Her eyes brimmed with regret.

“Stop, Jason!” She put up a hand and I obeyed because there was power in her voice. The diminutive tone she normally spoke in was gone and I could even hear the rasp of her tongue through the tempest surrounding us. “I’m sorry,” she said, tears springing from her eyes and mixing with the rain. “It made me! It made me!”

And she changed then.

Her outstretched hand thinned and something moved beneath her skin. It was as if she were a living casing harboring something else. Her fingertips flowed together, joining into a fleshy mass that bent and twisted how a human hand never should. Her spine arched in pain and she tipped her head back, her mouth opening as if to cry out to the sky. And that was when it emerged.

The tips of something, of many somethings, poked and prodded into the open air past her teeth. Her jaw gaped wider to accommodate the tentacles. And as I watched, the water darkened around her waist and a thousand black appendages appeared from where her legs had been. She hadn’t been walking at all; she was being carried by what her lower half had become.

Her mouth split along the edges of her lips and the face that I had looked at a hundred thousand times—kissed, caressed—broke apart as her true form was revealed. It was a blackened carapace of shiny flesh that emerged. Many folds rimmed with red fluttered in the soaking air. Gills, I thought wildly as the borders of my sanity began to fray. Her skin continued to slough off in the water like an insubstantial sheet peeling away, and more of her body was exposed. A gelatinous substance, mucousy and gray, covered her back between spiny fins that looked poisonous in the stormy light. The tendrils rising from the water around her pricked and preened the fins until they stood out like smoky sails. Del’s chest and belly were now flat and I realized that there had never been a child. It was only her, the true her, becoming what I saw now.

A low bellow that I felt more than heard, rippled through the air and Del’s mouth opened in a gash of needled teeth, their rows too many to count lining her cavernous throat.

And her eyes. Her beautiful gray eyes that had captivated me were now the pools of darkness that I’d witnessed that day looking out at the sea with longing. They held none of the softness and love of before.

I screamed then. I know I did, though I don’t remember it. I do know I raked trails of flesh from my face with my fingernails because to this day I bear the scars, and fell to my knees in the surf that roiled around me. I knew then that there was nothing left to do but scream and die in the sea because what I had seen wasn’t something a human mind or heart could ever accept. There was no swallowing the immensity of it. I sobbed something then, surely her name, and that was when the sea moved.

It began to rise a hundred yards out from the cove. It bulged, something surging beneath it so vast and powerful that the ocean itself seemed to be giving it precedence to the tide. The water rushed away from me, receding with the thing’s birth, and I watched, dumbstruck, as it emerged.

It was darker than the eye of midnight, its skin glistening as the water rolled away from it. It rose, shunting the sea aside as its tentacles, easily two-hundred feet long, their number beyond counting, thrashed the air. It body was torpedo-shaped, two slits on its closest end blasting air and mucus in a wave of air that smelled of dead things decaying in some forgotten place. A hundred, or a thousand, fins spread from its sides between the tentacles, shaking off garlands of seaweed and two hooked barbs that wouldn’t have fit on my boat appeared, shining white in bright contrast to its black body near its front. A great flap of skin slid back and a single eye easily fifty-feet in diameter gazed down with liquid malevolence. I still cannot say what color it was since there’s no name for it any language. It was painted of malice and age, and of some horrible, ancient knowledge. I was pinned beneath its stare, its utter and tangible hatred so thick it choked me.

I lost consciousness then. There was nothing for it, my mind could absorb no more and I fell to the wet sand that normally was always covered by the sea. The returning water awoke me and now I know that I was only unconscious for seconds, perhaps a minute. The water rushed over me and I spluttered as it closed over my head and I struggled for the surface, pawing at the ground below me. I gained my feet and turned, coughing out the sickening taste of saltwater.

A ridge of sea that would have capsized a thirty-foot sailboat was cutting away from the cove. A fin so tall it would have blocked the sun had it been shining, rose from the crest that was being upraised by the thing’s passing. And I saw then that what I had seen rising from the water had only been its head. The disturbance of water hid, I was sure, miles of the thing from the deep, its length and vastness beyond comprehending. Beside it a miniscule trail slashed the water where something much smaller swam, the movement of whipping tendrils barely visible through the rain as they headed further out to sea where the depths became deeper and deeper.

And then they were gone and I slept.

~

That was fourteen years ago this fall. As I write this I sit on my front porch and look out at the flatness of the Kansas field before my small house. Two miles to the south rests a marker that signifies the very geographic center of the United States. It is equally as far as I can get from either ocean that flanks the country and most days it doesn’t rain, which is good.

You see I can’t stand the rain. Water in general for that matter. I have a feeding tube that I put down my throat twice a day and pump fifteen ounces of water through since I gag whenever it touches my tongue. I hate everything about it, the taste, the texture, how it moves. There’s also a port I had placed permanently in my arm that I hook up to an IV on days when I can’t get myself to use the feeding tube. I bathe with baby wipes, tolerating a shower only once a month, and never a bath. Never a bath.

I love the dry reaches of Kansas and how the sun seems to shine longer than anywhere I’ve ever been before. I know the days don’t really hold more hours of light here, I suppose it’s the lack of trees and hills that create the illusion, but I’ll take it.

Because the nights are hard.

When the dusk begins to crawl toward my house across the land and the shadows lengthen in the fields, each blade of grass and every stalk of wheat seem to have a secret. And I already know too many secrets. I lock all the doors and windows then as the day dies outside and I turn on every light in the house. I’ve had extra installed in each room to dispel every inch of darkness.

And I try to sleep, but the dreams come for me when I do.

Dreams of sinking down through water the color of ink, so black you can’t see your hand before your face. The water crushes me and there is no air to breathe, but I don’t perish. I fall into an abyss where something waits. I always awake screaming before it touches me because I know that it will turn me over and show me. Show me its unblinking eye again. And what’s worse, I know she’ll be there beside it.

I’ve had a lot of time to think and some would say that it wouldn’t be a good habit to get into considering my situation. But I’ve swam in madness and I’m sure I left my sanity somewhere behind me in the surf of that cove. On days that the sky darkens and the wind speaks of rain, I think about her last words, so full of regret and horror.

It made me. It made me.

And I know now that she not only meant that the thing from the deep had controlled her actions in those days that should have been the happiest of our lives, but also that she knew where she truly came from and where her mother disappeared to for a week nearly nine months before Del was born.