There was a strange fetid odor in the room, almost brackish. It had simply been shut up too long, Anaximander told himself, momentarily forgetting the open window.
He considered how angry she would be. But was he not indulging her with this foolish trip to Syracuse? Surely, she would indulge him in this.
He crossed to the chest and forced the lock.
As he lifted the lid, a thick scent of musty brackish wrongness assaulted his senses. Was something dead rotting inside? What had she done?
There was something pink folded on top — a kind of strange almost flesh-like cloth. He lifted it out and shook it open.
It was the skin of a woman, complete but for holes at the eye sockets, hair still attached. He was holding it in front of him by its shoulders. He saw hair like his wife’s hair, curly and brown, and a scar like his wife’s on the left arm. He dropped it, and let it fall back into the chest, noticing for the first time that there were other objects below, other folded skins, sickly dark gray and green, with glimpses of feather and of scale and of fur.
He slammed the trunk, and sunk to a sitting position in front of it. He thought “witch” and “skin-thief”, and “not her, not my wife.” And, “gods protect me.” She would come back. She would know what he had done.
A shriek sounded behind him, and he turned. A hawk perched in predatory agitation, framed by the window, and its eyes were his wife’s eyes.
“Circe?” he asked.
The hawk flew to him, perched on his shoulder, and rubbed its head against the hair above his ear.
He flinched, expecting some attack, but it did not come.
She flew to the chest, lifted its lid with a talon, and slipped inside. A moment later, his wife climbed out of the chest. “I can change others, but not myself. I had to find another way. It is an old craft.”
“Will you change me? I should not have looked into that which you had locked and hid.” In his mind, he saw pigs and wolves, and he was afraid.
She looked at him and let the silence stretch. “Mander, if you will keep me company for the time you have left, I will whisper the secrets of the universe to you, the crazed babbling of flute-accompanied Azathoth, how Helios watches — a Cyclopean eye in a body of stars, how sleeping Oceanus dreams — the tentacled oozing leviathan, and how if both their eyes opened at once, the world itself would cease to be. I can show you things you would indeed find remarkable.”
He nodded mutely, afraid to contradict her, and, despite the last surrendering protest of his reason, absolutely curious and as absolutely smitten with her as he had been from the first day he saw her. “Shall we still go to Syracuse?” he asked after a moment. “Shall I see Scylla?”
Circe smiled, and she answered directly into his mind, no longer exerting the effort to twitch the skin and its mouth muscles in accompanying pantomime. “That foolish nymph slit her own throat centuries ago in her blind rage, but I saved her skin. I can be Scylla for you right now if you’d like. The possibilities, with so many nether mouths, are an adventure that might consume several days of exploration.”
He lifted the lid of the chest himself, and looked at her with an eager smile. “I do like to explore. But, remember I am an old man, wife. Be gentle with me.”
They were not seen for several days.
When they sailed for Syracuse, they looked out over the side of the ship at the dark surface of the water, his arm protectively encircling her, and he tried to imagine the strange shapes that slithered and slept and oozed beneath its depths. He shivered a bit, and was glad that the ship was as large as it was, and as well fortified against storm and rock as it could be.
She felt him shiver. “You have nothing to fear from the others while you are with me,” she whispered.
“Because they are… our family?”
“And because they can no longer abide the sound of barking dogs. The racket is fearsome carried under water. I have warned them off before, Scylla-skinned, and the lesson is now well learned.”
“What is there yet to see, in Syracuse and beyond?” he asked, realizing that the ship had little to fear from Scylla while she stood tucked beneath his arm. “Is there still a whirlpool, a Charbydis, to fear, in the Strait of Messina? Do we have a reason to sail through the strait and beyond?”
“There is still Charbydis, and as to what she is, I’ll let you see for yourself. But, as to what lies beyond the strait, if you remember your Homer, you will recall that my own isle lies beyond, Aeaea. There I have a house and cave, my eternal home, where I retire between the lifetimes that I choose to live skin-stolen. I’d like you to see it. I’d like to remember us there, wrapped in each other’s arms and other appendages, as I wait there in the centuries to come, immortal and alone.”
And this was what captured Dennis’s imagination, as he set aside the translation and its mad tale of the witch and the old Ionian philosopher-scientist. How many lives had she lived since, and in what skins? How long had she waited, alone?
Most scholars agreed that Aeaea was no longer an isle, but a peninsula off the Italian coast, in the salt marshes, in a place now called Mount Circeo on Cape Circaeum, bearing her name. Surely others had searched these spaces, and the caves there and on the nearby island of Ponza. But, he felt compelled to search as well.
Dennis left behind his scholarship, his father, the comforts of the city and its technologies, and all that he had been taught about skepticism and reason. He tattooed the back of his hand with the Orphic egg (a silver egg wrapped in a serpentine tentacle) in the hopes that it formed some kind of mark of initiation.
Eventually he found a cave that others had overlooked, or, perhaps more likely, he was permitted to see that which had been veiled to others. He found the grotto, and the beautiful woman reclining within.
As he approached, seeing only her top half, he did not know if this was her Thracian skin, or her Scylla skin, or some other skin. Beneath the water line, she could be hairy mouths and tentacles.
But he still went to her.
“You came,” she said.
“Are you Circe?” he asked.
She nodded, still half submerged, and reached up with one hand to caress his face as he knelt beside the pool. “You found my story.”
“Not I, but others. I read the translation.”
“I have written that story every two hundred years or so, different versions, each a faithful account of my adventures with the men of each age who have come to bear me company, and hid the papyrus, the papers, in necropoli and other old places. Perhaps one day in the far future, they will read of you and I, and it will inspire another young man to seek me out.”
“You are a fisher of scholars,” he said with a laugh.
“I cast my net,” she acknowledged with an ageless smile.
“You’ve caught me,” he said. “I am yours.”
“Are you ready to join me in this pool, knowing what I might be, beneath this water?”
He nodded, and began to unbutton his shirt, eager to find out.
One hairy mouth slipped out of the water and rubbed its furry head against his leg, where he knelt. He petted it, slick and soft, and traced its moist lips with one finger. She sighed in pleasure, and the sound purred and pulsed from all of her mouths at once, above and below the water. As she wrapped him in her arms, in her tentacles, in her nether mouths, he heard his own heart beating like a mad drum and her moaning cries echoed through the cave like the thin monotonous piping of a Phrygian flute.
Nathan Crowder
THE FISHWIVES OF SEAN BROLLY
The bottle’s neck in Steven’s hand was slick with sweat and blood, and his brow was knit with concentration in the stale motel air. He leaned back to let the table lamp shine down on his work. With a critical eye, he surveyed the cuts. Close, he thought. Close but still not right. Maintaining an erection would be difficult at best. Steven adjusted his position. As he examined his canvas, he licked a drop of salty sweat from his upper lip. There, he thought. He brought the broken glass to bear. With the whisper of parting flesh, he felt turgidity return. Yes. This will do just fine.