The frenzied animal in my chest calmed only a fraction at seeing the lights. They might mean Del was okay, maybe even up making a late breakfast for herself, but they did nothing to explain the fact that she’d lied to me about both of her checkups at Megan’s clinic. Why? But that was the question of the hour, wasn’t it? Why was any of this happening to us?
I slid the truck to a stop a couple feet from our walk and didn’t bother to shut it off. The rain hammered my back and head, its cold touch like dead, probing fingers. I yanked the door open and was yelling her name before I cleared the entry.
No reply.
I spun through the house in a fury, spending only enough time in each room to be sure Del wasn’t anywhere within before moving on. I half slid, half ran down the stairs from our room, the last vestiges of hope evaporating with the knowledge that she wasn’t in the house.
I stopped in the kitchen, trying to think through the whirlwind my mind had become. Where? Where would she go? Immediately I ran for the door, rushing through the rain to the edge of our yard. I leapt onto the highest rock I could see, nearly slipping from its wet top.
The sea tossed itself against the beach below in utter abandon. It was as if it shared in my despair and wished to dash itself apart on the rocks. Or maybe it was reaching for me after all my time spent upon it. Perhaps it wanted revenge for harvesting its waters without recompense. Maybe it had already taken something back from me as payment.
I scanned the roiling water but there was nothing. Its surface was so bleak and cold, I knew that if Del had entered the ocean even since I had pulled up in front of the house, she would be lost. With that thought, my head snapped around to Harold’s darkened house. I almost jumped from the rock and sprinted to the old man’s home, but thought better of it at once. Harold wouldn’t be of any help searching for her in the rain, and if he had seen her wander off he would have already called me or been waiting at our door when I came home.
I was about to leap down from my perch when something caught my eye, trailing off to the south down the beach. My stomach fell as if a trapdoor had been opened beneath it and my legs nearly collapsed.
Because it was at that moment I realized where Del had gone.
~
I climbed the last few steps up the hill bordering the cove. Our cove, we used to call it, laying claim to something so large and free as a border between sea and land being only within the reaches of two people young and so in love. The wind had risen even more since I had pelted down to the beach, following the ghostly impressions of where she’d walked, their indentations already being muted and washed away by the rain, as if the weather didn’t want me to find her. Even now I think it might have been better if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t seen.
But I did. I did.
I spotted her as soon as I crested the rise. She was a deeper shadow among the swirling water within the cove. She wore the thin, cotton pants and t-shirt I’d dressed her in the night before and she stood with her back to me, the water reaching nearly to her hips.
“Del!” I screamed her name as I ran down the path that stretched to the beach, her form disappearing behind a tall rock that the trail wound around. When I stepped onto the soft sand she was even further out, the rolling waves washing against her bulging stomach. “Del!” I didn’t break stride, the sand giving way beneath my feet, the rain and wind shoving me back. She didn’t seem to hear me as she took another step. But that was wrong. She hadn’t stepped, she had glided deeper into the water.
Even though there was something elementally wrong about how she moved, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t have stopped as much as I could have forced the sea away from her, away from us. It was only when my feet touched the water that she finally looked back.
She was so pale it looked as if she had lost all the blood in her body. She was translucent, shimmering there in the shadowed waves, blue veins and vessels teeming in her white skin. And her eyes. They were full of something that scared me more than anything had since the beginning of our dual descent.
Her eyes brimmed with regret.
“Stop, Jason!” She put up a hand and I obeyed because there was power in her voice. The diminutive tone she normally spoke in was gone and I could even hear the rasp of her tongue through the tempest surrounding us. “I’m sorry,” she said, tears springing from her eyes and mixing with the rain. “It made me! It made me!”
And she changed then.
Her outstretched hand thinned and something moved beneath her skin. It was as if she were a living casing harboring something else. Her fingertips flowed together, joining into a fleshy mass that bent and twisted how a human hand never should. Her spine arched in pain and she tipped her head back, her mouth opening as if to cry out to the sky. And that was when it emerged.
The tips of something, of many somethings, poked and prodded into the open air past her teeth. Her jaw gaped wider to accommodate the tentacles. And as I watched, the water darkened around her waist and a thousand black appendages appeared from where her legs had been. She hadn’t been walking at all; she was being carried by what her lower half had become.
Her mouth split along the edges of her lips and the face that I had looked at a hundred thousand times—kissed, caressed—broke apart as her true form was revealed. It was a blackened carapace of shiny flesh that emerged. Many folds rimmed with red fluttered in the soaking air. Gills, I thought wildly as the borders of my sanity began to fray. Her skin continued to slough off in the water like an insubstantial sheet peeling away, and more of her body was exposed. A gelatinous substance, mucousy and gray, covered her back between spiny fins that looked poisonous in the stormy light. The tendrils rising from the water around her pricked and preened the fins until they stood out like smoky sails. Del’s chest and belly were now flat and I realized that there had never been a child. It was only her, the true her, becoming what I saw now.
A low bellow that I felt more than heard, rippled through the air and Del’s mouth opened in a gash of needled teeth, their rows too many to count lining her cavernous throat.
And her eyes. Her beautiful gray eyes that had captivated me were now the pools of darkness that I’d witnessed that day looking out at the sea with longing. They held none of the softness and love of before.
I screamed then. I know I did, though I don’t remember it. I do know I raked trails of flesh from my face with my fingernails because to this day I bear the scars, and fell to my knees in the surf that roiled around me. I knew then that there was nothing left to do but scream and die in the sea because what I had seen wasn’t something a human mind or heart could ever accept. There was no swallowing the immensity of it. I sobbed something then, surely her name, and that was when the sea moved.