Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
Marsha moved to the door, and tested its latch. It was unlocked. The door squealed open. No bells jingled.
She stood a moment in an early evening beam of slanting and gilded light, that swarmed with motes like churning plankton.
There was a table in the corner with a chair behind it...a few books stacked there, and a lamp that was unlit. Marsha looked there, first, to see if someone would be waiting for that rare, lost customer. But the impromptu desk was empty.
She eased the door shut guiltily behind her, wondering if she were trespassing. She saw no sign in the door announcing business hours. How could this shop not be defunct? Only the fact that the door had been unlocked – that, and the tempting array of shells – encouraged her to move deeper into the shadowy room.
There were tables in its center, and shelves and benches around its sides. There was a bookshelf with various titles on shells and the sea, and Marsha recognized a few that her mother and even herself owned. But the shells drew her, foremost. She might find a few things here for her own, long-neglected collection. More importantly, she might even find a few things here that her mother didn’t own, that she could mail to her back home. They had lived half a country apart for six years now. Mailing a shell would be better than their brief telephone exchanges.
Marsha neared the closest of the center tables. There were shallow cardboard boxes with shells ranked inside them, the names of the shells either written on cards, or on the floors of the boxes themselves, or on stickers stuck to the shells. The prices looked very good. Even too good. Again, Marsha had the impression that the shop was defunct. Either that, or lost in a pocket of time long past.
The names of shells had always delighted her, and she relived that old nostalgic pleasure now. She lifted a lovely Imperial Harp into her palm, then set it delicately down again. There was one called an Eye of Judas. There was an abalone used as a bowl, and filled with numerous little spotted shells called Measled Cowries.
She wondered, not for the first time, if the huge Queen Conch with its smooth, vivid-pink lips had been so named for its lewd resemblance to a female’s genitalia. Even considering it made Marsha embarrassed. Brian would have made a joke if she had suggested such a thing. Perhaps held the shell up to his mouth and flicked his tongue in it. And she would have chided him, or just ignored him, and he might have laughed or sulked and told her she had no sense of humor.
From atop an old bureau, she lifted a greenish Violet Spider Conch in its own box pillowed with cotton pads. There was an Arthritic Spider Conch, which looked like a dangerous creature that had become fossilized. The diseased-sounding Pustulated Triton. The appropriately leering Grinning Tun.
A loud thump, the rattle of glass, and Marsha was startled – dropped the shell she was presently holding, heard it clatter at her feet. Peripherally, she had seen something strike the glass in the shop’s closed door.
At first she had thought it was a thrown toy, but in the tail of her eye she had seen the dark blur whiz back up out of sight. A bird, then, chasing insects and colliding with the glass. Good thing it hadn’t broken through. It had to be stunned pretty nicely. And now Marsha looked back at the improvised desk in the corner, then at a closed door which must lead further into the house.
The loud sound had brought no one to the door, and though she had half-expected to see some old woman (who perhaps looked like her aging mother) now seated in that chair, there was no one.
Still a bit unnerved, Marsha stooped to retrieve the shell she had dropped. Thank God it had no brittle horns or such to snap off. As she gathered it into her hand, she noticed there were more boxes of shells pushed under the table and hidden by its draped yellowish cloth. Some boxes were stuffed with brittle newspaper, the shells practically heaped amongst that crumpled garble of old printed words. And one box had written on its side in bold black marker the words: SAD THINGS.
Marsha glanced up furtively, knelt closer, dragged the box out into view.
These were not shells, but other sorts of flotsam and jetsam, detritus of the sea. There was a dark blue beer bottle without a label, with a mummified sea horse corked inside it. There was a child’s green plastic alphabet block. There was a naked baby doll with both eyes missing, as if fish had plucked them out, thinking they might be real. Marsha saw a child’s glove knitted from dark green wool, and picked it out of the box.
There was something inside the glove. Hardness, jointed and articulated, inside each finger of the glove. Marsha immediately dropped it in horror.
And part of the interior slid out into view. It was not the skeletal hand of a drowned and dismembered child, but a long-dead crab, some of its legs inserted into the fingers and thumb of the glove.
In a sort of disgust born of nervousness, Marsha slid the box back under the table. As she did so, another markered message caught her eye. It said: BLOOD.
She dragged this box out. It had sea shells in it. Some she knew by name, some she didn’t, but they were all labeled with stickers. And there seemed to be a theme.
There were a number of one kind of shell called the Bleeding Tooth. It was apt: on the lip of the shell there were several lightish bumps that looked like molars set into a vivid red patch like bloody gums.
Similarly, there were several specimens of a Blood-Mouth Conch, with its whole interior a bright red, though it wasn’t as gruesome an image as the former shell.
Another Marsha extricated from the box was a Blood-Sucker Miter, which wasn’t red, and the naming of which she didn’t understand...
But then there was the entirely red Full-Blooded Tellin, an elongated clam in two smooth halves. Marsha thought it was beautiful. She was sure her mother would, too. She selected the nicest specimen of it she could find in the carton, and as she lifted it out she took note of another sort of shell. The only example of it in the container, Marsha picked it out for a closer view.
It was much more violently red than the Tellin. Though it was elongated like the Tellin, it was only smooth on the inside (as glassy red as nail polish), its outer halves being rough and horny. They flared like the folded wings of a dragon, and Marsha wondered if it might be something in the family of bivalves called the Wing Oysters...
She turned it over in her hands and read the sticker.
BLOOD WINGS.
Well, she’d been close. But the thing was, she’d never heard of such a shell.
That was it, then. Without a second look Marsha set down the Tellin, and rose with the Blood Wings. There was no price on the sticker. Hmph. The Tellin had said two dollars. Marsha decided she would leave ten on the table in the corner, with a little note. It wasn’t a common shell or she’d be aware of it, and so ten dollars – at least in this store – seemed fair. It wasn’t like she was buying the ultra-rare Glory-of-the-Seas with a ten. It couldn’t be too extremely rare, to be buried in a box under a table like that...
The first pen she chose from the table was dried up, but she got a second to give up enough pale ink for her to scrawl on a scrap of newspaper from the sixties. Then, she weighed the note and the ten dollar bill down with a dried starfish.
Marsha lifted her head just as she finished, her eyes fixed on that closed door to the rest of the little structure. Had she heard a sound from somewhere deeper in the house? A distant and muffled but heavy thud? It was the sound, she imagined unaccountably, an old person heavy with soft, dead weight might make if they fell out of bed to the floor.
Marsha turned to the outer door, and saw that the sun was very low, much lower than she would have thought it would be. Her eyes must have adjusted to the increasing dimness of the shop without her being conscious of it. She had lost track of the time in her absorption.
She hurried toward the door, beginning to sweat again though the air was cooling, and was half-way out when she thought she heard the squeal of hinges in the room behind her. But she told herself it was the squeal of the door she was exiting, and thankfully she was out in the empty street again, not even a car parked along it, as silent as the inside of the shop had been except for the metallic ringing of cicadas.
As she walked briskly away, she darted a look over her shoulder that flicked her coppery hair. The shop’s molten window now gone obsidian black. And a figure behind the displays, peering out at her from the window, timidly or stealthily. She saw it only as a palish smudge before she looked away sharply.
She turned a corner down another, even narrower street. Then took a right. It was supposed to be a right, wasn’t it?
The shell was rough, fanged, in her hand. It hurt her flesh, pressing into it. She stopped to slip it into the zippered fanny pack she was wearing, then looked up about her to get a hold on her bearings.
Marsha saw the first of the flying things drop down from the bruising sky like a huge, hovering bee. Because of how it flew, for a moment she took it to be a hummingbird. The metallic cicada tone was right in front of her now.
Her first instinct was to turn abruptly and walk away from it. Was it a bat? She was afraid it would tangle in her hair, even though she had heard such fears were a myth.
She glanced back over her shoulder as she walked briskly. She saw two of the blurred dark flying things now, floating after her through the lingering heat of the air. Marsha quickened her pace...and looking forward again, about to turn down yet another side street, she saw one of the flying animals emerge from it ahead of her. She came to a jarring halt, just as another and another creature appeared from the side street...
Marsha kept on going straight, then, now breaking into a trot, her heart like a fish drowning in air as it labored in the hot confines of her chest. The cicada buzz mounting, closing in on her, more suffocating than the heat. Another glance back. Now there were more than a dozen of the things, a black swarm, the two groups having converged. They were pursuing her, she knew. Drawn to her. And they weren’t entirely black, she understood in that instant of looking behind her. There was an indistinct black body, with trailing feathers that she realized were actually more like the short, numerous tentacles of a nautilus. And the wings were not black, but red. Violently red. They moved too quickly for her to see them clearly, but she believed the wings were hard, and thorny. Rough on the outside, smooth as glossy nail polish on the inside.
She began to run as fast as she could. The street, unfamiliar now in the rushing gloom, made a T ahead. She started toward the left – but a flock of perhaps a dozen more of the buzzing animals began to pour from its mouth. Stumbling, she caught her balance and redirected herself down the right-hand branch of the T. Marsha’s mind was blank with fear and her lungs were working too hard to spare sound, but she felt a tear drop from the edge of her jaw.
She realized she still had the empty coffee cup, half-crushed, in her hand; she had been too polite to leave it in the shop. She let it drop. She ran. Ran. Yet another turn in the bleak maze ahead. She took a chance and lunged into it...and thank God, there were none of those creatures. But she heard them behind her, their buzz-saw sound so loud now it might tear her eardrums, tear her mind.
Marsha felt the foremost creature pluck at her white t-shirt with its many black limbs, seeking purchase.
She wanted to scream then, cry for help from these many dark staring windows, half-blind with grime, their half-drawn shades like senile drooping eyelids.
The groping creature caught hold of the material. She felt other squirming fingers reaching for her, now.
Her pace was faltering as she forced herself through the lava-like air, her mind a vortex of terror and buzzing. And ahead of her, a familiar landmark at last...
...a barber pole, unturning. Next door, the sea shell shop, its sign ALL WASHED UP smiling at her in welcome. She had come full circle, and there were more and more of the flying animals seizing hold of her clothing...and, for the first time, her skin.
Her steps slowing, crumbling. She had to find shelter. Safety. In her mind, she pictured sharp little bird beaks within those nests of writhing arms.
Just ahead of her, the door to the shop opened, and a pallid figure filled the doorway. It was an elderly woman, large-bodied and wearing a white nightgown, and for an instant Marsha thought it was her mother. Her mother here to protect her. But for all the resemblance, this woman was grinning, and her mother wasn’t one to grin. The woman was beckoning to her, and Marsha went to her...staggering, sobbing, the things snarled in her hair and fixing themselves to the flesh of her back, both through and inside the material of her crisp new t-shirt. She could feel blood running down her ribs, the small of her back...
...but the woman was grinning, and held her fleshy arms out in welcome, and Marsha stumbled into them with a sob of mindless gratitude. Immediately, the creatures fell away. The buzzing stopped.
She heard the door close with a squeal behind her, and she was folded into the woman’s damp and chilly bosom, which smelled of the sea.
The Cellar Gods
I
Ng
was beautiful. It was not that I was so lacking in prejudice toward those strange, silent tenants of the brick warehouse, not that I was unafraid of them when the rest of the town let their fear turn to rage. I was too weak to save the others, but it was a weakness that made me save her. It was simply this: that Ng was beautiful.