2. #2
The carpet was right at the edge of oblivion, so close that Claire could feel the blade of rough shale cutting into her kneecaps through the weave, the ragged lines that marked where the rock began to break into open air.
The ocean far below looked both close and eons away, the steady wash of the tide tripping vertigo and making her feel like she was falling.
Maybe that would be better. Falling. Leaning over the edge until gravity took over.
But death was no way out. She knew that. And it would finally drown out that still-flickering spark of hope, the one that was turning, bit by bit, into the semblance of an idea.
Down on the beach, more blazing-white figures, standing still and silent and craning their necks to stare at her. Other employees, those not deemed important enough to be up here, close to the Ashburys, close to the failed skins, close to Claire.
Vertigo swooped through her again; Claire closed her eyes.
Someone came up behind her, their tread timid. Theo. He dipped a cloth into the vase of salt water on the left. A moment of awkwardness while he looked at Claire and tried to figure out the best angle to approach her from, but then he clumsily wiped the cloth over her forehead.
“I…” he murmured, and apparently didn’t know how to finish. He stepped back.
Dierdre was next. She dipped her cloth into the vase on the right and stepped forward, perilously close to the cliff’s edge. Her skirt fluttered against Claire’s side as she wiped the salt water over her cheeks, her eyes, performing her duties in silence.
Finally Audrey, wan and thin in her white dress.
“You got the last years of my son’s life,” the woman murmured, and though the words could’ve sounded poisonous, instead they were just tired.
“There at the end, he didn’t want to bring you here.
So he did care, I guess. He resisted, and he was punished for it.
” The cloth tightened over Claire’s nose and mouth, trembling, as if Audrey was fighting the urge to suffocate her.
“You killed him, in a way. And I’m sorry for this, honey, but I also think you deserve it. ”
Claire didn’t argue. Audrey stepped back in line.
She expected something more. Chants, maybe.
A sermon. Ceremonial words like the ones Patrick had spoken over her and Ash last night, bare as they were.
But there was only silence on the cliff, and on the beach below.
Only the crash of the tide and the ruffle of the breeze through her hair.
The Vivienne Westwood skirt was tattered, the lace imprinted with dirt and blood.
The sky dimmed, though it was still midmorning. The blue of the ocean turned dark by degrees, became foaming ink. Down on the sand, penitents placed what looked like tea lights into the tide. They stayed lit, miraculously, moving in and out with the current, shifting constellations.
Everyone was silent. The Ashburys arranged behind her, the rest of the congregation, made up of Marinography employees who’d traded everything for a piece of this wealth. Even the skins in their fence were mostly quiet, shuffling back and forth with wet sounds, breathing heavily.
Claire risked one glance behind her, wanting to see where Ash was.
The white-clad guards still held his arms, and he sagged between them, as if his bones had gone to sea-sludge, invertebrate.
But his eyes were on her, and bright. Maybe he could see her spark of a plan, the nascent breath of an escape.
Maybe he could see the way she was coming back into herself, filling the gaps, becoming something without a hollow space.
Movement behind her. Wellington Ashbury, stepping uncomfortably close, the tops of his boots brushing her hips on either side. He raised his arms, and a flutter of fabric slid against her shoulders.
Claire glanced back. He was wearing an honest-to-God robe. Of course he was.
“Leviathan,” the Ashbury patriarch intoned, his stylishly graying head tipped up to the darkening sky. “We welcome thee.”
Nothing, at first. Then, down on the beach, all the candles in the tide went out. A thick cloud passed over, obscuring the remains of the sun.
A gasp caught in her throat; Claire swallowed it, because she didn’t want to give Mr. Ashbury the satisfaction of hearing her afraid. The eerie silence held, none of the waiting congregants or skins making any kind of noise. The darkness was expected, apparently.
A rush of wind. It was cold, fathoms-below cold, and wet enough to make Claire’s gown press against her skin, smelling like rot and salt and depths.
She thought for a moment that she’d be swept over the edge of the cliff; maybe the whole point of this was to splatter her on the sand and let the god reconstitute her body as it willed…
But then the wind stopped. And she was still on the cliff. And there was a hand in her hair.
“Hey, babe,” Elias said.
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
She didn’t know when she’d closed her eyes, but she knew she didn’t want to open them. Still, Claire did, almost against her will. Her lashes were crusted with salt; it stung.
He looked worse this time. Barnacles clung to his face, nearly obscuring the one slightly human eye he had left, yellow and pupilless but still in the correct place.
The other wasn’t anything close to human anymore, stretching up and hanging to glow over his forehead, sickly and sallow.
The skin on the left side of his neck was bloated and overgrown, and the kitelike shape of it covered his chin, his shoulder, making that side of his body a mass of unformed flesh.
His left arm was too long, grayish, slicked in salt water and some viscous fluid that looked like spit, or maybe what you’d find when you tore apart a jellyfish.
Human bones didn’t fit right inside it anymore, and the skin stuck out at wrong angles before tapering into a tentacle that curled by his feet.
At least the hand in her hair had fingers.
“Not pretty.” He still sounded mostly like Elias, but there was something shifting beneath his tone, like the movement of sand with a current. “Sorry. Tried to hold it together. He’s not the one I need.”
“I am.” Her lips were numb. It was winter-cold now that the sun was gone, and the spray of the ocean that had soaked her when this thing came forth made her skin rise in goose bumps and her muscles quiver.
There was nothing in the sky, no sun or stars or clouds, just dark. “Because I made you a promise.”
There would be no kind of divine help. The only divinity here was before her, wearing a corpse, smelling of wet sand and fish rot. The god who got to her first.
It tried to smile. A gelatinous chunk of cheek fell off, hit the cliff face with a plop. “You sure did, babe.”
And the thing opened its mouth, so far its jaw popped, then so far the flesh ripped, a bloodless tear that tracked from the corner of Elias’s gray lips up to his barnacle-crusted ear.
The god didn’t look like Elias at all anymore, as its mouth opened and opened.
Pieces of his body still clung to what he’d become, globules of flesh and shards of bone, but Elias was nothing but a blown-apart corpse now, and the thing hidden inside it shucked him off.
The Ashburys had moved back to make room for the true god, a writhing storm of tentacles spilling over the sides of the cliff, stretching past the fawning hands of the skins in their enclosure.
Not as large as it should be, still somehow obscuring its sheer mass, but huge, and growing larger.
Its throat became a corridor of dark, stretching before her, a portal into eternity.
Claire closed her eyes again as the darkness covered her and the god swallowed her up.