Arthur laughed. “Pay and reputation are probably the two things in this world he cares the least about. And there’s no way they’d buy into his theories. Not yet.”
She remembered the manuscript and its odd, energetic phrasing. Most of all, she remembered the Styela resting in her palm, the beating of its primitive, unseen heart. She finally looked at Arthur. In one of his hands was yet another bucket. In the other was a mostly empty fish-meal sack.
“So. He wants me back?”
Arthur grimaced. “Yes and no. He wants you to steer clear of the lab. But he also wants you to work.”
“Pictures for the specimen catalogs?”
“Yes.”
He offered her the bucket. There was a damp dishrag stretched across its opening.
“Your first assignment,” he explained.
“Thank you.”
“Oh, don’t thank me. I barely had to ask.”
“And the sack?”
“Oh. That one’s mine, I’m afraid. Empty coming up the hill, full coming down.”
In the silence that followed, he gawked at her like a child.
“With a sack full of cats,” he clarified, “it’s a whole lot harder going down than coming up.”
Silence.
“Going up, it’s easier without the cats.”
“Yes. You mentioned that.”
He frowned and looked at his feet. “I suppose I did.”
“Until next time.” She turned away.
“Wait!”
When he reached into the fish-meal sack, she half expected him to withdraw something furry and dead, teeth bared in protest. Instead, he produced her satchel, the heft of the sketchbook visible inside. She snatched it from him, took out the sketchbook, and ruffled the pages under her thumb. Some of them still felt wet.
“You left it at the lab after your accident. He wanted to return it to you the other day, but you and your father left before he got the chance.”
She packed the sketchbook away and slung the satchel over her shoulder.
“And between you and me,” he continued, “there’s some funny stuff in there. Almost gave me nightmares.”
“Then you shouldn’t have looked.”
“Oh, I’m glad I looked. It just seemed unusual, that’s all. That such a lovely person could draw such ugly things.”
She glared. He cringed. The scientists from Hopkins were retreating now, the gulls seeming to chuckle at them as they walked up the beach and toward the building on the point. In the distance, she could see the canopy of a dying kelp forest, its fronds transparent and sparse.
“Just this?” she asked. “Just what’s in the bucket?”
“That’s right. I’ll come up the hill to collect it in a couple days.”
“I’ll be done tomorrow morning.”
“That soon?”
“Yes. Best of luck with your cats.”
When he was gone, she waited a bit to make sure he wouldn’t return. Then she put the bucket on the ground and tore away the wet dishrag. At first, she couldn’t even guess at what she was seeing. It was plantlike in shape, a thick, tapered, semicoiled, leafless frond. In color and consistency, however, it was all animal: a disruptively fleshlike appearance to its pale skin, an asymmetry to it that implied a former attachment to something much larger.
It was only once she had taken the hill at a run, climbed the front steps, and dumped it out onto the porch that she understood. In her travels, she had heard of such things, but only from people whose penchant for superstition had made their tales fundamentally implausible: tales of a boneless beast, a creature of the darkest depths, a monster with a vulture’s beak, with suction cups the size of dinner plates. She poked the tentacle with her pencil and flipped it over. Dinner plates, no, but large nonetheless, large enough to be frightening, large enough to hint at the dimensions of something as incredible as it was evil. Shivering, she retrieved the bucket and placed it upside down over the bloated squid arm, concealing it from view. Then she began to draw, filling page after page by memory until the sun had set, at which point she looked up from her drawing and out at the ocean. The sky was lit as if with a strange, gray fire. The trees were making the sound of arthritic joints, the air sharp with pine sap and salt. Her father was halfway home, halfway through his daily climb. She closed her sketchbook and began to tuck it beneath her. At the last moment, however, she reopened it and put it back onto her lap, its pages turned to her most recent and most accurate work.
When he reached her side, he paused and looked down. “Started doodling, I see.”
Something small and hard appeared in her throat: something that was difficult, but not impossible, to swallow down.
“Tasty looking, isn’t it?” he said. “I should fry it up for dinner.”
8
1998
HIS NEXT MESSAGE, MUCH LIKE HIS FIRST, COMES at her from beyond the aquarium’s walls.