When you start shouting at things in the dark, you’ve essentially given up, haven’t you? You’re more or less saying, “Well, I know I’m fucked six ways to doom, and I’m frightened out of my wits, but I’d prefer we get this over with quickly and with as little pain as possible.”

But the thing in the water did not snap off my head, and my arms began to tremble until I could hold myself no longer. I let loose a great scream, relaxed my arms, and fell onto the slack of the chains like a plunging marionette, nearly wrenching my shoulders from their sockets and the skin from my wrists when the shackles went taut.

I continued to scream until my voice broke and what breath I had came with a desperate animal yowl that filled the chamber, the darkness, the very reaches of my imagination. All life became the instant before the bite, the slash, the sting from the thing unknown.

Nothing.

I hung slack in my chains and the water settled, a low wail drooled out of my lungs—hope hissing away. I would die now.

Water droplets tapped on the ledge by my hand and echoed like slow, distant clapping—Charon at his oar, applauding the pathetic efforts of his next fare to the underworld.

Something—a fin, perhaps—brushed my foot and I resumed my scream, kicked at the thing, which enveloped my legs, holding me fast, moving around and up my knees, thighs.

My bladder let go, and for the first time since I was a boy, I prayed. “God, save me, thou pompous great prick!” (Did I say I had not been on speaking terms with God for some time? Only polite to acknowledge our mutual resentments, innit?)

The creature, while bear-bonkingly strong, was not spiny, nor was its skin rough like the sharks I had seen at the Rialto fish market, but smooth—slick—it slipped around me as if I were being strangled by a great, slippery cord. I began to lose consciousness, some dreamy flowing of the mind from the terror—vestiges perhaps of the creature’s poison. Off I drifted, welcoming oblivion, as a set of barbs pierced my hips and the monster fastened itself upon my man-tackle.

* A natural was a jester who came to his profession by way of a physical or mental anomaly—a dwarf, a giant, Down syndrome, etc. Naturals were thought to have been touched by God.

Five: Ladies of the Lagoon

FIVE

Ladies of the Lagoon