I laughed, shifting the grocery bag from one hand to the other. “Well, I’m glad you got a trip under your belt before winter showed up. Don’t think it’ll be long now before it snows.”
He regarded the skies like a weatherman studying a barometric pressure reading. “Be a day or so and we’ll be gettin’ a storm. Not snow yet but wind’n rain for sure.” Over the years I had come to trust Harold’s predictions when it came to the weather. The old timers had something that the forecasters could never attain with their technology and weather models. It was as if time bestowed gifts to certain people when they reached a definite age, secrets that were normally out of reach becoming knowledge after so many years alive. “You and that pretty wife a yours should stop by soon, cook me up somethin’ off your boat there. I got a nice bottle of Cabernet that my daughter gave me and the doc said not to have more’n one glass at a sittin’.”
“We might take you up on that,” I said, starting to sidle away. “Give me a shout tomorrow if you figure out a night that would work good.”
“Any night’s good for me,” he called as I strode toward our house. “Ain’t got no one waitin’ on me but the reaper, an he can sit an spin for all I care.”
I laughed and threw a final wave over my shoulder as I made my way up our walk. I chuckled, stepping into the house, making a note to tell Del we’d have to bring dinner to the old man sometime this week. Del made a mean blueberry pie and we still had some frozen from the hours of picking I’d done in August.
I stepped into the kitchen, opening my mouth to ask Del which night she thought would work best to visit Harold, and stopped.
Del was standing at the sink. Her hands pressed to her mouth.
Her jaws worked, feverishly chewing. I could see the muscles in her cheek bulging each time she bit down. For a moment I thought she was having some kind of seizure or that something had happened while I was outside. She had fallen maybe and the baby had been hurt inside her. I took a step forward, reaching out, terrified to look down at the floor, knowing somehow that I would see blood there, pooled beneath her, running from her in a torrent of life that would never be.
There are sights that a person can witness that will not fit within the normal boundaries of consciousness or recognition. To put it simply, there are limits to the human mind that horror can surpass, and when it does, there is nothing but the void of madness waiting beyond.
Something was moving between Del’s lips. Squirming.
For a brief moment I thought it was her tongue, but then I saw the glossy blackness, the wet movement I always attributed to sea life, and a tentacle wriggled free between two of her fingers.
“Del, what the hell are you doing?” I said. She neither looked at me nor broke her gaze out the window. Her teeth ground together with a wet crunching.
I stepped forward and in that instant something let loose. It seemed like a physical presence had relinquished its grip on the room and fled, leaving the air cleaner and lighter. Del’s eyes narrowed and she turned her head toward me, her glazed stare slowly clearing.
Her mouth opened and the partially chewed squid fell out into her hands. It was a mangled, slimy mess of slick skin and broken tentacles. One limb death-flailed and wrapped around her little finger. Del’s jaw worked and her fingers opened, the writhing squid dropping free to the floor with a wet plop. The scream that burst from her was a rending of sanity, a shriek so full of repulsion and abhorrence that I flinched.
She shrank away from the squid that was turning itself in a slow circle, its remaining legs twisting obscenely. Del took two steps back, one of her hands coming up to cover her mouth, surely to stanch another scream, but just then she slipped. Her feet tangled and she began to fall.