1. #2
“It understands enough,” Dierdre said darkly. “It’s made that obvious.” Her next words came quieter. “Love is just one more way to get hurt. It understands that very well.”
Other than a disdainful sniff, Audrey made no reply.
“Either way, we can’t deny It.” Dierdre shrugged again. “It’s clearly demonstrated that the deal isn’t bullshit. The accounts, the sub exploding, the skins going haywire. So we give It what It wants.”
“I wonder if you’d be so blasé about it if you were the one on the altar,” Claire rasped.
Dierdre arched an eyebrow. “Don’t act like this is all our fault, Claire. You put yourself here.”
Claire swallowed.
Audrey touched Claire’s hair again, sweet and soothing. “I really am so sorry, honey. None of us like this.”
“Then don’t do it,” Claire begged. It was futile, but the instinct couldn’t be ignored. “Let me go. I promise I won’t tell.”
But Audrey was mournfully shaking her head. “No, honey. It’s necessary, you understand? Nothing we can do about it.”
Lying through her teeth, and Claire couldn’t even tell if she knew. Maybe she really believed it. Claire was grist for the mill, chum for the sharks, and for all her mask of kindness, Audrey Ashbury couldn’t conceive of her being anything else.
A shadow passed over the windows, something huge floating through the seawater beyond. Audrey and Dierdre turned, moths to light, staring at the tentacle-patterned glass with wide, too-blue eyes.
The shadow passed, and Audrey breathed out a sigh.
“It got tired,” she said, an answer to the question on Dierdre’s face.
“Making Itself into human form is hard work, and It did so over and over.” Audrey’s perfectly toned blonde hair glimmered in the light of the candles as she tipped her head pointedly to the gash in Claire’s side, still hidden beneath borrowed lace.
“I don’t see why It bothered trying to look like Elias for her, if It was just going to do that.
Making everything so messy.” Clearly she wanted this to be clean, over and done with, so she wouldn’t have to keep thinking about it.
That’s why the rules existed, Ash said. Make it a religion instead of just a murder, and if the rules needed bending, they didn’t actually matter anyway.
“It works in mysterious ways,” Dierdre said drily.
Small sounds at the back of the sanctuary, scuffling behind the double doors. Audrey glanced back, adjusting her corsage. “Here they come, finally.” She looked at Claire, sighed. “Sorry that the dress doesn’t fit, honey. Elias picked it out but never sent your measurements.”
“Better than mine,” Dierdre said. “Elias always had better taste than Patrick. That’s a Vivienne Westwood.”
Claire craned her head back to look at Dierdre. “So you just went through with this willingly, when it was your turn? Let them dress you up and strap you to an altar?”
Dierdre wrinkled her nose. “God, no. We got married in a country club. It didn’t want me.”
But It wanted Claire. To Wear her, whatever that meant.
“Not that it wouldn’t have been an honor,” Dierdre said, darting a surreptitious look at Audrey. “To be Worn is—”
“Don’t bother, Dee.” Audrey fumbled in a tiny satin purse the same color as her dress, coming up with a lighter and a pack of Pall Malls. Hypocrisy at its finest, though it seemed like her problem with Ash smoking in the house was mostly a cover for her problem with Ash’s general existence.
The Ashbury matriarch lit up and spoke around the cigarette. “No one wants to be Worn. We can yatter on all day about it being an honor, but in the end it’s a death sentence, honey, I won’t beat around the bush and lie. It can be a fast one, though.”
Panic made Claire’s heart hammer, almost visible against her wedding dress. Her Vivienne Westwood.
“I was glad that Wellsley loved me less than Jo, really,” Audrey said, blowing a plume of smoke at the ceiling. “Giving me up wouldn’t have been a great enough sacrifice.”
It didn’t sound like the truth, but it didn’t really sound like a lie, either.
“No one loves me, though,” Claire rasped. The thing she feared the most, set forth like armor. “I’m not a great sacrifice.”
“You’re right, no one loves you,” Audrey said. “But It looks through time. It sees what could be. All the suffering and guilt that will come from your death.” Smoke trailed from her lipsticked mouth. “That’s enough.”
“It is an honor, Claire,” Dierdre said quietly. “Try to look at it that way. It will make all this easier.”
“It could have been so much easier if Elias had obeyed.” Audrey shook her head. “It’s always a risk, sending them out, but he had Dad to watch him. I really thought…” She trailed off and shook her head again. “And now Dad is dead, too. Selfish boy.”
Dad. Audrey said her family had worked for the Ashburys for generations. Claire remembered the help, boiling out of Harrow Point, going to tooth and tentacle. She thought of the ones who were little more than blue-green knots of sinuous limb.
She thought of the octopus-thing in the aquarium at her and Elias’s house.
She thought she might throw up.
Another muffled bang, and the door at the back of the sanctuary burst open.
Claire expected Ash and his father, but instead, it was the help.
Not the hundreds that had come after them in the BMW, but all the ones that still looked mostly human, maybe fifty in all.
All of them were still dressed in their black-and-white uniforms, and all of them were silent.
Claire probably could’ve seen them without screaming, even with the memory of how their bodies had collapsed into gelatinous sacks, amalgams of human and sea creature.
She could’ve dealt with it if they’d just filed into the wooden pews and stayed far away from her.
But of course they didn’t do that, of course they came right for her, bound on an altar by insane fucking billionaires in an insane fucking tentacle sanctuary, and she screamed her throat raw before they even reached her.
The black-and-white-clad mostly-people formed an orderly queue before advancing down the aisle toward Claire, all moving as one organism, eerily similarly to the way the Ashburys had walked down the stairs and into the bowels of the house when Claire first arrived.
Only once the line was perfectly arranged did they advance, their movements sinuous and graceful, seaweed in a current.
“The price to be paid.” Patrick, intoning low, coming to stand at the lectern like a preacher. “Devotion for such as you can only be shown by proxy. Touch, and touch your god.”
The scream caught on something in Claire’s throat, fingers gripping a rock as you fell down a mountain, and strangled itself out into a whimper. A cool hand closed over hers—Dierdre. “Just breathe,” she murmured. “The skins want to pay their respects, that’s all. It’s not so bad.”
The first person—skin, Dierdre said, God, that made it worse—was the driver who’d picked Claire up from the airport.
Alton, she remembered, his name was Alton, though it was hard to put such an innocuous name to the thing shambling toward her.
Claire wondered how much energy it took for them all to look more or less human, to hold themselves together until given permission to stretch, expand, take true form.
She wondered how long Audrey’s father had been like that, before he became a thing that lived in an aquarium.
Rusty stains marred Alton’s white shirt, the corner of his mouth. Mike. The skins’ Ascension feast.
The skin leaned down, flesh sagging at the edges, pulling away from nostril and eye socket to show a nest of tiny tentacles just beneath, rolling over each other like maggots in a wound. With wet lips, he kissed Claire’s forehead, making an awful smacking sound.
When Claire was a kid, she’d get those cheap craft kits where you painted plastic pieces and stuck them to the window with suction cups to imitate stained glass. The kiss sounded like that.
“You are witnessed,” Patrick said.
In the dark sea beyond the windows, something immense floated. Watching.
“See?” Dierdre murmured as the process was repeated down the line, bags of skin and tentacles giving Claire revolting kisses that smelled like salt and bile, Patrick droning the same thing after each one.
“When the first Wellington Ashbury came and made the deal with the sea, he tried to find a different solution, something that would keep him from giving up members of his family. So he offered hundreds of his congregants to become skins for the god, the workers he’d brought with him and made part of his religion.
The help, first, then the children of business partners who could be bribed to keep quiet, or made to believe a lie about an accident on the island.
But It couldn’t be satisfied with a skin that wasn’t part of the family, wasn’t a worthy sacrifice.
When It tried to Wear them, they just turned into this. ”
Another sagging member of the procession kissed Claire’s forehead with clammy lips. The place where they all kissed her was starting to burn, as if they left behind some kind of acid. Claire felt something slide down her temple, jelly-like.
“The sacrifice has to be someone meaningful to the Ashbury family,” Dierdre continued, a professor giving a particularly dry lecture, as if knowing all this would somehow make Claire feel better. “Someone it hurts for them to lose.”
“But they don’t care about me.” Claire’s horror had faded to a kind of numb shock, the resignation of a dreamer waiting for a nightmare to end.
The people—what used to be people—in the line seemed to be deteriorating as they waited, the tentacles that had taken the place of bone beneath their flesh becoming harder to hide.
Skin bunched at their fingers, gravity tugging it off their frames, sometimes breaking away entirely to sit in pools of gore along the carpet.