MY RETURN TO Outer Reaches had better be shrouded in mystery. I wasn’t alone, and there were officials who knew it, and let us pass. That’s all I can tell you. So here I am again, living with Simon and Arc, in the same beautiful Rim apartment on Jupiter Moons; still serving as Senior Magistrate. I treasure my foliage plants. I build novelty animals; and I take adventurous trips, now that I’ve remembered what fun it is. I even find time to keep tabs on former miscreants, and I’m happy to report that Beowulf is doing very well.
My symptoms have stabilised, for which I’m grateful. I have no intention of following Lei. I don’t want to vanish into the stuff of the universe. I love my life, why would I ever want to move on? But sometimes when I’m gardening, or after one of those strange absences, I’ll see my own hands, and they’ve become transparent –
It doesn’t last, not yet.
And sometimes I wonder: was this always what death was like, and we never knew, we who stayed behind?
This endless moment of awakening, awakening, awakening...
THE DEEPWATER BRIDE
Tamsyn Muir
TAMSYN MUIR (tazmuir.tumblr.com) is a writer from Auckland, New Zealand. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare, Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Clarkesworld.
IN THE TIME of our crawling Night Lord’s ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie’s Dream Car. Aunt Mar had bought it for a quarter and crammed funsized Snickers bars in the trunk. Frankly, I was touched she’d remembered.
That was the summer Jamison Pond became wreathed in caution tape. Deep-sea hagfish were washing ashore. Home with Mar, the pond was my haunt; it was a nice place to read. This habit was banned when the sagging antlers of anglerfish illicia joined the hagfish. The Department of Fisheries blamed global warming.
Come the weekend, gulpers and vampire squid putrefied with the rest, and the Department was nonplussed. Global warming did not a vampire squid produce. I could have told them what it all meant, but then, I was a Blake.
“There’s an omen at Jamison Pond,” I told Mar.
My aunt was chain-smoking over the stovetop when I got home. “Eggs for dinner,” she said, then, reflectively, “What kind of omen, kid?”
“Amassed dead. Salt into fresh water. The eldritch presence of the Department of Fisheries –”
Mar hastily stubbed out her cigarette on the toaster. “Christ! Stop yapping and go get the heatherback candles.”
We ate scrambled eggs in the dim light of heatherback candles, which smelled strongly of salt. I spread out our journals while we ate, and for once Mar didn’t complain; Blakes went by instinct and collective memory to augur, but the records were a familial chef d’oeuvre. They helped where instinct failed, usually.
We’d left tribute on the porch. Pebbles arranged in an Unforgivable Shape around a can of tuna. My aunt had argued against the can of tuna, but I’d felt a sign of mummification and preserved death would be auspicious. I was right.
“Presence of fish en masse indicates the deepest of our quintuple Great Lords,” I said, squinting over notes hundreds of Blakes past had scrawled. “Continuous appearance over days... plague? Presence? What is that word? I hope it’s both. We ought to be the generation who digitizes – I can reference better on my Kindle.”
“A deep omen isn’t fun, Hester,” said Mar, violently rearranging her eggs. “A deep omen seven hundred feet above sea level is some horseshit. What have I always said?”
“Not to say anything to Child Protective Services,” I said, “and that they faked the Moon landing.”
“Hester, you –”
We recited her shibboleth in tandem: “You don’t outrun fate,” and she looked settled, if dissatisfied.
The eggs weren’t great. My aunt was a competent cook, if skewed for nicotine-blasted taste buds, but tonight everything was rubbery and overdone. I’d never known her so rattled, nor to cook eggs so terrible.
I said, “‘Fun’ was an unfair word.”
“Don’t get complacent, then,” she said, “when you’re a teenage seer who thinks she’s slightly hotter shit than she is.” I wasn’t offended. It was just incorrect. “Sea-spawn’s no joke. If we’re getting deep omens here – well, that’s specific, kid! Reappearance of the underdeep at noon, continuously, that’s a herald. I wish you weren’t here.”
My stomach clenched, but I raised one eyebrow like I’d taught myself in the mirror. “Surely you don’t think I should go home.”
“It wouldn’t be unwise” – Mar held up a finger to halt my protest – “but what’s done is done is done. Something’s coming. You won’t escape it by taking a bus to your mom’s.”
“I would rather face inescapable lappets and watery torment than Mom’s.”
“Your mom didn’t run off and become a dental hygienist to spite you.”
I avoided this line of conversation, because seriously. “What about the omen?”
Mar pushed her plate away and kicked back, precariously balanced on two chair legs. “You saw it, you document it, that’s the Blake way. Just... a deep omen at sixteen! Ah, well, what the Hell. See anything in your eggs?”
I re-peppered them and we peered at the rubbery curds. Mine clumped together in a brackish pool of hot sauce.
“Rain on Thursday,” I said. “You?”
“Yankees lose the Series,” said Aunt Mar, and went to tip her plate in the trash. “What a god-awful meal.”
I found her that evening on the peeling balcony, smoking. A caul of cloud obscured the moon. The treetops were black and spiny. Our house was a fine, hideous artifact of the 1980s, decaying high on the side of the valley. Mar saw no point in fixing it up. She had been – her words – lucky enough to get her death foretokened when she was young, and lived life courting lung cancer like a boyfriend who’d never commit.
A heatherback candle spewed wax on the railing. “Mar,” I said, “why are you so scared of our leviathan dreadlords, who lie lurking in the abyssal deeps? I mean, personally.”
“Because seahorrors will go berserk getting what they want and they don’t quit the field,” she said. “Because I’m not seeing fifty, but your overwrought ass is making it to homecoming. Now get inside before you find another frigging omen in my smoke.”
DESPITE MY AUNT’S distress, I felt exhilarated. Back at boarding school I’d never witnessed so profound a portent. I’d seen everyday omens, had done since I was born, but the power of prophecy was boring and did not get you on Wikipedia. There was no anticipation. Duty removed ambition. I was apathetically lonely. I prepared only to record The Blake testimony of Hester in the twenty-third generation for future Blakes.
Blake seers did not live long or decorated lives. Either you were mother of a seer, or a seer and never a mother and died young. I hadn’t really cared, but I had expected more payout than social malingering and teenage ennui. It felt unfair. I was top of my class; I was pallidly pretty; thanks to my mother I had amazing teeth. I found myself wishing I’d see my death in my morning cornflakes like Mar; at least then the last, indifferent mystery would be revealed.
When Stylephorus chordatus started beaching themselves in public toilets, I should have taken Mar’s cue. The house became unseasonably cold and at night our breath showed up as wet white puffs. I ignored the brooding swell of danger; instead, I sat at my desk doing my summer chemistry project, awash with weird pleasure. Clutching fistfuls of malformed octopodes at the creek was the first interesting thing that had ever happened to me.