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JUST DOWN THE SHORE, in the water, P.J. drove his boat around in circles. He went up and down and every time he went north he went a little closer to the hut, always riding parallel to it. It sat squat and gray, the rusty lawn chair nearly set in stone in that hard sand. The ugly brown weeds of that patch of land waved softly and P.J., with his binoculars, tried to peer through the windows of that hut, but they were opaque from the cardboard Rory put up inside. P.J. had just missed the little boy be guided into the house. Nobody had seen the child go in, for though there were people on the beach, they were either farther north or south, minding their own. Yes, people occasionally walked through, and maybe some tourists posted up near the water’s edge, thinking the hut was unoccupied, but even they didn’t have the intuition to look behind them and around the corner of the house at the driveway, where the persuasion took place.
P.J. felt ill when he thought of that small, squat hut. It stuck out like a rotten tooth. He thought of the man coming from the water and he thought of Rory’s face, gnashing and yelling as it threw chum off the pier. He knew in his heart that whatever was beyond those gross gray walls was certainly behind the disappearance of Haley and Wes. He turned off the ignition and lowered the anchor. He was far out and faced south but he sat on one of the benches and he watched.
The boat bobbed up and down and occasionally he looked through the glass bottom half expecting to see Rory’s face pressed against it looking up at him. His sense of reason kept wedging its way back into his mind. It kept reminding him that he doesn’t know anything for a fact. It kept reminding him that just because a man made him feel uneasy didn’t make the man a maniac or a kidnapper or a shark freak or whatever he may be accused of. But then he’d think of that night on the shore, when the water swelled up and seemed to give birth to a tall gangly man made of pale moonlight and dripping wet, dripping everywhere.
“I just don’t know,” P.J. said to himself. The phrase sunk deep in the ocean. He lowered the binoculars and took in a panorama of the beach. He saw Dennis sitting at the booth reading a magazine. He remembered how he felt about the Hardy Boys. How readily those boys seemed to toss themselves into danger. What danger was P.J. willing to face? What level of severity or urgency could he handle? A paper cut? A fire drill? A kidnapping and double murder? He looked at the sky. The sun was bright and the blue around it was cloudless.
He raised his binoculars again and looked for anything to happen at that hut. The magnified image bobbed with the boat making him nauseous. Sweat began darkening the back and chest of his uniform.
“What the hell are you doing out there?” It was Dennis through the walkie.
“Nothing,” P.J. lied.
The night before when he came back bewildered and covered in sand he tried to explain what happened. The alcohol on his breath was a hard fact to ignore so Dennis was hard-pressed to believe him. That being said, Dennis did consider, later, that his poor brother was under too much emotional stress and perhaps could use a break. Those were phrases their father used. Emotional stress. From what? Dennis thought.
Dennis tried to lighten the mood, “Did that Nina girl ever call you?” His voice came through with static. P.J. didn’t reply. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and kept watching the hut.
Dennis, back at the stand, grew annoyed.
“Dude, come back. You can’t just stare at that house all afternoon.”
And then,
“P.J.”
Through his own binoculars Dennis watched his brother bob up and down, sitting still.
“P.J., come back.”
“I think there was a kid here,” P.J. replied, “But I don’t know where he went.”
“He probably went home.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“Come back. You’re being annoying.”
P.J. turned off his walkie-talkie.
He sat out there for hours. Soon, the sun reached the deep horizon and turned from yellow to orange to blood. Before that though Dennis closed up early. Thought if P.J. was going to act this way and keep the boat out, why should he sit around like a punk. He lounged in his own chair and enjoyed the beach like a local, occasionally looking out at P.J. and the hut and then shaking his head and cursing him.
On the boat, P.J. felt neither fatigue nor hunger. He stayed a sentinel, driven purely by intuition. Eventually, before the sun completely set a small car appeared on the sand with the headlights bright. A frantic young lady came out of the car and began shouting a name and looking all over the beach, up and down. An older lady, wrapped in a shawl, stayed huddled by the car side and yelled too. The younger lady came to the water’s edge and began shouting the name out to the water and started jogging around, panicked and swift.
P.J. walked to the port side. He leaned over the edge with his binoculars. He watched the woman yell and cry. He turned on his walkie-talkie.
“Dennis.”
“Yeah, I see it. What’s going on?”
“What’s that woman screaming about?”
Shortly after P.J. said that flashes of red and blue appeared over the mound of sand and a cop car pulled up next to the lady’s car. Chief Eugene climbed out with a megaphone and began shouting Gregory in each direction. The blue and red flashed across the ocean. Blood, blue, blood, blue, blood, blue.
“I’m going over there,” said P.J. He felt secure with the backup and started the motor. He hustled to the rear and began cranking up the anchor. He watched the thick chain come from the dark water, slowly like it was escaping some dark space. He cranked manually and heard the shore bustle loudly, but it was beginning to get dark.
Inside the hut Rory panicked. He watched through a hole in his cardboard blinds the cop car drive up, and he knew a banging on his door was imminent. It would just be a question of whether or not he’d seen the boy, but Rory was too nervous to play cool. The child was lying sideways on the floor of the bathroom hogtied with duct tape. He had yet to stop crying and the snot and tears pooled on the tile floor where it met his cheek. Timing was critical. Rory’s plan was to carry the boy out of the back of the house to his pick up truck and drive out quietly and quickly. The mother’s car and the cop car were far enough away so that it was quite possible they didn’t even notice the truck when they roared on to the sand. And over their own shouting and that megaphone, the odds of them hearing a car start may be slim as well. Rory started crying too from nerves and he spat up some blood into the toilet over the kid’s head.
“I gotta take you for a ride, I’m really s-s-s-sorry,” he said and left the bathroom. When he returned he had a big quilt he used on his bed and began wrapping the kid in it. The muffled boy sobbed as Rory’s gross and rough hands tucked the quilt around his chest and rolled him up like how a spider does. The smell made the boy recoil. Fish and brine and rotten meat. Dark brown stains of blood and maybe shit. Loose hairs tangled in the weave. With his new found strength; Rory threw him over his shoulder, a much better weight than the girl before. He neared his door to the driveway, and on the kitchen table was the kite, unfixed.
Rory waited by the door. Waited for any distraction that could come. Again, the stress was too much for him and he sank to the floor with his back to the wall and he cried and prayed and asked for help. He prayed and prayed loudly, the votary of the waves and beasts there within. He prayed for chaos to happen on the water. He prayed for monsters to show up. He prayed for a chance to move.
The kid, bundled up, watched wide-eyed at the man sobbing into his own hands. And the kid noticed, when Rory spread his fingers, that they were webbed, a thick stretch of gray skin connecting each digit to the next. The monster focused hard on the paperback still in his pocket and like some perverted prayer, he asked for a distraction. And his cries carried up and dove deep into the water sounding the alarms that alerted the great beasts that never sleep.
On that dark water P.J. cranked at the anchor. His hand began to blister but the anchor stopped. He threw his weight on it but it didn’t budge. The metal chain immobile. As tight as a rod. It was dark out now and the waves began to pick up more. But there wasn’t a breeze for it.
“The house!” he yelled out from the boat, far out in that darkness. “Check the house!” He stood up and began waving his hand like a mad man, but then the crank leapt from his grip and started to spin. The anchor undid itself and yards of chain fed back into the water fast and violent. The sound of the metal spinning the wheel backwards startled P.J. It was spinning lower than it was set before. Maybe being pulled.
On the shore, Chief Eugene called through the megaphone and the mother was in hysterics. She kept cursing herself for being so stupid and careless and she wept into her cold hands.
“The house!” P.J. yelled. He returned to the anchor and began cranking but now it was too easy and it started to gain slack and the chain came too fast like the great anchor below was rushing towards the boat. P.J. took out his radio and called Dennis.
“Tell them to search the house!”
But Dennis didn’t hear it over the chaos on the beach.
“Dennis! Listen –
P.J., radio in hand, stood up and looked over the edge but a great slam hit the boat and the stern jolted a good five feet upward, and the wood splintered and cracked and P.J. was tossed into the air and then crashed against the floor near the bow. The slam was loud and Chief Eugene and the mother ran towards the water and looked out. Sandra yelled her son’s name as if he were out there, hoping so. Chief did the same.
“Get me a boat out here now,” Chief said into his shoulder.
P.J. clambered to his knees and crawled back to the stern. But it happened again. Some god-like force slammed the boat and the glass-bottom spider-webbed with a loud high pitched crack and then shattered beneath him plunging P.J. into the black water. And again, it assaulted him. It gnashed at him and he felt leather tails and creatures dart around his legs and between his arms. A sharp pain cut through his leg and he screamed in the water and he felt the warmth of blood cloud around him. He kicked and swam back up through the bottom of the boat and pulled himself up, hugging a bench, and found the blood from his leg pooling into the white of the boat and then flowing into the water. At first he thought it was a bite. But it wasn’t. It was the glass on the sides from when he fell through. The deep laceration drove up the outside of his leg from ankle to knee. He held it tight, but the blood bubbled out of the fissure and pumped between his fingers and poured down his palms, riding his knuckles like a river.
On the shore Chief Eugene, short and stocky, ran to the water’s edge and started calling to P.J., but the pain of his leg was too much of a distraction. Sandra, not knowing what to give her attention to, stood by the Chief’s side, thinking her son was out there on that destroyed boat. While they stood on the shore, their backs to the hut, Rory slinked out. He held the child, swaddled in the quilt, and carried him like a rescue to the pick-up truck. He recalled a time when he was younger, when he first lashed out at school. His father had heard about his behavior and ran an ice bath for him to come home to. His intentions were to re-baptize him in the name of their lord and savior and the father made Rory strip down to nothing. He shivered more out of fear than the ice water and his father held him down there until his flesh blued from the closing of blood vessels. When he was done the father wrapped him up in bath towels and carried him to his bed where the two stayed for what felt like days, neither talking nor looking at each other. Rory dropped the kid in the bed of his truck and quietly replaced the top of the bed and fastened it in place. He had tears streaming down his face and he felt stupid about them. He bent down and told the kid it’d be okay and then he closed the gate to the truck, got in, and drove away under the cover of night and chaos.
P.J. clenched his leg and fought the tumult of the water. He looked down into the splashing black, framed by the square where the glass used to be. He saw the anchor wasn’t taught anymore and he dragged himself across the deck and began cranking it and finally the anchor came up all the way.
He looked towards the bridge. It seemed impossibly far, but he rose himself up and used the cleats as support as he hobbled over, unstable and rocking back and forth in the chaos just focused on not pitching forward and falling back into the portrait of water. He started the ignition and gripped the small helm like a vice. He barely heard the motor kick on and feared that the water would be too choppy to make progress. He put his weight on the bridge and yanked the helm to shore.
But the water was splashing all around inside and the damaged stern slowed the ride to a drag. Then, without warning, or perhaps with the most warning that it could give, two sides of a great maw appeared through the frame on the floor. It was larger than life with teeth like kitchen knives. Its snout shot up through the space like an unholy church steeple, pointed and from depths unfathomable. The great beast chomped and gnashed and waved around violently, completely shattering and breaking apart the boat from the middle. P.J. screamed over the chaos but his voice was not heard. The throw of the waves and splash of the sharks and wailing sirens on shore made a cacophony.
Chief and Sandra ran to the shoreline. They could see the wood break away and the boat split into two separate chunks drifting apart, the stern sinking and the bow tilting at an angle where P.J. clambered, beleaguered, to the highest point. They saw the massive black shape decimate the boat in a tornado of chaos and calamity. The Chief drew his revolver from his holster and took aim at the black mass. In the moonlight he could make out P.J. crouched in action on the sinking bow, only about a yard or so above the surface.
“Jump! You can outswim it!” The Chief called out, not entirely sure what “it” referred to.
So he went for it. P.J., with all the strength he could muster from his wounded leg, leapt from the top of the sinking bow and fell through the gulf night until he plunged again into the cold and briny deep. Down there, under it all, was evil. He felt it right through to his heart. He could feel the presence of the monsters swooshing and sweeping around him. He started kicking in rhythm with his strokes but he was hardly making progress. The pain of his leg was immense. The saltwater stung it and he clenched his teeth nearly to a powder. The waves moved up into his face and he swam as hard as he could, each black swell slapping him on the chin, on the mouth, in his nose, in his eyes, retarding his flee to shore.
Dennis had run from his booth across the dark beach the moment he heard the first boat slam. The sand kicked behind him while other bystanders watched in fear. When Dennis joined the others at the shoreline he was sweating from terror.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“We don’t really know,” the Chief replied. He was scared too. The authority, the man who should be calm and collected had never seen this before. And then through the megaphone he cried, “Come on! You can make it!”
Sandra had stopped sobbing and her eyes were red and swollen and fixed on the race back to shore. She still couldn’t tell if Gregory was with him or not.
“Is something after him in there?” Dennis asked. His stomach dropped. The ‘something’ in his question felt heavy on his tongue. It left a bad taste in his mouth. Like ash or a salt lick. He ran into the water and yelled for P.J. to hurry. He saw the wood and fiberglass of the boat sink. Watched it get thrashed around by countless fins and tails. He saw one curve out of the water, breaching it with its snout, just to show how sharp its teeth were. It was too dark to make out what type of sharks they were, but even if they had been seen they were not from here.
Dennis ran deeper into the water. P.J. saw him and struggled more. His brother was waiting for him, arms outstretched, ready to receive him and drag him to safety.
“C’mon!” Dennis yelled, the water freezing his chest. He couldn’t see his own feet in the sand. He trusted they were safe. When he was waist-high in the water, P.J. closed the gap. Dennis reached out and grabbed him. With all the strength he had he yanked P.J. further along and the two ran together arm in arm, each of P.J.’s steps pumping more blood through the racing stripe down his leg.
Once they stumbled and fell onto the sand Chief turned his flashlight on to P.J.’s bloodied leg. The pink of the meat was showing. The skin pulling apart from each other like a bag being opened. Someone retched, another ran for towels, and Chief Eugene called for an ambulance to arrive. P.J. was in shock. He couldn’t stop shivering. The Chief wrapped him up in a towel and when the medics arrived they swaddled him too and carried him onto a gurney and then into the whirring truck.
By the time the patrol boats arrived P.J.’s boat had been entirely consumed. They threw spotlights on the water but found nothing. Then divers went in looking for bodies or pieces of bodies but they also found nothing. After the ambulance went away Chief Eugene looked at Sandra with a face of defeat and complete bewilderment and she returned the look and they drove off to the small island police station.
Making its way to the most southern tip of Marisol Island a rusted pick-up truck bumped and ground along the empty roads. It passed by drunken college kids and by empty palm trees standing skeletal in the night sky. It drove parallel to the sea and it was being followed, in the water, by a herd of devils. The truck coughed up exhaust as it moved along the black roads. The headlights were an old yellow and the lines of the lanes passed under and disappeared for good. Clutching the wheel, Rory shook his head from side to side and sometimes he cried a little and other times he smiled his bloody destruction of a smile and convinced himself it was all okay and it was all alright. He drove as calm as possible and thought as little as he could of the cargo he was transporting. He considered pulling over numerous times but he knew that if he did, then he’d never get to go to his new home. With each bump and turn he felt the weight of the child slide in the back of his truck. He winced with the more intense ones.
At the southern tip there was a wharf and it was large and it smelled rotten. Rory shut the lights of his truck off early and he pulled up slowly behind a bait and tackle shop to the east of the wharf. There was a dip down the side that lead to the actual docks but to the edge of that was a thin strip of dirty sand and rocks wedged in between the docks and even larger rocks. Rory turned off the car. He slid the child out and carried him down to that dirty strip. Tin cans, tires, broken bottles littered the small margin. The large black boulders and crags were everywhere and to go into the water you had to walk over yards of mossy green rocks resting in the shallow cool. The man laid the swaddled child down in the damp sand. He unwrapped him gingerly as if doing this part kindly would subtract from his doings earlier. He took the tape off of the boy’s mouth and the poor boy shuddered and whimpered for he was all out of tears.
“They paved the way for us to b-be here, you know... so I can’t let them down. I can’t let them down. They paved the way,” Rory spoke into the boy’s silent face. “Now c’mon and let me get you ready. I’m gonna unwrap you, okay?” And then Rory peeled the blanket off the child and the child began to shiver. Maybe it was out of cold and maybe it was out of pure terror but a pang shot through Rory’s heart and he bit his bottom lip and cried more. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll wrap ya back up,” he muttered and then he did so. “Is that better?” he asked and the boy didn’t move but he did shiver less.
Rory, crouched to his eye level, pointed to the water shimmering just beyond where the boats creaked and then he raised his finger even further – to the horizon and beyond. “We’re going out there right now.”
The child said nothing for he was too far-gone inside himself. Rory knew the look and picked the child up and held him close to his side the way a mother does. He started walking out towards the water and he stepped with concentration because the stones in the water were slippery and not sturdy. There was a splash up ahead and Rory clutched the wrapped up boy closer and hugged him tighter. The man cried and then the boy did and the two cried together as he stepped over some rocks and chose his footing. Soon the water was up to his waist and he sensed a deep slope up ahead. Some more splashes occurred and shapes were revealing themselves when they emerged from the water only to dive back under. They were ill-detailed creatures, described bleakly by the weak moon. Some boats started to rock even more and some loud thuds were heard from the heavy tails and bodies bumping into each other and into the hulls. Rory paused and thought. The wrapped up boy tried mumbling through the duct tape.
“Wait,” Rory said. It was to the water and the creatures in it. “I have to see.” The energy in the water slowed down and Rory turned around and, crouched low, took the child back up the margin of dirt and rocks.
He rested the boy down, wrapped up like a pupa. And then he looked at him and studied his face and wondered if something in the boy’s head was different than his own. Perhaps there was something in his brain or in the gray matter or in the still growing soup of his nervous system that allowed the boy to be happy or to feel at home or to think of a future for himself. Why did Rory have this consistent emptiness but this boy, clear as day in the rim of his eyes, not? Why did this boy feel and move through the earth like he belonged, but Rory never could? He looked at the boy’s face, still petrified in fear, and then grabbed both sides of his head. He lifted it forward and then brought it down with a quick bang on to the edge of a rock. Then he did it again. He cracked open Gregory Rett’s skull and fiddled around in his brains to see if there was anything different or new. He looked like an ape playing with toys or picking at pillbugs in the dirt. And then he stopped when he realized he was being watched.
Something in the water, just barely breaking the surface, watched him. Big eyes wide set apart looked at him like silver coins – the iris of them a purple and turquoise patina. Rory felt like a kid caught playing with his toys. He muttered an apology to the watcher and then scooped up the boy again, now dead, his head hanging back with weight and dripping with matter and clots. Then the acolyte, with his offering in hand, walked completely into the water, embraced by the froth and the chaotic splashing, until even his head went under.