dislocation, the knowledge of where she was — of when she was — became clear. And it felt good to finally understand. Beneath the discomfort of her throbbing head she wondered if that was how the rest of the world felt. Present. Aware.

Cars whizzed past as the Chevrolet raced across the highway, barely slowing for the austere toll booths. Leonard’s face was serene in the bathing sunlight, while Alexandra’s was covered by jittering hands working her throbbing temples. When the pain became too unbearable, Alexandra asked if they could pull into a rest stop so she could use the washroom, and there she splashed water on her face and took some chalky tablets, but the endeavor did nothing. She remained in excruciating pain, and yet was terrified Leonard might stop if he learned the truth. The risk was near incalculable, so instead, with the taste of bland chalk still on her tongue, she smiled and told him everything was fine. But even as she did she barely saw his face behind the stars that had gathered in her vision. His muted voice asked her twice if she were okay, and Alexandra responded with forced casualness. She hoped she didn’t look as pale as her reflection in the washroom mirror has suggested, or speak with the slur she certainly heard. But if Leonard noticed either, he was too polite to say, and they were soon back in the car speeding toward the ocean.

The highway signs increased with the amount of traffic, forcing them to slow down, but it was clear they were closing in on the coast. Commuters clogged the lanes beneath a sun risen to near its height, and the heat in the car steadily increased. Leonard seemed unbothered, but Alexandra had to remove her jacket and cardigan in an effort to cool down. The spasms in her head multiplied.

“The earliest we can check into the hotel is three o’clock, so we might as well go to the ocean first. There a little town off the water called Bearskin Point that would be perfect. It’s where I caught the whale-watching boat, so we can find out when it runs as well.”

Alexandra’s headache knotted itself, but she kept her face calm. “Sure,” she said. It was all she could manage without betraying distress.

After a time, Leonard stopped asking questions as he navigated the merging highways to Bearskin Point. Alexandra looked down at her map through squinting eyes as the lines contorted and skewed. Each time she thought the car was off-course, a landmark passed suggesting the opposite. She asked Leonard how he knew where he was going.

“I don’t. I’m just following the signs.” But even with the throb in her head, she knew there were no such signs. The map had been important until then, the foundation on which she’d been able to survive for so long. But the ocean, too, called to her, its quiet voice growing, and she didn’t know which she could trust.

Leonard drove on with unerring confidence, at once quieter and more intense. Alexandra’s face was turned out the side window, watching passing cars drag boats away from closed summer homes, her face grimaced in pain. She had traveled too far from home, her tether stretched near its breaking point, and as Leonard drove faster that tether continued to stretch thinner still.

She asked herself why she didn’t speak up, why she suffered quietly. Racing thoughts screamed something was wrong, but they were buried deep in a tangle of pain, slipping away with every second the Chevrolet closed in on the vast ocean. She had spent so many years — too many years — cooped in her small dry town, never moving beyond its imaginary walls, a bird in a cage. It was only as she approached the Atlantic and felt the difference in the air, the openness in the contrasted sky, that she began to suspect there were bars.

She had never felt so untethered, and it was terrifying. And yet, for all her freedom, she felt anything but lost. Her map was clenched to her chest, a symbol of her clarity; her life was the map, laid out in an exact path, the end-point of its journey set. The inevitability was itself a structure to which she was bound and soothed, and she felt no more in control of it than a bottle in the surf.

The transition from highway to street was seamless, and from there to side road even more so. Leonard guided the car through turns and stop signs without once stepping on the brakes. The tires squealed with each jerk of the wheel, and the momentum reignited Alexandra’s disguised pains, but she bore through them. Despite the pull back to where she had come from, back to where her father had stroked her hair one last time before becoming lost for good, she was convinced that her freedom lay in seeing the ocean, that it was only that sight, witnessed until then solely in dreams, that would ultimately and finally find herself. Leonard had to be right. Once she was able to stand in the water and look eastward toward where the sun emerged, she would finally stop running away from the world, and stop being afraid of running toward something better. On facing that immensity, her longing pains would reach their end.

Bearskin Point appeared no different than any small town she had seen, but Alexandra’s head swam so that she no longer trusted her vision. Behind the white and grey façades, she saw a large shape loom, its wide wings stretched outward, but in an instant the shape dispersed, the clouds that comprised it pushed apart by warm winds.

Leonard drove the car slowly along the short road to Bearskin Point, passing small stores with local crafts and paintings displayed in the dark store front windows, the warped glass reflecting strange shapes and colors moving. No one walked the abandoned road, and Alexandra wondered if she and Leonard were the only travelers left in the world. A sharp pain punctuated the thought — a charge through her head that Alexandra was unable to contain. The smallest moan emerged.

“Not much farther,” Leonard said.

Bearskin Point was a small circular outcropping into the ocean. Despite her draw toward it, Alexandra traveled the remainder with eyes closed, struggling to contain her encroaching delirium. Her tether was stretched to a thin gossamer thread, and she felt every tug on it, every twang. With clenched, bloodless fingers around the car door handle, she felt beads of sweat slip down her neck, steam off her chest. That thread was so taught, so painful, that it blocked the vision from her eyes. Blind, her body felt it continuous motion, falling into the depths of nothing, fading from a spiraling world of teeming shadows.

“We’re here!”

Leonard’s voice jarred her awake. She opened her eyes, though initially wasn’t certain she had.

She stepped out of the car onto her shaking leg. Leonard rushed to help, but she remained upright, never prying her eyes from what was laid out before her. All pain and discomfort forgotten.

“It’s . . .” She couldn’t think of words to follow.

The surface of the water stretched outward, encompassing the horizon. There was nothing else; only a line that met the clouded sky. It seemed unreal, the dark contrast of elements separated by that thin sliver; it went on and on forever. And, yet, there was something else out there, something more, moving toward them. She could not see it, but it was coming. Something large.

“Leonard, can you—” she looked at the wasteland of rocks between her and the water. “Will you help me down to the beach? I don’t think I can do it alone.”

“Yes,” he said, and held out his hand.

They took the first step onto the rocks together, then one at a time as he led her down to the ocean’s edge. With each successive step, she looked at the water’s calm surface, knowing what was out there was ever closer.

“Careful you don’t get your foot trapped,” Leonard said. “These rocks can be dangerous.”

“Okay,” she said.

It took ten minutes to reach the edge of the water, and when Alexandra’s foot first sank into the wet sand she felt an electric jolt travel through her. The air smelled as it did after a thunderstorm, wet and cold, and the standing hairs sent shivers over her arms. All sound ceased; she simply existed, as much a part of that place as were the rocks and sand and air. As much as the water and everything moving under its surface. She was at one with everything as she had never been before. Not in her own home, not in the arms of her father, not beneath any lover or among any friends. She struggled for a word that described it all, but as soon as she had it, it was gone, swimming away.

She released Leonard’s hand and stepped forward, each foot leaving a fading print in the wet sand. She stepped to the lapping edge of the ocean and then continued onward — the water rising first to her ankle, then to her knee, then halfway up her thigh. She stood alone in the water, watching the endless horizon, waiting for what was to come.

It did not take long.

She doubled over, unable to keep upright as waves of excruciating pain traveled from the frigid water around her legs. Leonard stood behind her — somewhere on the land or perhaps holding her, she couldn’t be sure — and she tried to scream but no words emerged. Or, if they did, they were inaudible over the rushing sound of the surf churning beneath her. It was as though she were being lanced by a burning metal rod forced though her skull one inch at a time, burning hotter the further it traveled. Her head was thick with pressure, and behind her tightly squeezed lids stars refracted and filled her vision. There were shapes in the endless field, enormous masses that moved in the distance, eldritch things that watched from the depths of a betweenspace she only now saw was connected to the ocean, the primal force of the drowning earth. And behind them all she saw him on the horizon, elephantine arms reaching out to draw her in close. Alexandra forced her eyes open, unable to bear any more, and the tears rushed forward, falling into the water. There, in the waves, each transformed into a silvery-sleek creature that darted away. More tears fell, more creatures darted, as though a tear between worlds had opened behind her eyes, and through it fell children of another place, all of whom were streaming toward the great thing that approached from out in the distant depths, something no doubt older than the earth, than even those ancient things behind her watering eyes. They swam forward in the churning ocean and she didn’t know why, didn’t know what it all meant, didn’t know where Leonard was or how many times he’d been there before, or when she had been impregnated with the horror. So many questions, burning inside her cracking head, so many tears falling she could not stop, and she prayed the pain would end and that she could once more be blind to the foulness she was a portal for. But she knew it would not happen; she knew it was too late. Whatever was inside her, whatever emerged from the beyond, would not stop until she was consumed, transformed from flesh and blood back to the essential salts that had formed her, left to mix and dilute, returning home at last to find herself within the great ocean of tears beneath which some unfathomable future approached.