“Does it mean that she didn’t care for me?” she asks him, when almost five full minutes have come and gone with nothing but silence and the crackle of the fire and the sigh of the wind about the eaves of the cottage. “That she went to the sea like that?”
“I can’t answer that,” he tells her. “But if she didn’t, she was a fool. Did she never say that she loved you?”
“No,” says the girl, though she wonders if that’s the truth or only the way it has come to seem in the time since she was left alone. “She was always good to me, though. She was never cruel.”
“It wasn’t cruel to leave you, the way that she did?”
“Maybe she knew that you would come, that my father would send you to keep me safe, to keep me from starving.”
“No, she didn’t know that.”
“Then maybe she thought my father would come for me himself.”
The dark man shakes his head, and he tells the girl, “No, she knew that your father had dealings elsewhere, business that left him with no time to look after a daughter, even if he’d had the inclination.”
“Oh,” says the girl and stares down at her plate and the bits of food there, waiting to be scraped and scrubbed away. She picks at a crust of laverbread.
“Regardless, it’s nothing you should fret over now,” says the dark man. “Your mother is gone. She made her choice. You are here, with me, and you have many choices remaining, none of which concern your mother.”
“Please tell me a story, before you go,” says the girl, regretting that she asked the dark man such a childish question, knowing how it had been a mistake to let on that she dwells overly on whether or not a drowned woman ever loved her. “Tell me again about Mother Hydra and Father Kraken. Or about Dagon and the Sargasso Sea.”
“Not tonight,” he says. “Indeed, I think possibly the time for stories has passed.” And then the dark man stops smoking his pipe and taps the ashes out onto the hearthstones at his feet. The girl is about to ask him what he means, that the time for stories has passed, when he says, “I’m going to show you something now. Maybe I should have shown you a long time ago, but I was afraid that you weren’t yet ready. Maybe you’re not ready even now, but I don’t dare put it off any longer. Not if the sea is already trying so hard to lure you away.”
The girl begins to ask him what it is that he’s going to show her, what it is that he’s afraid she’s not old enough to see. But then she stops and reminds herself to be patient. Whatever it is, she’ll know soon enough. Her mother was impatient, and all it got her was drowned.
The dark man has put away his pipe and he’s no longer gazing into the fire. He gets up, walks around the table and the dirty dishes and remains of their supper, and then stands looking down at the girl. Her eyes are the blue-green of shallow saltwater on a freezing day. Her hair is the color of bone char. The dark man reaches out and presses the tip of his left index finger firmly against the flesh between her brows. She sits looking up at him. She isn’t frightened. He’s never given her any reason not to trust him. He smiles a tired sort of smile, and she smiles back.
“All your life,” he says, “you’ve been waiting for this revelation to find you, though you didn’t know it ever finally would. All your short life, you have sensed there was so very much more to the world than you could see, and you feared that you would grow old and die with all those great mysteries still hidden from your view. You have even begun to believe you’re not meant to know them, not beyond the measly shreds and rumors your drowned mother whispers in your dreams and when you are no more than half awake. Close your eyes now, and I’ll show you everything.”
The girl nods once, then shuts her eyes.
And the dark man shows he’s as good as his promise.
Long hours later, when the sun is up and she opens her eyes again, Abishag sees the gift that he has left for her on the mantel, the figure carved from a lump of green stone. Stone almost the same color as her eyes.
And there will be another gift.
In nine months, the girl in the whitewashed cottage by the sea will give birth to a daughter, and the child will have her mother’s black hair. But her eyes will be the star-specked midnight eyes of the dark man and her skin will be the color of fog.
9.: Rime of the Super-Sargasso Sea
(October 2017–January 2018)
Two hundred feet beneath the Erastus Corning Tower, in the sprawling labyrinth of fluorescent lights, subway tile, and narrow, winding corridors, there’s a cheery sunflower-yellow door marked FORT FATE. Rest assured, the joke isn’t lost on the studious men and women who comprise the agency’s Directorate of Information Retention and Disposal (DIRD), those unlucky few to whom every damned thing is laid bare. And like the man said, by damned, I mean the excluded. That which it’s best goes unnoticed and unknown by as few souls as possible, those rude, unruly truths which have no fit place in any decent, polite, and sane understanding of the cosmos. And I say unlucky few, because, turns out, any given human being can only endure just so many worldview-shattering, paradigm-shifting revelations before their sanity starts to fray like a cheap pair of socks. The human psyche might well be resilient, but even Superman has to worry about kryptonite. So, employee turnover in the ranks of the DIRD is high
