Work Text:
I have seen things under the water that no laughing sailor's tale, no matter how gruesome or exaggerated, could ever fathom. The truth is that many sailors have seen such things, but they are considered a fraternal secret. But I am no member of their fraternities, now or ever, but merely an old Pinoy who has glimpsed the secrets of the waves and been privy to much backroom talk speculating what might lie on the sea floor. And the most fearful thing I have ever seen is the death of Frank Gardiner. They say now that he died in his bed of pneumonia in 1904 - I have seen men who swear to it, who say they were present at his deathbed - but I saw him last just before dawn on the morning of April the 18th, 1906. Perhaps he did die in his bed two years before - but if so, it is because his life was eaten by the thing that killed him.
April Fools' Day of that year saw me sitting in Gardiner's tavern, the Twilight Star, certainly a fool but, at least, a young and handsome one yet. Plenty of women on San Francisco's Barbary Coast were not shy about telling me so, at any rate, nor showing me. But there were no women in the Twilight Star then - just old men, and me.
"Sulu," one of the old men called, from a table where four or five geezers stood knotted like a stand of trees with their branches grown together. "I hear you're a pearl diver, Sulu." Sulu was not my name, but the islands of my birth - still, they could not pronounce my name, they claimed, or at least they could not remember it. I never pressed too hard to make them do so, either. It seemed unwise. But I did correct them now.
“No,” I said. “In the Philippines, I was a pearl diver. In San Francisco, I ferry girls out to Goat island and play snooker with the Navy boys there.”
“That's a shame, Sulu,” one of the old men said – Gardiner himself, who I recognized but did not really know. They said that back in Australia he was a bushranger and bank robber, the only man wicked enough that Australia kicked him back out, but to me he was just another old barman, one who didn't water his drinks not try to cheat me and charge me extra. “That's a real shame. We've got a job out in the bay that only a pearl diver can do – and we're willing to pay in gold.”
It was bait, and I didn't bite. “I don't know the bottom of the bay well enough,” I told him. “Get an old oyster pirate - he'll give you a better return for your money than I would.” That wasn't the truth, exactly, but old Gardiner didn't have to know it – and even young and stupid as I was, no amount of gold would have tempted me.
“That's a shame, Sulu,” he said, sighing gustily. “Well, next round is on the house, to show there's no hard feelings.”
I thanked him. And I drank the glass he gave me. I can just barely remember that, and then nothing, gaping stretches of nothing. Nothing is a terrible thing to feel, and worse to remember, but if I could replace the next three weeks with nothing, I would do it and be glad of it. Instead, sometime the next day (but still a fool's day, for me at least), I woke to the unmistakeable pitch and sway of a boat on the waves. I could feel the chain round my waist instantly, holding me tightly to the wall – neither my hands nor my feet were bound, and when the nausea and muzziness cleared my brain enough that I could think, slumped in that dark place and listening to the quiet noises I had not yet realized were a man, I knew why. Being tied in such a way would hurt my circulation, numb my arms and legs – and make it harder for me to dive.
I swore bitterly, but I kept my voice quiet, hoping that when my captors returned I could feign unconsciousness. There had been another sound coming from the other corner of the dark hold, and I had assumed it was rats, moving over one another, squeaking and speculating on whether my carrion might make a decent meal. I knew something about sea rats, and they disgusted but did not frighten me.
The sound stopped when I began cursing, and when it started again I could hear words. The sea will eat us and no, I won't, I will never and a broken weeping that still sounded uncannily like the conversation of rats, stuttering and full of small whistling noises made through broken teeth. I asked who was there and was answered only by more quiet, wheezing sobs, chained together between more broken utterances. I had nothing to do but listen for hours, and so, slowly, I pieced together the thread of the weeping madman's thoughts. I can only describe him thus, because he was not taken from the hold when I was, and I never saw him in light. Without a doubt, he saved my life – and perhaps his friends would swear that he, too, died years before. It is not unlikely.
The madman belonged to some secret religion, and had betrayed its tenets – under the influence of string drink, and then under torture, by letting its secrets slip to Gardiner and his cronies – who were, perhaps, the same oyster pirates I had suggested he seek out, and who did not dare venture beneath the waves themselves after what they heard. Twenty years before, or perhaps longer than that, the madman's cult had located a peculiarly sacred site, by their reckoning, because boats who sailed past it at night sank, and every oysterman who found a bed near that spot met a bizarre and unfortunate end. For years they had pinked its waters with blood by suggesting to unhappy boatmen that there was a rich stretch of pearls there untouched. The rumor was true, but they failed to mention how fatal those waters were – hedged in by a reef or by unseen rocks, I thought, and they took perverse delight and nothing more in sending men to their deaths there. Gardiner had pried the true secret of the place from him, along with a safe anchorage the cultists used to conduct their rites, and now we were bound there.
However much time had passed, it was night when the door creaked open and a man with a rifle entered. He leveled it at me, and nodded at the wall behind me – there must have been a peephole of some sort, because some unseen compatriot of his in the next room loosened the chain that held me until I was free, and could stand. I did not, until he told me to – and from his voice I knew it was Gardiner himself.
“How long have you been back in the shanghaiing trade, Frank?” I asked him, but I stood as I did so, more out of a sense of futility than because I feared the rifle.
“Not long, Sulu,” he told me. “And I'd rather be out of it. One chance for you, now – do this of your own free will and you'll have an equal share at the end, and the gold I promised you besides. You can use it to by yourself a mansion on Nob Hill, if you like – it's that much money.” He lead me out on deck, where his compatriots, old salts and oyster pirates, kept the small ship on an even keel. I thought about spitting at him. If I said no, I would answer to that rifle – not now, but after I had done his dirty work anyway. I did not want to end like that other man in the hold, but neither did I want to dive in this foul place. If I said yes... well, perhaps Frank was a man of his word and perhaps it would still be the rifle in the end. Foolishly, I thought that if I consented now he might trust me, and give me some extra chance to escape. I told him I would take that chance, but still the old men tied a line to my ankle, their convoluted knots too much for me to loose when diving, brine-tightened as the rope would be.
“Just to be sure, Sulu,” he told me. “Now dive, and bring us some fine pearls.”
“Dive, Sulu,” he said to me night after night, gun ready to correct a rebellious impulse, and I dived, though he liked me well enough each time I surfaced. I ate with the crew, and slept in a real bunk, but the rope chafed my skin raw, and they never removed it, nor left me unguarded – nor let me out on deck while the sun was above the water. I dove just after dusk every night, before the waters were chill enough to be lethal on their own, and stopped only when I could swim no more.
The dark waters terrified me, though at first I could not have said why. There were no rocks or reefs that I could see, though diving in the dark was foolishness of the worst kind and I might have missed them until a current or my own strokes brought me near enough to gash open a limb and send out a beacon to any sharks, if any were circling nearby. There was an odd taste to the water, though, and in my dreams that taste was the iron from decades of shed blood. By the third or fourth night I had grown accustomed to the murk, able to see more clearly in it than I would have dreamed, but what I saw baffled me.
There were wrecks everywhere, sometimes crushing one another into the dark sand at the bottom of the bay, but there was nothing to have sunk them. There was seaweed aplenty, and barnacles crusting every surface, but I seldom saw even the smallest fish. Once, I thought I spied the black shape of an octopus in the distance, strangely distorted, and as it was my first fellow-swimmer I followed it, hoping to discover what brought it to these preternaturally empty waters. Soon it had vanished, outpacing me, but that was the night I found the oyster bed, near the extreme length my tether would stretch, in the space between wrecks where I had first seen the octopus – if it was an octopus – lurking.
It was still a mad errand to me then – the oysters farmed off the Barbary Coast were there for seafood, not for pearls – but Gardiner had sworn that he had seen one that the madman had kept – uncannily huge and green-tinted, unlike any pearl I had seen but still unmistakeably that. I kicked my way back up to the surface with the first two in my hands, and returned to the boat.
“Gone a long time, Sulu,” one of the nameless old sailors said. “We was just taking bets on how long it would be until your carcass floated back up. How long c'n you hold your breath, anyway?”
“Eight minutes,” I said, withholding – I could do more than ten – but never mind that. Get me the basket – I've found your damn oysters.”
By the time I returned with the next load, the old men were cackling, prancing about the deck triumphantly, and Gardiner had a pearl the size of a marble in either hand.
There were hundreds of oysters there, or thousands, but it was no natural bed. There were patterns in the way they were laid out, but not regular lines or arcs such as any man would imagine. I thought perhaps the cultists had placed them this way, in some runic patterns of significance to their superstitions, but all I knew was that, the longer I dove, the more I came to understand the bends and switchbacks the oysters were laid out in. It made the work go faster, and I did not complain, but I dreamed strange things, and once I even thought I woke, in the middle of the night, to feel the madman's fetid breath heating my ear as he whispered to me.
“We are the keepers of the city,” he said. “It turns restless in dreams, and we write it chary lullabies. To keep it as still as the waters of Hali. The pearls are notes in the singers' mouths,” he said, and called me by my name – not Sulu, but my real name, which no-one on the boat knew, and no-one could have told him. But of course it was a dream, I thought, as I readied myself the next day, almost eager now. Gardiner wouldn't kill me – there was more than enough money for us all, the pearls half-filling the spare oyster basket. We would finish this – there was only one more twisted arc of the bed to harvest – and I would be rich.
I dove too quickly, and rose too quickly, and thought it was only the dangerous aches in my joints that troubled me, that when I saw dim shapes in the water they were reflection or shadows, or maybe that curious octopus wandering by again. I certainly did not believe that I really felt the water tremble around me, though the waves were choppy and restless when I surfaced, though there was no wind. Gardiner was in a bright mood – the first oyster he opened had two pearls in it, and he gave one to me, claiming it as another bonus. I tucked it away in a pouch on my belt and forgot about it, diving again.
This time, the sea floor quivered just as I pulled the first oyster from the sand, and I could not believe it was only my imagination. It seemed to breathe beneath me, one slow shudder after another, and I fled back to the surface with my basket only half full. Gardiner had felt it too, but he laughed when I asked him if we could wait until another night to finish.
“Dive, Sulu,” he told me, and patted the rifle leaning against his leg. “A secret like this can only keep so long. If you're afraid now, then finish, by God, however long it takes you, and we'll be docked by dawn, and you a rich man.”
The glint in his eye made me uncertain again, but I had no answer to my doubts treading water, and so I dove again. This time I saw the thing that shadowed me, and it too was real – a pale, shiny shape, with scaled grey limbs, more like a frog than any mer-man I would have imagined. I recoiled, stroking away as quickly as I could, but it paid me no mind. Instead, it sank toward the pearl bed, and despite myself I followed, taking a longer route, curling around the derelict hull of the nearest ship. It was digging in the muck where I had already harvested, and as I watched it uncovered a finned hand, a greenish arm – another like itself, that stirred as the weak moonlight filtered through the water to touch its flesh, and blinked yellow eyes. Together they moved to the remaining oysters, greedily cracking their shells and celebrating the pearls with underwater gyrations that reminded me too much of Gardiner and his friends' victory dance. Not far away another shoved its own way up through the muck, and forgetting the pearls I surfaced again, pounding on the side of the boat with both hands and demanding they let me up.
“You've come unhinged,” Gardiner snapped. “Frog-men? Christ, Sulu, did you really listen seriously to that stupid blighter's mutterings?” I had not heard anything from the madman of frog-men, but evidently Gardiner had. He stared at me critically. “Dive, Sulu,” he said at last, leveling the rifle at me and working the bolt, and I knew then for certain that whatever I did, he'd see to it that my blood was added to the sacrifices piled below.
But I dove. This time the frog-things welcomed me, grinning, gesturing to undug oysters, and in a mad frenzy I dug them up, ignoring the trembling of the earth stirring the sand to clouds, ignoring the times that a clammy hand clutched the oyster from beneath and pushed it up into my fingers. I think I wept, but with saltwater all around me, how could I be certain that it was not merely a leak round the edge of my goggles? I was certain of nothing, now, save the task at hand, and my basket was overflowing when I surfaced again, only the single tail of an eldritch serif remaining below, perhaps a dozen oysters. My fellow swimmers would have eaten them before my return, and I did not mention to Gardiner that two of them now clung to the underside of his hull.
“That's all,” I said. “I swear to you that's the last of them, Frank. For God's sake let me up so I can die on land. Or if you won't do that, untie me. You owe me that much, at least.”
“You're raving, Sulu,” he told me, and sighed. “I told you. You're going to be - “ I dived immediately, watching his fingers creep along the rifle barrel as he spoke, steadying it for a shot. Al;most immediately I could feel the tug of his co-conspirators reeling in the slack of my line, and I plunged straight down, away from the suppurating wound in the mud where the oyster bed had been, making instead for the hulking shape of a sunken fishing boat. I could not see what sunk it, but I knew now – gaping holes in the bottom, the same holes the frog-men had begun to gnaw through the planking of the ship above me.
I tore my hands flailing too close to the barnacled hull, until I could find a bare spot to grip, twisting so that my ankle came in close, and each kick of my leg sawed the rope along the barnacles. It was mad and foolish – surely somewhere in the boat was a broken shard of glass, or a sailor's knife, or some better sharp edge, but I was past thinking once again, in a state where all I could feel was the steady shake of the sea floor in time with my heart, in time with the tug of the rope that was almost taut now, in time with the steady kicks of the frog men making for the surface and climbing up the sides of the boat.
One last tug, one last temblor like a seizure in the water all around me, and then I was free, trailing wisps of blood that curled through the water around me like the tentacles of an octopus. I almost retched in my mouth as some semblance of thought returned to me. I could see, as if it hung in front of me, the whorls of the ravished oyster bed, and my mind could suddenly make sense of the prayer it spelled out, both a warning and an invocation. The madman was sane, and his co-religionists had been right, right about everything. They had fed and placated the frog-men to keep them in a drowse, to keep them from doing what I had just done and urging something into wakefulness.
I rose in the water, frantically, and beside me something else did as well. It was a huge shape, sluggish, but bigger than any of the boats. There was a terrible solidity to it, a sense of history, of immortality, of a being more real than any I had seen, the same way the sight of the frog men had inspired some piece of fiendish clarity in my mind. And yet it was a shadow, this thing, translucent for all its massive bulk, because it wasn't truly here, not yet. This was an eidolon, a fragment of some restless dream come as a harbinger to see what might wake it, and the frog-men scattered before it, skirling around it in widening gyres. I wanted nothing more than to turn and make for shore, but solid ground would be no refuge, I knew. There was one hope and one alone, and that hope lay in me reaching the boat before it. It rose slowly, only floating upward, and I swam, kicking as fast as I could, pulling at the water above me. The boast was listing, only one hole chewed through below the water line, and there were three limp shapes spread-eagled in the water around it, clutched in their own tentacles of dark blood. The moonlight threw their faces into sharp relief – and the great rents bitten in their corpses as well – and I recognized all of Frank's men, but not Frank himself.
The aft of the boat was just ahead of me, the swelling polypheme of the dreaming thing beneath me, and I lunged out of the water, seizing the aft rail in one arm and pulling myself onto the deck with a sudden wrench. I saw light coming from the city, and thought it for dawn at first, but it was fire – fire raging through San Francisco, the shape of the city as twisted and ruined as the boats on the ocean floor, as the undulating suggestion of a shape pushing up bubbles through the water.
Frank was situated in the captain's chair, bleeding with a stoic aplomb, undisturbed. The rifle lay across his knees, and the backet of pearls was in his lap. He turned to me as I raced toward him, and faster than I could believe I was staring down the barrel of the rifle.
“I'll be buggered, Sulu,” he said softly. “You're not mad, and you're not dead, but you're both if you think you'll lay a finger on my damned pearls.” I could see the white of bone though the hole in one of his arms, and a rent in his side that distended grossly, suggesting at the displaced shapes within. There was surprisingly little blood.
“Please, Frank,” I said. “You haven't seen it, not yet. The pearls have to go back – they have to go back if we're going to live.”
“I'm dead already,” he said grimly, and his hands tightened convulsively on the rifle, finger slipping along the trigger but not pulling it all the way back, not yet. “Hell. Take them, then, your fair and equal share, as you deserve.” He stood, and the basket spilled across the floor, nearly half the pearls clattering across the deck. He ignored me as I scrabbled on my knees, trying to recover them, and limped toward the foredeck, a great gout of blood splashing suddenly from his side, where it must have collected in some torn pocket of flesh. I heard the sound of the rifle's chamber being filled again as he worked the bolt, and then the behemoth breached just off the bow.
There was no more time. I seized the basket with as many pearls as remained in it and flung a cloth over the top of it to make sure no more escaped. Then I dove, not daring to look behind me when I heard the futile crack of the rifle. I squeezed my eyes shut, working my legs, letting the weight of the pearls themselves pull me down. Almost before I knew it, the broken and disturbed mud was beneath me, and I began plucking pearls from the basket. It was them, I knew, and not the oysters, that were key to this place – the notes of a lullaby that the choir dared not stop singing. I worked from a memory that should not be as clear as it was, tracing the spirals and slashes of the unfathomed shapes in the sea floor beneath me, much more compact now, simple constellations of pearls that could not hope to match the grandiose sweeping script of the oyster beds. I would have prayed it would be enough, but I did not want to risk anything awake hearing my prayers.
What had taken me more than a week to undo, I had ten minutes to do before I was out of breath, and I could not do it. Now I knew that I cried, my body betraying me by its little convulsions, slowing me even more. There was an indistinct shadow above me growing more solid, more alive, and I could not outpace it. I would have given up, would have turned my face upward to see it coiling on the surface, encompassing the boat with its tenebrous grasp – but then there was another worker beside me. I dared not look at it, either, its tarry shape and blinking yellow eyes, not remotely the octopus I had imagined it, but its pseudopods and my hands reached into the basket together, replacing each syllable of that potent invocation. I did not fear it – in the same way that I knew what words I was writing in this unearthly tongue, I knew that it was called by me need to serve me, as it had been before when I was hunting for the oysters.
My vision wavered and began to grow dark, and I could feel the labored contractions of my lungs, squeezing in on themselves, and I worked on. The shadow above us was now too dark to see through, and it was expanding – not because the creature grew, but because now it was descending, sensing what it was I was doing. My companion and I redoubled our pace, I as possessed by some other will as it was by mine, and at last, at last as I could feel the cold turbulence of the approaching shadow, we placed the final serif in the pattern.
The water cleared, and I was alone. I knew I had to rise slowly, that at this depth the bends would kill me if I sped upward to fast, but I was relieved by the thought of such a welcome death, and so I kicked upward, raising my face to the surface.
The dream-shape remained there still, transparent and fading as it subsided into its coma. I would not describe it to you if I could, any more than I will tell you of the expression I saw on Frank's face, before he vanished with it.
It had embraced him, but it had not killed him – not then. In his eyes I could read what it was doing, what it had done, and it was a thing more terrible than what we call death. It was a true death, a consumption of any essence, a Hell contained in each second of the terrible draining.
Dead or not, Frank dreams with it now. He always will, until it wakes again.
I can see that you don't believe me. You can see that pieces of this story are missing, such as what lengths I have gone to in the years since to keep the frog-things in their sated stupor. I will confess no crimes.
But I will show you this pearl. My bonus from Frank, tucked into my belt and forgotten until days after I washed up on shore, the only man alive who could know, but never explain, that it was no earthquake that shook this city to pieces. It is curious, is it not? Certainly there are no other pearls with the same luster, the same color. And yes, it is larger now, the size of a robin's egg. It doesn't need an oyster to grow. It isn't really a pearl at all, you know.