The Sea Always Takes What is Hers

“The Sea Always Takes What is Hers”

(A tribute to H.P. Lovecraft)

Darryl S. Burrows

I’d arrived that very evening, September the 9^th, and the last of my siblings to do so. The more than four thousand mile train ride from Fairbanks to Providence was a long, grinding, crashing affair that took such time as I thought the old man to be gone before I’d arrived. The passage of miles and the endlessly gradual change of scenery served to produce a miasmatic blur as Fairbanks gave way to Dawson, then Whitehorse, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Sudbury, Ottawa. No one who’d not made such a journey would have any notion of the mindless distance the Canadian tundra boasted with its too-few outposts in between and too many hauntingly dead and barren plains, like the dead vacuum of space between the stars. In spite of the efforts of time and distance to slow me there was time to spare, although I was weary and long-in-the-tooth for it without the luxury of a warm bath or a place to lay my head. I should have liked to rest but at least I was in one piece and with the family of my youth.

Returning to the home of my upbringing was most unsettling though not in the usual manner of mere awkwardness or melancholy, as will become evident at the unfolding of the evening. Since mother had passed more than a decade prior the upkeep had been sorely lacking. It should have mattered little in terms of visitors, what with the increasing oddities of my father without my mother to tone down his behavior or alleviate his oddness with a semblance of normalcy; such go the accounts of those about town. I vaguely recall him at her funeral at that time before I’d moved to Alaska and that he was vacant and staring, his eyes constantly veering seaward (or, were the sea not in view, in the direction thereof) and he of few words. I’d liked to have thought it was shock at the passing of his spouse and the mother of his children, but in hindsight upon this most recent visit I have my doubts.

The house was a tall, Victorian structure which hadn’t been new since the Van Buren administration, with its twin sentry-like gables placed on either side of the doorway and massive bay windows staring back like dusky stained-glass orbs. The house was backed up to a high cliff which threatened any who ventured too close with rolling froth and jagged rocks; the mouth of a rabid canine biting and snapping at an onlooker with slavering and dread determination. What I found of beauty and promise in the halcyon days of my youth now filled me with foreboding; the too-cautious imaginings of one in the earliest part of middle age.

There was no yard as such for children to play but it mattered not for no children had dwelt in this house for nearly fifteen years. A wrought-iron fence outlined the yard and dared visitors to scale it. Were any to have found success they would have found themselves in writhing vines, brambles and sharp stones, if not impaled like a ghastly scarecrow upon one of the fence’s spires.

Were one to approach the door they would have been greeted by a most hideous and loathsome brass knocker; a staring, cephalopod head, its tentacles arrayed around it in asymmetrical distribution. Mother wished to dispose of the monstrosity in favor of a more inviting piece but the old man would have none of it to the point of near-violence. Not that it mattered; visitors had become fewer and fewer over the decades in lockstep with my father’s increasing oddities and it mattered little as to whether the home was inviting or not. Still, my curiosity was pricked at wondering where he’d acquired such a unique abomination; such things were not available at the local hardware. My father had been a field archaeologist as well as an adjunct professor at Brown University, yet whether this was an artifact he’d brought home with him from one of his excursions at some point none of us could say.

Presently, I found myself greeted by father’s caretaker, a grizzled but well-dressed man I recall vaguely from my youth; a specter who passed in and out on the periphery of our lives who was more a name we’d heard rather than a familiar face. He was there at present for my father in his old age and was said to be someone my father knew from some of the globe-trotting he did in years gone by. He was said to be a research assistant and one of the few who could have borne the old man’s peculiarities at this stage of his life, as one who perhaps had some insight the rest of humanity lacked. With little more than a nod of acknowledgement and a brief introduction, I learned that his name was Warren Semple and he bade me climb the stairs to the topmost storey where I would find the old man laying in his bed, shivering under his blankets while his children—three daughters and three sons (of which I am one) looked down upon him. With no small trouble Mr. Semple had called us all together into one household as the end grew nearer at his employer’s request. My brothers and sisters, all younger than I, waited in the room, silent and uncomfortable as though in the presence of strangers. In part some of that effect was the imminent death of the old man; in other part were strained relationships which had never quite mended. I’d seen none of them in the last decade, and yet the circumstances didn’t lend themselves to festive reunion or familial banter. The only conversation that had left our lips was the proclamation that we were to wait until the arrival of two distinguished visitors; one Thomas Prendergast, Esq. and another man as-yet unnamed. It was unanimously assumed among us that he was arriving to finalize the will and testament and that the other man was perhaps a priest, coming to give last rites. My youngest sister, Julia, was quick to point out that the old man was not Catholic and it occurred to me that I never knew of his religious affiliation and sought clues by searching around the room.

His room was as pale as the old man himself, and rank with the smell that accompanies death, the latter no doubt caused by a bed stained by urine and defecation. The shadows the dim lighting cast on the creases of the ceiling loomed over him as ghastly harbingers of what was to come and giving nothing of the day or the hour. Accentuating the otherwise common surroundings of the old brass four-post and dry sink was an ancient-looking book I took to be a bible, its leathery cover cracked and disintegrating, but this volume had writing—or so I took it for script of some kind—which was unreadable and not of any distinguishable written language, although my knowledge of such is admittedly small. In truth, I didn’t recognize the language, if indeed that was what it was. There was a crude drawing on the cracked leather cover; a hideous, tentacled thing with a staring, almost human eye at the center of its head which seemed to measure the reader. It sent a chill up my back to look at it and I guessed that it had the same effect on my siblings as I took note that they studiously avoided looking in the direction of it. I supposed it to be of similar origin to the hideous door knocker and wondered what mad civilization would have manufactured such unsettling apparitions, much less why.

As to other relics, there were few. A long, tubular device rested on the dry-sink, perhaps two feet long forming a rough conical shape that began as a rough maw large enough to engulf a man’s hand and terminating to a narrow, flat point. A musical instrument, perhaps? Other objects rested nearby, indescribable things I had no name for. I knew of my father’s exploits as an archaeologist, an explorer and adventurer. Perhaps he had been to places I’d never heard of, that perhaps less than a handful of people in the world had heard of much less seen. My discomfort of the room grew by the moment, made starker by the impending death of the old man and I grew anxious for the arrival of the guests, swearing that if they did not arrive soon I would plunge back out into the night and take my chances with the watchful gaze of the staring, gibbous moon, creeping darksome vegetation and slavering seashore.

I was not long disappointed. The two visitors arrived momentarily and I was glad for the diversion. Two men, Prendergast—a tall, willowy fellow with dark, bushy hair and a jaundiced hue—and a uniformed official, Inspector Babcock, a man of simple, unremarkable features who might have gone unnoticed were it not for his state of dress. For formality’s sake a brief round of introductions ensued, followed by a proclamation that they get down to business. If any of us were in expectation of division of posthumous assets we would be disappointed. In fact, it was the inspector who led in with the mention of “hearing a confession before the old boy bought the farm”; a particularly insensitive thing to say in front of the man’s children, I thought.

As if on cue, the old man gasped, wrestling to consciousness. His eyes, gray and dusky and lifeless, poked out from wrinkled eyelids and yellowed sclera. He glanced lazily around the room at his children and guests. At last satisfied that all invited were in attendance, he set his gaze on the ceiling above. He was too weak for greeting or for the emotion of seeing his remaining family gathered together again. Instead, he opened his mouth revealing intermittent and yellowed teeth, and he cleared his throat, coughing furiously and bringing great concern among us that he was breathing his last, but it was merely a precursor to his attempt at speech from weak lungs and long unused vocal chords. Something must have given out in his coughing fit for his lungs seemed to clear and find new strength; enough for him to string coherent sentences together.

My youngest brother and I held him up by his shoulders until the obstruction had passed from his breathing tract and we were able to lay him back upon his bed as one of my sisters had propped his pillows for him to lie against. Thus cleared, he managed to speak. “My children are gathered,” he said by way of greeting. “Before I pass from this world into the next,” he began in a rusty croak which bore no semblance of the tenor of the man I once knew, “it must be told what caused the tragedy leading to the deaths of eleven men on twelve November the year of your Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-seven.” Immediately I took notice of two things. The first was that the date he spoke of was forty years ago, when I was but a lad of three and only my sister Eleanor was born of my siblings. I recall, mostly from my mother but with a bit of childhood recollection, that my father had disappeared for a great number of months when I was very young and my mother had lost contact with him from his letters for better than a year.

The second thing that caught my ear was that he had said “your Lord” when pronouncing the date, rather than “our Lord”, as customary.  It could have been the oversight of an old man near death, but I did not think so. He seemed lucid, almost virile in his speech and seemed almost not to be near death at all. Perhaps this was a remnant of the man who’d been a powerful classroom speaker and storyteller in his day. Further, from what I remember of him growing up he was also a careful speaker, often choosing his words with care, his facts carefully considered upon utterance, even in his more severe state of mind as a grew older.

“On the date of which I spoke,” he went on, eyes like marbles poking out from festering sores as they took in the paneling of his ceiling, “twelve men left the harbor from Boston aboard the Sam Humphrey for the Mediterranean on an expedition we all knew could well be our last. I was in charge of the expedition but all in attendance knew the risks and were in agreement.” He went on to speak of the journey, of the maelstroms and winds and furious ocean that seemed to fight back at them every inch of the way, as though resenting the insolence of their mortal intrusion, or perhaps was trying to keep them from something. In any event, he went on about the travel and I watched as the visitors grew weary and bade him to get to the point but he would not be hurried.

Seventeen days after they set sail, they had reached the coastal area near Spain and Portugal, in search of something that was unseen but each knew to a certainty existed nonetheless. The ocean had quieted, became almost inviting and the men were able to set anchor (figuratively, of course; the water was too deep at this point for an anchor to reach bottom; likely, they had set to trolling in small circles) sixty nautical miles off the coast of Europe with the port of Portugal a small thing in the distance, and there remained, watching and waiting. Each man was a model of patience, and that was a fortunate thing as they seemed to know that what they were about to test would be well worth waiting for so long as they would muster the fortitude to stay the course.

Much of what happened, the old man stated, was written in his personal journals and he indicated them with a sweep of a knotty hand to a spot in the room that had a heavy sea chest filled, as it happened, with all manner of bric-a-brac. It wasn’t until the thirty-seventh day when even the most patient among them grew weary of staring out into a bright and glaring sea day after endless day, but it had been necessary. They’d lost some nine or ten days in the voyage due to weather and navigational troubles and needed to wait until the phase of the moon came back around. In all this my father feared not and had the certainty of faith to drive him to continue with the mission, although as he’d written in his personal log, he feared a mutiny if not perhaps a murder at some point until that day took place. The validity of what they were exploring was called into question, and then, on this particular night, history would change.

One of the men, a scientist of some renown in oceanography, was gazing into the sea out of boredom rather than the need to explore when he gave a frightful cry and fell over backwards onto the deck. Naturally, the others had come running over to find out what had happened. He was stammering unintelligibly and pointing over the side. All had rushed over to see what he’d been yammering at. They’d all to a man nearly followed suit in his fright and may well have fallen back themselves had they not been prepared for something dreadful or wonderful.

It was a woman, or something like it, and too far out to sea for it to be natural. The first man had supposed that she might be dead, a floating corpse locked into place by kelp, but she was not dead, rather very much alive. Their initial thought that she was a woman was a misconception on their part, for she had the form of a woman and some comeliness, but was not human. Her body, unclothed from head to waist, had a hint of scaly coarseness which gradually became heavy scales as her body terminated into something like a mackerel. Her face looked up at them from a depth of only a few feet, eyes covered by a nictitating membrane and she smiled up at their amazement with teeth like the rows of a shark; at once inviting and terrifying. Gills opened and closed at the sides of what would be her neck, around which hung what must have been some form of natural adornment. Shells, perhaps, rows of them glistening like tiny gemstones under the tide. For all her alien appearance, the men were strangely drawn to her, almost in a lull. One of the men made as though to reach for her and she flipped her tail once and was gone as though she were merely a phantasm.

Those of us in the room listening to the story did our best to be pleasant but could not overlook the fantastic nature of the tale as it unfolded. The inspector, who I was beginning to strongly dislike, complained that he had come to hear a confession, not a bedtime fantasy. He was warned by myself and several of the siblings to have a care, that he was our father and was dying and we would hear what he had to say, extraordinary or not. He threw his hands up and, to his credit, held his peace.

The story continued. The men on the boat began to postulate what they had seen, some arguing a mermaid, others arguing a Siren as her obvious enchantment was made known to them. In point of fact, they could have been correct in both counts as legends over the ages may merely have been manifestations of the same thing seen at different times by different people. But it was curiosity that drove the old man to ask the obvious question: If they were in fact mermaids or Sirens, where did they come from? The ocean was filled with untapped potential, of depths not plumbed. Who knew what lay in the vast depths of the watery underworld?

It did beg the question which was quickly answered: As fantastic as it were, what would an archaeologist have need of such an expedition? It did not fall into his discipline of study, so why be troubled with it? In his studies of ancient Assyrian-Babylonian mythos, it had been theorized that a civilization dwelt beneath the deep, that if there were civilizations on land, which comprise only a fraction of the surface of the world, how much more likely that there would be something of some intelligence in the untapped depths? But, as an archaeologist, he studied ancient or extinct cultures whose remnants were left behind. What was it he expected to find?

The truth was, claimed the old man, the expedition appealed to both the archaeologist in him and the religious aspect of him. It had been supposed by many that they were near the very spot where Atlantis had sunk millennia before and that denizens of that lost continent yet existed, perhaps no longer human, lending credence to such legends as Mermen and Sirens, among others, and Dagon of Assyro-Babylonian mythology or the Kraken of Scandinavian lore. My eldest sister Eleanor, a teacher of history, mentioned that Atlantis was not a real place but was derived from the writings of Plato. To enlighten us, our father explained that Dagon was a fish-god of fertility of ancient culture, but he had reason from his archaeological experience to believe that all legends and myths had basis in fact, as was evidenced by the appearance of the sea maiden (or so he called her) they encountered on that day.

The inspector spoke up again and was quickly shouted down by the rest of us, to which he declared, “Bosh, I suppose I’ve not heard a good tale in quite a spell. Proceed.”

There were no appearances from the sea-maiden or anything like her for two days. The impatience of the crew changed from an angry to an expectant tone. Even the staunchest detractor had become the greatest champion for the cause they had embarked on. It was the find of the century and, they vowed, would go down in the annals of history as such. The old man had cautioned that their discovery might not go so well-received, rather be taken as yet another legend or myth in a long history of many. They may need to satisfy themselves with the truth and let it be the end of it.

Of disconcerting note in a story already fraught with such overtones, Philcott, the man who went to reach for the mermaid, had to be quite restrained from diving in to find her in a mad fit of passion. It was quite inexplicable to the rest of the crew who’d not been so smitten or spell-struck. Like Ulysses of ancient lore who had to be lashed to a mast, Philcott was held in restraints where he howled like a mad thing, cursing and feverish, lest he dive overboard when all slept, for those able to sleep though the infernal baying. The madness seemed to pass him on the thirty-ninth day and so, with some trepidation, he was freed and passed about among the crew as though confused about where he’d been. As quickly as it came upon him the wave of craziness passed; he was himself once more.

By the end of the fortieth day, twilight gave way to darkness and the pattern of stars dotted the sky, the clouds that gave a mist of showers previously that day had moved on and shown the night sky in all its tapestry. The Pleiades’ cluster, the Great Bear and its offspring and the Belt of Orion were among the spectacles, all overseen by a moon that was gibbous and waning. It was the night of the old man’s watch and the sea air had grown quite cold, and so he had bundled himself against it. Presently, around what he took to be the twenty-third hour of the day, he saw a bright illumination from he knew not where. He sat up and looked to the horizon and saw no source for it. The brightness was soon followed by a second, a third, until their vessel, a seventy-five foot craft, was surrounded by a ring of light that brought attention from others to it. With great trepidation, the old man made his way over to the edge of the ship and peered out, seeing that the light came not from the sky, nor from land nor some other horizontal source, but from out of the very ocean itself!

Those who slumbered among them were soon awakened by the bell which he rang in alert that something was happening. All were awake, some confused by what to make of their surroundings and the old man supposed that they may have thought they were still asleep and dreaming, for in fact he was not convinced of otherwise even for himself. The air presently took to murmuring and he thought it was from the chatter of the men as another of his senses was assailed from a discrete source. Again, he turned his attention to the sea. In the light that shone up from the water, casting crazy shadows on the creases of his face, there was a bubbling activity and some movement within it. A form of some kind was making its way up from the depths, scales, a face—

It was a sea maiden, perhaps even the very one they had seen two days prior. No, he saw that it was not her. The adornments were different, a ruby color rather than the pearlescent hue he remembered. She beckoned to him and, in the extremity of the moment he noticed the same of the other men. He heard a splash as a body hit the water and he saw that the man who’d gone over was immediately engulfed by one of the sea maidens and pulled into the depths with a quick whisk of a tail. He turned his attention back to the maiden before him and she continued to beckon, gesturing with a hand that was surely webbed, breasts prominent and enticing but devoid of the mammalian feature of human females who had need to nurse, instead showing more of the ruby-encrusted adornment as hung around the gilled neck in their place. Closer her face came, until the water that divided them was little more than a thin mask and the murmur that came from her was replaced by a sly whisper until he found himself in the cold water and immediately pulled down with a strength no human could have had, made so by her size and frequent exertions against the deep of the ocean, now plunging rapidly down into the fathoms that lay in wait with tremendous flicks of a tail faster than any ship’s rudder could have produced. Her arms, long and slick and sinuous held him pressed against her body as in the manner of a nursing mother and he the suckling child for all the strength he had against her.

He was hazy as to what had happened for some passage of time, supposing that he must have blacked out, only to waken sometime later in an environ as alien as any he’d read of in some incredible tale. He was underwater to be certain, and somehow able to breathe, but how to determine at what depth was impossible for him to know. The sky he was so accustomed to of stars and moon and cloud was now a fantastic parade of illumined underwater anglers, bright coral and other unnamed things that mankind had never set eyes upon. He was all at once terrified, amazed and curious. At the depth he supposed them to be—perhaps a thousand fathoms down—there should have been utter impalpable darkness and pressure so crushing from the weight of the ocean at his back that he should have been a pulp, but none of these things came to pass. He then remembered his sea maiden and supposed she had something to do with his survival, perhaps feeding him something from her body in the embrace they’d had. How she and the other sea maidens were simultaneously able to survive tremendous pressures and likewise the lack thereof at the surface was also a mystery, likely having little to do with any science he understood regarding internal pressure on a body. He saw her nearby, a long, willowy creature of striking features and much larger than he’d imagined, the size of a white sturgeon, her hair as verdant and fine as kelp, her scaly exterior pallid and soft as a human female. She held him in what he presumed was a maternal stance, never more than arm’s length from him.

In looking around, he saw the others of his party in the same plight and did not know what to make of their situation and so, approaching the matter from the tack of a man of science, he attempted to be analytical about what he saw. The sandy floor of the bottom was dotted with such adornment as the sea maidens themselves had held, though he learned by contact with his particular guardian that they were appendages of her and not things slipped on and off like jewelry. Pillars of architecture formed a massive archway which must have served as a gateway into some aspect of civilization. He marveled that he had been right, that something did exist below the waves, that a race of creatures which, for the moment, he took to be benign and intelligent, dwelt at the gorge in what could only have been the ocean floor. The architecture was not ruinous as would have been presumed of an Atlantean culture, but stark and dynamic and alive, built below the waves and not above where it would have collapsed into a heap of rubble. He felt a gentle tug at his hand and saw that the sea maiden was guiding him and spoke to him in a voice and language that was beyond knowing, although her intentions were clearly prompted by a deep and cavernous rumbling sound that he felt rather than heard.

With no other choice but to follow as beckoned—likewise the others of his party—he was dragged beneath the massive colossi of pillars to come to rest in some even more massive chamber, bright and powerful. A figure was there, immense and towering and, the old man decided, hundreds of feet high, a tremendous thing of colorful and sparkling mussels or some other sea matter and at once frightful, its head consisting of tentacles and a single eye that nearly disappeared into blackness with its tremendous height, and at his description, my eyes dared rove to the book that rested nearby with the hideous image on its cover. I shuddered.

In looking about, the old man saw that some of his party were attempting to partake in relations with the sea maidens who gave them all the attention of patient mothers placating hungry infants but seemed otherwise unresponsive to the wiles of homo sapiens sapiens, neither did they look to prevent their activity, quite possibly because they didn’t comprehend it or were of incompatible species. The old man felt a similar urge within him, though whether brought about by the ideas of his crew or some unidentified source, he did not know and began to respond in kind. In retrospect, he assumed that she gave off pheromones to which he and the others responded, perhaps as a sedative or as a byproduct of her body chemistry he’d had inside himself, perhaps euthanizing them for what was to come. His sea maiden was kind but giving him minimal attention as he probed her body and looked to satisfy his urges with it. She was large enough to allow his intrusions without much disruption and no doubt she supposed that it was some expression of gratitude or curiosity that compelled him to act in the manner he did.

The old man interrupted the amazing tale (which I found more convincing if not more fantastic with each passing moment—if it was a lie, it was well concocted or at least an element of his imagination which his mind held to bear) with a fit of coughing which I thought sure would mark his end, but we held him upright by his fragile shoulders and he cleared up at once, that he may resume his peculiar monologue. His emotions were overtaking him, his mind reliving the day with trepidation and affecting his body. In my many years of knowing him this was a secret he carried around which none of us would know until this time. And why would we? What manner of courage would it take for a man to tell others of such a mad Odyssey without himself being institutionalized for it? At the end of his days such a confession would not matter but to appease and clear the conscience.

A deep, basso sound came from within the cavern, seemingly from everywhere at once, and what he had at first taken for a statue began to move. The old man feared a massive ocean tremor, as though the very earth would open up and draw them into new depths unseen by anything resembling humanity, but he saw that the movement of the vast leviathan had undulated up its bulk, affecting limbs and tentacles. A sound like a conch-horn only many times deeper and more powerful emanated from a hidden maw on the creature. At some point, he felt himself pulled with more force than before toward the monstrosity and he found himself struggling ineffectually against the sea maiden’s great strength which was easily twenty times his own. As with his rutting tendencies before, she scarcely seemed to notice his protest and he watched in horror as some things swept out from under the titanic thing and began to devour his crewmates. He fought all the harder, his arms trapped in the slow soup of the ocean, landing blows several times slower and weaker than he would have thrown on the surface to the maiden’s head and face as they encroached upon the feeding frenzy to which she continued to utter that dreadful name. As they approached to within a few dozen yards of the abattoir, he caught hold of a length of sharp coral and plunged it hard into the chest of the sea maiden. She shrieked, immediately loosing the hold on his hand, and tumbled backward, streams of deep indigo pumping out of the wound as, in spite of her bulk, the wound was imminently mortal. Back and back she moved, striking him with her tail by incident and moving him further away. He saw that the minor versions of the huge and loathsome creature had set upon her and were rending her as they had rent the others of his crew.

Without wasting time to see what horror would next occur, he turned and swam mightily from out of the great cavern, following the bubbles which were surely headed toward a great distance upward, not knowing what dangers lay above but certainly knowing the ones that lay behind him, he fled with a speed that would not have been possible were it not for the sea maiden’s concoction coursing through him. He still had hold of the sharp coral and plunged it backward into his pursuers, other maidens who’d finished with their charges and rushed to haul him back. He stabbed at scales and soft tissue, disgorging an eye here, slashing a gill there and heard horrid and muffled squalling as the coral found its mark in the blackness until he’d begun to see the hints of light as the surface grew within view and he broke through it, nearly choking on the high oxygenated content of the gaseous atmosphere of his birth. Morning had broken since he and his mates had been pulled down, at least he presumed it to be on the same day and not a more significant span of time. His captors apparently had abandoned their pursuit and he desperately looked around to see where his ship was and saw it nowhere to be found, but he saw a shoreline much closer than the craft had been and swam for it, the strength of his strokes diminishing as the elixir in his system wore off. Clearly, by the activity he was meant to be a sacrifice. There would have been no need for the potion to last far beyond his means of escape as he should have been surely dead by then.

As he neared the shoreline, half-dead from exhaustion, he saw some modest boats as of fishermen and one of them rallied to pull him from the water. There seemed to be no shock from them at the mysterious appearance of this foreigner from the ocean as though such things happened as a daily occurrence. As he lay in the boat, he was aware of the smell of nearby bream and mullet, and of the lined face of the fisherman who stared down at him. In a hoarse tone, the man said to him “O mar sempre leva o que é dela.”

The sea always takes what is hers. Those words would come back to him over and again, haunting his dreams for years.

He moved about from place to place—Lisbon, Florence, Istanbul, Kathmandu—for the next year, collecting artifacts and making his way through Asia so that he might return home through any passage other than the Atlantic, even avoiding the Pacific itself until the gibbous and waning moon had passed. The way was hard enough slipping in and out of each place like a vagabond, but the nights were harder as he often imagined a horrid sound in the darkness, deoxygenated gasping and the slap of something wet as it moved in the darkness hindering his sleep. On those nights when sleep came more easily, prior to waking he would see a leathery, octopid face staring down at him from a dim sky, its mouth a rictus of needle-like teeth and the words O mar sempre leva o que é dela just before he woke in a heart-stopping fashion, checking his throat against imagined bite marks.

He had finally come back home after many adventures to a wife who fainted at the sight of what surely must have been his ghost and two small children who remembered him not. I, for one, remembered little of him from any time before that day, but he always had struck me as an odd man, a reclusive sort not given much to warmth or friendship; tortured as though he held onto some secret he knew he could not share and, as it turned out, with good reason. He’d never spoken of the incident until now, never uttered the names of the mates on the expedition who were lost, but his habits had proven themselves strange. Though I’d never made the connection, he explained just before his death that on nights when the moon was gibbous and waning, he’d lock himself in his study, reading the ancient Assyrian script in the pages of the ageless and horrific volume at the side of his bed and blowing the soundless trump of the Dagon-call, certain that in doing so he might never incur the wrath of the monstrous fish-god Dagon. The ceremony had infidels as the points of sacrifice and he was certain that if he could remain in the good graces of the monster-god and remain devout as in the pages of the ancient and dead language. The ocean had haunted him all these years, his fear of the seaside most evident, making his selection of a seaside home most curious. His nightmares, he claimed, had plagued him, his life over and he was now ready and willing to embrace his end.

“This is not the worst of it,” he told us. We all waited breathlessly, the inspector rolling his eyes. I did not know why he held such animosity toward my father until I learned that one of the missing had been a close uncle of his from his youth. The inspector had always fancied him a crackpot and was hopeful for some satisfaction on the whereabouts of his departed uncle and was instead victim to a hoax, or so he thought. “Each year, at the same time, the sea demanded a sacrifice which I was able to provide it with. Each year, for the last forty years, I have either pushed or coerced someone off the cliffs of this very house to their deaths. A young woman who happened to walk by one year, a boy who was soliciting another year. A student from the university, strangers to the town mostly. My evil has come to fruition and I have staved off the inevitable for a long time to save my own life. There is but one sacrifice that remains.” I checked the room at this declaration and all mouths were wide open and aghast, making me realize that my own was as well. The room held silent as we all took in the preposterous account and no doubt our thoughts ran the gamut. Was this the ranting of a man who was near-dead and delusional? Had he always been this mad? Or, by some aspect of impossibility, was the whole thing true? Was our father a murderous monstrosity for all the time we lived under his roof and all the time since?

“Father, how can this be?” Eleanor asked in horror, asking what we all thought.

“Preposterous!” Prendergast spat. “I’ve heard quite enough of this! Fairly tales, myths, lunacy!”

“Inspector, were there no missing persons reported during this time?” the old man rasped. “No instances each September where someone in the east coast would be missing? If you do not believe me feel free to check the base of the cliffs after this night. You should surely find some remains other than my own.”

The inspector was aghast and stared hard at my father. Satisfied that he saw no lie in the old man’s eyes, he succumbed to the truth of it from what he knew each year of the disappearances and the failed investigations. They’d captured a man suspected of these crimes one year and the courts saw fit to have him hanged, only to find out the following year another person had disappeared, then another the year after. Declaring he would resolve this mystery straightway, he moved toward the exit, all the while boldly declaring the insanity of such a thing.

As he moved down the stairs toward the front door to gather his coat, there was a sound at the other side; a slithering thump heavy and wet, followed by the scraping as of claws on the paneled wood. His senses were assailed with the smell of kelp and the salt sea like a tangible thing, the stench of beached and rotting cod. What was presumed to be a voice could be heard; a mellow, garbled affair like the sound of leather-on-leather and a croaking call of Dagon.

It occurred to me at that point as it did the rest of us that Semple was missing. And not Semple only; the long, tubular apparatus in my father’s room was also gone. It was then that I saw out on the veranda a silhouette of my father’s old friend with that piece to his mouth, the swell of his chest exhaling but no sound emanating from it. How long he’d stood out there I could not recollect and my mind, soon to be overwrought with horrors unfathomable, sought unsuccessfully to recall at what point he was not present during my father’s tale.

Energized by the impending horror, the old man sat up in his death bed, calling back to a home not of his birth and a fish-god whom he’d cheated long ago. “O mar sempre leva o que é dela,” he croaked, a dry smile touching his cracked lips.

From downstairs we heard the scream of the inspector, though whether it was a death cry or from the sheer fright of what he saw we did not then know. Soon came the strangled sounds of gurgling, of flesh torn apart and the unfettered screams of a man being rent alive until the screams ceased. It would have sufficed that the sounds would have ended there, but the tearing sounds gave way to the horrid, sloppy sounds of chewing and the crunch of broken bones. Breathlessly, we were immobile, too fearful to go to the inspector’s aid lest we meet his fate, my siblings and I looking for an exit. I found one; the adjoining room where there was a secondary flight of stairs which ran out the back of the house. I bolted, beckoning my siblings to follow after but not bothering to look to see if they were. I ran out into the night, wondering at the shrieking I heard and finding that it came from my own lungs.