Excerpt: THE SEA HIDES ITS DEAD by Megan Bontrager

There was no ceremony in the anniversary of my mother’s death. I bore the day like a rotten organ, one that had gotten stuck in its botched extraction. No one mourned her in the way that one might hope to be mourned, missed her in the way one might strive to be missed. The art of mourning was one that had always eluded me, an equation that I never quite got the answer to. No one teaches mourning. It just happens.

It takes no bravery to make the active choice not to mourn. This, too, just happens.

The date occurred to me only after the day had already come to its dark and watery conclusion. The flicker of a time and date across the dashboard of my car; a change of time on the phone in the passenger seat. I had more important things to tend to: a flight to catch, a paper to finish, a thesis to edit. The soaked-through backpack in the back seat and the useless poncho in the trunk didn’t care what day it was, or what day it wasn’t. I had work to do. Mourning had no space on the agenda.

The rain was endless, all the way from Maine to Ohio, and had been for nearly forty-eight hours. A thick swath of it, a heavy canopy that seemed to have been placed on purpose. The moment it had struck a thick line across the landscape, Professor Beck had stopped his lecture—History of Religious Anthropology—short, bustling from the hall and leaving a room full of undergrads in bewilderment. They’d all come to expect a certain level of strangeness from the infamous Edward Beck, but this was… different. More.

“The idea of judgment before the afterlife, or what we understand as the stage of being after material life,” he said, “is an excellent place to start when building a case for an ethnocultural profile.” Beck had gestured to me, and I’d dutifully flipped to the next slide. It was a thrilling post, and one best left to the professionals. “What do rites like the Duat or the Bridge of the Requiter teach us about these cultures?” Another nod, another slide. “Some might say that man mandates divinity. Others believe that divinity directs man. Which is more—”

A phone rang. For once, it was Beck’s. He’d looked to the usual troublemaker at the back of the lecture hall, only to redden when he realized that it was his own ringtone coming from behind the projector desk. As he took the call, I did my best to fill the space.

He was gone before I could finish my speech about deadlines, leaving me no instructions. I’d flipped awkwardly through a few more slides before giving up. I distributed handouts, reminded them all of the homework, and had followed Beck’s arrow-keen trajectory from the lecture hall and to the cloister of his office.

But when he informed me, once I’d caught up, that a monolith of limestone and dolomite had risen from the sea, I understood.

“A monolith?” I echoed. I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye. Enough hours I’d spent entrenched in his work; I knew his theories, his notes, his crude drawings better than I knew my own phone number. “Like… just out there?”

He nodded, my incredulity washing off him like rain. “With a single opening in the rock face, turned right in toward the coast. It’s an invitation.” This was no question, no uncertain hypothesis.

The rain began shortly after he’d received the call from his colleagues at the University of Maine, and even sooner did he raise a toast to the fishing village on the coast that had all but been washed away. The rain stretched across the northeast like a hand reaching in good faith for Beck himself. Come and see, it said. Come and be vindicated.

“I need you with me, Caroline,” he’d said, his lips hot against the hollow of my throat. The photograph of his wife sat downturned atop the stack of notes he had meticulously moved from the desk. This was practiced, routine; it didn’t seem like the time to fuck in his office, but men were men. “Will you come?”

Historically, no.

Of course, that wasn’t what he’d meant. “I’m just a grad student, Edward,” I huffed, bracing my palms flat upon the mahogany desk top as he tore at the buttons of my blouse. “I would only be in the way.”

“Bullshit.” His pants hung round his thighs, just low enough. A tungsten band slipped from his pocket and rolled beneath the couch. A place for crying undergrads, mostly. We rarely used it. “Need, not want. I trust you more than anyone with this work. You believe in me. Don’t you?”

I nodded, and wrapped my legs around his middle. For the briefest of moments, I couldn’t pull my eyes from where the band had disappeared beneath Beck’s designated crying-for-better-grades sofa. Had his wife heard the news? Did she know what the rain meant? Did she care?

But of course I believed in him. I always had, and always would. I believed in him as he believed in me: fervently, quietly, and against all odds. Whenever he asked me questions like this, I couldn’t help but think of the very first time. He’d found me crying in the hall outside his office, fresh off a call with my father. My father, who never called. My father, who loved to talk about death. About belief, and how little of it he reserved for me.

Edward Beck was the very first person to believe in me, as far as I was concerned. And so I’d follow him anywhere. Even if I had to do so in secret.

His hand slipped to the slope of my neck, fingers playing in the loose tie of my hair. “God,” he sighed. “It’s finally happening. As if the earthquakes weren’t enough; the cave, the islet, the runes. It’s real. It’s there.” Beck lifted his head and met my gaze. Something fiercer than anything I’d ever seen roared in his eyes. It tugged at the hard knot in the pit of my stomach. I’d believed him before now, of course. But this… this was something else.

“What is it?” I’d asked.

Beck’s face had slipped into a sly smile, the practiced curl of his lips like that of a fox, or a cat with claws poised above a mouse. “I have my theories,” he said. It was always theory. Theory above everything. He needed to see it to believe it.

“A monster?”

“Maybe.”

“A god?”

“Could be.”

“An angel?”

A twitch of the lips, an invisible seam tugged taut. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Theories and understanding; one feeds the other.”

I didn’t believe in any of those things. Not really. So where did that leave us?

He left me alone in his office, trusted to clean myself up and not touch anything important. Beck took his notes and left the ring, likely not even noticing that it had slipped out of his pocket. A weather alert lit my phone, the only glowing reminder in the midst of a room that had been left darkened by design. Another earthquake, and more rain. The sea was angry. I imagined the monolith in Maine to be no more than a raised middle finger.

I wondered idly if he only wanted me there so that he could fulfill some fetish. It wasn’t every day that one found themselves alone in a cave with their lover.

Lover. What a stupid word.

Why else would he want me there? I was his assistant, sure. I’d heard all his rants and read all his papers—whether I wanted to or not. I knew what he believed, knew what haunted him. It didn’t mean that I believed it, too. Hell, I’d only registered for his class in the first place, years ago, to fill an “undecided” credit. I was directionless. He had seen it as malleability.

No—it was unfair to ascribe that line of thinking to him. Beck valued me for my ideas. That we were actively sleeping together, that he told me that he loved me and that he chose me above all others, was a side benefit. Ours was a partnership born into the warmth of shared ideas, of belief in the impossible. I just had to work a little harder at the latter than he did.

Someone so sure of his purpose, his life’s grand design, could no doubt smell my indecision on me like pheromones. Maybe this—this discovery, this research, and the notoriety that would come with it—would spur me toward something tangible. I couldn’t work at the co-op for the rest of my life, wandering without aim or purpose. I hadn’t come this far to only come this far. I had done too much, sacrificed too much, to settle for uncertainty. All I needed was a hard push off a sharp drop.

“What do you want, Caroline?” he’d asked me once. “What do you want your life to be?”

I had no answer for him. Even as he asked it a second time, and then a third, with every ounce of honesty in the world, I couldn’t muster a response. I wanted him, but couldn’t have all of him. I wanted purpose, but couldn’t find the way. I was a collection of half-wants and maybes, where he had, no doubt, spawned into the world fully realized. And so I had shrugged, and let him do what he wished with me. I was good at being used, filled and molded and squashed and stretched to fill a need. An accessory. I existed for the negative space. I made people whole. That was enough. That was purpose.

For a while, anyway. And so today, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, I decided to jump.

Beck paid for my plane ticket. A separate flight from his own, and that of the rest of the crew. Even the other graduate student, Mallory, was allowed to sit with the group. I took it in my stride; I lived on the Kentucky side of the river and worked a part-time job in addition to being in school and serving as Beck’s teaching assistant. I was only ever invited to his brick townhouse in Hyde Park for school functions that would fill the room with enough people to force us onto opposite sides. The great divide between the Ohio and Kentucky sides of the Ohio River gave me enough plausible deniability that I could show up to the airport for a later flight and not be looked at sideways.

The university had offered him no stipend, no emergency grant, to travel from Ohio to Maine. Nor did they even think of funding his team, an assemblage of professionals from all walks of life, as they made their pilgrimage to Seal Harbor. They did nothing to intervene as the Coast Guard and Navy swarmed the place like they intended to blow it off the map. Beck himself made a call to the local authorities, demanding to be put on the phone with the Lieutenant Commander on site. He’d turned the worst shade of purple I’d ever seen when the man on the phone let it slip that they’d sent a SEAL team into the mouth of the cave, only to come back empty-handed. Their first inclination was to blow it up. As it always seemed to be, where the military was concerned.

There was no dissuading the Navy, I’d told him. But somehow, some way, he’d done it anyway. Getting the US military to do anything with measured patience was an act of something divine, I guessed. It seemed completely improbable. Amid the media circus, the keyboard conspiracy theories, the clamor for footage and on-site coverage of the strange thing that had risen out of the sea, Beck said with no reservation that we’d be in and out before the Navy got to work.

Hysteria was pervasive, touching every corner of every hole that the internet could take me down. Nearly every radio station, even the local chatters here on the Kentucky–Ohio border, wondered at the great stone monolith that had risen from the sea off the coast of Maine. Some seemed to be onboard with the Navy’s line of thinking: blow it up first, and ask questions later. But some were like Beck. Some wanted to know. One man from Columbus, whose Reddit account I’d found with almost verbatim transcripts of what he posited on air, suggested that someone – anyone—should sneak in and get ahold of whatever was inside before the “red-pilled bureaucracy of the military” could ruin something so significant. I couldn’t say that I disagreed. And maybe, it occurred to me, Beck didn’t either.

I made a note to press him about the legitimacy of this “permission” we’d been given. Asking questions likely wasn’t going to change his mind, but it would at least keep mine free from the worry of getting thrown in federal prison before graduation.

The only one who’d questioned my exclusion from the group at large was Mallory. She’d texted me a photo of the donut and green smoothie—“Balance!”—that she was bringing on the plane, along with an unflattering selfie and a picture of the back of Beck’s head. All of it came with questions about my whereabouts, requests to bring an extra phone charger, and enough sparkly emojis to effectively hide the photo of Beck’s cowlick. We grad students had to stick together, I figured. At least she knew what she wanted to do with her life. If she was willing to brave Beck’s wild fantasies for the sake of a thesis, she could do anything.

I reached across the center console and turned my phone face-down. Any reminder of the day was unwelcome. I had work to do, and no phantom pain could be great enough to deter me from that. No matter how I wondered what my mother might make of the rain, what she might think of Beck’s wild theories and his endless studies, mourning was no business of mine.

No texts, no calls, no condolences. Only silence.

I drowned it with a crank of the radio, turning the evening talk show higher than was strictly comfortable. Even the pair of radio hosts that pandered to truckers and rural-Kentucky ranchers had turned their attention skyward, theorizing that the great, immovable patch of rain over the northeastern US was some kind of biblical warning.

Not me, Rusty, said Darryl, the louder of the two. Reckon it’s punishment for that goddamn foul they called on Tennessee…

They worshiped at the altar of beer, football, and Jesus Christ. I often wondered how someone like Beck, someone so secular and academic, ended up here. What a world to carry out his research in. No wonder he was met with skepticism and snide, sideways laughter. He spoke of old gods and cosmic knowledge. If it didn’t guarantee a showing at church on Sundays, people here didn’t want to know about it.

The rain hadn’t let up for a week, almost like a wink and a nudge from up north. I could barely see the road ahead of me, the dark Kentucky back road that arrowed away from the highway and toward the cargo roads behind the terminal. There, I’d park in one of the free long-term lots and shuttle to the Cincinnati Airport—which, oddly enough, was just as Kentucky as I was. Windshield wipers whirring furiously and headlights cutting weakly through the deluge, I fiddled with the radio dials.

The steering wheel wobbled as I whipped around a curve, the wetness of the road threatening to pitch me into the steep ditch on the side of the road. Something small, something set apart from the endless, monotonous black of the woods on either side of the road, cut through the watery beam of the headlights. I gasped, slamming my foot down on the brake pedal. My suitcase toppled forward, slamming into the back of my seat. The car skidded, twisted, and thudded into the grass.

I flicked on the hazards. My phone had flown from the passenger seat, now face-up on the floor; my backpack had toppled, and my suitcase righted itself with a thud in the trunk. But I hardly noticed. My eyes, wide and watering at the corners, trained upon the body on the side of the road, the great lump of brown and white fur that I had just missed as I’d skidded around the turn.

A deer. Its side heaved with belabored breaths. And across its back, a great bloom of crimson that the rain simply couldn’t wash out.

How long had it been left here? Had it been hit here, or had it struggled from far off to die in peace? It was alive, certainly; even through the rain, each breath puffed from its wet muzzle in a short burst of steam. For a long moment I could only watch it, dumbstruck, as its eyes wheeled wildly. Its front legs gave a great lurch, and the unbidden wetness in my eyes spilled over my cheek.

“Shit,” I hissed, fumbling for my phone. “Shit, shit, shit.”

I put the car in park and hoisted the door open before I could think otherwise. My boot sank into the muddy rut left behind by my tires, and I nearly slipped as I spilled from behind the wheel. The rain was a roar; I could hear nothing else. Door left wide, light swallowed by the darkness of the rural road, I stepped into the street. I was soaked through immediately, the denim of my jeans slick to my thighs. As best I could, I shielded the phone with my trembling hand as I did a quick search for the number for animal control.

I relayed to them our location and the state of the deer. “Someone just left it,” I said. Spitting rainwater from my shivering lips, I looked down the road in one direction, and then the other. “It can’t get up.”

“You could do the humane thing and put it out of its misery,” the man on dispatch said. “Or let nature take care of it.”

Put it out of its misery. End its suffering. Take its pain. Kill it. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. The deer’s head had barely inclined to mark my approach, its shining eyes locked onto me as I eddied at the edge of the street. I could help it, I knew. It would be the humane thing. Anything to lessen a creature’s suffering was worth doing. And the deer didn’t deserve to suffer.

Foolishly, I wondered if it might be fixed. Healed. Rural veterinarians were tantamount to miracle workers. Animal control could come collect it, take it to the after-hours vet in Idlewild, and set it loose again with a stern talking-to about coming near the road in such heavy rain. They could even track down the bastard who’d done it. Only a real monster would simply leave such a creature, knowingly, to suffer.

But I couldn’t kill it. I couldn’t.

“I—absolutely not. I’m not a killer. It just… it just needs to see a vet is all.”

A sigh, and then the clacking of fingers on a keyboard. “I’ll send a truck along now, ma’am. Give it ’bout ten minutes. You have a blessed day.”

The line went dead before I could say anything else. I watched the deer, the phone still pressed to my cheek, as it tried to move its legs again.

“Hold still!” I cried, my voice swallowed by the roaring of the rain. I tucked my waterlogged phone into my back pocket and wiped my hands futilely down the front of my soaked-through jacket.

The deer opened its mouth, then closed it again. I splashed into the road without thinking, crossing the warm headlight beam. Blood spilled from an open wound only to be washed away by the rain, running in watery crimson rivulets down the bloated curve of the deer’s belly. A doe, and young by the looks of it; she had no antlers, faded spots on her rump, and a ring of white fur around her muzzle. Her eyes tracked me, alert and aware.

I stared down at her for a long moment, gaze darting from the wound, to her eyes, to the unnatural jut of her legs. No animal deserved to suffer. Humans had a more complicated relationship with the concept of anguish. But not animals. In a perfect world, they would know nothing of it.

As I stepped from the road, my boots slipping in the mud beneath me, the deer made an attempt at moving once more. I shushed her, holding out my hands like I might have done with a startled horse. Knees knocking and teeth chattering, I sank into the muddy grass beside the doe. She made no moves to squirm away from me, though her eyes followed me closely.

And then, with trembling fingers, I reached out. I let her get a whiff of me, her breath hot on my hand. Carefully, I wiped the mud from her muzzle, clearing her nose of muck and refuse. Hot tears spilled faster still over my cheeks, ruining what little remained of the makeup I’d put on early that morning.

The deer gave a great, heaving sigh. Her side billowed, then deflated at last with a heavy groan. I looked up and down the empty road again, searching for any sign of headlights. Nothing.

“Someone’s on their way,” I muttered, touching the deer’s wet fur again. “Hold on a little bit longer. They’re gonna fix you up real good.”

I wanted the deer to hear it, to believe it, in any way an animal could. No matter how violently I shivered, no matter how warm the tears felt on my cheeks, I hoped that perhaps a moment of kindness might make her believe. If she could understand me at all.

Without thinking, I slid closer. Mud soaked through my jeans, slick and impossibly cold on the skin of my thighs. Surely my phone was ruined, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to care.

As gently as I could manage, I tucked my hands beneath the doe’s head and lifted. Gritting my teeth to quell the chattering, I slid my legs underneath and settled her back down atop my thighs.

“There,” I said. I stroked her cheek, wiped mud, rain, and bits left over from the underbrush from her muzzle. Her body splayed weakly, angled down toward the quickly flooding ditch below us. I debated pulling her higher, further from the ditch and into the light of the headlights. But she was safer here, out of the road. I had almost hit her myself, skidding around the curve with no regard for what could be on the other side.

The deer blinked heavily. Wiping the mud from my palms on the front of my sodden jacket, I stroked her cheek. Her head was heavy in my lap, breath short. I spoke aloud, my voice drowned by the roar of the rain on the cracked blacktop. I hoped that I could comfort her, in a way one might comfort a loved one on their deathbed. There was no telling if the doe understood me, or if she even heard me at all, but her breathing was slow. Even.

And then, when the glare of the Animal Control truck’s headlights curved around the bend, she was still. The doe’s eyes were glassy, unseeing, and for ever fixed on the underside of my chin. My hands were cold, so numb that I could barely feel her fur beneath my fingertips. The rain had well and truly soaked through my clothes now, and my teeth chattered so harshly that I could barely speak to the man in uniform as he crossed the street to appraise me.

“You been sittin’ out here with it since you called?” he barked.

It. I wanted to fling mud at him, but I couldn’t feel my hands.

And so I nodded. “I couldn’t leave her.”

“She’s dead, kiddo.”

She was. It didn’t matter. All things deserved gentleness in the end.

I sat behind the wheel of my car, still half-jutting from the ditch, as the man from Animal Control loaded the doe into the back of his truck. Mud and rainwater soaked into the seat and dripped from my legs and onto the floor beneath the pedals. I cranked the heat on high and sat with hands outstretched over the vents as the truck disappeared around the corner.

My phone buzzed in my back pocket. I startled, smacking the tops of my thighs on the steering wheel.

A text from Beck sat atop a stack of unopened email notifications. Hope you have a good flight, it said. Let me know when you land.

I blinked numbly at my phone. With the pad of my thumb, I wiped away the muck that had collected in the crevices. It was only then that I noticed the blood on my jeans. Barely visible, as muddled by the road-dirt and rainwater as it was, but it was there. All that remained of the deer I couldn’t save.

This—this – was mourning. Maybe I did understand it.

I tabbed through the notifications on my phone’s home screen, blinking away hot wetness from my eyes as the image jolted and stuttered against the water on the screen. Beck’s text, a number of emails from the Anthropology department—and my plane ticket. I looked at the time. The gate was likely closing by now, last call for boarding coming and going in my absence. Beck would be furious.

That, more than anything, was tangible. A problem I could fix.

And so I shot off a text with a weak excuse. A flat tire, a wreck, something that he couldn’t verify and couldn’t blame. He wouldn’t understand why I had taken the time to sit with a dying deer in the rain. He wouldn’t understand the tears that still wet my cheeks, nor the feeling of acute hollowness in my chest. And so I wouldn’t tell him.

I returned home to find another ticket in my inbox. First flight out; I would need to leave again in just a little under twelve hours. With little ceremony, I set about peeling off my muddy clothes and scrubbing the dirt from beneath my fingernails. Short brown and white hairs shook off my jacket when I stuffed it into the wash. I turned on the news simply for something to fill the silence. Another undersea earthquake, another record-breaking day of rain. Fishermen along the east coast presented buckets and buckets of dead fish—“already dead when we pulled ’em out of the water”– to begrudging reporters, and representatives from the Navy spoke at length about a stretch of Massachusetts waterfront that had simply been washed out to sea.

But it mattered little. As I slipped into bed, curling beneath a generous heap of blankets, I could think of only one thing.

The deer deserved more. Maybe I should have complied. I could have done it, put the doe out of its misery. It would have been the humane thing to do. But death was never humane. It was just death. And that, more than mourning, I understood.

By the time I arrived in Seal Harbor on the eleventh of April, the others had already assembled in the only pub in town. The Silver Fisher was devoid of all life, save Beck’s assemblage of professionals and begrudging students. Even the place’s owner, who stood behind the bar and polished the same glass for the entire duration of our debriefing, seemed as if he would rather be literally anywhere else. All four of the daily specials on the blackboard over the bar—some variation of fish on all counts—were messily scribbled out. Instead, the blackboard read “NO MEDIA” in thick, striking letters. Bits of chalk clung to the surface, like whoever had written the message had done so with a heavy hand and a clenched fist.

Even through the rain, I’d seen a great hulk of grey metal out in the bay, far beyond the monolith and down the coast. The Navy had already assembled by the looks of it, patrol boat bobbing like a hungry shark and a convoy of utility trucks gumming up the one exit off the interstate that led to this little corner of Maine. Between the soldiers and the news crews that buzzed like flies, it was strange that The Silver Fisher could stand to sit so empty. Maybe the people of this town hated the intrusion. Maybe they hated us. I couldn’t blame them.

I decided that my ire would be solely reserved for the folks that amassed in RVs on the highway with signs declaring that Jesus had come, that the monolith in the bay was somehow a retributory warning sign. The fanatics on the other side of the highway who, instead, shouted at the Navy corpsmen about the undeniable proof of aliens within the rock, I could handle.

The place smelled of dead fish. Not only the pub, and the inn above, but the whole town and all along the waterfront. And not in the way one might expect a fishing town to smell; it was rotten, dead, and decayed, like a carcass left to the maggots.

And there, just barely visible through the rain and fog, the rugged monolith of stone and salt loomed in the bay. Not so close that I could make out the mouth of the cave at its base, our intended destination, but not so far that I could pretend it didn’t exist. I pressed my face to the glass of the taxi’s passenger window as we sped down the main street of Seal Harbor. A great shapeless darkness in the mist, watchful as a guardian.

On all sides, shop windows bore hand-written signage, all similar in message. OUT OF FISH, said one. CALL DOLORES FOR CARCASS REMOVAL, said another. A third sign felt significantly less subtle: LEVITICUS. 26:18-20. I didn’t know a great deal about the Bible, but I could make an educated guess that this was fairly damning, given the circumstances.

“Hell of a time to come here,” said the taxi driver. “You and the rest of the goddamn country.”

“Any idea what it is?” I mused. Beck wouldn’t like it that I’d asked a stranger for an opinion when his was so indisputable, and so very readily available, but I had to know.

The driver shrugged. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a hunk of rock that’s gettin’ in the way of business as usual.” He met my eye in the rearview. “This is a quiet town. Never asked for any of this ruckus.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Were archaeologists and graduate students the same shade of “unwelcome” as the rest? Or had Beck let it slip to their hosts, too, what he planned to do out in the bay? It didn’t seem like the ideal time for tourism, certainly. So what had he done? What lies had he spun? Suddenly, “permission” felt like a faulty word. I felt like apologizing, but I didn’t know what for.

The taxi driver left me on the curb before I could fish a tip from my bag. Alone on the sidewalk I stood, the sound of chatter audible from within. The eyes I felt upon me, however, came from elsewhere.

I hated being the center of attention. Needless to say, the sheer ferocity of the attention on me as I entered the pub with my sodden bags and slick-wet hair made me feel like I could very easily dissolve like sugar in a hot drink. Beck’s spread of papers—maps, tide charts, and diagrams from his own long-suffering study—was momentarily forgotten as I eddied in the doorway, a puddle of rainwater pooling at my feet. I gave a nervous wave, then shuffled over to where the others had left their crates upon crates of survey and caving equipment, setting my suitcase aside as quietly as I could manage.

Not quietly enough, apparently. Mallory shot from her chair, one of many around a wide, round table, and rocketed across the creaking boards to meet me. A bright splash of pink and candy hearts, she looked wonderfully out of place among the damp, and dank, and gray. She waved with both hands as she approached, and I flushed a deeper crimson as every eye around the table followed her approach. She hugged me, smelling of vanilla and peony, the colorful clay of her dangling earrings snagging in the wet mess of my hair.

“Come sit by me!” she said, squeezing my arms and giving my shoulders a rub like she might chase away the cold by sheer force of will alone. She took my hand and I obliged, Beck’s gaze following me keenly as I scuttled across the room to join the others. Maybe it made him jealous to see that someone was, in fact, capable of giving me the kind of attention I craved without needing to lock a door to do it. Or maybe I was projecting. Two of the others smiled noncommittally at me as I settled into the chair beside Mallory, scooting it closer to her with a scrape of wood on wood. The others… did not.

Mallory and Beck’s were the only faces I recognized here. The woman closest to Beck picked furiously at the loose skin around her nails, her glasses slipping down the slope of her nose and the strap of her professional-grade camera sagging around her neck. Beside her sat a meticulously dressed woman too far hunched over her notebook, in which she scribbled furiously, to appraise. The more rugged man at her shoulder made no effort to conceal his curiosity, scratching at his generous beard as he leaned away from his own stack of paperwork to snoop. The stranger in the occupied seat beside me had round glasses that magnified her eyes—eyes which, to my dismay, had been trained on me from the moment I entered the room.

Notebook glanced up at me only once, as my chair scraped gratingly across the floor. She looked from the frizz at the top of my head to where my hands disappeared beneath the table, then added a new bullet point to whatever it was she was recording in her book. Somehow I knew that it wasn’t complimentary.

“As you can see,” Beck said, clearing his throat, “the tide patterns have completely changed. Where we might have had six or seven hours of low tide to work with, we have none.” The stranger at his shoulder shifted uncomfortably, tugging at the straps of his rubber waders. Beck gave him a winning smile, which he took no pains to return. “Joseph and his partner have been kind enough to provide us with the use of their boats. Transport to and from the cave, with a transfer to kayaks and dinghies once we’re out to sea. It’s quite dangerous to be out on the water in such weather,” a muscle twitched in Joseph’s jaw. “Which is why we are so very grateful for their assistance today.” How much had Beck paid them for this? Clearly it was enough that they couldn’t turn it down.

My stomach churned. This was a horrible time to remember that I hated boats.

Beck continued, unaware of the green pallor I’d taken on. He gestured then to the pair of strangers opposite me at the table, two identical blonde men, told apart only by the impressive scar on the brow of the one closest to Beck. They were perfectly coiffed, seemingly untouched by the rain. Their eyes were bright, smiles broad. I was reminded at once of every travel ad I’d ever seen for Sweden. “Again, we’re thrilled to have Anders and Leon Grundstadt along for the journey,” he said. I knew the names from his many rants, but had never been able to put faces to names. Cavers, divers, thrill-seekers; they were made of different stuff than I—that was for sure. I’d be sticking by them at all costs, no matter how in the way I was. “Their expertise will be invaluable,” a twitch of a smile, and a self-satisfied laugh, “as will their equipment!”

I glanced around the table as the twins introduced themselves, one after the other like a practiced pantomime. It was impressive. And surreal. Meanwhile Glasses, so short and wiry that her feet barely touched the floor, cleared her throat as she rummaged in her overfull pockets, knocking loose an orange pill bottle, a crumpled tissue, and a dried dog treat before producing a Band-Aid, which she slid across the table.

She leaned down to retrieve her fallen bric-a-brac, temple thumping loudly on the edge of the table. The woman cursed, then guffawed, then leaned beneath the table again, seemingly completely unaware of the fact that Beck had stopped talking—again—and was watching her with open annoyance. I leaned in, pressing against the warped edge of the table, and found Beck’s gaze, offering a conciliatory smile as Glasses emerged with her droppings in-hand. I looked back to our expert guides at once, relieved to see that, at the very least, Beard, Notebook, and Camera were all giving the appropriate attention to the presentation.

She turned to me then, smile broad, completely unaware of Beck’s withering stare. “Another graduate student, I’m guessing?” she sniffed. “Senior?”

I nodded, keeping my gaze trained on the Grundstadts. They chatted among themselves; one of them polished a carabiner right there at the table. Seemed a little excessive, but whatever. Maybe Glasses needed to stick closer to them than I did.

She stuck a hand under my nose. Heat rose in my cheeks as the twins paused their chattering—and their polishing—clearly thrown off by her lack of attentiveness. “Hannah,” she said. “Pleasure.”

I took her hand and shook it shortly, glancing at her only once with a tight-lipped smile. “Caroline,” I said.

Beard shot us a dirty look. He brought his finger to his lips, and the redness of my cheeks deepened. Hannah gave a scoff. She tugged off the top of the pillbox, and popped something small and white into her mouth with middle finger extended.

“What?” Hannah clipped, swallowing hard. She shoved the pills back into her pocket. “I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake. It’s ibuprofen.”

That was no ibuprofen I’d ever seen. And as a graduate student, I felt uniquely qualified where the subject of liberal ibuprofen was concerned. She didn’t exactly look like a doctor either, though I guessed that it would be silly to assume she’d come all the way out here with a white coat and stethoscope. But I didn’t care enough to question it; if our supposed medic wanted to pop pills at brunch, that was her prerogative. What else was the medical degree for if not that?

Across the table, Notebook raised a hand. Beck gestured to her, as encouraging and eager as if we were sat in a long lecture hall. “A question?” he prodded. “Yes?”

“I just want to make sure I’ve got your verbiage right,” the woman said, propping the end of her pen between her generous lips. She held it there almost suggestively, the keen eyes behind her wide-rimmed glasses raking Beck up and down like she was working dutifully at imagining what he looked like in his underwear. I hated the twist of possessiveness that flared within me, and hated more that Beck seemed tickled pink by the very same idea.

“Which part?” he asked.

“Just—do you want to keep the bit about the equipment in? The Swedes; do you want to keep in the line about their equipment?” She said this so plainly, so bluntly; it seemed to take everyone at the table by surprise. The Grundstadts looked between one another like maybe they’d misheard, and even Beck seemed chagrined. Beneath the collar of his shirt, I could see telltale crimson beginning to spread.

I did my best to nudge Mallory under the table, but she looked up from her phone none the wiser. Again, Beard leaned over Notebook’s shoulder, less careful in his snooping now that this faux pas seemed to make her fair game. I watched Beck consider her question, eyes darting from our guides to the woman—scribe, note-taker, whatever the hell—in a clear attempt to salvage the situation.

“Well, Dorothy, you could make a note about how grateful I am to have their expertise,” he began, voice measured. His eyes flickered to me, and I shrugged one shoulder. “I appreciate your candor, and your determination to record this expedition appropriately, but if you could refrain—”

“Got it,” Dorothy said, returning without another glance, or another word, to her notebook. Beck blinked, mouth hung open like a fish on a dock. Dorothy seemed unperturbed by the looming presence at her shoulder, nor by the fact that he seemed to be muttering under his breath as his beady eyes scanned the page. Beard seemed as unimpressed with this woman as I was. Maybe I could trust him, if he was this decent a judge of character. I nudged Mallory again, and this time she acquiesced; Beck had lost us all by now, as had our expert guides. Instead, the meeting had rerouted to hinge entirely on whatever the hell was in our note-taker’s journal.

And then, as if to preserve the sheer discomfiture of the moment in amber, Camera lifted her equipment from the strap round her neck and snapped a photo of Beck. The flash went off, dazzlingly bright, and he blinked furiously.

Beard shot her a nasty look. “Sorry, Oliver,” she said. “I mean sir.” If I didn’t know better, it looked like she wanted to salute him.

What a team. If we weren’t taking said team into a long-lost cave in the middle of a storm, it would be one thing. A funny thing, even. But I wasn’t amused. And by the looks of it, neither was Beck.

We broke for breakfast with the intention of collecting ourselves, making any last-minute preparations, and gathering at the docks in an hour. The fisherman left without a word, rubbing at the heavy, bruised circles beneath his eyes, as the group filed past me, introducing themselves with all the enthusiasm of the bartender and his favorite glass. Hannah, with her full-moon spectacles and loud personality, I already knew: a doctor from Orlando, recently back from leave. She’d rattled her bottle of “ibuprofen” at me on the way out, then hip-bumped the door to open it. I liked her.

Next was Iskra, the photographer; she seemed young, and stumbled over her own name like she was halfway to forgetting it. I couldn’t blame her—this was a lot. She was pretty, with silken hair tied in a braid down her back and a flannel tied round her waist. The strap of her camera hung heavily with pins that named no fewer than ten National Parks.

Beard followed shortly after, ramrod straight and utterly imposing. “Oliver Coramar,” he stuck out a hand. It was easier to get a look at him this way, and I was glad I did. He wore faded camouflage cargo pants, thick-soled boots, and a thin t-shirt that spread taut over a broad chest. His lips sat in a hard line beneath the thickness of his beard as he waited for me to return the handshake.

“Nice to meet you…” a pause, a fumble, as I took his hand. “Officer?” I didn’t know shit about the military aside from what I saw in movies. But I tried again, against my better judgment. “Colonel?”

It was small, but I caught it nevertheless. Oliver’s lips twitched, his eyes darkening for only a moment. “Sergeant, formerly. Field grade.”

I stared blankly. “Right. Formerly?”

“Honorable discharge.”

“Oh.” Whatever that meant. “Good to meet you, sir.”

Notebook came last. She waved me off with no more than a name—Dorothy—and a declaration that she didn’t have time for small talk. I watched her as she passed, dressed far too snappily for this place. Boots to the knee, hunter-green breeches, quilted vest; damn her, but she looked the part. Clearly rich. It felt suddenly all too clear that she’d written something derogatory about my sweater in her journal.

Half of the group meandered out into the street, muttering blithely about the selection at the diner down the street, while I made to collect my bag and find my way upstairs.

Mallory followed, taking hold of the other handle atop my suitcase and hoisting it onto her hip. “Let me help,” she said. “Bet you’re exhausted from such an early flight.”

I nodded. In a perfect world, I would sleep away the rest of the day, forgotten about by Beck entirely. “Can’t beat free airplane coffee, though,” I mused, gladly accepting Mallory’s help as we made for the narrow wooden stairs that led from the pub and up to the rooms Beck had rented above. The only other hotel in town had been closed down due to water damage; it was so close to the coast that the woman at the front desk had one morning come outside to find that the sea had swept away the valet stand, the hotel sign, and her bicycle in one fell swoop.

“Rough day yesterday, huh?”

I paused, turning to stare down at her from the step above. “What?” I immediately thought of my mother, of the deer on the side of the road. The pitying treatment I’d gotten after my mother had died was an insult, a guilty stain on a filthy conscience. I never spoke of her. She was no one’s business. There was no plausible way for Mallory to know…

“You missed your flight,” she said, adjusting her grip on the damp handle of my suitcase. “This fucking storm, right?”

I sagged, exhaling. “Yeah. As if airports weren’t stressful enough already.” The stairs creaked as we continued upward, banging the wheels of the suitcase on the corner as we made our way to my designated room. A number of buckets and piles of dish rags peppered the creaking wooden floor, for the rain had begun to seep through the less sturdy parts of the roof. A few streams dripped steadily, the fogged window at the end of the hall rattling beneath the pounding of the squall.

Mallory helped me hang my wet clothes in the small cabinet in the room, laying out my wool socks on the bathroom counter and attacking them with the weak hair dryer attached to the wall. I wrung the water from my hair into the shower, then did the same with my jacket. My boots squelched with rainwater, my socks dripping as I tossed them aside.

“I packed some extra socks if you want,” Mallory said, chatting away cheerfully as I took stock of what had and hadn’t been soaked through in my suitcase. “Beck’s wife was at the airport, and she complimented my cat socks so clearly I’m a professional—”

Beck’s wife. Fucking fantastic. With every day that passed, I was less and less secure in the beautiful lie he’d spun to get me into his bed. Separated, unhappy, distant, loveless; he was a veritable thesaurus of condemnations. “Divorce” was a Hail Mary that arose at opportune moments, and I was always inclined to believe him. But the woman kept appearing where I least expected her. Case in point, a loving airport send-off. Guilt roiled in my stomach. All at once, I felt dirty for being here. I had every right to be here, of course; I was his goddamn teaching assistant, after all. Anything that would look this good on a resume was a no-brainer.

But fuck. Did the beautiful and elusive Georgina Beck know that I was here? Did she pray to God that I drowned in the bay?

Luckily Mallory seemed not to notice my change in attitude. She chattered happily, as if she’d been saving up things to talk about since the last time we’d seen each other. I was happy for her company, and kicked myself semi-regularly for not seeking her out more. She was good-natured, talkative, and liked by most everyone. Mallory was a safe sort of person, a splash of vibrant color in every dull room. We couldn’t be more different, she and I.

And yet one thing that we did share, which I was infinitely grateful for, was the good sense not to ask questions. She never shared anything about her family, and I never spoke of mine. One “family weekend” in our first year, she and I had both found convenient excuses to be elsewhere. While loving families swarmed the campus like locusts, Mallory and I found a sudden common interest in varsity golf—simply because they needed schmucks with nothing better to do to work the ticket table at a tournament in Bloomington.

The week after, she’d slipped a pair of earrings—pink golf tees, clearly homemade—into my backpack during a communications lecture. I’d turned to find her wearing a matching pair. That afternoon, I went to the mall to get my ears pierced.

I wasn’t as good a friend to Mallory as I’d have liked to be. Maybe I could change that. Maybe I could start right now. I crossed to my bag while she dissected Georgina Beck’s choice of shoes—“I mean, really? Kitten heels at the airport?”—and produced the brick-heavy collection of papers, notes, and photos I’d brought along. These were all the notes I’d kept and compiled about Beck’s work, which I’d squirreled away for my own study. I had to keep up with him somehow; this was no corkboard with red string, but it was enough.

The spine of the old binder was cracked and flimsy. Mismatched and dog-eared corners poked from the binder on all sides, manilla envelopes and stapled stacks of research papers threatened to slide from the mass as I held it up like a gold trophy.

“Wanna see my notes?” I asked. “They’re nowhere near as thorough as Beck’s, but –” I shrugged. “I think it’s pretty cool. And if you’re planning a proposal, it’s the least I can do to help. A fresh source, maybe. I know it’s not the most relevant to your field of study, but…”

“No more ‘buts’!” Her face split into a grin, and with a nod she plopped down on the rug beside me. “Everything is relevant.” It was a bit of a stretch; Mallory was headed for museum curatorship and artifact preservation. She was a dual-major, where I could hardly handle one. Her encyclopedic knowledge of art history made her an asset in any anthropologist’s study. It was her determination to do right by the field that I admired in particular.

“All right. But don’t judge my sketches.” I settled the binder between us, opening the paper-laden files with a creak of old plastic. A photograph here, a copy of Beck’s notes there; all the world’s understanding of the Leviathan, of her reclusive cult, of the strange monolith in the bay, lay before us now. I smoothed out a map of the world, marked with red pen where ley lines intersected with points of longitude and latitude and handed Mallory a folder labeled “KNOWN SEA CULTS,” which she took gladly. One of my own essays slipped from the bunch, marked and graded by Beck himself. I’d written it at the beginning of the year, a study that posited a relationship between thermo-mineral springs, natural fault lines, and religious settlements. Multiple all-nighters had gone into it; disappointing Beck had never been an option.

I smoothed the paper over the rug. “Pretty proud of this one,” I said. “See, water is a prevalent symbol in pretty much any faith; it’s the basis of nearly any cultural system you could think of, because of how necessary it is. So it only makes sense that it would show up in spiritual texts. Water’s always been used for ritual purposes, healing purposes. Like baptism, Wudu, bathing in the Ganges.” I paused, glancing up at Mallory to see if she was starting to tire of the sound of my voice. But she wasn’t. Her eyes had never wavered. I sat a little taller. “So, then, you think about ancient civilizations, and how they often thought of imperfect physical health. To offset that, it would make sense that the spiritual and the bodily interest in water—regardless of the source—would intersect. Cultic, religious, spiritual facilities all would be best served by water sources that the practitioners felt were significant somehow. Be it medically, like the way hot springs are supposed to be good for our muscles and such, or spiritually. I mean, and even thermal springs were considered gifts from the gods, right? Like Aquae Patavinae.” Another pause, another deep breath. And still, Malloy hadn’t moved. “So, then, what about the sea? The Greeks and Romans in coastal towns lived and died by it. So many cultic traditions thought of the sea as a source of spiritual rebirth, salvation, trial and judgement—the possibilities are as endless as, well, the sea, I guess!” I tapped the paper again, color swelling in my cheeks. “So that’s where Beck’s research came in. It’s hard to put a label on just what he thinks this cult has been worshiping all this time, but…” I shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Mallory blinked, then hunched over the paper to scan the first page. “Caro, this is fucking awesome.”

“Yeah, I think so, too,” I said. “Beck’s research is pretty much in line with my own. This cult seems to be all about the idea that water is purifying, and that whatever thing they worship—angel, or creature, or divine entity—is the arbiter of that. But it’s weird. All of the text he’s found on it is in Enochian.”

Mallory raised a brow. “Isn’t that kind of…”

“Weird and mired in skepticism?” I chuckled. “Yeah. And what’s more, the Enochian is really poorly rendered in all his sources, too. Like someone’s writing it in a British accent or something. That’s where the connection to the biblical Leviathan comes in.”

“And that’s what he’s brought us all out here for?” Mallory asked. There was no derision in her voice. It was a welcome change. “The not-quite-Enochian that aligns with your work on aquatic cults?”

I flushed, fiddled with a loose strand of hair that curled around my ear as I looked back down at my marked-up paper. “I think his research has legs. Anyway, I thought about trying to get this thing published, in a journal or something, but Beck wanted me to hang onto it.”

The open, curious expression on Mallory’s face twisted, wilting in on itself like a rusted lattice. “Why?”

I shrugged, the uneven tip of my fingernail tracing the indentation left behind in the paper by Beck’s heavy-handed marking. “He thought it was a decent case for his own research, I think. Into the Leviathan, the cult, all that. And fair enough, too. Our combined efforts got us here, after all. He made a copy and kept it with his own notes.” My chest puffed, swelled, the pride still lingering. “It’s a damn good paper, if I do say so myself.”

Mallory’s expression soured further still, pink lips twisting into a scowl that had no place on her pleasant features. “Well, obviously it’s a good paper,” she said, chewing each and every consonant and spitting them out with great purpose, petulant, and clearly aggravated. I wasn’t sure what I’d said wrong.

I blanched at her tone, leaning back from the messy assemblage of papers between us. “And that’s… bad?” I ventured.

She huffed, rolling her eyes. “Yes. Well—no, technically. But yes.”

“You lost me.”

“It’s a good paper for you.” Mallory thrust a manicured finger between us, straight and accusatory. “Not Beck. You should do what you want with it.”

I blinked. “I mean, I have no real issue sitting on it. Not if it’s going to help him with his own research. No one takes him seriously, y’know, and it’s bullshit.” I was talking fast, I realized; talking without taking a breath as I rattled off the defense of Beck that simmered, omnipresent, at the back of my throat. “He values my research. My opinions. Could even be that we’ll collaborate on something, get me a co-contributor credit on the whole shebang when it’s all said and done. He values me, Mal. Seriously.” He’d said so himself. Time and time again. He was actually one of the first people to ever tell me as much in no uncertain terms. Everybody needed someone to believe in them; for Beck and I, it went both ways.

The same couldn’t be said for Georgina Beck, as far as I knew. She wanted no part of this. But me? I believed in him wholeheartedly. And he gave me the same in return. It wasn’t just sex, though that was a nice bonus. It was support. Love, even.

Mallory’s eyes narrowed, her pink lips puckering like she’d sucked on something sour. Her gaze was withering, like she could see right through the flush of my skin to the bones beneath. The way she looked at me—I couldn’t help but wonder, all at once, if she knew about my—our—extracurriculars. I doubted she’d judge; it didn’t seem to be in Mallory’s chemical makeup to judge anything beyond superficialities like questionable airport fashion choices and show tunes at karaoke bars. I could tell her right now; I could tell her everything. Maybe then she’d understand why I needed so badly to prove myself.

And then she spoke, two load-bearing syllables that chipped at my already weak will. “Uh huh.”

I shifted, casting my gaze down to the notes assembled between us. Clearing my throat, I thumbed through the damning essay before placing it among the painstaking notes I’d assembled during my years under Beck’s wing. “It means something,” I said. “All of it. This is huge, groundbreaking shit. And he’s the expert, so I might as well do what he—”

“Lame. Expert schmexpert.” She yanked the paper from my grasp, lips pursed. “I think you should publish it anyway.” Her eyes drifted from the inked pages to the assemblage of maps, and notes, and printed articles between us. “No offense, but I think it’s bullshit.”

“What is?”

“That he’d want you to sit on all this research, that he wants to use you as a repository for good ideas. I know he respects your work or whatever, but I think you’re perfectly capable of publishing on your own.”

I shrugged, picking at a loose bit of skin beneath my thumb nail. “But Beck’s research—”

Mallory waved my paper in the air between us. “But your research. You’re smart as hell, Caro. You’re so concerned with what Beck thinks, but have you considered that he wouldn’t have schlepped you all the way out here if he didn’t think your brain was worth picking?”

“I mean… I guess.”

Before I could stop her, she rolled my paper into a narrow tube and lifted it high, bringing it down like an executioner’s ax atop my head. “You stop that. I’m gonna start charging you a dollar every time you underplay your own work. Got your wallet handy?”

I snorted. “Sure, but I hope you’re prepared to settle for five bucks and a 7/11 Slurpee punch card.”

The serious expression that twisted her features alchemized, softened like unfurling petals, the welcome warmth of her laugh filling the room like midsummer sun. “It’ll have to do, I suppose.”

A shadow passed across the space between the door and the warped wooden floor, followed by a short-patterned rapping that I knew all too well. A signal Beck and I had. Four short taps followed by two long; it was how I announced myself during his office hours, just in case anyone else was around to see me. And there it was, four and two; the toes of Beck’s shoes tapped, and thus the spell was broken for me.

“Speak of the Devil, and he shall appear,” Mallory droned, returning my paper to the stack and giving it an affectionate pat. She hoisted herself up, both hands flat on the faded bedspread, and groaned as her knees cracked. A laugh bubbled from me as I collected my notes, essays, and maps, and she returned it in kind.

“Thanks, Mallory,” I said, following her up. At the door, Beck’s shadow stilled. I could tell that he was listening. Impatiently, probably. He would just have to wait. It would be a first for him.

She gathered her things, and I followed as she went, eddying in the dark bathroom doorway. The room smelled of wet socks and old hair dryer cables. If ever there was proof of our friendship, it was this. “For what?” she mused, head cocked. Her eyes fell upon me as she paused at the door, a sparkle of knowing in her eye.

“For the socks,” I said.

Mallory smiled. My friend. I’d make this count. “Sure thing, Caro.”