The Tide Pool — March 1885

  They dress me in white for my death.

  The robe is thin, meant to dissolve in salt water, meant to leave nothing between my skin and whatever waits below. Gray sky. Gray sea. Gray cliffs falling away to churning water. Wind cuts like knives, salt spray on every gust, storms building somewhere beyond the horizon.

  That's new, this awareness of weather—the marks have made it part of me. Pressure shifts, clouds gather weight, electricity builds. More than the ritual is coming, a larger force waiting beyond the horizon.

  Marsh leads the way down the cliff path. His robes are white today. Clean, pristine, the color of offerings. The color of surrender. Behind him, robed figures process in pairs, candles guttering in the sea wind. Their chanting is soft, rhythmic, in a language that makes my ears ache. The words don't quite fit in my head. They slide off, refuse to be remembered, like water running off oiled cloth.

  I count them as we descend. Eighteen figures. Eighteen people here to watch a sixteen-year-old girl be fed to something ancient and terrible.

  Every face I can see gets memorized. Every hood that slips. Every gesture that marks one from another. The tall man with the limp; his right leg drags on the stone steps. The woman whose candle keeps going out. Nervous, I think, her hands shaking just enough to catch the wind wrong. The one who can't stop looking at me. Not with pity. Anticipation. Hunger. He wants to see what happens. He's been waiting for this.

  Thomas Garrett is near the back. His face is pale, his hands steady on his candle, his expression carefully blank. He doesn't look at me. Won't. But his heartbeat reaches me from here. Faster than it should be. Afraid.

  Good.

  They think they're witnessing a sacrifice. They don't know they're writing their own death warrants.

  Seventy-three steps to reach the bottom. I count every one.

  The tide pool waits at the base of the cliffs.

  The water doesn't move. Wrong. Tide pools should surge and retreat with the ocean's rhythm. But this water is absolutely, perfectly still. Black as ink. Deep as forever. It doesn't reflect the gray sky. It absorbs everything.

  Symbols carved into the surrounding rocks glow faintly. Same phosphorescent light as my marks. They pulse in unison, like a heartbeat, like a living thing waiting to be fed.

  And I sense it calling.

  Not with words. Pressure. Need. The marks under my ribs are screaming now, straining toward the water, demanding completion of the connection that began with the carving.

  Marsh's voice rises above the chanting.

  "The offering is prepared. The marks have been inscribed. The ink has been applied. The door is open."

  Robed figures spread out around the pool. Their candles make a ring of light against the gray morning.

  "We present this offering to the Deep One. We ask that it be seen, that it be judged, that it be taken or transformed, as the Deep One wills."

  The chanting peaks. Words in that old language, syllables that scrape against my mind like fingernails on slate.

  Silence.

  "Step forward," Marsh says, voice soft as old velvet. "Step forward now, child. Time to meet your god."

  The water is warm—first wrong thing. March on the coast of England, the sea should be cold enough to kill, but this water welcomes me, blood-warm, like coming home.

  I wade in to knee-deep, and the marks ignite, the connection strengthening as every drop of water registers against my skin, every ripple, every current. The pool is alive with sensation.

  At waist-deep, the white gown floats on the surface, then sinks as the water claims it, fabric clinging to my skin, heavy and strange.

  At chest-deep, the marks are beneath the surface now, and looking down, I see them glowing through the water with phosphorescent light, but brighter, beating in rhythm with a presence huge and far away that's starting to notice.

  "A bit further, child," Marsh calls from the shore. His voice seems distant now, muffled by the water in my ears. My pulse is loud against my ribs. "To the center. Let it see you."

  One more step.

  The bottom drops away.

  I plunge into black water that closes over my head, my eyes open though I don't remember opening them, and I can see because the marks are blazing now, casting light into the darkness.

  And the darkness is full.

  This isn't the tide pool anymore—can't be. The pool was small, twenty feet across at most, but this black stretches in every direction, infinite and endless, the water become an ocean, an abyss, space itself bent around me, folded, opened into immensity.

  Something is rising.

  Before seeing it, I feel it—a shift in pressure, a change in the current, a presence massive moving in the depths below, ascending toward the light I'm putting out, coming to see what's calling.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The marks blaze brighter, a signal, a beacon.

  Here I am, they scream. Here I am, look at me, SEE ME.

  And the Deep One hears.

  It rises.

  Trying to see it, to comprehend the shape, but my mind keeps sliding off, refusing to process what my eyes are receiving. The thing isn't invisible—the very concept of "shape" doesn't apply. It exists in ways that shouldn't be possible, in dimensions that have no names, geometries that hurt to perceive.

  My sanity strains at the edges. The parts of my mind that understand concepts like "up" and "down" and "here" and "there" start to crack under the weight of a thing that doesn't follow those rules. This is what broke the counting girl. This shatters every offering who comes to this place. Not pain or fear. Just the simple, devastating truth of a being so vast and so wrong that human minds can't hold it.

  But there are parts I can perceive—fragments, impressions my mind can almost hold before they slip away.

  Eyes. Millions, billions, a surface too vast to measure, eyes covering every inch, stretching out in every direction like stars in a living sky. They blink in waves, ripples of motion spreading across the impossible expanse, some the size of moons, others smaller than pinpricks, all of them aware.

  Some of them are human. I see that now. Human eyes, scattered among the alien geometries. Eyes that might once have belonged to offerings like me. Taken. Absorbed. Made part of a greater whole. Are they still conscious in there? Still aware? Do they dream of the lives they lost, the bodies they wore, the people they loved?

  I don't want to know.

  And they're all turning toward me.

  Looking away is impossible. The eyes hold me, pin me, examine me with an attention so heavy it has weight. Compression. Squeezing. Pushing me down into a smaller and smaller space. The Deep One is looking at me, and the looking is a force, a pressure, a gravity that makes everything else in my life feel like a dream.

  Nothing—I am nothing, an insect, less.

  The scope of it, the age—this thing was old when the first fish learned to breathe air, old when the continents were one landmass, old when there was nothing on Earth but bacteria and volcanic rock and endless sea.

  And it has been sleeping all that time, dreaming in the deep, waiting for a thing interesting enough to wake it.

  My lungs burn. Do I still have lungs? Am I still human, here in this space between spaces? The marks blaze beneath my ribs, the only anchor to what I was, what I might still be.

  The Deep One's attention presses deeper. It touches my thoughts, my memories, flipping through the pages of my life with casual disinterest. My mother's face. My father's betrayal. The cellar. The counting girl. All of it laid bare, examined, and found—

  —wanting.

  Small. Ordinary. Just another small life, full of small pain, in an endless parade stretching back to the beginning of human existence.

  The attention begins to turn away.

  And a part of me. Small and bright and absolutely furious. Refuses to let it.

  No.

  The thought cuts through the black like a blade.

  You don't get to dismiss me. You don't get to look away. You watched while they carved me open. You watched while they pushed me under. You've watched a hundred children drown in your name, and you did NOTHING.

  The attention pauses, turns back, curious now in a way it wasn't before.

  They worship you, I think, rage burning through the cold and the pressure and the crushing ancient regard. They murder children for you. Sixty years, and you've never given them anything in return. They're insects to you. We're all insects to you.

  Pressure against my mind. The Deep One doesn't use words. But meaning. Understanding. An immense presence trying to communicate with a tiny one.

  Yes, it says. You are insects. What of it?

  Then watch this insect, I think. Watch what I do to them. Watch me tear down everything they've built in your name. Watch me destroy the people who worship you.

  Silence. The attention deepens, sharpens, a being asleep for eons waking up, just a little, just enough to be interested.

  You cannot harm me, it says.

  I know, I think. I don't want to harm you. I want to entertain you.

  More silence. Then laughter—if such an immense thing could laugh—cold and utterly inhuman, like mountains grinding against each other, like stars dying, a being impossibly old finding novelty at last.

  Entertain me, it says. How?

  Give me back, I think. Let me live. And I'll show you.

  The attention weighs me, measures me, finds a quality it likes—the rage, maybe, the cold determination, or simply the novelty of a creature so small having the audacity to bargain.

  Interesting, it says. Very well. Live. Hunt. Destroy the ones who serve me. I will be watching.

  The pressure shifts, the void recedes, and I'm rising, surfacing, returning to a world that suddenly seems impossibly bright and impossibly small.

  But before I go, more comes through—a gift, a curse, information transferred from that vast mind to my small one with the casual ease of pouring water from one cup to another.

  Names. Faces. Eighteen people who stood around the tide pool while I drowned. Candles in the dark. Heartbeats I can sense now, scattered across Europe, going about their small lives, unaware that they've been marked.

  The Deep One is giving me targets. Showing me exactly who to hunt.

  A kindness, it says, the word dripping with alien amusement. Or perhaps just good theater. I look forward to seeing what you do with them.

  But remember, it adds. You belong to me now. The marks make you mine. Whatever you do, wherever you go, I will always be watching. You are my creature now, Eleanor Winchester. My entertainment. My tide.

  I know, I think. I'm counting on it.

  Air—cold, salt-sharp, achingly real. I gasp it in, huge lungfuls that burn my throat and fill my chest, my body remembering how to breathe even though it shouldn't, my heart remembering how to beat.

  Open sea—the actual ocean beyond the tide pool, gray waves stretching in every direction, churning with the aftermath of the storm. The sky is angry, dark clouds piled against each other, lightning flickering in the distance. Far away: a coastline with low cliffs and rocky shore, a place I don't recognize.

  The marks beat steadily beneath my ribs. Still connected. Still carrying that thread of awareness into the depths, where an immense and amused presence is already turning its attention back to the long slow dreams of the deep.

  I don't care—let it watch, let it be entertained.

  I have what I need.

  Alive—against all odds, against all logic, against the sixty-year track record of offerings who never survived. Alive.

  And I have eighteen names burned into my memory. The Deep One showed them to me during that connection. Every face, every name, every person who held a candle while I drowned. Gift or challenge or both.

  All of them—I can sense them now. Scattered across the continent like stars in a constellation, each one connected to me by invisible threads of water and blood. Thomas Garrett in Dover. Marcus Webb in London. Helena Cross in Bristol. Fourteen others, spread from Edinburgh to Paris to places I've never been.

  They don't know I'm coming. They think I'm dead. They think the ritual worked exactly as it was supposed to.

  They're wrong.

  The sea is cold around me, but I don't feel it anymore. The marks have made me part of the water. The water has made me part of a larger whole. I'm swimming now. Being born.

  I turn toward the shore and swim.

  But a wrongness emerges.

  My arms move through the water, and the motion feels different, stronger, and when I kick, the power that surges through my legs isn't human but a different force, one that belongs to creatures born in the deep, moving too fast, cutting through the waves like a blade.

  And my skin—my skin is changing.

  Lifting my hand out of the water, I watch the flesh ripple, just a flicker, like a presence beneath the surface rearranging itself, learning its new shape.

  The Deep One didn't just let me go.

  It sent a piece of itself back with me.

  And whatever it is, it's hungry.