He took it, held it under his face so he could better see and sniff it.
“It’ll only hurt for a little bit, and it won’t be that bad,” she’d promised. “I read all about it. Mother can fix you up, but it’ll cost her plenty of energy to do it. Drink it, and you’ll get a little sick. But you’ll make me so happy. And you want to make me happy, don’t you? I thought you did. Maybe I’m just stupid.”
“You aren’t stupid,” he’d said, even though he’d long and privately assumed as much. It was only polite to argue.
Lying on his side in the back of the van, lying with a mouth filled with pieces of his own tongue swimming in acidic pus, José felt something cold against his cheek and he realized with only the dullest jab of horror that it was the van’s floor against his gums. The acid had burned through his face, and now it dripped down onto the floor. Where it touched the painted metal, the finish peeled and ran.
“Hang in there, baby,” Bernice said from the front seat. “I’m sorry it’s taking so long, but it’s not far now. I can feel it, you know? The way the water pulls at me, I know it’s right over there—but I can’t find a road. If I don’t find something soon—” She cut herself off. “There’s a road!”
She made a hard left and the ambulance teetered briefly on two wheels.
José gagged on the motion, and on the corrosive vomit. The vehicle bounced and bobbed on a barely paved strip. He could feel it, even through all the misery and disorientation and pain. He could also feel the water somewhere close, beckoning. He reached out with what was left of his determination, and he begged for Mother to hear him. Out in the distance, from the depths of the water, she heard him, and said she was coming to meet them.
What has happened? she asked, but José was too far gone to answer. He’d spent all his energy to summon her attention, and it was merely a weak cry—a hand waving in the darkness. But she heard him and she was coming. That was all he needed to know or believe.
So he tumbled into unconsciousness, convinced at last that it was safe to do so. Mother would be there when he awakened.
Dimly, as if it were happening centuries or miles away, in the darkness of his blessedly quiet mind he felt the jostlings of the rushing, crashing ambulance as it moved him closer to the shore—and yes, he felt the shore, even asleep and lost—he could feel the water up against his awareness, washing up and down like the comforting lull of a tide.
Crash, jerk, jolt, and shudder. The ambulance had stopped.
The back doors yanked open and a blaze of light penetrated his mental fog. “Bernice.” He said her name in his sleep, or he thought he did. He hadn’t spoken a clear word since leaving Ybor. She was looking at him, trying to decide how to remove him. She was strong, though. He trusted that she could carry him.
Bernice pulled him out by his chest, hoisted him by the crooks of his arms, and dragged him to the water’s edge. Her hands squeezed and stretched the skin there, and it pinched—but the pinch was such a tiny discomfort compared with all the rest. It was a wonder that he felt it so sharply.
And then there was grass. It tickled the underside of his legs. It brushed with an itching determination along his feet and against his legs, and he understood that his clothes were gone in giant patches where the acid vomit had eroded them into nothing. It left his burning skin open to the air, and he wanted to scream about it. But he was beyond screaming. He had no tongue, no cheeks. His jaw was hanging agape, and the walls of his stomach were collapsing upon themselves. The poison was eating him from the inside out, turning his blood into jelly and his bones into fragile things, leeched of all their strength.
When Bernice dragged him over a driftwood log, he heard his hip snap, and it sounded like a slice of apple being broken between a child’s fingers.
He didn’t feel it at all. He could barely feel anything, even pain.
He could hear Mother’s voice, though, and it was outraged and—if he dared to flatter himself—afraid. He tried to cry out for her, but the motion was gruesome; there was not enough muscle left to hold his face in its correct shape, and his effort merely shifted the festering gore.
She picked him up, pulled him into the water. He would have smiled if he’d had enough mouth left. The coolness of it soothed him, where there were nerves left to be soothed. The salt of it was tart against his body, but it was a familiar tartness that felt correct and friendly despite his open wounds.
She cradled him in her arms, not caring how little was left or how terrible it looked. Arahab hummed to him and held him. She drew his quivering, oozing form inside herself, shutting him away from the air, from the sky, and from the pain.
Even the pain.
Even . . . yes. It was gone, there in the swirling, beautiful blueness of her body—created with the ocean, reflecting the heavens. There was pleasant chill, and there was a pretty gleam of white that covered everything, blanketing the universe with calm. He heard a song humming from the water around him, and he realized that his Mother was singing to him, something old and quiet, something soothing and loving. She was singing him a lullaby.
Blanketing him with . . .
Covering him with . . .
And all of it was.
White.
Arahab held José’s mangled body, even though it leaked poisonous fluids from every orifice, pore, and wound. She washed him with her hands and then she absorbed him, pulling him deeply into her own torso and closing her blank-white eyes.
“Mother?” Bernice asked. She was holding the small bronze shell between her hands. She fondled it nervously. “Mother?”
The elemental had not chosen a towering shape for this encounter, at the water’s edge where the sand clumped itself around sea oats and water weeds. The lumpy dunes hid them from view, or at least gave them a touch of shelter and the illusion of privacy. Beyond the dunes, beyond the farthest reaches of high tide, a ring of trees grew in a crescent. They clung to the mainland, fearing to reach too far onto the sand. The whole earth cowered away from Arahab.
She was only a little larger than a regular human, and only a little stranger in shape. With José inside her, the image was doubled and dreadful.
Arahab, an outline—a woman-shaped sack of water with hands held apart and outstretched. José, a shamble—a man-shaped tangle of gristle, meat, and bones that floated within the translucent skin of his Mother. She was holding him more snugly and warmly than a womb.
And she was concentrating, training her pupil-free eyes inward so she could examine her patient with all his torturous injuries. Whatever he’d consumed was consuming him in turn, and it sickened her, too.
She writhed, just a bit. She buckled a bit under the atrocious weight of his suffering, then stood straight again, with only her pelvis and legs concealed by the surf.
What happened to him? she asked. The question was addressed to Bernice, who was still running her fingers around the ridges and ruffles of the shell.
“Poisoned,” she said. “The Greek, at the shop where we went for the call. He did it. He poisoned José; he tricked him. He almost tricked me, too, but José got sick real fast.”
Why? she asked, not bothering to pursue the how. She knew how. She could feel how. It was something more than a spell and more than simple chemistry. There are powders and fumes that react poorly with water, even striking smoke and sparking peculiar flames. But there was magic here, a bad old kind that was meant to eat gods.
“He said . . . he said he had to make you the call, because he was keeping the peace or something. But he wouldn’t let you rouse Leviathan,” she said. The word “rouse” felt funny between her teeth. It wasn’t one she’d ever used. She wondered where she’d heard it, and why it sprang so easily into the story. “He said he’d kill us both to stop you.”
Did he?
José was squirming. No, he was twitching. He was dying there, held suspended and falling apart. The water around him was turning a cloudy yellow, a venomous placenta too sick to nourish anything.
Bernice nodded ha
rd, trying to answer without speaking. She didn’t trust the sound of her own voice. She didn’t trust the grasping flicks of her fingertips as they held and hid the bronze shell. For the first time in her life, she didn’t trust her own ability to talk her way through a falsehood.
It was Mother. It was the way she glared with her unseeing eyes, closed and turned to regard José—who wasn’t twitching anymore. Something taut and quietly seething pinched her face, even though it had no muscles to pinch or make it look cross.
Arahab made a small gasp, a burp of pain. She coughed and José’s body flopped and wriggled inside her; she hacked again and the simmering blond liquid spilled out of her mouth. She was forcing something, harder and with more power. It buzzed in the air around her, and it hovered over the beach like a cloud of mosquitoes. Arahab called it; she dragged it. She commanded every bit of it, and it came to her—and she funneled every spark of force, or grace, or energy into her own body.
She sent it into his body.
No, she said, but Bernice wasn’t sure what she meant.
“Mother, are you all right?”
Yes. Arahab’s eyes flew open, and they were no longer blank. They were red as if shot with blood. I’m all right. But he . . . And then she expelled him through her chest, not in a violent burst of gore, but in a tender little birth that was slow with regret and disappointment.
“But he?” Bernice was transfixed, but not by the sight of the pulpy, repugnant mass that Arahab had deposited onto the edge of the beach. She was watching Arahab, watching and waiting. She had been expecting something, and it hadn’t happened. She had been keyed up with anticipation, but this was not the outcome she had planned.
There’s nothing more I can do for him.
“Wait.” Bernice shook her head. “Wait, I don’t . . . No. Look at him. You’re just going to let him die?”
Arahab’s slim, crimson eyes narrowed brightly and smoldered with something riotous and unreadable. Look at him yourself, girl. He’s dead. And that’s all. He’s dead, and you’ve killed him.
“I? No, I didn’t. I told you, it was the Greek, in his awful little shop. He’s the one who did it. I tried to stop him—he was going to kill me, too. I was trying to help you, Mother.”
Were you? She feigned a wide-eyed face. It was a mirror of Bernice’s, when Bernice wasn’t telling the truth; that was where she’d seen it before. “Were you so devoted that you followed my directions to the letter?”
“Yes—” She had to say it fast, because Arahab was firing questions one after another, harder and quicker. And she was rising up with each question, taking in more water and taking on a bigger form.
She swiped at Bernice and pulled the shell from her hand with a ferocious splash that almost knocked the girl off her feet.
Were you such a devoted daughter that you’d wish for my success, that you’d wish to awaken my father, my Leviathan? This time she wasn’t in a cay puddle, surrounded by a rock wall. This time she was wallowing in the Gulf of Mexico, and there were tons upon tons of water at her disposal.
“Yes!”
And were you so single-minded in your pursuit of my ambitions that you strayed not at all and dabbled in no preposterous dark arts—as they are weakly known and dimly understood by the mankind that spawned you first?
“Yes, Mother—”
I made you to help him! To help me! And you would go with him into the fire priest’s den, and you would conspire with him to—
“Mother, fix him! Fix him, you have to try harder!” Bernice was shrieking, hysterical. She couldn’t help it. Mother was twice her size, and then three times and four times it. She was the size of a house, and growing larger by the sweeping second.
He’s dead, and there is no fixing him! I could not do it. I don’t hold that kind of power! No one does, any longer. The one who was once called Death is an outcast shadow, weak and shunned. Even if that creature had the means to assist me, I do not think that it would do so.
“You brought me back to life,” Bernice insisted. She was crying now, and no matter how hard she tried to sell them as tears of pain and loss, they were tears of fear.
No, I prevented you from dying—as I did him, a hundred years before you were born.
“Then why not now? Why did you let him die now? I don’t understand! Why didn’t you fix him; I swear to God, I thought you could fix him!” And then she realized she’d said too much. This confession would not have been on the script if she were as innocent as she swore.
But Arahab already knew—if not everything, then enough. You gave him too much of that elixir, and you waited too long to bring him, and now you are afraid, as you should be. Look at what you have done!
Bernice didn’t know what she was looking for, but through terrified streams of tears she did her best to see. “I don’t understand,” she sobbed, folding her legs beneath herself and crawling slowly back away from the water. “What happened to him? What happened, and why didn’t you fix him? I know you could have fixed him.”
You know? Arahab twisted her neck and crushed her eyes closed with pain, or with restraint, or with some other unidentifiable pressure that pushed up on her from within. You know nothing—or worse, you know small pieces of things. You’ve picked up fragments here and there; you’ve gathered tiny bits of secondhand chatter and you think that you know all the answers!
“No, I don’t. But you saved us before, and I thought if you tried harder—”
If I tried harder, then what? That I would bring the poison into myself? That I would sicken myself and become vulnerable? Do you think I did not know what you were planning?
Bernice’s face went gray, and her knees folded. She scrambled backwards crablike, realizing that she should not stay so close to the infuriated monster. Arahab was gathering malicious, outraged mass. She was swelling and growing, but she was aching somehow. Something about her rise was pained and forced. There was power there in the water, and there was energy untapped still waiting her command, but it was hard for her.
You know so little, she continued, that you did not even understand the workings of the call you sent to me, from the wretched little boat that my son wished to sail. You did not know or did not believe that the intent is carried with the casting. But I heard you, my precious liar. I heard you hold the trinket to your breast and make your wish as if it were a coin, and as if the Gulf were a well. I heard your query to the gods.
Flustered and now beyond panic, Bernice tried hard to remember what she’d wished. She remembered the act of it—the closing of the eyes, the childish toss over the side of the boat, and how it had felt like throwing a coin in a well, yes. It had felt like saying a prayer, so she assumed that no one was listening.
But she couldn’t recall the plea she’d made.
Arahab answered for her, filling in the missing piece. My lamb, you wished to be rid of me. My child, you wished to replace me. And because you are so very knowledgeable— She opened her massive hands and spoke with sarcasm, another thing she’d learned from Bernice. And because you are so very wise, and so cunning . . . you did not realize that you were making that wish to me.
“If . . . if . . . if that’s what you think—” She was blubbering, and she hated herself for it, but she couldn’t stop. “—then why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t . . . Why didn’t you . . . You could’ve kept me here. You could’ve killed me or changed me, or whatever it is you do!”
The creature in the water had grown to the size of a city block, and even though the beach was deserted, people far away could see her. Somewhere far away, someone began to scream. Arahab began to roar.
Because I did not know that you would harm him!
The tides that swirled inside her were sloshing back and forth, and the things she’d caught up—the fish, the weeds, the shells, and the rays—were thrown from side to side. She was a maelstrom contained. She was a vortex above the surface.
“But you could’ve saved him!” Bernice shouted back.
> So the fault is mine, then? So I was the one who killed my son, not you? I made him to ease my loneliness as much as to aid my plans, and he was good to me, and devoted.
I did the best I could, my darling love. I gave him all the energy I could spare, and it was not enough. It has drained me, yes, and the metal venom with its water poison tastes like death in my mouth. But it cannot injure me. It can only disgust me, and a simple aversion is not deadly.
It cannot kill me . . . and I believe you did not know that.
Arahab gazed down at José’s body, which was half-floating in the shallow water where the tide was leaving it, tugging it, and breaking it up on the sand where it lay. She regarded him with her empty face, gazing down as if she did not know what to do.
I wanted to fix him, she said, her voice dropping from an ear-shattering explosion down to a mournful howl. I would have fixed him, even if doing so sickened or wounded me. I would have fixed him regardless, for I loved him longer than I ever loved you.
Bernice was nearly at the water’s edge, almost free of the sopping, slapping mess that sucked at her shoes and held her in the damp. There was no point to her retreat, and she knew it. She could never run far enough or fast enough.
She struggled to her feet, and she stood there all soaking wet and vomited upon. She held herself upright in the sandy mud and in her towering shoes, and as she stared Arahab in the face, she began to pry the shoes off her feet—using her toes to pick and pull at them, one after the other.
Arahab met Bernice’s gaze, though she met it from a height of several stories. The Gulf had shrunk around her, but the tide was seeping in to replace what she had taken. The water seeks its level, as it seeks its mistress.
The mistress of the ocean brought herself down swiftly and firmly, planting one hand on either side of Bernice, and planting those hands down so hard that the wet earth shattered and shook. I knew when I took you that you were evil. That’s why I pulled you under the waves and held you against myself. That’s why I saved you, because you were formless and void, and I thought I could bend you to join and assist me. I brought you in as a daughter, and as a companion to my son. I received and restored you knowing that you were made of bile and nails, so I suppose the fault is mine after all. I did not frighten you enough while I had the opportunity. I tried to rule you with love, but fear is all that will move you.