The
Call
by James Robert Smith
copyright 2012
When I was a young child, my family and I lived on
the Atlantic coast, moving, at various times, from the Carolinas to Georgia to
Florida as my father felt so inclined. Always, we lived on the edge of the sea
where he had easy access to the marine creatures that he studied. It was here
that I first felt the call that became such a passion to me.
As a youngster of only eight years, I would often
travel the wide swatch of sand that made up the beaches with which I had become
so familiar. Barefooted, I would climb the high, bleached dunes and observe the
waves' constant crush against the shore. And always I would hear the subtle
call and feel the gentle tug that seemed to draw me toward the depths. Had my
innocent mind been able to interpret these sensations, I might have raced away
from the beach, away from the beckoning sea where I could be sucked down amidst
the swirling waves. But I could not fathom these alien desires, and so I merely
watched, listened, and waited.
Often, my mother would ask me, "Why do you sit
and watch the sea for so long?" I would merely shrug in my child's way,
expressing ignorance of the cause of my actions. In truth, I 'was' ignorant of
the reason for my infatuation with this ocean. The call had not reached the
intensity it would achieve in later years nor the clarity it finally attained.
My father, seeing the strained concern of my
mother's face, would explain: "Anne, it's only natural for the boy to be
interested in the sea. After all, it's the source of his father's livelihood.
I, for one, am more than delighted in the interest he's showing."
Afterwards, my mother would seem satisfied with his words, though I know now
that she only feigned acceptance of his reasoning.
As the seasons passed, my obsession grew. Even on
those rare days when the icy wind blew in with some northern-birthed storm, I
would leave the warmth of our home to be close to that endless, frothing
horizon. On such occasions I think that even my father wondered if my actions
were those of a sane mind. Still, I did not let this obscure urge interfere
with either my schoolwork or my social life. These facts alone allayed my
parents' fears.
By the time I was fifteen, the call had reached a
frightful power. No longer did I venture into the salty breakers. I feared some
ancient and eldritch force waited just beneath the surface to draw me screaming
to some awful place. As great as my fear was, it was not enough to outweigh the
morbid curiosity I felt toward whatever was the source of this magnetism
between the limitless waves and myself.
*****
One month before my sixteenth birthday, I was
visited on a lonely beach by a lean, dark-skinned woman. I watched her as she
made her way up the tide-sodden stretch of sand. She moved deliberately in my
direction, never hesitating, using the same careful pace. When she was parallel
to where I reclined atop a dune, she turned and faced me. The wind plucked at
her black hair, and the whipping strands obscured her face.
When her eyes fell upon me, I knew that I was as she
was. In the instant I realized this, I held my body rigid in the foolish hope
that I would be unnoticed by her. I was afraid.
As the woman stood between the sea and me, the
strange calling fairly screamed within my skull. I writhed there upon the sand,
strange thoughts rattling my brain. It was as if this woman were a transmitter
beaming these monstrous titterings. For the first time, I was able to
comprehend some of it.
Gradually, this great orchestration ebbed and I was
left exhausted. I lay where I had rolled, at the base of the dune, wind-blown
sand sticking to my sweating skin. Through closed eyes and ringing ears, I
'felt' the dark lady approach me. She knelt beside me and, placing one hand
upon my heaving chest, she spoke.
"Do you know?" she asked. Her voice was
like an echo—hollow and unreal.
I opened my eyes and beheld her face. Her features
were small, delicate, but those familiar eyes at once induced a kind of terror
in me. Her pupils were depthless things and I feared they would draw up my soul
from my body. I must have gazed at her for quite some time for she brushed my
face lightly and asked once more, "Do you know?"
I shook my head from side to side, unable to speak.
"Soon," she breathed. She rose and
continued down the beach. In a few minutes, she had disappeared.
During the nights that followed, I began to dream
vividly of the dark woman. In my dreams we floated weightlessly together as
vague shapes and slithering shadows danced about us, staying just on the
periphery of my vision. Each dawn I would awaken, my knowledge of what I knew
must come a little greater every day. Soon (as she had said), I could
comprehend what was expected of me and prepared myself to return to the place
where I had met her.
*****
And so, one morning I arose very early; I crept
silently from the house. Once away from my home, I flung off my shoes and raced
over the low dunes toward the sloping beach. I topped the last of those sandy
hills and beheld the sea as only a damned few had ever seen it.
In the blue semi-darkness, the waves leapt and
towered and bubbled with a strange, almost life-like animation. Just beneath
the surface, amorphous shapes billowed, glowing with phosphorescence that
lighted the depths, banished the shadows. There, my sanity receded farther than
it ever had, relinquishing control to the single command that now droned
unceasingly. As one totally possessed, I made my way to where I knew the woman
waited.
Naked in the pre-dawn cool, she stood; the waves
lapped anxiously at her ankles and sucked hungrily at her feet. She raised her
arms and offered her hands in invitation. I shed my clothes and followed her
into the breakers where she turned and grasped my hands in hers. We swam to
where the sea floor dropped away from our bobbing forms. She drew me to her,
and the glowing surf closed over us.
In the instant our bodies sank beneath the surface,
shimmering tentacles of something living entwined about us: tangling ropes of
pliant substance that enwrapped our limbs and tugged gently upon our torsos. At
once the ocean was a colorless void where something seemed to call from below,
something that even then was rising to greet us.
I became aware of a presence beneath, and the dark
woman pulled me tighter to her and tried to avert my questing eyes. More of the
sentinels swam to us, their arm-thick bodies tugging urgently. Pulling my
shoulders free of the clinging things, I gazed downward at that which
approached. My scream sounded in the depths.
My eyes fell upon a nigh-forgotten god who had
heaved its bloated bulk up from the dark liquid chasms where it lived. Great
questing feelers of mucilaginous texture sped toward the woman and me,
spreading, shaping themselves into massive blankets of flesh in which to enwrap
new converts. Behind those boneless arms floated the god's hideous face, a
compounded mass of eyes and of tooth-filled maws, a pulsating corruption that
appeared (after that first, mind-numbing glance) to bear an expression of
strange hunger.
I seemed also to be suddenly seized by an aura of
ancient and consuming evil I had never (even vaguely) suspected during my
association with those unknown forces. I sensed this evil and I fought to be
free, to be quit of this alien horror.
The dark woman knew what I attempted and made fast
her hands about my wrists. Her grip was far stronger than I would have
suspected and only after a vicious struggle did I free my arms. Even then, she
attempted to refasten her body to mine; her fingers clamped repeatedly; her nails
dug painfully into my flesh. Finally, I managed to free myself with a savage
kick and made frantically for the surface.
For an instant, my way was clear. But all the while
I had battled the woman, the attendant amoeboids had gathered in response to
some silent command, and they swarmed about me. Their ropy bodies whipped
against my own, and some of them wrapped tightly about my arms and legs to drag
me downward toward their approaching master. Still, I was able to struggle
upward, away from my doom.
At last, the shimmering waves seemed to be within my
reach. There was a sudden and mammoth surge from below as one massive godhand
raised up to block my way. The huge thing spread about me, and I at last
resigned myself to the inevitable. I watched in relieved amazement as those
constricting tendrils passed wraithlike through my body. My stubborn resistance
had broken the spell, and I was returned to my own plane of existence.
I looked back once more and watched as the dark
woman was pulled down toward unknown fathoms. Her eyes seemed to reflect the
horror of the coming eternity she would spend alone among the mindless minions
of a patient and vengeful evil.
I found
myself floundering in the real sea, beneath stifling and cloudy waves, swimming
with river trash and detritus. My head broke the surface; I gulped in great
amounts of salty air. The water stung my eyes, blinded me for a short time.
Weakly, I made my way shoreward and found myself not far from where I had
entered the ocean. I climbed back into my clothes, there to pass into oblivion.
My father found me later that morning, unconscious upon the beach.
*****
Even though the polychaetes my father found adhered
to my chest and back were of a type never before identified, and even though
there were numerous puncture wounds upon my arms and legs as those made by long
nails, my father forever remained silent of the event. He seemed only relieved
that I went no more to gaze mindlessly at the unending waves. I do not know
what he suspects of the incident, for he never mentions it nor inquires as to
how I should have been found soaking and insensible at the ocean's edge.
And while they found her clothes as if shed upon the
beach there, my mother's body never did wash ashore.
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