It’s been five years since the great Lake Erie earthquake, an event that seismologists claim wasn’t an earthquake at all, and of course, they are right. The stories about that day are wild—aliens shooting down from the heavens, weapons testing gone wrong—but none of them are as odd as the truth. The Fowler Island monster died that day, and the island went under, shipwrecked at the bottom of that great and eerie water. I helped end it. Swam so hard into that monster that his sharp points and soft organs blew apart, became tiny food for the lake creatures who had so long steered clear of him.
I would have done anything for my Beatrice and my Henrietta—that has always been true—but it was also selfish on my part. I didn’t think I’d move on. I expected whatever was left of me to go dark after the troll was dead, so it was a bitter surprise when I woke up in a new place, my soul a little dimmer but still aware. I woke up angry, as angry as I was the day I stood on the cliffs with my baby in my arms. That day I screamed down at the monstrous island. Told it that my daughter and I were done—tired of being scared and fucking furious all the time. Back then, though, I was sad. As sad as I was angry, but I’m free of the sorrow now. The cloying sourness of it is gone.
I’ve followed the girls south to Gaunt Creek—this small, college town that sits in a sea of cornfields. They have mistaken this town and their new house for a quieter, safer place than it is or will ever be. They think they have finally found peace. And maybe they have, but they do not know how many monsters walk among them as casually as men.
For the first few years, I discovered I could travel between this new home and what is left of Fowler. A tunnel took me back and forth so that I could check on what remained of the island, watch the strong limestone of the Island Inn stay proudly intact underneath the water, fish kissing its windows but unable to get inside. The museum bell tower is a weaker spot. It is the castle at the bottom of a fish tank. Windows and doors are gone. All the recorded history kept there blurred and melted in the cold waters of the lake, a blessing that will keep the mysteries of Fowler safe. The quarry house, of course, brought my babies to shore. Its great attic hull is preserved by the tourism board in Marblehead, a museum of oddities grown up around it of which Fowler would be proud.
Recently the tunnel disappeared, and the earth began to call to me. I resisted for a time, thinking it was the grave beckoning me—a place where I’d be locked up, caged, the weight of limestone on my chest, quieted in a way Quarry Hollow always wanted me to be—but the earth kept it up. It whistled and whispered, so much that I wake up now curled in the deep dark soil with the light of me stringing out into roots. When I’m down here, I feel myself growing, my form has substance again. I am not plant or parasite, or a speck of dirt. I am seed and womb. My essence is hunger, sucking up water and nutrients like air.
I must think of my girls to pluck myself up from this new mission, ripping longer and longer tendrils from the earth and digging upward like a mole when I want the girls. It’s begun to hurt, this breaking free. A pain that is almost satisfying—I haven’t had a body in a long time.
The others, my sad and ghostly companions for all those years, have moved on, found resting places elsewhere—perhaps they’ve gone where souls are meant to go—heaven or graveyard or out into nothingness. Perhaps I am the lucky one.
Henrietta is happier now, fixing up this new house with her mother, a house finally that wants to be fixed. Walking to the small-town grocery. Finishing up her undergraduate degree, which was left ragged for a time. Opening an art gallery. She is pregnant—a girl, although she does not know this yet. The baby will be present for the wedding. Little ears not yet formed, but the vibrations of their vows—hers and Joshua’s—will be felt all the same. The wedding will be here. They will all attend. Carrie. Sonia. Wally. Wilderness will even come back for it. Their feet will press to the green grass above my head, and I will reach for them without their knowing. Kiss their soles as they press heavily on the front lawn of this not-quite-safe house.
Wilderness is the only one who drifted away. Beatrice took a long time to heal from her island injuries, and she was exhausted and angry and sad from all she lost. She doesn’t like to think of it this way, but she misses her ancestry, her heritage, the most. A time when she had a destiny. Power. Now she feels loose, unmoored. Just another woman wandering the earth. Wilde let her push him away, and maybe it’s for the best. He is off to find his own life, and Beatrice is working. The college has an archival office, and she is an intern there, learning about how Gaunt Creek was born of the work of women and of freed slaves who crossed the Ohio River from Kentucky, looking for their freedom, a purpose found.
They want to build, my girls, to stretch so that the town grows bigger, more successful. A place to be found. A place that will draw more like them. A bigger school for Henrietta’s child. Another restaurant. A town museum.
Greed does not quit with the slaying of one monster. Nor does desire. The need to thrive and expand is by its very nature human. Re-creates whenever and wherever it is allowed. The body remembers and the earth captures the rot. Big shaky patches of land that seem solid, unmonstrous, yet they are sinkholes of secrets waiting to open up and swallow. But this time, it will not hurt my girls. I will be their monster. Their hungry, rooted beast.
I sometimes miss my old self. The infamous Olivia Rose. The queen of an actual island. The birth mother of Beatrice the Powerful. Beatrice the Great. The mothering version of Olivia Rose who thought she could defeat the monster haunting her family by simply confronting it. But that old self is gone, and the missing is fading too, as I find myself underground bathing in my own strength. My limbs grow long and pale, they grow strong, and as I stretch myself out under this town, I do not need eyes to see or ears to hear. I am hungry for the vibrations of townsmen too stupid to know they should shut up.
There are no cliffs to jump from here, but there is the rushing of the river, the steam tunnels that run forgotten under the college, and the sweat and tears of men that find their way down onto the pale tongues of me.
The female body is a miraculous thing. This I know. This I remember. Even as it finds a new shape, it nourishes. Gives and grows. And feeds.