It Grows in the Belly
Continuing this week with the second new short story in the series, "It Grows in the Belly," a dark fantasy and horror story about old bloodlines and the dangers hidden within the ocean.
cw: Thalassophobia, violence, gore
The sack in my hand is an anchor but I have come so far already tonight.
Moonlight breaks into a thousand shimmering scales on the surface of the ocean. The silver-painted waves crash onto black sand as the tide rolls in, washing over my bare feet. A gust of wind buffets me, whipping my greasy hair around and bringing the odor of brine and old, hidden things.
It is too late for hesitation. I drop my bloody scaling knife into the sand and push our boat into the breakers. My hands tremble, adrenaline still coursing through my veins. I take a shuddering breath and count to five like you always tell me to, but it doesn’t help. It just makes me think of you and what’s at stake. You’ll never forgive me, after all, even if this works, but there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, even damn myself to your hatred. Maybe you’ll understand one day, long after the village has executed me. Long after it recovers.
The sack squelches around the bottom of the boat, turning my already emptied stomach. I don’t need the reminder of what I’ve done tonight. Those horrible things are seared into my mind forever now. The flash of my fishing knife. The splatter of dark blood and the gurgle of an extinguished life. Gutting a fish isn’t so different than…
The oars propel me through the foaming waves to the reef, where the dark things wait. The ocean undulates beneath me, volcanic glass turned liquid. I imagine I can see the labyrinth of coral beneath the waves, but it is an illusion. Neither the reef, nor the sand bar, nor the sunken ruins are visible. The lights of our village, the ones I did not snuff out, twinkle from the shore, silent witness to me then and now. I stop rowing and the boat drifts in the expanse of the ocean lit but by the white glow of the moon.
Did I miss the moment? Am I too late? The thought that I’ve done all this for nothing is more sickening than the guilt I am barely keeping at bay, and yet nothing compared to the fear that I have missed my opportunity to save you.
The water dripping from the oars echoes strangely. The stench from the sack mixes with that older, sour smell. I dry heave as something stirs in the water. An oily voice whispers in the old tongue and I thank my mother for having taught it to me.
"Why dost thou risk this place, invader?" The words are viscous, sludge seeping into my ear canals.
Remember why you are here, I tell myself. I see your face, not as it is now, not as it was the first time I saw you, but as it was when I first fell in love with you. Dark eyes, thick brows, a proud nose. A face framed by ocean-drenched curls with a wry smile.
Beautiful.
"I want to bargain." I sound so sure of myself.
Bubbles break the surface. The smell of old fish guts and rotten kelp chokes the air as a shape rises from the water. A sand bank, long and flat. It reflects no moonlight, no, it drinks it in. A dark patch of void in a black sea and the fear within me is overwhelmed by hope.
I plunge my oars into the water and row toward it, long strokes pulling me toward the shoal. The keel of my boat runs into the sand and the ocean pulls back, beaching me on the bank’s shore. Cold sand—never once touched by the sun—greets my bare feet as I leap from the boat. Deflated anemones, gasping coral, and flaccid kelp paint the black surface of the sand bank. In the center of the bar, a stone pillar towers over the risen shoal, dominating the tiny isle and bathing it in a primeval aura that makes me want to cast off and row for shore.
Its surface is rough, the details on it worn away by what I can only guess must be centuries under the waves. The weight of age is dizzying. Visions of a land unspoiled by human hands and waters teeming with schools of fish whip through my mind. I do not belong here. I am anathema. I am a disease.
But I’ve made it this far and I will not go back empty-handed. Anything for you.
I run a hand over the monolith’s pocked surface, wondering if it is made of volcanic rock or coral. Perhaps both. Perhaps something else. Barnacles and mussels grow in cracks and fissures that run through the column. Seaweed clings to deep gouges on its surface. My finger catches on the edge of what, for a moment, looks like a fish-headed human swallowing children. Blood wells from a jagged slash and I press the flap of skin closed to stop the bleeding. My blood drips onto the black sand and I look back at the monolith, but that fish-headed creature is no longer there.
Tendrils of mist pour over the sand, obscuring everything but a patch of clear sky directly above. The moon and stars shine down in a bright column, centering on the black pillar. The distant stars twinkle brightly, despite the brilliant orb. I do not recognize the asterisms. The moon is not our moon.
I pull the sack from the boat and drag it to the pillar’s base, leaving behind a streak that churns my stomach. The seafloor flora writhes and curls, drinking in the leaking sacrifice, revitalized by it.
"What hast thou brought, usurper?" The same unctuous whisper emanates from the surrounding mist. Layered within it are a thousand-thousand voices far more menacing than the first. A haunting cacophony, beautiful and terrifying, echoes the inquiry as I pull the sack’s ties apart and dump its contents a the base of the pillar. The smell of iron fills the air, pushing against the swelling stench of the ocean before the two combine into a fetor more nauseating than either alone. I step back, hoping the old ones will accept my terrible offering.
The water at the edge of the isle froths and roils. Shapes move at the edges, slithering, sliding, flopping. They burst from the brine, inky shapes covered in silver scales, their heads crowned with spines, heavy with ocean weeds. They propel themselves across the beach toward me on thick tentacles or slapping fins or skittering claws. Carapaces click and pincers snap as they drag themselves across the sand. Hulking forms of shells and barnacles with the needle teeth of deep water abominations. Serpentine, glistening shapes with yellow eyes, red eyes, violet eyes, all glowing. Gills flap in the chill air of night, unhappy to have been called from their comfortable depths, excited for the coming bargain. Gullets bob as they swallow the poisonous air, but they are eager for the gifts.
They stop a meter from me in a ring held back from attacking me by the ancient magics that bind them. An army of oceanic nightmares, waiting for the deal to be struck so they can return from whence they came.
The voices swell with a note of hunger. "What dost thou ask for, landwalker?"
"My wife!" I say, shouting the words. The voices echo them back to me, mocking me.
I try again. "My wife. She is sick. You have to save her."
The shambling creatures press in tighter and the bargaining magics stretch, barely holding them back. A seed of doubt grows within me. Did I forget something? Did I do something wrong? The aura of malice on the shoal thickens and a note of eagerness threads through the air. The bag of organs at the base of the pillar thrums with echoes of the power swirling around the island. The stone obelisk, still shifting with every new look, towers over me. It now bears many faces staring down at me, leering, hungry, impatient. They are old, ancient faces, with molluscan traits and all-too-human eyes. They look as if they are laughing at me.
I harden my resolve. Just as I cannot undo what I did to my village, I cannot undo what I have done here. It’s for you. Haven’t I already proven I would do anything?
There is a gurgling of the ancient tongue and then the amalgam of voices croon in eager tones, "We accept thine offerings." A creature darts forward and upends the bag at the base of the monolith. Twelve fishermen’s hearts spill out onto the sand. The ichthyic horror taps each bloody organ, counting out their number in their ancient tongue. With each count, the creatures cheer. One fewer invader to their territories.
At the twelfth, the counting creature snatches it and dives into the sand, disappearing. The others, only a moment behind, howl and snarl and click, hurling themselves at the other hearts, eager to taste of my bargained gifts. Eager to feast on those who feast on their own.
Had I not already emptied my stomach on shore, the gluttony I am forced to witness would have painted every last piece of dinner across that dark sand bank. After a while, my vision blurs and my mind disconnects from my senses, protecting me from the brutality that surrounds me.
Eventually, silence falls, and my vision returns. I am alone on the sandbank but for one creature standing beneath the monolith. No hint of the others remains. It sways in the shaft of moonlight, silhouetted in silver. It turns its flat head to look at me, showing two eyes atop one another on the side of its face like a flounder. Fat lips suck at the air, their gills quivering uselessly in the misty ocean air. It holds itself up with a crab’s claw and stares unblinking at me.
"Take us to her," murmur the silky voices from the mist, and the creature, their emissary, reaches a tentacle forward, urging me to the boat.
I shove off into the water as the isle sinks with a great squelching sound. I have to oar with all my might to get clear of the suction created by the whirlpool. The last thing I see is the monolith, glimmering with a human head thrown back, carved with an open mouth. Is it screaming? Or laughing?
The mist lightens enough for the moon and stars—familiar stars again—to guide me to shore. The monster, the lone sentinel they sent with me, glides alongside the boat, a flash of silver. Every once in a while, a bubble bursts on the surface of the ocean, releasing a sour miasma.
I row fast and hard toward the lights of my village. My palms blister and burst. Blood trickles down my wrists and dribbles into the sea water sloshing around the bottom of the boat. Black drops of tar lost in an inkwell.
I pay the pain price gladly. The horrific things I’ve done have paid off. I will be with you soon and all will be well.
The village—what’s left of it—is still asleep as the boat slides up to our pier. I moor it at our post and leap out. The flickering orange light of the candle I left burning for you is still visible through the window of the hut, bright against the dark houses of our neighbors. Those will remain dark for a long time to come, I suspect. The underwater sentinel they sent with me follows behind, its tentacles propelling them swiftly over the black sand and sharp rocks of the beach.
I throw the door open and let the creature slither past me. It crouches over you, staring at you, its nostril slits breathing in your scent. A tentacle wriggles out from beneath the hardened carapace of its hunched body.
Your face is sallow. Your eyes sunken. Brown flecks of blood rim your nostrils and upper lip. You cough in your sleep and shiver. Something about the smell of the creature penetrates the dream haze you’re stuck in and your eyes dart side to side beneath your long-closed eyelids. Your shallow breaths quicken.
“No,” you say, and a lance of guilt stabs me through my chest as the first word you have spoken in months washes over me.
"Peace," whisper the voices, this time in my head, and I force myself to be still. Or maybe they do. I cannot tell anymore.
Their emissary slips a tentacle into your nostril. Your throat bulges as it slides down into your stomach. Your abdomen undulates with the appendage’s movements.
"What’s it doing?" I whimper, still unable to move, asking the voices. I want to lunge for the obsidian-tipped spear leaning against the wall of our hut, wanting to end this. The feeling I’ve made a mistake grows ever stronger and I fear more than anything I won’t ever get you back. That this has all been for naught.
"What thou commanded, child," hum the voices in the raptures of ecstasy.
Commanded?
What dost thou ask for?
It's only when the tentacle slides out, stained black by the corruption it has removed from you, that I notice the tendrils pulsing beneath the surface of my skin. I did not see them detach from the emissary. I did not see them creep across the floor nor slide into my leg. I try to step forward, but they wrap around the muscle fibers in my calf and thigh, holding me in place. My arms are heavy. The air is getting stale and I’m having trouble drawing breath.
But not you. For the first time in months, your chest rises fully. There is color in your cheeks again. I smile even as I suffocate. I reach out and slather your cheek with oily feelers, leaving behind patches of my human skin as hard chitin bursts from beneath. The bloody rags of my flesh decorate the bed. Something to remember me by.
Your eyelids flutter once more. You are waking.
The monster shoves me out of our home and I stumble back to the beach, unused to the new carapace and the boneless tentacles that propel me now. The world looks different. Grayer. The light in our window flares brilliantly against my too-large eyes. Spirits crowd around the houses of our neighbors, howling their accusations at me, long fingers pointed in my direction while they hold their torn chests open, showing me the price I made them pay.
I trip at the edge of the waves and the emissary drags me into the ocean. The breakers crash over me and I suck in a mouthful of brine. Oxygen rushes through my body and my brain starts working again. Life floods back into me and my black heart pumps cold, thick blood through me. I roll into the crashing waves and propel myself forward through the ink-black water. Shafts of moon and starlight spear the obsidian expanse in front of me and my eyes adjust. Out in the distant reef, in dark, deep depths of coral, kelp, and ruins, a looming monolith calls to me. A chorus of voices chants in delicious tones that reverberate through my body. Pieces of our neighbor’s hearts—remnants of my offering—drift in the water around the pillar.
My eel head breaks the surface of the water and I look back at our village for one last time. There are more lights in our hut now. I unhinge my jaw in the bastardization of a human smile. You’re safe. We will never see each other again.
Gorgeous and haunting
Another riveting piece. Always a pleasure to be engrossed in one of your stories. 🤌