Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

They don’t always play board games after dinner, or watch movies, or talk. Because there are nights that his just knowing her secret isn’t enough. There are nights it weighs so much Elizabeth imagines it might crush her flat, like the pressure at the bottom of the deep sea. Those nights, after dinner, they go upstairs to her bedroom, and he runs a porcelain bowl of water from the bathtub faucet. He adds salt to it while she undresses before the tall mirror affixed to one wall, taller than her by a foot, and framed with ornately carved walnut. She pretends that it’s only carved with acanthus leaves and cherubs. It’s easier that way. It doesn’t embarrass her for Michael to see her nude, not even with the disfigurements of her secret uncovered and plainly visible to him. After all, that’s why he’s returned from the bathroom with the bowl of salty water and a yellow sponge (he leaves the tap running). That’s why they’ve come upstairs, because she can’t always be the only one to look at herself.

“It’s bad tonight?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer straightaway. She’s never been one to complain if she can avoid complaining, and it’s bad enough that he knows. She doesn’t also want to seem weak. After a minute or half a minute she answers, “It’s been worse.” That’s the truth, even if it’s also a way of evading his question.

“Betsy, just tell me when you’re ready.” He always calls her Betsy, never Elizabeth. She’s never called him Mike, though.

“I’m ready,” she says, leaning her neck to the left or to the right, exposing the pale skin below the ridge of her chin. But I’m not ready at all. I’m never ready, am I?

“Okay, then. I’ll be as gentle as I can.”

He’s always as gentle as anyone could be.

“You’ve never hurt me, Michael. Not even once.”

But she has no doubt he can see the discomfort in her eyes when the washcloth touches her skin. She tries hard not to flinch, but, usually, she flinches regardless.

“Was that too hard?”

“No. I’m fine. I’m okay,” she tells him, so he continues administering the salt water to her throat, dabbing carefully, and Elizabeth Haskings tries to concentrate on his fingertips, whenever they happen to brush against her. It never takes very long for the three red slits on each side of her throat to appear, and not much longer for them to open. They never open very far, not until later on. Just enough that she can see the barn-red gills behind the stiff, crescent-shaped flaps of skin that weren’t there only moments before. That never are there until the salt water. Here, she always loses her breath for a few seconds, and the flaps spasm, opening and closing, and she has to gasp several times to find a balance between the air being drawn in through her nostrils and mouth, and the air flowing across the feathery red gill filaments. Sometimes her legs go weak, but Michael has never let her fall.

“Breathe,” he whispers. “Don’t panic. Take it slow and easy, Betsy. Just breathe.”

The dizziness passes, the dark blotches that swim before her eyes, and she doesn’t need him to support her any longer. She stares at herself in the mirror, and by now her eyes have gone black. No irises, no pupils, no sclera. Just inky black where her hazel-green eyes used to be.

“I’m right here,” he says.

He doesn’t have to tell her that again. He’s always there, behind her or at her side.

Unconsciously, she tries to blink her eyes, but all trace of her lids have vanished, and she can only stare at those black, blank eyes. Later, when they begin to smart, Michael will have the eye drops at the ready.

“It’s getting harder,” she says. He doesn’t reply, because she says this almost every time. All his replies have been used up, Elizabeth thinks. No matter how much he might want to calm me or offer surcease, he’s already said it all a dozen times over.

Instead, he asks, “Keep going?”

She nods.

“We don’t have too, you know.”

“Yes we do. It’s bad if we do. It’s worse if we don’t. It hurts more if we don’t.” Of course, Michael knows this perfectly well, and there’s the briefest impatience that she has to remind him. Not anger, no, but an unmistakable flash of impatience, there and gone in the stingy space of a single heartbeat.

He dips the sponge into the salt water again, not bothering to squeeze it out, because the more the better. The more, the easier. Water runs down his arm and drips to the hardwood floor. Before they’re finished, there will be a puddle about her bare feet and his shoes, too. Michael gingerly swabs both her hands with the sponge, and at once the vestigial webbing between her fingers, common to all men and women, begins to expand, pushing the digits further away from one another.