Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

THE TRANSITION OF ELIZABETH HASKINGS

by CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

E LIZABETH HASKINGS INHERITED the old house on Water Street from her grandfather. It would have passed to her mother, but she’d gone away to Oregon when Elizabeth was six years old, leaving her daughter with the old man. She’d said she would come back, but she never did, and after a while the letters stopped coming, and then the postcards stopped coming, too. And now Elizabeth Haskings is twenty-nine, and she has no idea whether her mother is alive or dead. It’s not something she thinks about very often. But she does understand why her mother left, that it was fear of the broad, tea-coloured water of the Ipswich River, flowing lazily down to the salt marshes and the Atlantic. Flowing down to Little Neck and the deep channel between the mainland and Plum Island, finally emptying into the ocean hardly a quarter of a mile north of Essex Bay. Elizabeth understands it was the ruins surrounding the bay, there at the mouth of the Manuxet River—labelled the Castle Neck River on more recent maps, maps drawn up after the late 1920s.

She’s never blamed her mother for running like that. But here, in Ipswich, she has the house and her job at the library, and in Oregon—or wherever she might run—she’d have nothing at all. Here she has roots, even if they’re roots she does her best not to dwell on. But this is only history, the brief annals of a young woman’s life. Relevant, certainly, but only as prologue. What happened in the town that once ringed Essex Bay, the strange seaport town that abruptly died one winter eighty-four years ago, where her grandfather lived as a boy.

It’s a Saturday night in June, and on most Saturday nights Elizabeth Haskings entertains what she quaintly thinks of as her “gentleman caller”. She enjoys saying, “Tonight, I will be visited by my gentleman caller.” Even though Michael’s gay. They work together at archives at the Ipswich Public Library, though, sometimes, he switches over to circulation. Anyway, he knows about Elizabeth’s game, and usually he brings her a small bouquet of flowers of one sort of another—calla lilies, Peruvian lilies, yellow roses fringed with red, black-eyed susans—and she carefully arranges them in one of her several vases while he cooks her dinner. She feels bad that Michael is always the one who cooks, but, truthfully, Elizabeth isn’t a very good cook, and tends to eat from the microwave most nights.

They might watch a DVD afterwards, or play Scrabble, or just sit at the wide dinner table she also inherited from her grandfather and talk. About work or books or classical music, something Michael knows much more about than she does. Truth is, he often makes her feel inadequate, but she’s never said so. She loves him, and it’s not a simple, platonic love, so she’s always kept it a secret, allowed their “dates” to seem like nothing more than a ritual between friends who seem to have more in common with one another than with most anyone else they know in the little New England town (whether that’s true or not). Sometimes, she lies in bed, thinking about him lying beside her, instead of thinking about all the things she works so hard not thinking about: the river, the sea, her lost mother, the grey, weathered boards and stone foundations where there was once a dingy town, etcetera & etcetera. It’s her secret, and she’ll never tell him.

Though, Michael knows the most terrible secret that she’ll ever have, and she’s fairly sure that his knowing it has kept her sane for the five years they’ve known one another. In an odd way, it doesn’t seem fair, the same way his always cooking doesn’t seem fair. No, much worse than that. But him knowing this awful thing about her, and her never telling him how she feels. Still, Elizabeth assures herself, telling him that would only ruin their friendship. A bird in the hand being worth two in the bush, and in this instance it really is better not to have one’s cake and eat it, too.

They don’t always play board games after dinner, or watch movies, or talk. Because there are nights that his just knowing her secret isn’t enough. There are nights it weighs so much Elizabeth imagines it might crush her flat, like the pressure at the bottom of the deep sea. Those nights, after dinner, they go upstairs to her bedroom, and he runs a porcelain bowl of water from the bathtub faucet. He adds salt to it while she undresses before the tall mirror affixed to one wall, taller than her by a foot, and framed with ornately carved walnut. She pretends that it’s only carved with acanthus leaves and cherubs. It’s easier that way. It doesn’t embarrass her for Michael to see her nude, not even with the disfigurements of her secret uncovered and plainly visible to him. After all, that’s why he’s returned from the bathroom with the bowl of salty water and a yellow sponge (he leaves the tap running). That’s why they’ve come upstairs, because she can’t always be the only one to look at herself.

“It’s bad tonight?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer straightaway. She’s never been one to complain if she can avoid complaining, and it’s bad enough that he knows. She doesn’t also want to seem weak. After a minute or half a minute she answers, “It’s been worse.” That’s the truth, even if it’s also a way of evading his question.

“Betsy, just tell me when you’re ready.” He always calls her Betsy, never Elizabeth. She’s never called him Mike, though.

“I’m ready,” she says, leaning her neck to the left or to the right, exposing the pale skin below the ridge of her chin. But I’m not ready at all. I’m never ready, am I?

“Okay, then. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

He’s always as gentle as anyone could be.

“You’ve never hurt me, Michael. Not even once.”

But she has no doubt he can see the discomfort in her eyes when the washcloth touches her skin. She tries hard not to flinch, but, usually, she flinches regardless.

“Was that too hard?”

“No. I’m fine. I’m okay,” she tells him, so he continues administering the salt water to her throat, dabbing carefully, and Elizabeth Haskings tries to concentrate on his fingertips, whenever they happen to brush against her. It never takes very long for the three red slits on each side of her throat to appear, and not much longer for them to open. They never open very far, not until later on. Just enough that she can see the barn-red gills behind the stiff, crescent-shaped flaps of skin that weren’t there only moments before. That never are there until the salt water. Here, she always loses her breath for a few seconds, and the flaps spasm, opening and closing, and she has to gasp several times to find a balance between the air being drawn in through her nostrils and mouth, and the air flowing across the feathery red gill filaments. Sometimes her legs go weak, but Michael has never let her fall.

“Breathe,” he whispers. “Don’t panic. Take it slow and easy, Betsy. Just breathe.”

The dizziness passes, the dark blotches that swim before her eyes, and she doesn’t need him to support her any longer. She stares at herself in the mirror, and by now her eyes have gone black. No irises, no pupils, no sclera. Just inky black where her hazel-green eyes used to be.

“I’m right here,” he says.

He doesn’t have to tell her that again. He’s always there, behind her or at her side.

Unconsciously, she tries to blink her eyes, but all trace of her lids have vanished, and she can only stare at those black, blank eyes. Later, when they begin to smart, Michael will have the eye drops at the ready.

“It’s getting harder,” she says. He doesn’t reply, because she says this almost every time. All his replies have been used up, Elizabeth thinks. No matter how much he might want to calm me or offer surcease, he’s already said it all a dozen times over.

Instead, he asks, “Keep going?”

She nods.

“We don’t have too, you know.”

“Yes we do. It’s bad if we do. It’s worse if we don’t. It hurts more if we don’t.” Of course, Michael knows this perfectly well, and there’s the briefest impatience that she has to remind him. Not anger, no, but an unmistakable flash of impatience, there and gone in the stingy space of a single heartbeat.

He dips the sponge into the salt water again, not bothering to squeeze it out, because the more the better. The more, the easier. Water runs down his arm and drips to the hardwood floor. Before they’re finished, there will be a puddle about her bare feet and his shoes, too. Michael gingerly swabs both her hands with the sponge, and at once the vestigial webbing between her fingers, common to all men and women, begins to expand, pushing the digits further away from one another.

Elizabeth watches, biting her lip against the discomfort, and watches. It doesn’t horrify her the same way that the appearance of the gills and the change to her eyes does, but it’s much more painful. Not nearly so much as the greater portion of her metamorphosis to come, but enough she does bite her lip (careful not to draw blood). Within five minutes, the webbing has grown enough that it’s attached at the uppermost joint between each finger, and is at least twice as thick as usual. And the texture of the skin on the backs of her hands and her palms is becoming smoother and faintly iridescent, more transparent, and gradually taking on the faintest tinge of turquoise. She used to think of the colour as celeste opaco, because the Italian sounded prettier. But now she settles for turquoise. Not as lyrical, no, but it’s not opaque, and turquoise is somehow more honest. Monsters should be honest. Before half an hour has passed, most of her skin will have taken on variations of the same hue.

“Yesterday,” she says, “during my lunch break, when I said I needed to go to the bank, I didn’t.”

There are a few seconds of quiet before he asks, “Where did you go, Elizabeth?”

“Choate Bridge,” she answers. “I just stood there a while, watching the river.” It’s the oldest stone-arch bridge anywhere in Massachusetts, built in 1764. There are two granite archways through which the river flows on its easterly course.

“Did it make you feel any better?”

“It made me want to swim. The river always makes me want to swim, Michael. You know that.”

“Yeah, Betsy. I know.”

She wants to add, Please don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to, but she doesn’t. It would be rude. He means well, and she’s never rude if she can help it. Especially not to Michael.

All evidence of her fingernails has completely vanished.

“It terrified me. It always fucking terrifies me.”

“Maybe one day it won’t. Maybe one day you’ll be able to look at the water without being frightened.”

“Maybe,” she whispers, hoping it isn’t true. Pretty sure what’ll happen if she ever stops being afraid of the river and the sea. I can’t drown. I can’t ever drown. How does a woman who can’t drown fear the water?

There are things in the water. Things that can hurt me. And places I never want to see awake.

Now he’s running the sponge down her back, beginning at the nape of her neck and ending at the cleft between her buttocks. This time, the pain is bad enough she wants to double over, wants to go down on her knees and vomit. But that would be weak, and she won’t be weak. Michael used to bring her pills to dull the pain, but she stopped taking them almost a year ago because she didn’t like the fogginess they brought, the way they caused her to feel detached from herself, as though these transformations were happening to someone else.

Monsters should be honest.

At once, the neural processes of her vertebrae begin to broaden and elongate. She’s made herself learn a lot about anatomy: human, anuran, chondrichthyan, osteichthyan, et al. Anything and everything that seems relevant to what happens to her on these nights.

The devil you know, as her grandfather used to say.

So, Elizabeth Haskings knows that the processes will grow the longest between her third and seventh thoracic vertebrae, and on the last lumbar, the sacrals, and coccygeals (though less so than in the thoracic region), greatly accenting both the natural curves of her back. Musculature responds accordingly. She knows the Latin names of all those muscles, and if there were less pain, she could recite them for Michael. She imagines herself laughing like a madwoman and reciting the names of the shifting, straining tendons. In the end, there won’t quite be fins, sensu stricto. Almost, but not quite.

Aren’t I a madwoman? How can I possibly still be sane?

“Betsy, you don’t have to be so strong,” he tells her, and she hates the pity in his voice. “I know you think you do, but you don’t. Certainly not in front of me.”

She takes the yellow sponge from him, her hands shaking so badly she spills most of the salt water remaining in the bowl, but still manages to get the sponge sopping wet. Her gums have begun to ache, and she smiles at herself before wringing out the sponge with both her webbed hands so that the water runs down her belly and between her legs. In the mirror, she sees Michael turn away.

She drops the sponge to the floor at her feet (she doesn’t have to look to know her toes have begun to fuse one to the next), and gazes into her pitchy eyes until she’s sure the adjustments to her genitals are finished. When she does look down at herself, there’s a taut, flat place in place of the low mound of the mons pubis, and the labia majora, labia minora, and clitoris—all the intricacies of her sex—have been reduced to the vertical slit of an oviduct where her vagina was moments before. On either side of the slit are tiny, triangular pelvic fins, no more than an inch high and three inches long.

“We should hurry now, Betsy,” Michael says. He’s right, of course. She has to reach the bathtub full of warm salty water while she can still walk. Once or twice before she’s waited too long, and he’s had to carry her, and that humiliation was almost worse than all the rest combined. In the tub, she curls almost foetal, and the flaps in front of Elizabeth’s gills open and close, pumping in and out again, extracting all the oxygen she’ll need until sunrise. Michael will stay with her, guarding her, as he always does.

She can sleep without lids to shield her black eyes, and, when she sleeps, she dreams of the river flowing down to the ruined seaport, to Essex Bay, and then out into the Atlantic due south of Plum Island. She dreams of the craggy spine of Devil Reef rising a few feet above the waves and of those who crawl out onto the reef most nights to bask beneath the moon. Those like her. And, worst of all, she dreams of the abyss beyond the reef, and towers and halls of the city there, a city that has stood for eighty thousand years and will stand for eighty thousand more. On these nights, changed and slumbering, Elizabeth Haskings can’t lie to herself and pretend that her mother fled to Oregon, or even that her grandfather lies in his grave in Highland Cemetery. On these nights, she isn’t afraid of anything.