The Sea of Ash Read online

  "No!" he cried.

  Arabella jolted back in her seat, then slumped forward, her head hanging down so that black hair made a veil around the damage. A stream of liquid poured down, darkening her dress. It was greyish, translucent, and it smelled like the sea.

  There was a terrible commotion, women screaming, people tumbling and running. Pond bent to try and aid Arabella. The fragile little hand had dropped the silver gun; it reached to touch the woman's face. It stroked her wet cheek with a tenderness that seemed apologetic.

  Several men rushed at Pond and pinned him to the ground. Davis Storrow came raging, wielding his violin like a club. Arabella was the only one left sitting in the audience, slack amongst the tipped chairs. The bleeding had stopped suddenly, as if a faucet that had been shut off.

  16. A MEETING OF SORTS

  Pond was charged with murder and placed in the only cell that the little Sterling police station possessed. Numb, and bruised from his capture, he sat on the bunk staring at the floor. He had not even bothered to try to explain that the small freak arm had acted of its own accord.

  They had left Pond his journal and his pen, but he felt hollow inside and incapable of words. Although he was not a violent man, he found himself wishing that he had removed the third arm. He found himself wanting to kill it.

  Pond felt something tap his shoulder. He looked down -- it was the little pale arm. It pointed to the journal that sat beside him on the bunk. It also pointed to the pen.

  "You want to write?"

  The doctor was both incredulous and intrigued. He was hesitant about giving the thing a sharp object, but he handed it the pen nonetheless. He remained ready to subdue it if it made any threatening moves.

  Pond opened the journal to a blank page. He had to hold it up so that the short protrusion could reach it with the pen. The doctor read as the little hand wrote.

  "My dear Dr. Pond, there are not words enough to express my regrets in regards to this dreadful situation. Please allow me to explain. The creature you called Arabella was, in actual fact, a walking ocean. The Sixth Ocean. Poor thing had no choice in the matter, mind you, but upon her death, be it natural, accidental or by some pistol other than that exceptional one which you had procured, her form, as it was, would have unleashed an unborn ocean to flood the world as we know it. Imagine if she had taken a fatal tumble down a staircase, or been trampled by one of those queer horse-less carriages? Arabella would have been the end of the world."

  The journal trembled in Pond's hands.

  "But, all that has been corrected, though the method and the results were indeed unfortunate. I should like to have had the opportunity to explain this all in advance. However, interred as I am in your body, I have only recently achieved a satisfactory quality of cognizance, and mastering my dreadful little appendage has proven no small feat. It is perhaps fortuitous that I was capable of taking action when the opportunity arrived. Please forgive the lack of due warning.

  "I should like to add that I have observed you to be a gentleman of honor, and an adventurer of the highest caliber. I tip my hat to you, Dr. Pond."

  Then the hand signed its name.

  "Yours sincerely, Simon Brinklow."

  Pond stared at the words, dazed. He recognized the signature.

  "Heavens," he muttered, "it is you."

  The hand gave Pond the pen, then hung in the air, offering its palm.

  Pond gently shook the little hand. "Mr. Brinklow, it's an honor to meet you."

  17. VISITATION

  I close Dr. Pond's Journal and put it down on the bed.

  They found his cell empty in the morning. He had disappeared, though the confining chamber was intact. There was nothing to be found but his journal and pen and a few limp strands of slippery black sea rack. Neither the authorities, nor anyone else for that matter, ever found Dr. Albert Pond.

  It has been more than an hour since I left the bottle at the little graveyard. I have once again finished reading Pond's book. I've lost count of how many times I've read it. This time it thrills and terrifies me even more than the first time I read it. I am about to experience something that he, and Brinklow before him, experienced, an earnest contact with another realm...a visit from Fractured Harry.

  The rain has persisted; in fact it has increased if anything. Several times I have mistaken its sounds for the noise of a figure moving about in the darkness outside the house. Once I even thought that I heard the distant door in the main entryway open and close. I actually shuddered at the sound, and I find my hands trembling still, even though there is no evidence whatsoever that Harry is anything but a benevolent spirit.

  It is nearly two in the morning, and I am sitting here like a frightened boy in this ancient house. How small I feel, stripped of the security of disbelief. It is an aching thing to know that we are all so tiny, stumbling in a universe that is wider and darker than any Earth-bound sea.

  Two-fifteen and I hear the first footstep. Rain patters in the leaves outside. The second step, like the first, is soft, a measured pressure on the old floor planks. Others follow -- they are too quiet to echo in the hall outside my room.

  A single knock at the door. I have left the door unlocked. I startle, jolt up from the bed. Another knock, just a bit louder this time.

  "Come in," I call softly.

  A third knock. A fourth. I step toward the door. I remember that Brinklow and Pond both opened the door for Harry -- I must do the same. I reach for the door -- it slides open several inches before I can touch the knob.

  A pale hand grasps my wrist! The grip is icy, and the fingernails are tiny white trilobites. I cry out and jerk free, stumbling back toward the bed as the door swings wide.

  The creature has white hair -- wet leaves tangled in the hair. It is naked, thin as an upright greyhound, smiling a toothless smile.

  I fumble a hand into my pocket, grope for the small black bag.

  It speaks -- a voice that is several wound together like the threads of a string. A wintry, thin sound...

  "Have you no manners? You can't even say hello to an old friend? This is the second time you've stung me with your impudence..."

  The figure steps fully into the room and pushes the door shut behind it. Hair obscures the eyes.

  "Haven't you realized that I was only going to thank you back at the library? I was going to thank you for letting me out. But you scorned me." The black mouth twists around its words, "A pity. You can't expect me to let a slight like that go unpunished."

  The creature raises one wrinkled hand to the height of my face and advances as I pull the bag from my pocket and throw it. A direct hit in the chest. Voices shrill. It dances backward and folds to the floor. I hear an electric crackling sound as the pale mass jerks then goes still, its limbs folded in as if it is a dead spider.

  "Pain," voices hiss. "Terrible pain!"

  The being shoots up from the floor. It is partly fragmented; there are gaps in the torso that I can see through, and others filled with dull flashes of light, and what look to be weaving swarms of tiny flies. One arm seems to be connected by nothing more than twitching pixels.

  "You hurt me," the thing's voices rasp. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to kiss you now..." It reaches up and flicks the long white hair away from its face, revealing the eye sockets. There are no eyes, only gouges from which twin masses of small jointed legs, like those of a crab or a trilobite, protrude. The legs quaver and flex as the ghastly figure prepares to pounce.

  The door behind the monster swings open and a jerky figure with a pumpkin for a head lunges from behind. Its body is a plaid bathrobe, the bloated fingers are bunches of colorful Indian corn. It wraps its arms around the naked creature and the two figures grapple.

  Fractured Harry hooks his fingers into the holes in the other, and bursts of light widen the wounds. The grey thing shudders and shrieks as an arm falls off and breaks like white ash on the floor. Chunks of chest follow, then the legs and hips. The upper body rips and tumbles, then the screech
ing head -- white hair trailing like the tail of a comet -- it falls to the floor and breaks.

  The cries fly away like birds and fade until the only sound is the rain tapping its meaningless code on the window. I sink to the edge of the bed, gasping and feverish. Fractured Harry stands above the powdery stains, facing me. He bows stiffly. His corncob fingers are scorched black and smoking. I look up at his pumpkin head.

  "Thank you," I manage.

  Harry takes a step closer and leans down. His words are an alien whisper, a meaning that I receive just the same. He tells me the name of the place where I must go. Home.

  18. DUSK

  The first snow of the season is falling. It wanders down the grey November sky and settles on yards and roofs, finds grooves in the limbs of naked maple trees. It brushes the windowpane, each flake unique, each a ghostly fingerprint.

  I am listening to a rare recording of Davis Storrow's Daughter of the Drowned Temple. It is the first time that I have actually heard the piece, and I find it as lovely and haunting as Pond had described it to be. It actually gives me chills.

  These last few weeks have been pleasantly uneventful. I've kept to myself, safe in my small house in Grafton, snug in a womb of tea steam and Nana's old books.

  What of Pond and Brinklow? There are those who claim that they have uncovered traces of them, like the eccentric fellow in Vermont who insists that he found their initials carved on a rotten old board that washed up on the shore of Lake Champlain. Down in Sturbridge, Massachusetts there's a structure that Pond aficionados refer to as The Trilobite House because the frost that appears on the windows looks distinctly like those strange prehistoric creatures. Witnesses have even claimed to see three handprints shaped by ice on the panes -- two of normal size, with one small one in between. Then there's the Mt. Desert Photo, a grainy, half-focused snapshot taken atop a mountain in Maine that purportedly shows a portly fellow in Victorian garb and a dashing fellow in 1920s attire standing on a ledge, gazing out over a misty expanse of sea and distant islands.

  The music ends. I am pensive, too comfortable to get up and put anything else on. The snow has stopped, having left little more than a dusting. I continue to look out the window. The sky clears, but for some of those brooding purple-grey clouds so characteristic of November in these parts.

  The days go dark so early now. The tree shadows reach to each other and merge, and the moon comes up, as if released from some forgotten stone temple, as if born of an ash-colored sea.

  End

  Afterword

  Jeffrey Thomas

  My brother Scott Thomas’ story The Sea of Ash has a rather convoluted back-story.

  A decade ago now, publisher Sean Wallace of Prime Books had a brainstorm. He was very enamored of a piece of artwork by Travis Anthony Soumis (who has done covers for a number of my books), called Dreams Are Dark, which portrays a woman lying supine in the surf, with her arms spread wide like wings, while in the distance a strange pillared building looms against a moody sky. Sean asked if Scott and I could each write a novella inspired by the same image, to be collected in one book with Travis’ art serving as the cover. We agreed to this unique challenge, and Scott came up with the book’s title: The Sea of Flesh and Ash. One of us would write a story called The Sea of Flesh, the other The Sea of Ash. I confessed I wanted the flesh, Scott admitted he had hoped for the ash, and so with title and Travis’ image in hand, we went our separate ways to write our stories in solitude, without sharing anything with the other about our respective stories until they were finished.

  After this promising beginning, however, the project stalled, and remained in limbo for a number of years. While we were both grateful to Sean for inspiring our stories, which wouldn’t have come into existence without him, and fully understanding the difficulties and vagaries of indie press publishing, ultimately we felt we needed to find a new home for the book so that it could finally reach the hands of readers who had been hearing about it, and anticipating it, for years.

  So in 2011, we decided to take a chance on a new publisher called Terradan Works, and the book was finally released with its intended cover art (though Travis updated it slightly).

  Though Terradan published a lovely looking book, it’s often hard for a beginner publisher to reach out and garner sufficient notice for their titles, and so in an effort to gain a wider audience for my novella The Sea of Flesh, in 2013 I included it in my short story collection Worship the Night, separate from Scott’s novella. I encouraged Scott to see that The Sea of Ash was likewise reprinted somewhere, to reach the readership it deserved. Thus, I was overjoyed when Mike Davis, of the widely esteemed Lovecraft eZine, read Scott’s story, fell in love with it, and decided to reprint it in digital and print formats -- gushing that it was one of the finest stories he had ever read.

  Indeed, the wildly inventive and intricately constructed The Sea of Ash may very well be Scott’s masterpiece to date, and that says a lot when you’re talking about a writer who was selected by Karl Edward Wagner to be included in the final edition of DAW’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories, and who once saw two of his stories selected by Ellen Datlow for a single volume of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Scott’s stories typically take place in an 18th or 19th Century New England or UK (or in some alternate reality version of either), and as such they are impeccably researched. Scott’s work is very much informed by his love of classic horror literature, most notably the great M. R. James, and yet it is highly original. Typical of Scott’s fiction is an astounding level of fantastical imagination bordering on the surreal, abounding with imagery and concepts as poetically beautiful as they are eerily disturbing. Another prominent feature of much of Scott’s work is his love of nature, and how the natural world factors into his stories -- this, and the tragic plotlines of many of his tales, calling to mind Thomas Hardy.

  Having read The Sea of Ash, I believe you will feel that its release to a wide audience was worth the long wait, and you will understand why Mike Davis stepped in to champion it. I envy you your first encounter with this novella. Indeed, if this is your first encounter with any of the fiction of my younger brother, I envy you all the more.

  Biography

  Scott Thomas’ short story collections include Urn and Willow, Midnight in New England, Quill and Candle, Westermead, The Garden of Ghosts, Cobwebs and Whispers and Over The Darkening Fields. His novel Fellengrey is a fantastical nautical adventure set in an alternate 18th century Britain. Thomas lives in New England.