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Bark sat surrounded by darkness, a switched-off flashlight balanced on his thigh. No ‘lectricity, indeed. The wall behind him creaked as he leaned his head back, sounding like it might crack and crumble against his touch. He had been trying to get some sleep for hours now, but sleeping at all was hard for him in his old age, and even moreso in an old beat-up dining room chair. He had managed to doze here and there, but something always kicked him awake.
His eyes felt heavy now, as he focused on the hum of the lawn mower running outside. He liked it better than the silence that had filled the night. Too much silence left him too much time with his thoughts, and those, more often than not, frightened him. Bark didn’t wear a watch, but the light seeping through the cracks on the boarded-up windows told him that morning had come. Newt must have woken up early — to mow the lawn, apparently.
Bark’s right foot hurt, as it often did. The pain started in his leg, but always settled in the arch of his foot. He flexed his toes as far as he could within his boots to try to work out the kink. It helped a little, but it never fully went away. Distraction always proved better than anything to numb the pain.
Bark mulled over his relationship with Newt and wondered whether it would work out. The two of them had been fishing in the waters of Cape Madre for years, so they had a lot in common, but Bark couldn’t be sure that Newt really understood what was going on. He hadn’t been through the same things that Bark had.
Bark’s eyes shot open when the lawnmower’s engine stopped. Seagulls cawed in the distance. The walls in Newt’s old investment — a word that could only be used ironically — were paper thin. Being inside them was almost like being outside.
The screen on the back door creaked open and the light flooded into the room as Newt stepped into the house, covered in sweat. Bark could smell the grass clouding the air as Newt removed his trusty sunglasses to peer into the darkened room.
“Still got the front yard to do. Been too long,” Newt said as he walked into the kitchen. He filled up a glass at the sink.
“You know I don’t even pay for this stuff? I canceled the account and they just never shut the water off.”
Bark grunted. “They’ll come for it eventually.”
Newt had no answer for that. He sat in a folding chair across the room and took a long drink. The two men sat in silence for a few minutes. Bark started to plan his day. He’d have to trust Newt to stay at the house without him eventually. There were things to get done. The cats needed to be fed.
Newt broke the silence with a quiet thoughtful question. “Mind if I ask when she got to you?”
Newt surely didn’t know the gender of that thing any more than Bark, but it seemed right that they both settled on it being female. Bark tried to make out the expression on Newt’s face, but he saw only the lithe outline of Newt’s stringy body. Bark answered slowly, “A while ago, now. A good while.”
A shadowed nod in the dark. “Sounds ‘bout right. Prolly before me. I think I got lucky holding off for so long.”
Lucky. Maybe. Bark had never considered the situation as lucky or unlucky. He could hardly remember the times before. His current life seemed natural. Like he was born to it. It had gotten worse in recent months, though. She was never happy with his work, and he constantly had to evolve to work harder and smarter so that he could stay in the shadows and keep Cape Madre safe. He wouldn’t be able to do it forever, and when he died, someone would have to take over. Someone who had been touched by her. Someone who understood the importance. Bark had a hard time imagining that person to be Newt Goodreaux.
“How’d it happen?” Newt asked.
Bark hesitated, scratching the scruff of his chin. What if Newt didn’t really understand? It might turn ugly, and Bark might have to make some hard decisions. And that would just be more work. So much work. But, what the hell. Maybe if he took a chance on Newt, it would engender loyalty.
“On the Mayhem. A few years ago now,” Bark stated.
Newt stood up and used his free hand to move his folding chair closer to Bark, dragging it along the worn carpet and making a weird whooshing sound. Maybe a little too close, but at least now Bark could make out Newt’s expressions, though he could have done without the overwhelming smell of fresh-cut grass.
Bark continued, “Caught a dolphin in the nets. Didn’t notice until it was too late. Had it dead on the deck. If I brought it in, they’d fine me. Couldn’t afford that.”
Newt nodded as if he understood. No doubt, Newt had fished up a dolphin or two. It was an unavoidable hazard of the job.
“So, I took it out to the vortex. Tied some weights to it. Figgered it’d sink so deep that no one’d ever find it. Or at least not quickly enough to lead back to me, ya know?
“Went off without a hitch. I watched that poor thing sink down to the depths, only to be remembered by me. Ain’t nobody more sad than me to see a creature like that die. Never feels good when it happens. But that’s how it goes.”
Bark stopped to see if Newt wanted to interject, but Newt chose to fill the silence by finishing off his water instead. Newt smacked his lips and made an ahh sound when he finished, which seemed intentionally dramatic.
“Fired up the motor to go back in and the boat didn’t go nowhere. I mean, the motor was runnin’. Should’ve been moving. But wasn’t. Not an inch. Felt like a truck stuck in mud.”
Newt leaned forward, clearly intrigued by the story. Bark wondered if Newt had a similar story of his own. He must’ve. Or he wouldn’t have asked the question.
“Go back to see what’s holding me up, and there’s just this mass of slimy, slick grayish purple stuff everywhere. I didn’t know what it was at first. Didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen.”
Newt jumped in. “Like a shark, but not one solid mass.”
“Right. More flexible and squishy than that. When it started moving and writhing, I became even more intrigued. Thought about getting something to try to dislodge it. Next thing I know, I’m in the water. Something pulled me in by the ankle. It hurt like the devil. Squeezed hard. No hope of getting away.”
“You thought you were gonna drown, eh?” Newt offered.
Bark bent down to roll up his right pants leg, then flipped on his flashlight to shine it down at his ankle. The long-healed scars stretched all around, perfectly circular. They had started as bruises years ago, but eventually gave way to these strange, inconceivable scars. And the pain. The never-ending pain.
“Did this to me,” Bark said as he moved the light up and down his lower leg. “Jerked me around and under. I said my last prayers. I thought it was all over. But then I was just out there. Floating. Alone. That thing was gone. My boat was still fairly close. Managed to swim to it. Climb up. There wasn’t nothing broken, best I could tell. So, I just carried on. Went about my business. Didn’t have no money for the doctor, anyway.”
Newt nodded his head now, fast and furious as if he gained strength from hearing Bark tell the tale. He stood and lifted his shirt, motioning towards his mid-section to get Bark to point the flashlight there. Newt’s scars stood out against his dark skin, and the circles along his waist were bigger than those around Bark’s leg. It looked like someone had taken a large cup and traced the top of it onto Newt’s skin in a kind of gruesome tattoo. Bark didn’t say anything. He didn’t know what he could say, but at least now he could be sure that Newt most certainly understood.
Once Newt seemed satisfied that Bark had taken in the whole of it, Newt dropped his shirt and sat back down in his chair. “Kinda the same for me. There’s so much competition out there now, and me and Mama Jean were having a tough go of it. I knew y’all said that there weren’t no fish to catch out there in the vortex, but I thought maybe if I trolled deeper or used some different bait. There had to be something down there.”
Newt paused and looked down towards the floor, surely reliving his own encounter with her. Bark flipped off the flashlight and balanced it back on his thigh. Though lots of folks were scared of the dark, in Bark’s experience, facing one’s demons tended to be easier when no one could see the pain. Newt looked up again, and Bark could just barely make out the whites of Newt’s haunted eyes.
“I sat there for hours and ain’t nothin’ happened. Didn’t catch no fish even after trying every piece of bait in my box. I tried running the nets as deep as Mama Jean would let me, and I didn’t come up with even a single thing. It’s not just that there ain’t no fish out there. It’s that there’s no life at all. What I wouldn’t give to go down to the bottom out there and see what it’s like. I betcha there ain’t even seaweed down there.”
Bark sat silently, taking in the story, wondering if Newt would be able to stop embellishing long enough to actually get to the point. Newt liked to talk. It was a miracle that he hadn’t told this story to every person who would listen. Did she do that to him? Keep him quiet? Bark could believe it. She had a way of making sure things went by her plans. Ways that Bark had never understood, but had been a slave to since he first encountered her that day.
“Anyway. It was hours, like I said. Two, three, maybe four? I don’t know. I wasn’t keeping too close a count on it. Not like I had anyone back on land waiting for me. Hell, even y’all probably wouldn’t have noticed if Ol’ Newt and Mama Jean never came back. For me, it started with the water. It was calm that day, without many waves and hardly any boats kicking up wakes. At least near the vortex. So, when the water out in front of me started...”
Newt motioned with his hands, wriggling his bony fingers like he was playing with a puppet. “Bubbling, I guess? Not like boiling water exactly, but sorta. Like something was coming up from the deepest parts of the ocean. And there she was, breaking through the surface and sending out a wake of her own that shook Mama Jean just a little. It was the first time I saw her, but I didn’t even know what I was looking at. It just looked like a tiny island had appeared in the middle of the vortex, really. I thought it might be some trash or something, but then... then she opened one of her big black eyes and she looked at me. Into my soul, Bark.”
Bark knew those eyes well. Not from his first encounter, but from the other ones. Those pools of black were unnatural and powerful, demolishing a lifetime of certainties. But there was love in those eyes, too. A creature who understood things about loyalty and friendship. She was like one of his cats in that way, begging for attention and care.
“I didn’t know what to do, but running didn’t feel right, so I sorta just stood there for a while and we watched each other. She blinked and rotated around and eventually I saw both of those big black eyes sticking out of her head. Well, I guess it’s her head. I don’t really know. But that’s where eyes go, so that’s what I’ve always assumed.
“I talked to her. Told her I didn’t mean to hurt her none. Asked her what she was, where she came from. All sorts of things. She didn’t answer, of course, but I talked to her like I would my own dog — well the dog I used to have, rather, before she got run over out there by the mail truck. Jean was a good dog, God rest her soul.”
Newt motioned with his hands in some semblance of the cross, but Newt wasn’t Catholic. Bark suspected he’d just seen that on the television, then adopted it as some way of invoking help. Bark didn’t believe in God. Not anymore. God wouldn’t have made something like her.
“Then the tentacles came, over the side of Mama Jean. I wasn’t scared then, though I ought to have been, I suppose. They just kinda moved toward me and I petted’em. I remember that part. I just stroked one of’em. It was smooth and wet and strangely comforting like one of them stress balls you see on the desks of people who have desks. You and me ain’t the type to have desks, though, are we Bark?”
Bark shook his head. The Mayhem had a desk below deck, but that old thing wasn’t the type of fancy desk that Newt meant.
“She started to coil one around my waist, and that’s when I really started getting scared. I tried to dodge out of it, but those tentacles there were huge. There weren’t no getting away at that point. Once she started squeezing, I worried that she’d kill me. I begged her to let me go, but she just jerked me forward, twisted me around.
“My head hit the side of Mama Jean on the way out. Must’ve lost consciousness because next thing I knew I was underwater, struggling to swim back to the surface, but she held me down. Not in and out, like what happened to you or that kid out there. She just held me. I knew I was gonna drown. I tried to pry it off me, ya know? But she held on too tight. It all seemed so weird at the time. I’m sure I was more scared than I remember now, but it just all felt like it was supposed to happen and there weren’t nothin’ I could be doing about it except to give in.
“Then she let go. My stomach hurt something fierce, but my legs worked well enough to kick me to the surface. I came up right next to Mama Jean, like she was there waiting to save me. I climbed up and laid on the deck for a long time, Bark. A long time. Just trying to process it all. To make sense of it.”
Bark replied, “You’ll never make sense of it, Newt. There’s no sense to be made.”
“Yeah. I suppose so. My stomach and my head hurt, but I just didn’t feel right telling nobody about her. She was too special. I didn’t want them going in there and hunting her down. The way I figger it, I went into her home and caused a ruckus. So, I left as soon as I was able. That’s my whole story.”
The end result of which was no more complicated than Bark’s, but still took way longer to tell. Newt was so incredibly tiresome. But he and Bark shared the same path, of that there could be no doubt.
Silence cloaked the room again as the two men sat across from each other. It just didn’t seem like any conversation could top that. Bark felt happy to have had the conversation, though. It felt strangely reassuring to know that he wasn’t alone as he had once thought.
After a few minutes, Newt asked, “How come it works this way, Bark? You and me. We’re ok, right? But Joe. It was harder for Joe.”
Bark thought about it for a few seconds, but quickly realized that no amount of thought would ever provide the real answer. They were dealing with things that couldn’t be understood. Of all the years on the sea, nothing prepared him for this. For her. But Bark did have thoughts on Joe. A lot of them. Too many of them. Too often.
“I shoulda helped him, Newt. I coulda maybe steered him the right direction. Helped him cope with it. It’s a mighty tough thing to get through. I thought I was doing right by him keeping him away. But maybe I was wrong.”
Newt motioned to the door next to Bark. “Why didn’t she kill him?”
“Why didn’t she kill you? Or me? Or Joe? I don’t know why she does anything, but I reckon she needs some of us.”
Newt nodded as if he agreed and understood. “What’s gonna happen to the kid now, then?”
Bark took a deep breath, exhaling all the air in his lungs before answering, “I don’t know, Newt. I just don’t know.”
