Midnight at the Pier

According to the laws of melodrama, there should’ve been a storm brewing. The scenario was certainly right for it. But behind me, the dark sky and the darker sea were both calm. Having only a few yards of rotting pier between me and both of them meant this wasn’t much of a comfort, though.

My hands were tied behind my back with plastic cords, and there was a man in a dark suit holding each of my arms. They were big, silent, no-nonsense types, all body language, and what theirs said was that things could quickly and easily be worse for me if I tried to break free. I had to admit that things as they stood were bad enough; I was at least twenty miles from the closest excuse for civilization, outnumbered three to one, and only still standing because Altmann, bless his cold black heart, couldn’t pass up a chance to gloat. He looked down at me and smiled, thinly.

“Well,” he said. “It comes to this at last, old girl. You and me and the deep cold sea. Ahaha.” His hands were folded in front of him as he said this, slender and pale; the signet ring of his Lodge showed on the left middle finger, heavy and gleaming. He had a dark tailored suit and a little pointed goatee. I think it’s some kind of membership requirement. “And so the illustrious career of Jenny Haniver comes to a fitting end. It’s almost romantic, don’t you think? Out on the water at midnight, just the two of us, facing off for one last time.”

“Well, and your pair of goons, of course.” I gave him my sweetest smile. With my glasses askew, and my hair falling in my eyes and plastered to my face, I doubt it had quite the effect I would’ve liked. But you work with what’s at hand.

“Indeed. But by now it should be no surprise to you, dear Jenny, that I always play with a stacked deck.” He fished a miniature cigar out of his coat pocket and lit it, daintily. “Mmm. Truly fine, as befits an occasion such as this. I’m sure you’d appreciate it, my dear. I’d offer you one, but in a moment I think you’ll rather have trouble keeping it lit.”

I spared a glance at the water behind me, as much as the guards holding my arms would allow. “What, there? Oh, Oscar, I’ve had a bath today, thanks.”

Altmann flashed some teeth at that, small and perfect and white. “Do you know, I think I’m going to miss that wit of yours. It almost seems a shame to end it like this. But one does what one must.” One slender hand went to a coat pocket and withdrew a delicate silver derringer. He cocked it with his thumb. “And on that note, let’s sweeten things up just a bit, shall we?” And with that, he raised it in a graceful, fluid motion, and shot the guard on my left in the forehead.

The man’s mouth opened, and he staggered back, and fell into the water with a muffled splash.

“There,” said Altmann, pocketing the gun again. “That should get them all excited for you.”

I dared a look back, and down. Sure enough, there were shapes moving in the dark water, sinuous and ropy. Then something swam in, fast, and the foam blossomed red.

I swallowed.

“Hold on just a minute,” I said.

Altmann puffed lazily at his cigar; cognac-dipped, by the smell of it. I was craving one like mad myself, but I fought it down. “Yes?” he said.

I lowered my voice. “In the left-hand pocket of my jeans. There are three coins there. They’re yours.”

One of his eyebrows went up, and he smiled wide. “Why, Jenny, is this a bribe? I thought better of you than that.”

“Sure. Whatever. Take them.”

He walked over to me, lithe and graceful. The one goon still holding me shifted a little, nervously. I didn’t blame him. But I kept my composure, even as Altmann’s long fingers slid into my pocket and felt for a moment, and I found myself grateful that his sex drive was probably the first thing he traded away to the Dark.

His hand came up, and three circles of gold glinted in the palm.

“Lemurian solars,” I whispered. “Worth a fortune. You won’t find three of them together like that in five lifetimes.”

He was still smiling, but his eyes were cold and hard. “Fortune, my dear, is not what I’m lacking at the moment. I don’t need your museum trinkets.” His hand flung out, and three golden flecks sailed out and into the water. “I don’t need anything you can offer me, except your absence from this world. So feel free to collect them back, as you follow them down.” He turned away. “Throw her in.”

“Altmann! You’ll live to regret that!”

“Possibly,” he said over his shoulder. “But you will not.”

I could’ve kicked myself, setting him up for a line like that, but the chance was past. Altmann’s goon had already taken hold of my coat collar and was dragging me to the edge of the pier. And then I was treading air, and free-falling into the dark.

The water was cold – oh, gods and powers, it was cold when I hit, and the salt stung like a bastard. I managed to keep my wits about me enough to take a deep breath before I went down, but only just. I’m not a great swimmer at the best of times, but with my hands bound behind me and my coat tangling around my legs, it was pretty hopeless. I felt myself going down. And then I saw what was waiting for me there.

They were just shapes, mostly, but shapes out of nightmare, half-seen in the dark water. Rippling, ribboned eel bodies as long as a bus, dancing and undulating. Huge fat things like half-frogs, trailing tendrils. Scaled torpedo shapes with fluttering spined fins and lashing tails, jointed shells with rows of twisted legs, clusters of tissue full of tangled, blossoming viscera. And all around me, flashes of pale eyes and clawed limbs and awful grids of dagger teeth, half-glimpsed and then gone, a strobing slideshow of Hell.

A white hand on a ragged stump floated down, balletically, past me into the shadows.

Undines, merrows, grindylows, fomori, vodyanoi – every demon of the deep waters had gathered here at Altmann’s call. I couldn’t help but feel, watching them circle around me, that it was just a bit of overkill. Unarmed and hobbled as I was, any one or two of them would have been a match for me. But Altmann, as he’d said, hated playing fair…

I felt a grasping limb take hold of me; sharp claws dug into my side. And I was being dragged off.

I figured that’s what Altmann had in mind throwing his henchman to them – he knew they wouldn’t be as hungry right after a feeding like that, and would likely carry me off to sea to eat later. I’m sure the thought of them toying with me, prolonging my suffering, got him all excited. Typical, but at least it bought me a little time…

I broke the surface and gasped for air. Beside me, I could see the rippling shape of the thing’s body that carried me, a sine-wave in the water. I had just enough time to breathe in deep before I went down again, into the dark and the cold; I had no idea how far I’d been taken from land.

I don’t know how long it went on like that, plunging and resurfacing, coming up each time just at the point I was sure my lungs would burst, long enough to suck in air and get pulled back down. It was excruciating, and exhausting, and the cold was starting to take its toll on me. I had almost resigned myself to the idea that the sea had beaten me – and then I surfaced and did not go under again.

I was looking up at a huge promontory of rock jutting up out of the water, slick and glistening even in the dark night. There were shapes moving on it, and more pulling themselves out of the sea to join them. Then the limb holding me tightened, I felt myself lurch upwards, and the next thing I knew there was solid stone underneath me and I was coughing up brine in a puddle onto it.

I lifted my head. By some miracle, the swim hadn’t cost me my glasses, though they were beaded with seawater and badly askew. I could make out a ring of shifting bodies all around me, all sizes and shapes, some flexing fins or webbed arms, some lazily waving tentacles or less identifiable things. The huge grindylow that had carried me here lay with the folds of its eely tail draped around a ridge in the stone. Its head, a shark-toothed salamander’s with lantern eyes, loomed against the sky.

But I turned my attention to the shape that squatted in the middle of the circle, seeming almost a part of the rock itself, hung with kelp and encrusted with barnacles. It was like an enormous toad, an anglerfish, an octopus, vast and green-black, corpulent, covered in spines and fanlike fins, folding and unfolding. A face that was almost all mouth grinned at me with dozens of needle teeth.

“Hello, cousin,” said Kellmoryn. “And welcome to my court.”

Fortunately for me, Altmann was an idiot who couldn’t be bothered to do his homework.

“Hi,” I said. “Thanks. I see you got my calling-card.”

“Indeed,” said the Fomor king, lifting one of his huge webbed hands. Three tiny golden coins fell out of his palm. “I trust you are well?”

“Yeah, though I could use some untying.” I smiled. Kellmoryn nodded. I felt something sharp slide between my wrists, and the cords parted. “Aah, thanks. Ow. Gods, that was starting to cramp.”

Kellmoryn’s pale hooded eyes narrowed, just a little. “A host of my subjects was called to shore tonight by an old magic, Mother’s-sister’s-daughter. ”

“Yeah, I know.” I felt inside my brine-drenched coat for the hidden pocket in the lining, and pulled out a watertight package, which I unwrapped gingerly. Inside was a book of dry matches and three cigars. I lit one and blew a smoke ring, and let out a long slow breath. “Aaah. Aaaaah. Oh, heaven and earth, have I been needing that.”

The Fomor king shifted his monstrous bulk in a chorus of squelches and creaks. “I take it you were not the one responsible?”

“Um, no. You have to ask? Obviously I’ve got much better ways of knocking on your door, if that’s what I wanted. No, this guy’s a moron. Figured he’d summon up a bunch of monsters to do his dirty work so he wouldn’t have to strain himself. These Lodge wizards are all like that. It’d never occur to him I’d have… blood out here.”

Kellmoryn leaned in. “And is that what we are, Jenny Haniver? Blood? You presume much, land-walker. Are you so certain of my familial goodwill, then? I, Kellmoryn of the line of Liach, who devours his children when they displease him?” He shook his barnacled head. “You may have Eldritch fire and Fomori salt in you, magician, but your sentiment shows you to be all too… human.”

I looked around at the circle of grotesques surrounding me, the bulging eyes, the naked teeth. I’d wondered if it would come to something like this. I sighed. “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not willing to believe that you’re going to let yourselves be at some hedge-conjurer’s beck and call just to prove a point. “

“You misunderstand,” said Kellmoryn. “The working that called to us was not a summoning. It was an offer of tribute.”

I nodded, slowly. “Ah. Well, then. I think I see how it is. There’s a price that needs settling now, one way or another, is that right?”

Kellmoryn, if possible, grinned even wider. “Yes. You have the right of it, cousin.”

I blew a smoke ring into the sky, and looked at the gathered god-monsters of the deep, all muscle and gleaming scales and appetite. Kellmoryn was right; I wasn’t really one of them, whatever heritage we shared, though something in me admired them for their primordial power. They still lived in that ancient world of raw exchanges, offerings and devouring, and if I was going to get out of here I needed to do it on those terms. Tribute…

My eye caught the glint of the golden coins on the ground.

“Hold on a moment,” I said. “Hmm. I wonder…” I looked up at the king, and grinned back at him. “How long have we got until dawn?”

6 6 6

The little boat was out at the first light, a stone’s throw from the pier. The slender man sitting in it had the oars pulled in, and was looking over the side into the water below.

“Oh, bloody hell, you thickheaded dolt,” he said. “Three gold coins. How long can it take?”

There was a splash, and a man in a wetsuit surfaced beside the boat and unhooked his breathing mask.

“No sign, boss. I can’t see any of ‘em. Maybe you threw ‘em further than you thought.”

Altmann reached over the side and clocked him on the head. “And maybe if I turned your eyes into dead pillbugs, you’d be more use to me. Keep looking, you idiot.”

On the pier, I struck a match and lit a cigar.

“D’you know, Altmann,” I said, “I almost wish I’d been wrong about you. I mean, it was such a grand performance; I’m actually disappointed that you didn’t mean it. But I guess greed got the better of your sense of drama after all.”

“You!” Altmann’s eyes were saucers. “I… I don’t–-” He stood up in the boat and pointed a long finger. “I damned bloody killed you, you bitch!”

“Oh, you sure threw me into the briar-patch, I’ll give you that. But you’ll have to start getting up a lot earlier if you want to beat me at a treasure hunt.” A golden coin flashed as I tossed it into the air and caught it.

That did it. Altmann snarled and started to chant an incantation, his eyes blazing. But I held up a hand.

“Oh, sorry. You can’t do that. Not inside the circle you’ve sailed out into the middle of. Not unless someone were to go underwater and–-” He turned just in time to see his wetsuited henchman vanish below the surface. “Though, honestly, I wouldn’t recommend that, either.”

He looked desperately around, and swore. A dark, sinuous ribbon of a shape was moving there, under the water…

“So, Altmann.” I blew a smoke ring out over the pier. “You remember what you told me last night about how you like to play with a stacked deck? Well, me too. And I hate to disappoint you, but, as it turns out…”

The grindylow broke the surface and reared up over the boat, clawed arms wide, mouth full of daggers gaping.

“…I’m holding all the face cards.”

The teeth came down. He screamed then, but only briefly.

I watched until it was over, which was not long. And then there was only the capsized boat bobbing there on the water, rocking gently. I almost turned to go, but hesitated. Altmann had come hunting for coins, and I felt I owed him something. Tribute. I fished out a pair of bright pennies and tossed them into the water. They floated down and disappeared, and I hoped they would suffice for him; there would have been nothing to lay them on anyway.