“Steve, unlock the damn car.”
Steven jolted awake in the stuffy womb of the rental car to see his wife, Linda, pounding on the driver’s side window. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to hide an unexpected hard-on.
He had been dreaming of Brolly’s fishwives again. Ever since he and Linda had arrived in Grayce Point, North Carolina, he had seen them. Each time he closed his eyes, the women were there, tempting him.
Linda shouted again, veins visible in her neck from anger. “Steven, the door!”
Steven scrambled to comply. Intense pressure from her editor had made Linda more intolerable than usual lately. Any way he could keep her happy was to his advantage. Her door swung open, letting in the muted roar and salty breeze of the incoming tide across the desolate tidal flats. The last book’s success had earned her a big advance, and big expectations. Linda had sold her publishers on another historical fiction novel based on the notorious wrecker Sean Brolly. She knew little more than a story told by her grandmother about the subject. The new book required research, and that required a few weeks in North Carolina. The story’s birthplace was a stone’s throw from historic Roanoke, on one of its less-scenic islands, soaking in the grisly details.
Steven had to go. He was Linda’s personal assistant as much as her husband, if not more. He brushed a lock of fine, windblown hair from her face, hoping to mute her anger with his apparent cheer. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
She batted his hand away with a sigh. “I found the site of the stilt huts out on the flats. The posts are almost rotted away — I bet they only get below the water at extreme high tides. But I had no luck tracking down graves along the surrounding shore.”
“So maybe they weren’t buried,” Steven suggested, nursing his stung hand as well as stung ego. It fit at least one of the legends about the fishwives of Sean Brolly. Spawn of several generations of incestuous relations, the women of the Brolly clan were said to be just as blood thirsty as their husband/father. While Sean merited a historical marker in town, ten feet from where he was hung, there was no definitive answer for what happened to the women. If they were buried, no one knew where.
Some said that the women were killed where they stood, the bodies set to the torch.
Another legend was heard from a rum-soaked old mariner at the dock four days ago. The fishwives of Sean Brolly were monstrous, inhuman, and the townspeople who fell upon them forced Sean’s progeny out into the ocean, pockets filled with rocks and sewn shut.
While Linda loved the more macabre version, she was unlikely to use it in her book. The mariner’s account, told in wafts of sour breath, involved the worship of forgotten gods and ritual sacrifice, not the kind of thing her editor was looking for. No, she would likely stick to having the women killed and tossed on a bonfire. Nothing like a good human pyre for sales, she had said.
The way her eyes sparkled at the thought turned Steven’s stomach, just as the mariner’s description of the wives stirred something else in him. Monstrous, he had said, their affinity for the ocean and its unforgiving god visible upon them like a shroud of sin. He would say no more, his eyes like a storm every time Linda brought the subject around to the Brolly women again. He eventually limped away, pulling his stocking cap down low over his rat’s nest of white hair as he vanished into the salty evening fog. They never saw him again, but Steven doubted they would get much more information. There was something in the way the old man had clammed up — something in Steven’s eyes, perhaps.
That night, the fishwives of Sean Brolly visited Steven in his dreams. Their dark hair was heavy with musky brine, their eyes wide, bulging on either side of narrow noses. In the muted sunset of his dream, their skin was grayish-green, their bellies white, glistening like raw oysters. Their bare backs were rough, scaly to the touch. There was nothing attractive about them, and as they first slid from the murky waters of the mudflats, he was revolted. Paralyzed in dream terror, he watched them advance down the length of the warped pier, a scent of bitter fermentation preceding them.
When their cold, grasping fingers began assailing the buttons of his shirt, his pants, he felt powerless to stop them. Insistent, slimy hands proceeded to touch him in ways his own wife’s had not for years, and his revulsion gave way to base animal lust. Their hungry grasp clutched wetly at him, tracking sticky lines down his torso, up his thighs. Strong, clammy fingers tugged at his manhood, stirred it to life. It was not real, he reasoned, only the dream result of constant frustrations. By the time their foul, black tongues snaked past his lips with a taste of seafood past its prime, he no longer resisted. Inhibitions lost, he gave in to their needs, their hungers.
The dreams continued, pulling him down into increasingly depraved visions of lust whenever he closed his eyes to sleep. He felt his waking and dreaming lives becoming disjointed, and wasn’t certain that he cared.
“Steven! Are you listening to me?”
He turned his attention to Linda. They were in the parking lot of the seaside motel. Steven didn’t remember the drive from the tidal flats, and memory of the briny stench faded beneath the rose soap smell of Linda’s skin. “Sorry. Drifted off.”
“For fuck’s sake. You’re supposed to be taking notes.” She waited for him to fish out his notebook. Once he opened to a blank page, she started in with the tone she reserved for children and idiots. Linda knew he hated it, that pedantic way of reinforcing that she was a success and that he was nobody. “Tomorrow, I need to go see the wreckage of the two ships out on the rocks. Book a charter boat for me. Meanwhile, I want you to search the local newspaper archives for accounts of Brolly’s trial.”
He wrote it down and returned the notebook to his rough, canvas over-shirt.
“And hide your boner before you get out,” she added. “It’s disgusting.”
How would you know, you harridan, he thought, already missing the wet caress of cold hands. You haven’t seen it for months.
The fishwives were waiting when Steven fell asleep. The touch of countless cold hands drained him of warmth and left electric fire in their wake. There were no less than a half-dozen women, the range of ages shocking had they not been figments. Light, sticky tracery of fingertips turned rough, scratching to raise a slow seep of chilled blood. Hands tore at him seemingly at random until he was drained, then wrote strange symbols in his flesh with their gnarled fingernails. Though spent, he felt desire building to new heights with every drop of blood they drew from him, the slow oozing of his essence replaced by energetic spurts of red as his heart raced. He no longer feared their freakishness — he reveled in it.
Steven woke before the alarm went off, sheets sticky with the evidence of his nocturnal escapades. He slipped off to the shower and scrubbed with the pale, unscented motel soap. Fully clothed atop the ripe sheets to avoid Linda’s discovery of his night, he shook her gently awake. “The water’s hot if you want a shower, and I’ll have your boat chartered by the time you get out.”