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I feel a pinprick at the nape of my neck, but hardly anything more than a pinprick. I may have winced, but now I honestly can’t recall. It’s an hour before dawn or an hour after midnight; it genuinely does not matter which, and I’m standing at the dormer window in the attic looking south out across the dunes towards the winter sea, and I only may have winced at a pain that was hardly more than a pinprick. There must be stars in that sky. There must be stars beyond counting up there, just as there were last night and every night before, back to the first night I slept in this house and back to the very beginning of time. But I can’t see them. There are no clouds, and there must surely, certainly be stars, but the fact remains that I cannot see them. There’s only the moon, three nights past full on this freezing December evening. The waning moon is a jealous, bloated thing, drooping in the heavens as if it has gorged itself on star flesh and star light and soon will fall from the sky and lay bobbing in the ocean, a victim of its own unbridled appetites. I shut my eyes and try to remember if I winced. The air in here smells like cobwebs and mildew and regret, and my breath fogs, which is the strangest sort of comfort to me. Beneath the cold white gleam of the moon, the dunes shimmer like parabolic mounds of granulated sugar heaped against the sourness of the sea and a sky filled with voids where devoured stars used to be. The dunes reach almost all the way to the house.
I lift my left hand and touch the spot on my neck where only a moment ago I felt the pinprick, the small and hungry pain, and my fingertips come away damp.
“Would you like to hear a story?” you ask me, and when I don’t answer right away, you also ask, “If I told you a story about the moon, would that make it easier?”
And your voice is a lot like the moonlight—hungry and cold and devoid of even the smallest trace of mercy.
“I’m tired of your stories,” I reply. “If you want to know the truth, I’m sick to death of your stories.”
“You’re pouting,” you say. “It’s unattractive. It’s futile, and it’s unattractive.”
I raise my sticky red fingertips to my mouth and lick them clean, feeling shame in that act and tasting the saltiness of my own personal interior seaway, for each and every living man and woman is no more and no less than the kingdom of Neptune made flesh and bone, given consciousness and the illusion of freewill. We are all of us emissaries and we are all of us castaways, tossed up on the dry shingle of the world three hundred and seventy-five million years ago and forever exiled from the womb and bosom of Mother Panthalassa. We are the forsaken children of Devonian heretics—Tiktaalik, Ichthyostega, Pandericthys, and a thousand other as yet unknown and unnamed stem-tetrapod progenitor gods. Behind me, you wipe your lips and smile your taunting razor smile at my thoughts, every single one of them laid as bare to you as if I were speaking them aloud. I imagine that your smile makes a sound like tearing paper—or maybe that’s not my imagination at all. You kiss the wound you’ve made, counterfeiting tenderness, lapping at my skin with your sandpaper tongue, and somewhere in the room the albino boy with bat wings laughs and scratches at the attic floor.
“I could tell you the one about the USS Revenge and Oliver Hazard Perry,” you say, speaking hardly above a whisper. “The ninth of January, 1811, and naval historians all say that the schooner became disoriented in a fog bank and tore out its bottom on a granite reef just offshore from Watch Hill Point. But you know better, and I know better. Or how about the collision of the Larchmont and the Harry P. Knowlton, the eleventh of February, 1911? One hundred and forty-three souls perished that night, only three miles from the Watch Hill Lighthouse, swallowed up by the wind and the snow and the sea. Would you like to know the last thing they heard? Would you like me to sing that song for you tonight?”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I say, but we both know that’s a lie.
“Well, you can’t stay locked away up here forever,” you tell me. “It would be an awful waste, and I cannot abide wastefulness,” and just for a moment I’m no longer standing in the attic gazing out across the dunes. Instead, I’m on the listing deck of a stormbound ship, no more than three miles out from shore, three miles out at the most. I know exactly where the lighthouse should be, but there’s only a patch of deeper darkness waiting there, a throbbing, tenebrous void beckoning me forward. A lure, in point of fact. At my back, even over the wind in the rigging and the waves slamming against the hull, I can hear the bosun praying to Saint Nicholas. There’s another sound, as well, woven into the fabric of the nor’easter gale, high and sweet and deadly as nightshade, a sound that anyone who doesn’t know better might easily mistake for a lullaby. It must be very much like what Odysseus heard, bound to the mast and his men’s ears all stuffed shut with beeswax.
“I won’t listen,” I say. “I won’t hear,” and, for an answer, the sea heaves itself up, bearing the little ship towards the sky, spinning the bowsprit landward. A heartbeat, a dozen heartbeats, and we’re over the crest and racing down the backside of the mighty swell. I lose my footing on the deck, the soles of my boots slipping on boards slick with ice and brine, slipping despite the shagreen nailed to the soles. As I fall, the storm tears itself apart around me, and I come down hard on my hands and knees in the attic of the house by the dunes, the house where I first heard you sing, the house where I might have died or surely soon enough will. I stare at the scars on the dusty floor and the scars on my wrists, waiting until all of this feels real again. I can still taste the sea, I think, then realize that it’s only the taste of the blood I licked off my fingers. I look up, and you’re right there standing over me, your eyes burning the same shade of pale as the bloated winter moon.
“You have to forget and let it all go,” you say, and I ask, “Let all what go?” even though I know damn well what you mean. The asking is only deflection, a half-hearted defense mechanism, same as the sheets I’ve used to cover all the mirrors in the house, same as the way I force myself to swallow food I don’t need and can no longer keep down. You reach out and offer me your hand, just like that night you reached out and pulled me from the surf, where I was only trying to drown and be done with it, once and for all. But I was weak then, and my fear got the better of me. Faced with the absolute and undeniable fact of the end of myself, and so with the fact of the end of everything, I discovered that my resolve was a paper tiger, and I flinched. Tonight, however briefly, I’ll pretend that I won’t flinch, and so I don’t accept your assistance. I don’t take your hand. If I should ever decide to stand up again, I can manage it well enough all on my own.
“What is it you’d have me forget?” I ask a second time, playing dumber.
“The guilt,” you reply, indulging me. “You have to let go of the guilt. It’s no good to you here, not on this side. It’s useless enough to the living, and to you it’s worse than a millstone tied about your neck. You might think that you’ve nowhere left to fall, that this is the very bottom, but you’d be wrong, and guilt is the deadweight to drag you down so far that even I could never find you again. Do you really think it was curiosity that queered things for Orpheus and Eurydice? No, my sweet, it was guilt. Now, stop being silly and take my hand.”
I shut my eyes and hear a clanging bell buoy, rocking on the water out beyond the dunes. I don’t take your hand.
“Fine,” you sigh, all mock exasperation and annoyance and bother. “Go on ahead and crawl around down there like an insect if it pleases you. Wallow, if wallowing is the best you can do. I’ll tell you a different story, instead. A different sort of story.”
And hearing this, the albino boy with bat wings makes a high, ugly chittering noise. Fie was with you when you found me. He follows you about like your shadow, stitched into the lee of you, but if he has a name. I’ve never yet heard it. I have imagined that he’s what I’ll be someday, when you’ve stolen from me every last vestige of humanity that I have left to take, when I can no longer recall who I might have been the day before we met or the feel of the sun on my face. I suspect that he’s only an indigestible bit of something you haul about behind you, because it gives you one sort of pleasure or another to see his ruin. Maybe you only came to me because he needs a sister.
“No,” I say, opening my eyes again, opening my eyes and shaking my head. “I’m sorry. Please, tell me a story about the moon. Tell me a story about the moon and shipwrecks and drowning women.” My voice has become that of a frightened woman, because suddenly I have become exactly that, because you’re capable of far worse things than blizzards and icy decks and that foundering schooner bobbing about in Block Island Sound. I’m frightened because I’ve pushed you, even though I know better than to push you. Even though I knew there was nothing to gain, even if, strictly speaking, there was also nothing to lose. I glance about the attic, but now I can’t see the boy with bat wings anywhere. He must have hidden himself in the clutter of old furniture and cardboard boxes, must have dug in amongst the newspaper bundles and dust. “I’m sorry,” I say a second time, my eyes still searching the gloom for some evidence of what’s become of the boy.
“Liar,” you say, speaking hardly above a whisper. “No, you’re not sorry, not in the least. You’re a coward, that’s all. You know that?”
“I do,” I admit. “Of course I know that, and you knew that much from the start,” and if nothing else in all the wide and time-haunted world is true, that much certainly fucking is. “It’s not as if I ever claimed otherwise. Now, please, tell me a story about the
moon. Tell me the one about the USS Revenge and Oliver Hazard Perry.”
“No, I don’t think so,” you say, and you crouch down on the floor next to me and gently brush the hair back from my face. Your fingers are like frost on wrought iron.
“Not tonight, darling. I’m afraid that ship has sailed.” You laugh at your own joke, and your nails graze my left temple and my cheek, breaking the skin, drawing more blood. Somewhere in the attic, the albino boy with bat wings giggles happily to himself, delighted as a child pulling the legs off a spider. Then you tell me to look at you, and so I do as I’m told, because I’m frightened, and whatever stingy shred of resistance I’d scrounged and cobbled together since the last time you came sniffing around has all been spent, squandered on token refusals, and now there can be nothing for me but compliance. I obediently raise my head and look at you, looking into you, and I see that your irises are no longer the color of moonlight. If there’s a word for the color they’ve turned, I don’t know it; I doubt that it exists anywhere in all the languages of men.
“That’s better,” you say and smile for me. You lean in closer, your cat-rough tongue flicking out to lick at the fresh scratches on my face. Your breath washes over me, cold and clean as the sea, and I remember how surprised I was the first time we kissed and your mouth didn’t smell like death, that your breath wasn’t the breath of the grave. Abandon all your preconceptions, all ye who enter here. Forget the fairy tales and horror-movie clichés. What Bram Stoker didn’t get right would fill a set of encyclopedias.
You kiss me, and your tongue probes about and slides eagerly past my teeth. And I fall again, even though I’m still on my knees. This time there’s no attic floor to rise up and catch me, and no slippery ship’s deck, either. This time, you’re letting me pick the destination, even if my choosing is purely unconscious. No matter how many times we’ve been through these motions, and no matter that I know exactly what’s coming next, I’m caught entirely off my guard. I gasp, and you breathe yourself into me, bearing me down.
Time shatters. My perception of time shatters, and then it’s made whole again. Easy as you please. Easy as falling off a log. Easy as cherry pie.
I’m standing barefoot in the sand, and it isn’t winter anymore. Or it isn’t winter yet. The air is warm, even though the sun’s almost down, and tucked underneath all the smells of the sea, I catch the scent of dog roses. Behind me, the dunes are alive with them, pink and white blossoms speckling a wilderness of poison ivy, bayberry, and beachgrass. All that’s left of the day is the thinnest fiery red-orange rind smeared out along the western horizon, bridging earth and ocean, tying together the end of a day and the beginning of a night. And here I am, caught in between, pressed like a dried flower between the pages of a book, standing in the sand and watching the tide go out. The sea at dusk is so calm that it’s almost flat, and the little waves rushing up and breaking on the shore are hardly louder than a murmur. There are still a few noisy, complaining gulls wheeling about overhead, and a cormorant rushes past, sleek and skimming along only a foot or so above the water. Farther out, there are the crimson, green, and white running lights of shrimp boats, like Christmas coming in July, and farther out still, the old lighthouse at the northern tip of Block Island winks on and off, off and on. There is nothing whatsoever extraordinary about this scene. My apocalypse is the most mundane sort imaginable.
In the east, the moon is rising, and if it’s not quite full tonight, then it will be tomorrow or the night after that. The full buck moon or the full thunder moon or whatever it was called by the people whose land this was in the long ages before white men came and took it all away and made the world safe for tourists and surfing and clam shacks.
And then I remember that it’s a Thursday, and I remember, too, what this particular Thursday means. I look down and see the stone clutched in my right hand, a fist-sized chunk of granite I found washed up and half buried among the cobbles on this stretch of beach a mile or so north of Watch Hill Point. I’m holding onto it so tightly now that all the color has drained from my knuckles and my hand is beginning to go stiff and numb. The stone and my fingers are sticky and dark, and for a few precious seconds I try very hard to be confused by that stickiness, to fool myself into believing that I don’t have any idea what’s happening here, or, more precisely, what has happened, only a few short moments before. But the body is right there behind me, her body, lying facedown in the sand. The back of her skull has been caved in, and the way her arms are outstretched puts me in mind of a crucifixion. It always surprises me that I can smell her blood, even over the ocean and the dog roses and the acrid stink of my own sweat, but I can. Every time you leave me here, I smell the blood, the blood on the stone and the blood still oozing from her corpse and spattered across the sand and across the pebbles and the cobblestones, just as I must have smelled it on the actual night of the actual deed. I open my hand, and gravity dutifully drags the murder weapon from my grasp.
Behind me, somewhere among the dunes, someone has begun to sing.
“Were you watching?” I ask you. “Were you watching the whole time. Did you see it all, start to finish?”
“I was watching,” you reply. “I saw enough.” And then you ask me, “Have you ever had to get rid of a body? I hope you’re not just planning to leave it lying there, believing the tide and the crabs will do the work for you.”
“It’s not as if I planned this,” I say, and that might be true, and that might be a lie.
“You could bury her, but a dog or a pack of coyotes would probably only come along and dig her up again. Skunks and raccoons and foxes, you have to think of those, too. But sure, you could give that a shot, burying her. Unless you didn’t bring a shovel. Or a mattock. Or maybe a hoe. It would take you all night, to dig a hole deep enough and wide enough, but you could always give it a shot.”
The song from the dunes sounds almost like a lullaby, and I gaze out across the water and the twilight wondering if the people in those fishing boats can hear it, too.
“There’s little enough harm in trying,” you continue, “unless, of course, it doesn’t work out and you waste all that time digging a grave when you should be doing something else, instead. Something smarter. Something less obvious. Do you even know if you can lift her? A dead body is a surprisingly heavy thing, and you’re not all that much larger than her. If you had to drag her all the way back to the car, what a sight that would be. And have you considered what you’ll do should someone come along and catch you in the act?”
I’m already in the water up to my knees before it occurs to me that I’ve decided to drown myself, and I can’t recollect taking however many steps I’ve taken away from dry land and the dead and crucified woman I’ve left lying back there with my neatly folded jeans and shirt and underwear, with my socks and shoes and with the bloodied chunk of granite.
“Do you even know why you did it?”
In the dunes, the singer’s voice rises several octaves, and now it seems more like the call of some strange bird than anything from a human throat. It has, in fact, become almost painful to hear, but I don’t cover my ears. Soon, the water will be deep enough to hide me safely away from the reach of the song. The sea sloshes about my hips now, freezing despite the season, neither welcoming me nor turning me away. I’m only going home, after all, only seeking redress for an ancient abandonment, offering myself as a sacrifice in apology for the faithless fishes that fled the sanctuaries of far warmer, more inviting Paleozoic waters, seeking their ill-advised terrestrial salvation. I take another step, and another after that, and something slimy and unseen wriggles quickly past my bare legs.
“There must have been a reason,” you say, “though not necessarily one of which you are aware. That would compound the tragedy, wouldn’t it, her tragedy and your current predicament, if you didn’t even know the reason why you’ve done murder against that poor, poor woman? It would compound the waste, and you know how I feel about waste.”
I don’t remember walking into the water. I don’t remember taking off my clothes.
“All evil enters the world by way of wasteful acts,” I say, proud and prompt as any studious schoolgirl.
“Then you do know why you killed her?”
The sea buoys me up an inch or so, then gently, indifferently sets me down again, my feet once more touching bottom. I wonder if the people on the shrimp boats are watching, and it occurs to me that, if they are, all they’d see is one woman lying very still on the sand and another ignoring the ban on public nudity and skinny dipping under the cover of the approaching night. They might glance up from their nets, smile or shrug, then go right back to work. Or they might not even notice.
“She laughed at me,” I say. I hadn’t meant to tell you that. Not the first time I admitted the truth of it, and not this time, either. But what is intent and what is will, what is resolve but wishful fucking thinking, when I’m staring into your eyes that have turned a color normally hidden well out beyond the borders of the visible spectrum. An uneasy, shifting color to which I ought to be blind, but which I now can so plainly see.
I dare to look over my shoulder, just once, and the albino boy with bat wings has crept out of the dunes and the tangle of poison ivy and is hunched over her corpse, worrying at the crater in her skull.
“And that’s all? She laughed at you?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
Thirty, thirty-five, maybe forty feet from shore, the sand abruptly falls away beneath me, and I sink, the water folding me away like a funeral shroud, like an executioner’s embrace. The salt stings my eyes and burns my nostrils and throat, and I leave a silvery trail of bubbles rushing back toward the surface. They remind me of the insubstantial, translucent bells of jellyfish. They remind me of spilled mercury. I breathe in the sea, and my lungs fill with ice and fire to freeze me and bum me away to ash. But at least I can no longer hear the song from the dunes.
“Why did she laugh at you?”
“Does it even matter?”
And you look taken aback (which I know you’re not) and say, “I would imagine that your victim would think it matters, very much so, were she alive to care. Had you not so effectively and permanently silenced her. But, then, that was the point, wasn’t it?”
“Is that all this is?” I want to know. “A cheap morality tale? A sordid pulp fiction wherein the killer gets her eternal comeuppance?”
“No, darling,” you say. “This isn’t that, at all.”
Strands of kelp and ribbon weed seem to twine themselves about my feet and calves, ready to deliver me lifeless into the unloving arms of the waiting Atlantic abyss. And I’m ready to go. Indeed, I realize that I’ve been ready to go for a long time now. But then—then you intercede. You reach down and grasp me by the hair and haul me coughing and gagging and vomiting seawater back up into the cruel white light of the waxing moon. And you ask if I’d like to hear a story, and you sing to me and wrap me in your arms, pale and hard as if they’d been chiseled from Egyptian alabaster. I do not mistake you for death, not even for an instant. Anyone who has looked upon your face would know that you are nothing if not the opposite of death. Death is no mighty thing, and you are mighty. Death is nothing more profound than a piece of granite found lying on a beach, nothing more terrible than the consequences of a moment’s rage or a lifetime’s insecurities. Death is small and simple and inevitable, and you are nothing of the sort. No, whatever you are, it isn’t anything like death.
For a time, we hang there in the sky, wedded, you and I, and then I open my eyes—which I’d not even realized were shut—and I’m on my knees in the attic of the house by the dunes. Anyone who did not know better might think that I’m kneeling before you in supplication. Moonlight spills in through the dormer windows and washes across the floor and over me. The boy with bat wings reemerges from his hiding place with, a mangled rat dangling limp from his jaws. I can hear the bell buoy again, tolling its lonely warnings against the songs of sirens. And I feel a pinprick at the nape of my neck, but it’s hardly anything more than a pinprick, and your tongue laps at the sea leaking from the tiny breach you’ve made in me.