Instead, all my older fears were pushed aside. As soon as I closed my eyes, I found myself sitting alone on an empty beach. Dunes rose beside me, high as mountains, and the ocean lay still and waveless to my other side. I walked between them until I was exhausted, but I knew with absolute certainty that I would never see another living creature. I’d find no end to the solitude: there was no place to flee or seek, and no one looking for me on either side of that boundary line.
No meditation could make these visions lucid, or even let me recognize them as imaginary while I dwelt in them. And though my studies told me that the human mind only dreams sporadically throughout the night, these lasted the full span of my supposed rest.
When I confessed the dreams to Charlie—and they felt very much like a dreadful transgression—he listened solemnly, saying nothing until I had finished. He walked over to the workroom’s bookshelf, ran his hand across the familiar titles.
“Mine are of the store,” he said at last. “Looking in book after book, and finding every page blank. I was hoping you’d know what to do.”
“Void,” I swore softly. I had prayed that the dreams were only my own fevered imagination. But prayers are rarely answered.
“It’s the confluence, isn’t it?” he asked. “It doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, this far away.”
“I think so. We could go back and ask the archpriest if there’s any way to make the connection more flexible, but I don’t think he’d know. We didn’t usually travel all that far, before. And in the water, distance is a different thing. We could ask him to break it.”
“No! I mean, is that what you want to do?”
I shook my head. “I want to live where I will, in the place where I need to be. But it would be worse to give up the family we’ve just started to form. The Kotos … what we’ve been through, we’re family no matter where we are. And I could come back for a few days, here and there. But the confluence, much as we love each other, needs this connection.”
He rested his hand on the workroom door. He didn’t have loving family here, as I did, but he had friends and the business he’d built up over years. “That’s how I feel, too. I guess everything has a cost. It would just be nice to have some advance warning.”
I rose, embraced him, said nothing. He didn’t need me to tell him how the universe worked.
*
“I wanted to go back to Innsmouth, eventually,” I told Mama Rei. “But not like this.”
She put down her sewing and patted the couch cushion beside her. I gave up my pacing and sat, leaned against her side, let her hold me. “You need to be with your family,” she said.
“I know. I wish they didn’t live on opposite sides of the country.”
“Yes.” Mama Rei’s father had sent her to school in Osaka when she was young. She never talked about missing the family who hosted her there, and she didn’t now.
I realized I was crying. I sniffed and rubbed my eyes. Right now, I didn’t want to get up, away from her, even for the sake of finding salt water.
“Aphra-chan,” she said. She leaned her forehead against mine. I felt the faint creases of her skin, and smelled familiar, familial sweat. “Don’t mourn. We’re here, and you’ll visit when you can. Perhaps we will even fly out ourselves; it must be a more interesting journey than the one over the Pacific. You’ve told me how much happens under the waves, but it is hard to tell from aboard a ship.” I giggled in spite of myself, and she stroked my hair. “Home is where your family is. You have a lot of family, and they will all miss you, but they will all wait for you.”
“I love you. You’re much more patient than Grandfather.”
She laughed. “I will come and meet him, and find out.”
“I’d like that.”
I imagined it as I packed—as on too little sleep and dreams that sapped our waking energy, Charlie and I crated the store’s inventory for shipping to the newly leased building in Arkham. If the Kotos flew out—perhaps they would fall in love with the New England spring, with my worrisome and exasperating blood relatives, and decide to stay.
But they had roots here, people and food and the culture of the city that held them fast—as those things would have held me, if I’d had my way. And even if they chose, absurdly, to give all that up, I still had connections in water and air, among different places and peoples, that would never mesh easily. Even if I hadn’t chosen the strictures that now forced my hand, I had chosen to open myself to those intimacies. The vulnerability, the mourning, everything I had to learn from their disparate experiences, were things I had accepted with every conversation offered and every request granted.
I had not been helpless when I made those choices. And though I dealt with their consequences out of necessity, I was not helpless now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book owes its greatest debt to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who invited everyone to play in his sandbox—even the monsters.
After I wrote “The Litany of Earth,” I thought I was done. I’d said what I needed to about Lovecraft and being a monster; it was time to move on. When people started asking for more, I figured it was just a nice way of saying “I liked it.” But the requests kept coming, and I started explaining to anyone who’d listen why the story didn’t need a sequel.
My second thanks, therefore, are to everyone who pushed for more of Aphra’s story until I talked myself around and figured out what else I had to say. Eager readers are the best inspiration I can think of—please don’t stop asking.
An excellent agent does too many things to easily list. Cameron McClure speaks fluent publisher, marketer, and author, and translates lucidly between dialects. In getting Winter Tide ready to shop around, she helped me level up my editing skills, a push that I badly needed. She has been, and continues to be, a pleasure to work with.
Carl Engle-Laird believed in Aphra enough to make “Litany” his first slush acquisition for Tor.com. He gave my little novelette the red carpet treatment, from an intense (and intensely needed) line edit through hand-selling it to anyone who came close enough to listen. I was delighted to work with him on the novel as well. The book you now hold is far stronger for his encouragement, editing, and squeefulness.
Jo Walton and Ada Palmer drew attention to “Litany” with early and high-profile reviews. Ada’s “non-review” is a remarkable work in its own right, and all that any author could hope to have said about their writing. My Yith owe much to her discussion of Petrarch and Diderot; the whole book owes much to the bar she set with her praise.
Jo has provided empathy, honesty, and high-level writerly geeking since well before I even thought of Aphra. As a salonière and hostess, she facilitated this book’s birth in very practical ways. In her Balticon hotel room, I awoke worrying that “the next Aphra novelette” looked like it might actually be a novel—she gave me tea and assured me that it was okay to have a novel. Six months later at her home in Montreal, fortified by more excellent tea, I finished the draft at 4 a.m.