The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

With “Umbilicus” Damien Angelica Walters “wanted to subvert the traditional mythos by writing a Lovecraftian story based on the maiden, mother, and crone archetype instead of an entity like Cthulhu. I asked myself: What if Cthulhu wasn’t the only deity who slumbered beneath the waves? What would happen if another, older, deity woke, determined to take her rightful place? What might she unleash upon the world?”

Her work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Cassilda’s Song, Nightmare, Black Static, and Apex. Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, was released in 2015 from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, in 2016 from Dark House Press.

Umbilicus

Tess places the last of Emily’s clothes in a box, seals it with a strip of packing tape, and brushes her hands on her shorts. Stripped of the profusion of books and games and art supplies, Emily’s room is a ghost.

The box goes into a corner in the living room with the other things earmarked for donation. In her own bedroom, she stands before the wall papered with newspaper clippings, notes, torn pages from old books, and turns away just as quickly, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and index finger.

The small air-conditioning unit in the window growls like a cat that swallowed a dozen angry hornets; a similar sound sticks in her throat. Everyone has to say goodbye eventually, her mother said once from a hospital bed, three weeks before her heart failed for the last time.

With her mouth set in a thin line, Tess begins to remove the thumb tacks, letting the paper seesaw to the floor, catching glimpses of the pictures — a school photo with an awkward smile, her own face caught in grief’s contortion, a stretch of beach — and the words — depression in children, somnambulism, unexplained juvenile behavior — and the headlines — Suicide? . . . Not Sleepwalking, Her Mother Says . . . Body Not Found, Presumed Dead . . . Presumed Dead . . . Presumed Dead . . .

She drops the thumbtacks from her palm onto her dresser and rips the clippings free, tearing them into pieces before she lets them go. When the wall is nothing more than a study of pinprick holes in plaster and the floor a mess of tattered white, she grabs a dustpan and brush and a garbage bag. Sweeps everything in, refusing to pause even when Emily’s face appears.

Utter madness to try and find reason in the unexplainable, and Tess knew, without a doubt, she’d never find an answer. Let the doctors claim Emily was depressed — ignoring everything Tess told them to the contrary — and committed suicide, but they weren’t there that night. They didn’t see what happened, the way the ocean receded—

(the shape in the water)

—the way Emily kept walking, murmuring a word too low for Tess to discern.

She pulls a face. Ties a knot in the bag. Emily was only seven years old; the word suicide wasn’t even in her vocabulary.

Tess tosses the bag near the front door on her way into the kitchen to wash her hands. On the living room television, a commercial is listing side effects for a medicine to treat high cholesterol, side effects the stuff of nightmares. Background noise, its only purpose to swallow the silence.

“Mommy?”

The voice is muffled, but Tess would know it anywhere. She whirls around, soap bubbles dripping from her fingers, her heart racing madness in the bone-cage of her ribs, and pads into the living room.

“Mommy?”

Now it’s coming from behind; Tess races back into the kitchen. “Emily?”

Nothing but the rush of water, then she hears another voice, too low to decipher, speaking under — inside — the water. Her stomach clenches.

Not possible, not possible at all — Emily is gone and all the pennies in the world tossed into a fountain won’t bring her back — but Tess grips the edge of the sink hard enough to hurt. “Emily?” she whispers.

Only water splashing on stainless steel answers. Reason kicks in; Tess turns the faucet off and steps back from the sink, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. Through tears, she glares at the boxes piled in the corner — a sandcastle built by sorrow’s hands.

From the kitchen window, she can see a small playground just beyond the parking lot. Two children are on the jungle gym, their mothers sitting on a nearby bench. Occam’s Razor, Tess thinks. Sound travels in odd ways.

With one hand in her pocket and the other clutching Emily’s favorite teddy bear, Tess takes the narrow pathway leading to the beach. Her apartment, the second floor of a converted house, is far away from the tourist trade, and the night is quiet and calm.

The soft whisper of her footsteps in the sand is masked by the susurration of the night waves kissing the shore. Once upon a time she loved the ocean, loved the feel of sand on her skin, loved the sound and smell of the surf — it’s the reason she moved to Ocean City the summer after her nineteenth birthday, why she stayed after David took off, leaving her with no warning, no money, and three-month old Emily — but now it’s a thing to be tolerated, endured.

She stops well above the waterline, afraid if the sea comes in contact with her skin she’ll follow it out, screaming for Emily as she did that night a long year ago. Only this time she won’t get knocked back to shore; this time, the waves will pull her in, and she’ll let them.

After a time, she lifts the teddy bear to her nose, breathes in, but it no longer smells of Emily, merely terrycloth and fiberfill.

“I’m sorry, punkin. I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice hitching. “I love you.” She hurls the teddy bear as far as she can; it bobs on the surface for several long moments, and then the waves suck it down.

Clouds scuttle across the moon, turning the ocean black. The weight of the air changes, a pressure Tess senses in her ears. The thunder of the waves striking the shore amplifies, and a stabbing cramp sends Tess doubling over. Her vision blurs, the salt tang of the ocean floods her nose and mouth, and a sensation of swelling fills her abdomen.

She staggers back. Presses both hands to her belly, feels the expected flatness there. The clouds shift again; something dark and impossibly large moves deep in the water, and she flees from the beach without a backward glance.

It’s all in your head, she tells herself. All in your head.

When she gets close to the apartment, the bright end of a lit cigarette glows from the shadows of the front porch. Tess waves a still-shaking hand; the orange glow makes a responding arc, but neither she nor her neighbor says a word.

Tess slides a box into the trunk of her car, wipes sweat from her brow, and heads back to the house. Her neighbor is sitting in her usual spot — the battered lawn chair in the corner of the porch — with a lit cigarette in her hand and a glass by her side. Gauging by the bright sheen in Vicky’s eyes, the liquid in the glass isn’t water.

“What are you up to, lady?” Vicky asks, her smile turning her face into a tissue paper crumple.

“Getting ready to go to the thrift store to drop some stuff off.” Tess cups her elbows in her palms, hunches her shoulders. “I finally boxed up some of Em’s things.”

Vicky nods. Exhales a plume of smoke. “Good on you. It might help, you know?”

“I hope so. I kept putting it off, kept thinking I should leave everything the way it was, just in case, but I guess I’m ready to try and let her go. That’s why I went to the beach the other night, to—

(see the shape in the water)

—say goodbye.” She touches her stomach. Swallows the unease.

“Grief is a bitch of a monster.” Vicky stubs out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. “You think it’ll kill you, but it’s a hell of a lot more clever than that because it lets you live. Only thing you can do is give it the finger and move on as best you can. Only thing anyone can do.” She shakes her glass, rattling the slivers of ice inside. “I need a refill. Want one?”

“How about a rain check for later?”

“Absolutely.”

Tess strips off her dusty clothes in front of her full-length mirror. She’s all arms and legs and narrow hips and small breasts and her belly has no loose skin, no “pooch” that says a child once sheltered there.

Morning sickness lingering well into her second trimester and a waitressing job kept her from gaining too much weight, but now she wishes she’d gorged on ice cream and chocolate and gained fifty pounds, slashing her skin with stretch marks in the process and turning her breasts to sagging teardrops.

She pushes out her stomach, runs her hand over the curve, remembering the fluttering of butterfly wings and later, the heel of a tiny foot, the point of an elbow.

The air goes heavy and thick with the smell of the ocean. Beneath her palms, her skin ripples, and she yanks her hands away. She feels the tremor again, from the inside, and makes a sound low in her throat, then both the smell and the sensation vanish. Frowning, she pokes her abdomen with her fingertips and doesn’t stop until her skin is patterned with tiny red marks like overlapping scales.

When Tess stands, the world swims around her, and she grabs the porch railing with both hands, swaying on her feet.

Vicky laughs in commiseration, not mockery. “Need some help?”

“No,” Tess says, cupping one hand to her forehead, although it doesn’t stop anything from moving. “I got it.”

She takes each step to her apartment with careful measure, ascending one tread at a time the way Emily did as a toddler. Tess can’t remember the last time she drank this much; long before she got pregnant, of that much she’s sure. Thankfully, she left her door unlocked because sliding a key right-side up in the lock would require a bit more dexterity than she’s currently capable of.

Not bothering to remove her clothes, she drops down on her bed, leaving one foot on the floor — she can’t remember if that truly prevents a hangover or if it’s an old wives’ tale — and squeezes her eyes shut. The gray lure of sleep begins to tug.

“Mommy?”

The word cuts blade-sharp through the haze of alcohol, and Tess struggles to sit, her eyelids at war with her intention. Her arms and legs tingle, then her limbs elongate, her fingers and toes deform, her abdomen expands, and a slimy, brackish taste slicks her tongue. She gags, staggers from the bedroom into the bathroom, her body a peculiar, heavy weight to bear, and makes it — barely.

The alcohol and the two slices of pizza she had for dinner come up with a burning rush; she retches again and again until nothing’s left but bile, and then again until even that’s gone. She runs frantic hands over her arms and legs and torso to find everything the way it’s supposed to be and rests her head on the edge of the bathtub, breathing hard.

She flushes the toilet and hears, “Mommy,” this time from the chaos of the Coriolis swirl.

“Emily?”

An unintelligible voice — too deep, too big, to be Emily’s — mumbles something Tess can’t grasp; black clouds of octopus ink coalesce in her eyes, and she slips to the floor into darkness.

“Hair of the dog?” Vicky says with a smile.

Tess shudders. “Oh, god, no.” She half-sits, half-collapses into a lawn chair and holds her water bottle against her forehead. “How much did we drink?”

Vicky shrugs. “Enough to make you laugh. Hell, you even flirted with the pizza boy.”

Tess’s cheeks warm. “Ugh, there’s a reason I don’t drink like that.”

“Plenty of reasons why I do,” Vicky says, her lips set into a grapefruit twist. “I lost a daughter, too, a long time ago. I was going to bring it up last night, but what’s the point? We were having a good time and you seemed happy.”

“What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Course I don’t mind. I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise. So, what happened to my daughter?” She lights a cigarette, exhales sharply. “Her boyfriend.”

Tess gnaws on a cuticle.

“He beat her. She hid the bruises from me, but I knew something was wrong, and when she finally got the gumption up to leave him, he came after her. And I wasn’t there to protect her.” Vicky takes a long swallow from her glass. “The bastard got his a couple years later. Got jumped in prison after he mouthed off to the wrong guy. Still didn’t bring Crystal back, though.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. For both of us. And for the record, I don’t think you were lying about what you saw that night. Depression, my ass. Anyone who met Emily even once would know that child didn’t have a depressed bone in her body. Damn fool doctors don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time.”

“Thank you.” Tess touches her water bottle to her forehead again, thinks about what she saw—

(the shape in the water)

—and didn’t—

(the shape)

—see.

“Hell, at least your story doesn’t make you a cliché or a stereotype. Never sure which one is the right word, but either way, had to be some truth before the word made sense, right?”

Tess can only nod in reply. She closes her eyes; in the shadows there the waves recede, and Emily walks into the space they left behind, and Tess almost remembers what her daughter said.

Tess wakes and she’s cold, wet, standing in the shower. Although the faucet is set to hot, the water pouring down is ice, her skin is bright pink, and there’s a thickness in her head as though she’s been listening to someone speak for hours or for days. Her nightgown is plastered against a protruding belly; she blinks, and it’s gone. Her fingers distort, turning too long with jagged fingernails that resemble lobster claws, but the image proves no more real than her stomach; when she reaches for the faucet, her hands are fine.

“Mommy?”

With a grimace, she shuts off the water. Leaves the nightgown dripping on the edge of the tub and curls up in bed, shivering. Disoriented. Scared. She hasn’t walked in her sleep since she was a child.

Is this some sort of involuntary penance for thinking Emily was sleepwalking that night, even though she’d never done it before? Tess followed her, remembering how her mother always said waking up a sleepwalker was a bad thing, curious to see where she’d go, and she was only a few paces behind her. More than close enough to keep her safe.

When Emily approached the beach, Tess took her arm, intending to turn her back around, but Emily pulled free and kept walking, heading across the sand toward the water. And then the world changed, became a rubber band stretching Tess into one place and Emily into another with a huge distance between them.

As before a tsunami, the waves pulled back and they kept receding, the sea folding back on itself to reveal an endless stretch of wet sand littered with fish trapped in the throes of death, driftwood, and tangled clumps of seaweed. Tess screamed her throat raw, but Emily kept walking, and no matter how fast Tess ran, Emily remained out of reach. Between her screams, Tess heard Emily say a word (and why the hell can’t she remember what Emily said?), and then the waves curled into their rightful place again and Emily was gone. In the space between, did Tess see a shape, an unknowable being, deep inside the water? Her mouth yearns to say no; her mind says an emphatic yes.

Even if the police didn’t believe her, she saw something. It wasn’t an optical illusion, as one police officer suggested, not unkindly. The media shitstorm and the blame from the legions of armchair detectives seems a distant dream now. The press was all too willing to give up when they realized Tess didn’t make a good subject; she wouldn’t answer their questions, wouldn’t get mad and curse them out, wouldn’t tear her hair and break down in hysterics. Not in front of them anyway.

Two steaming coffee mugs in hand, Tess pads downstairs, knocks on Vicky’s door with her elbow. After she refills their cups a second time, Tess scrubs her face with her hands, clears her throat, and says, “I keep hearing Emily. Every time I turn on the water, I hear her saying Mommy.” She fiddles with the drawstring on her pants, hating the quiet desperation of her words and wishing she could take them back, inhale them like cigarette smoke.

Vicky takes several sips of her coffee before she answers in a soft voice. “Well . . . You’re trying to move on and you’re feeling guilty about it, and Emily disappeared in the water so it makes sense you’d hear her like that.”

“But it sounds so much like her.”

Vicky leans forward. Fixes Tess’s gaze with her own. “For a couple years, I used to see Crystal all the time. Once, I even followed a girl nearly a mile because I was convinced it was my baby. And I identified Crystal’s body, I knew she was dead, but I knew it up here.” She taps her forehead. “I didn’t know it here.” A second tap, to her chest. “Once my heart caught up, it stopped. You’ll get through this part of it, too.”

“Right now, I don’t feel like I will. Not today or tomorrow or forever.”

“But you will. One day you won’t hear her, and then a little while later you’ll realize you haven’t heard her, and then a little while after that, you’ll realize you don’t need to hear her anywhere but in here.” She touches her chest again.

Tess wants to believe her, but her fingers curl in and her fingernails leave half-moon bruises in her palms.

“Mommy?”

Tess’s head snaps around, the washcloth falls from her hand. She places her palms on the porcelain, bends over the sink. Takes a shuddering breath. No one there, no one there, she thinks, but another sound emerges from the water, an evocative yet inhuman voice, one she knows she’s heard before –no. She had too much to drink that night. She heard nothing then and hears nothing now.

Her belly curves, her breasts swell, her limbs are taffy caught in the pull, her mouth is salt tang and bitter.

“No,” she snaps. “Do you hear me? No.”

Her ears pop, and a dull throb spreads through her abdomen, radiates in a slow spiral to her back. Moaning through clenched teeth, she fumbles for the faucet.

The pain ebbs. Her stomach, her limbs, are perfectly normal, perfectly fine. She rinses away the taste of the ocean with mouthwash, hears only the normal rush of water when she turns the faucet back on.

Tess wakes in the middle of the night with her pulse racing. In her dream, she was on the beach, running toward Emily, and she stopped her before her feet met the water but when Emily turned around, she wasn’t Emily but other, her skin the white of a deep-sea creature and cold as the Atlantic Ocean in January.

Tess turns on her bedside light and scrubs the sleep from her eyes. The sheets are gritty against her feet, and she throws back the covers — sand coats both cotton and skin. Hands clamped tight over her mouth can’t keep in the shout.

Without curtains hanging at the windows, sunlight floods Emily’s bedroom. Tess lugs in paint, brushes, and a canvas tarp, and pulls the bed toward the center of the room. From behind the headboard, something thumps to the floor; Tess retrieves the sketchbook with tears shimmering in her eyes.

From the time she could hold a crayon in a chubby fist, Emily loved to draw and while not a prodigy, her passion made up for it in spades. The first picture is her favorite dinosaur, stegosaurus; the pages that follow show more dinosaurs, a picture of Tess wearing a superhero cape, the beach at night, a second sketch of the beach with a scattering of shells, and then the beach with the waves high and arcing and a dark outline in the raised water.

Tess sinks down on the edge of the bed. The shape in the water, done in crude strokes of pencil, is not a whale or a prehistoric shark. It’s alien and wrong with too many limbs, too many curves. Tess flips the page. Yet another sketch of the same, the lines more defined, darker, the likeness slightly different, but still improbable. In the next sketch, the shape has altered even more, as if Emily couldn’t quite capture on paper what she wanted. Tess’s fingers leave indentations in the paper. This can’t be real. It can’t be right.

“Who are you?” Tess says. “What are you?”

What she can’t bring herself to say aloud: why did you take my daughter?

Tess stands on the beach, wind tossing sand into her face and twisting her nightgown around her hips. Her mouth opens but nothing escapes. Is she dreaming? Dreaming awake? She turns in a slow circle, spies the steady tracks her feet left behind.

The waves begin to recede, and she freezes in place. A dark silhouette twists beneath the changing water; pain threads through her body, the darkness moves closer, and she sees—

No. It’s too much. She closes her eyes, can’t bear to look. The agony seizes her tight; when it loosens its hold, Tess runs, kicking sand in wide arcs. Behind her, the waves crash upon the shore, and she hears something else beneath — a moan, a whisper.

(Emily said Mother. That’s what she said, and Tess knew she wasn’t calling out to her, wasn’t referring to her in any way.)

By the time she gets to the porch, she’s sobbing hard enough that her chest aches, and when Vicky grabs her arm, she shrieks.

“Tess? What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Talk to me. Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

Words spill from Tess’s lips, and she knows they don’t make sense, but she can’t make them stop.

Vicky shoves a glass in her hand. “Drink.”

Tess does, grateful to wash the salt from her tongue.

“Now take a deep breath and talk to me. What happened?”

“I woke up on the beach, and I saw something in the water. I saw, I don’t know, I couldn’t look, but I know it was there. I felt it. It was there the night Emily went into the water, too. I know it was. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was there. I think it wants something from me, but I don’t know what it wants. I don’t know what to—”

“Shhh, take another drink.”

“You don’t understand. Emily saw it, too. She drew it in her sketchbook—”

Vicky presses the glass gently to her mouth. Tess drinks, this time wincing at the liquor burn.

“Okay,” Vicky says. “I don’t know what you thought you saw, or whether you just had a bad dream or what, but maybe you need to get away from here for a while. I know things have been rough, maybe being close to where it happened isn’t good for you right now.”

Tess pushes the glass back in Vicky’s hand. Vicky continues to talk, and Tess responds in the right places with the right phrases while her thoughts drift elsewhere.

She sleeps on the bathroom floor with the water running. Spends the day in the kitchen with the faucet on full blast and the sketchbook in her lap. Ignores Vicky’s knocks at the door.

“Why did you want my daughter?” she says over and over, the tone of her voice as foreign as the thing in Emily’s sketches. “What more do you want from me?”

After the sunlight bleeds from the sky, she waits until Vicky goes back into her apartment and creeps down the stairs as quickly and quietly as possible. Her hands are shaking when she walks onto the beach, and she steps as close to the water as she dares.

“I’m here,” she calls out into the wind.

The waves break and crash, break and crash. Tess steps closer.

“I’m here,” she shouts. “Isn’t this what you want? Goddammit, isn’t this what you fucking want from me?”

The wind tears her words to ribbons. She steps into the waves, hissing at the sudden sting of cold. Like fabric gathered in a hand, the waves recede, and Tess links her fingers together, wills herself to keep still. The water withdraws even more, and a leviathan, the shape from Emily’s sketchbook, undulates beneath the darkness. Goosebumps rise on her arms; her nipples go hard and painful; a shiver makes a circuit on the racetrack of her spine. The air thrums with an electric undercurrent.

A distant gaze bores into hers. A distant mind delves, tastes. An image of Emily’s face flickers in her peripheral vision, flickers and breaks apart into nothing at all.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” Tess shrieks. “Just give me back my daughter.”

Her mouth is salt and seaweed. Crab claws dig into her stomach, and she falls to her hands and knees. Her abdomen swells; something unfolds inside her, shoving razored points and spiked edges against the confines of her womb. She grips fistfuls of sand and arches her back, lets loose a keening wail.

Muffled by the water, another wail echoes her own, but Tess isn’t sure if she’s hearing it in her ears or only her mind. She rolls onto her back, supports herself with her elbows, and draws up her knees. The grotesque curve of her belly ripples, and as the claws dig in again, the other cries out as well, a great and terrible groaning cry.

Tess arches her back as an urge to push fills her body. She strains with all her might. And then again. The world melts into shadow and stardust, leaving only the torment inside her and the exertion of her muscles. She screams as something breaks free and falls flat on her back, panting.

Reaching under her nightgown, she expects to find ribbons of torn flesh, and although the contact makes her wince, her vulva is intact, albeit swollen, and there’s nothing beneath her but sand. Her stomach is flat, but the skin is loose, elastic.

Emily emerges from the water, walking as though she’s forgotten how legs work. Tess climbs to her feet, staggers forward, and then halts, her mouth in a wide O. Beneath a mottled covering of viscous liquid and traces of sand — a nightmarish mockery of lanugo — Emily’s skin is sea-pale. Where once she had a navel, she now has a fleshy protuberance resembling an ornate skeleton key emerging from a lock. She blinks once, twice, and nictitating membranes roll back, revealing black eyes — shark eyes — and Tess swallows a scream. This isn’t Emily, it can’t be.

“Mommy?”

Tess’s entire body jolts. The eyes and skin might be wrong, but the voice and smile are all Emily, yet when Tess holds out her arms, Emily steps back, not closer, and lifts her chin. Moonlight reflects in the black of her eyes, and an image comes in view: a still-swollen abdomen, pendulous breasts, vulva concealed by a thick thatch of curls, long tentacular limbs, eel-like fingers ending in claws, a dark eye emerging from tendrils of coiling hair.

Tess backs away, her hands held palm out; Emily stands, face impassive. Her lips don’t move, but a deep, mellifluous voice says, “I see you, first mother of my firstborn.”

Tess bites back a sob. “What, who, are you?”

“I am the mother of all, she who birthed the world and made it whole. I am all that was, and all that will be.”

Emily takes her hand, and Tess hisses in a breath — Emily’s skin is cold, so cold — and once again, the world melts away. Tess sees the shape, the mother, sitting atop a throne. Another being emerges from beneath the ocean floor and wrenches the mother from her place. Sand obscures a great battle, then settles to reveal black blood and lifeless limbs, and the mother, battered and bruised, crawling back to her throne. A second beast rears, rends; the mother’s mouth opens in a silent scream; battle begins anew. More blood and sand and fury; endless creatures, endless battles.

Tess covers her eyes. No more. She can’t bear this. Emily squeezes her hand; she reopens her eyes. Sees Emily walking on the beach and into the waves, into the mother’s embrace; sees inhuman hands guiding her between two great thighs, pushing her into a cavernous womb; sees Emily floating, sleeping with her hands clasped together beneath her cheek; sees small creatures crawling from her navel to drift and grow beside her in the amniotic fluid.

Emily withdraws her hand. “Now you see,” the voice, not Emily’s, says. “The usurper gods are finally dead, and it is time for my children to put the world right. The birthing is over, but your work is not done. You must open the door.”

“But why me? Why my daughter?”

“Because you are her first mother and she alone had the strength to answer my call.”

Tess swallows hard, pushes defiance in her words. “And what will happen if I don’t?”

There is a silence, a profound absence of everything, and stars glitter in the sky. Tess’s fingers tremble; in the black pits of Emily’s eyes, the mother quivers.

A peal of inhuman laughter slices through the quiet. “Then I will take my children back into my womb, and I will unmake the world.”

In Emily’s eyes, a face begins to rise to the surface, and every instinct tells Tess to avert her eyes, to run, then the face slips into the depths again. More laughter.

Emily steps forward and touches Tess’s cheek. “Everything will be okay.” She takes Tess’s hand and places it on her belly.

Sobbing, Tess curls her hand around the umbilicus. Its pulsing warmth is unexpected, and she fights the urge to pull away. It changes, softens, wraps around her fingers. The narrow strands dance across her skin, and in the center of it all, Tess’s fingertips meet a hardness. Emily’s gaze, with its strange, black un-Emily eyes, locks on hers.

Panic courses through her veins. What is she going to set in motion? What if this is the end of everything?

“I love you, Mommy. I’ve missed you so much.”

Tess sobs harder; the panic shatters. “I love you, too, punkin, with all my heart. I’ve missed you every single day.”

Emily smiles. “But now I’m back and everything will be okay, I promise.”

Tess sucks in a breath and turns the key. The umbilicus shrivels, turns the shade of an oyster shell, and falls to the sand. The weighted silence returns, hangs, and then the creak of a great doorway opening. From the water emerges a thousand, no, a hundred thousand Emilys, all black eyes and pale skin, but there is something inhuman in their faces, something painful to look upon, as though their Emily skin is nothing more than mimicry and a closer inspection will reveal the truth and send her screaming into madness.

They move with odd, liquid strides and when they pass, each pauses to pat Emily’s shoulder and whisper, “Sister.” Tess catches sight of jagged teeth, too many teeth, and where navels should be, they have a circular patch of translucent skin that reveals not organs, but a darkness hiding in a shifting sea. As they leave the beach, disappearing into the shadows, Tess whimpers. What are they going to do? What has she unleashed?

And how can such wrongs set anything right?

“Don’t worry,” Emily says. “They won’t hurt you.” She blinks and familiar green eyes replace the black, wraps her arms around Tess and the cold is gone, too.

Tears turn Tess’s vision to a blur, and she can’t speak, can only hold Emily tight, breathing her in, terrified to look too close, to see beneath the camouflage. But she has her daughter back, and that’s worth everything and anything at all. No matter what, it has to be.