Ollphéist

What we needed that much bait for, I couldn’t imagine.

With his big arms, hardened from years of rowing against the icy sea, Granda lifted his corner of the cooler from the ground. Mine dragged behind on the rocks.

He let out a musical grunt. “We’ll get some meat on your bones by the end of this summer. I can promise you that, lad!”

The cooler fell into the dinghy with a thud. It rocked against the shore, gurgling and scraping.

Granda took his lantern from the rocks and used it to light his way onto the boat. He stepped in ungracefully, though somehow trusting the creaking boards to cradle him. He always told me that you had to trust the boat to catch you. You couldn’t step in all tentative and careful or it might slip out from under you, and then a big fish might come and nibble off your toes.

I had never quite gotten the hang of this, and my knees wobbled as I pulled my wet boots out of the water.

On most days, we left early in the morning. Granda told me stories about how he’d taken my mother out with him just the same when she was young, how she’d had a better eye for it than he did. She could see things other people didn’t. He said she used to disappear for hours during the day, but he never worried, because she had made herself acquainted with the wee folk and would come back with a wreath of tiny flowers tucked into her hair.

I thought of how she would disappear at home, and how she wouldn’t come back with flowers. And when Granda noticed how quiet I’d gotten, he would ask if he’d upset me.

He showed me the right way to fish for eels. You couldn’t just use a regular lure or even a worm fresh from the dirt. No, eels were far too picky for that. I watched him do it several times until I could manage myself; he’d split a mackerel down the middle, from the head all the way to the tail, until its body fell apart freely. Then he’d tease out the spine so that both halves would flutter in the water and entice hungry creatures below.

I always felt bold tossing my lure in the water, seeing the line jump and tug. But then when it came time to wrench them out, long and writhing and making a knot of slimy black flesh in the boat, I thought really they belonged to the sea and we probably shouldn’t have taken them from there in the first place.

But this time, instead of leaving at dawn, Granda had shaken me awake sometime in the middle of the night. I felt around for my glasses and put them on. Only then did I see Granda’s wiry beard and round nose in the warm, swaying light of his lantern. He slapped my cot, making the springs creak. “Up and out of that bed, sonny!”

“What time is it?” My mouth was dry, and I wasn’t sure where I was. The room was far too old and cobwebby to be mine.

“Come on, put on your coat!” He was already halfway down the steps of his rickety little cottage, calling after me.

My father thought it would be good for me to come here, to see where my mother grew up. Part of me wondered if he planned on coming back for me at all. After what happened to her, he sometimes had trouble looking at me. 

I pulled on my wool parka, which was too long and made me stumble when I ran, trying to keep up. Granda danced along the bluff, not worrying for a minute that he might fall. The height always sent a sickly spiral going in my stomach, like a mess of eels. I went cautiously, several feet back. If he fell, I would be here all alone. I would have to go get him from the gravelly beach below.

As we paddled out, the cold started to set in. The only light came from Granda’s lantern, shouting over the surface of the dark water around us. I could hardly see the shore anymore, and if it weren’t for the blinking stars above, it would be hard to tell where the sky ended and the ocean began.

“What are we looking for?” I asked, trying to warm my hands inside my mittens.

Granda chuckled, watching the sea as he rowed. “Just wait ‘til you see it, lad. Just got to bring ‘er to the surface. Just you wait.”

I tried to see what he was seeing, looking out over the water. In the light of the lantern, shadows seemed to move below us. I would tense until I was sure they were a trick of the light, always expecting something to brush against the underside of the boat.

“Something big?”

“Oh, yes. Very big.”

Some other time that might have excited me, but this time I just shivered, holding onto my knees. I didn’t want to see whatever Granda had planned for us tonight. I didn’t want to know what other slimy writhing thing the ocean could cough up.

Granda had spent his life on the water, and most of the time, I trusted him. My father said all the time he spent alone had loosened a few screws, but he only really had a few odd habits. I started to eat my buttered cod with my fingers just like he did—it tasted better that way. Once he even let me try a drink from his flask while we sat by the wood stove. It burned my throat and I didn’t like it very much, but it made me feel like I’d grown a few inches taller. He slapped me on the back and laughed, and went on telling one of his stories.

Granda had lots of stories. Some were about my mother as a girl. His little Shan, he called her. She’d always had an adventurous spirit, he told me. It was just too big for my father, too big for our apartment in the States. Ireland had always stayed her home.

He talked about her like she was still alive, like she was gone on some long vacation and might come through the door any minute now. Sometimes I was afraid his memory was going, and I would remind him that she was gone for good. Forever. And he would nod and scratch his chin and smile, and say, “Sure she is, lad.” 

His other stories—the ones about fairies that stole away babies and left sickly changelings in their place, or banshees with long, knotted hair whose cries cut through the wind, or horsemen who looked out of eyes in a skull they could carry in one hand, a whip of spine in the other—those were the stories I thought of when the wind wailed through the cracks in my window or when I had to use the outhouse after dark.

But then I would remember how my father had grabbed me by the shoulder, shaking me so hard his fingers left red marks. How he’d asked me, You know the difference between what’s real and what’s a story. Don’t you, Kieran?

They were only stories, even if Granda’s eyes flickered with firelight and his voice shook and hushed with real dangers outside.

He had been rowing a long time, and the waves started to rise up higher and rock us back and forth. I hugged my hands to my armpits, trying to warm them.

“What do you see, lad?” He looked down into the water.

“Nothing,” I said. It was a wish as much as an answer. There was nothing and would be nothing. Nothing that might see us out in the darkness.

“Look at the water. See how it’s angry?”

The lantern light swung back and forth, Granda’s face blinking in and out of the darkness. Each time the light came back, he was looking at me, smiling.

“Should we be out here? It’s going to storm.”

He laughed. The sound was almost swallowed by the waves sloshing against the boat.

“She speaks to you too, doesn’t she?”

“What?” I shouted back.

“Don’t be afraid, Kieran. You trust me, don’t you?”

I watched his eyes for a minute, watched as they softened. Granda would never do something he thought would put me in danger, would he? “Yes, it’s just—”

“Just what?” He snapped.

“I’m cold.”

“Start moving then, it’ll warm you up. Open up the cooler. It’s time.”

Moonlight bounced off the cooler’s white lid. Granda rubbed his hands together like he was waiting for me to open a present, so I got to my knees and tried to open the latch.

My mittens were too thick to get under it, so I had to pull one off. The numb tips of my fingers burned against the sudden pressure, and pain shot up my arm. With several tries, the lid swung open.

The smell hit me first. It was a dense, sour smell, like rotting meat. I pushed myself away and tried not to gag.

But curiosity had the better of me. I sucked in a breath through my teeth and inched closer, closer, until I could peek inside.

I couldn’t understand what it was. The skin was wrinkled and pink, and one glassy black eye stared up at me.

“Hurry up and get it out, why don’t you?”

He wanted me to touch the thing? My skin riled, revolted. Granda just laughed behind me. I could almost hear in his laugh the kinds of things he would say when he returned me to my father. Not cut out for this life, it seems. Take him back where he belongs. Would my father be disappointed, or relieved?  I pulled my mittens back on. That way I wouldn’t have to feel it. I took several fast breaths while my heart pounded, and slipped my hands down into the cooler. I closed my eyes, hands sliding into goopy wetness. I felt the solid weight of its body, the give of its flesh. The smell got even stronger. I pulled.

As it came up to my chest, the legs unfolded. Four pink, almost translucent hooves clattered against the deck. I gasped and dropped the thing.

“What is it?” I didn’t want to look, but couldn’t tear my eyes away.

“A calf from Locky’s farm. Not as good as fresh, but it’ll do.”

Snot from my nose was dripping down to my lip, so I sniffled and wiped it on my sleeve.

I didn’t want him to think I was crying. “It’s ugly,” I said.

“It was stillborn, lad. Have some respect.”

I hated the way the eye stared at me blankly, because it had never seen anything in the world. I hated the way the skin was hairless and wrinkled and almost human-like. I wished it had never slid out, limp and unmoving, from its mother’s belly.

“Go on now,” Granda said. “Like I showed you.” He held out a long knife, handle-first. It gleamed in the moonlight.

I would have taken a step back, except I would have stepped into the ocean. 

“Like the mackerel.” He nodded. “Go on.”

I laughed, disbelieving, and tears sprung to my eyes. A fish was one thing, and that I’d always had to bite down the sick feeling in my stomach for anyway. This was something else, something much worse. “I can’t!”

“What did you say?”

I hung my head. “I can’t do it, Granda.”

I expected him to be angry, ashamed of me. I expected him to shout with spittle flying and landing in my hair, and tell me I could go on home if this was how I was going to behave. It sounded like he was coughing at first—that hacking smoker’s cough, but then I looked and saw that he was laughing. His head tipped back to show the bramble of gray beard at his neck and the flecks of gold in his teeth. He gripped his chest and blew out air with a long “hooooo!” as he tried to stop himself. 

Then he really did start to cough, and took out his flask from his coat to swallow it down.

Granda heaved himself up from his seat, letting his oars rest in their locks. He nudged me aside and took the handle of the knife in his other hand. The boat rocked under us, and had to I sit to keep from falling.

“Fine, then. Make the old man do it.”

I turned away to the sea while he worked and talked. I tried not to listen to the sounds—the wet squelching, the grating sound of the knife against bone, the heavy in-and-out of his breaths. 

“You know, Kieran, sometimes you’ve got to get your hands a little mucky to get what you want. Can’t be afraid of a little blood and guts if you’re going to catch a behemoth.”

I sucked in lungfuls of ocean air, trying to drown out the smell. I shut my eyes and felt the rolling of the water. I tried to picture a sunny day, out by the cove and dropping nets into the water. How Granda would pick at his teeth and tell me about the time he faced off with an angry bull shark. I wondered if that’s what we were after—some ugly sharp-toothed thing he wanted to get even with. 

“You want to take something from the sea,” he said, panting with the effort, “you’ve got to give her something in return.”

Granda heaved the calf over the side of the boat with a loud crash. It sent us off balance, water splashing over the sides of the boat.

“Aha! There we go.” Granda wiped his wet hands on his pants.

I was glad for it to be gone. But as the line spun out, I thought of the weight of the thing

in my arms again, how all that weight must be pulling it down and down under the water.

Sinking fast. Even if the line went all the way out, maybe it still wouldn’t reach the bottom. It

would just dangle there in the blackness. Frilling out, waving its meaty wings.

If I was some predator in the water, sighting it through a curtain of blue, creeping up to

tug on the line—what would that make me?

“What are we looking for, Granda?”

Instead of answering, he put the fishing rod in my hands and wrapped my fingers around it. It was cool to the touch, even through mittens. I wanted to give it back to him right away, but he’d trusted me with it, and I couldn’t let him down.

He looked off distantly. “There are stories, you know. Sheeps and cows and even people going missing, snatched right off the riverbanks and shores. It’s why you never wander too close to the water alone. People want to put all sorts of names to the things they can’t see, or just catch glimpses of. Makes ‘em feel more certain of themselves if they can put a name to strange creatures.”

“Does this one have a name?”

The waves were growing, throwing us around like a leaf in a thunderstorm. I held tight to the pole, picturing myself losing my grip and the line whipping it all the way down to the bottom of the ocean, never to return. 

He sniffed, nostrils flaring. He took another drink. “It does.”

I waited for him to go on, but he wouldn’t meet my eye. It was strange for him, and made something like dread grow in the pit of my stomach. As gruesome as Granda’s stories were, it was comforting to hear them in his voice, recounting a long-dead legend. Now, his silence frightened me more than his stories ever had. 

The water churned violently. It crashed over the back of the dinghy and Granda’s shoulders, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“We should go back!” I told him, my voice giving away my fear.

“Oh, I don’t think so, sonny.”

“Why not?”

“Patience. You’ll only see this once in your lifetime.”

I swallowed. If I could go a whole lifetime without knowing whatever he wanted to show me, maybe I was better off that way.

A wave threw us into the air for a moment, and my feet left the deck before we came crashing down again. Water poured in, drenching my coat and pooling at the bottom of the boat. Saltwater lashed at my cheeks.

Granda hooted and laughed. “She’s close now, isn’t she?”

And like that, everything stilled, the water evening out, the boat rocking slowly. I watched Granda’s face for disappointment, for a frown, waited for him to pull the oars back in and say we ought to head on back to shore because whatever was out here didn’t want to be found tonight. 

Then something tugged on the fishing line. Gentle at first, the rod jumped in my hands.

Granda’s eyes gleamed in the bright throws of the lantern.

Then a harder pull. The line zipped out, reel whirring, and yanked me to my feet.

I might have been pulled over the edge and into the water, but Granda grabbed me around the waist and we both toppled backward. My elbow landed hard in his gut. He grabbed the rod, hands gnarled like wood wrapping around mine.

“Hold on tight, lad! Hold on now!”

The rod shook, straining under the force of something deep below. It bent, straining toward the water. Granda and I slid toward the edge of the dinghy until he jammed both feet out to stop us. The wood flexed and creaked; his legs shuddered under the pressure. “Don’t… let… go!”

The rod continued to arc, pulling closer and closer toward the water.

Then it snapped. A piece of the rod whipped away into the darkness. Both of us flew

backward, and Granda cried out and let go. All I had in my hands was the broken handle. I kept staring at it, trying to make it come back together in my mind. 

Granda got to his feet. He balanced on the quaking deck, building up a bellow from deep inside.

“Come out and show yourself, why don’t you? What are you so afraid of?”

No answer. We drifted, no longer held by the weight of the calf. It was gone. Maybe sunken deep, maybe swallowed whole. Granda’s chest rose and fell, his eyes wild and searching.

And then I felt a force greater than the waves against the boat, pushing, sliding. It grated the wood, shredding little splinters into the air. I caught a glimpse of grayish-white in the moonlight.

The dinghy tipped away from it, lifting us up. I jammed my hands and feet against the wood, resisting the pressure trying to dump us into the growling mouth of the ocean. My muscles strained, arms shaking, but as I looked below, I saw something flash below the water. Some churning body, looping over itself. 

Then we plunged back down again, a wave crashing over us. I tried to find my balance, hands scrabbling blindly at the deck. I could feel Granda’s heavy movements, hear his grunts. I looked up to the sky.

What rose out of the water held me pinned against the deck with pure terror. I didn’t even feel myself against the boat anymore, or the movement of the ocean, or the water spraying down on me as a muscled column of flesh unfurled and towered overhead. The snake-like body billowed with slick gray flesh, which seemed to pulse and churn against itself. Eyes—dozens of them—peeled open along its head, each revealing a deeper darkness. 

I choked out a cry. The sound was distant and foreign to me; it didn’t sound like anything from my own throat. I stared, and it stared back. It saw me. It knew me. And beyond my fear, the galloping rhythm of my heart, there was a quiet feeling of awe.

And then it opened a gaping, unhinged jaw. It could swallow us whole. Stringy saliva dripped from glassy fangs. The muscles of its throat worked, clenching over and over like a fist. It let out an ear-splitting shriek. I screamed and clamped my hands over my ears. The pain through my head was instant, making my vision flash pure white. I felt it all the way from my core to my fingertips. 

All I could do was hold myself there, pinned to the deck, waiting for it to stop.

When I managed to pry my eyes open again, I heard the ringing sound and I heard nothing at all. The monster was gone, leaving nothing but bubbles on the surface of the water. The waves calmed to a gentle beat on the hull.

When my ears stopped ringing, I heard Granda screaming. He had probably been screaming the whole time, a desperate howling I never thought I would hear him make. 

It gripped me deep in the belly. I crawled to him and grabbed bunches of his wet coat. I held onto him. I begged him to stop. I clung around him until he stopped.

________________________

We rowed back to shore in a numb quiet, neither of us finding words to speak. It had already started to feel like a strange dream, just a flight of imagination from one of Granda’s stories.

While we trudged up the bluff to the cottage, I kept my eyes on Granda’s heavy plodding boots ahead of me. Without meaning to, I kept falling into step with him. I would try to change it on purpose, but kept tripping over my own toes.

I fell into bed and slept like the dead.

________________________

By the next morning, I had convinced myself it had never happened. None of it seemed real—the sickly pink calf from Locky’s; the long fishing knife; all of those eyes, knowing me. Any time I thought of it, I plucked at the silky hairs on my arm. Each time, I pulled one, and the sharp sting reminded me what was real.

But something was wrong with Granda. He started drinking early in the day, and by afternoon, he was asleep with his head bobbing to one side by the fireplace. He would startle awake in the evening and wander out to the bluff while the sun went down. He would just stand there looking out over the water. He stayed long after it got dark. Just standing there, not moving.

He wasn’t making anything to eat, so I decided to go down to the cellar where he kept preserves he said would last longer than he would. I’d seen him come up many times with jars of pickled vegetables and fish, but I’d never gone myself. I didn’t like the thought of going beneath the house into the darkness.

I stood at the top of the steps, looking down. I could see a square of dirt at the bottom and a lightbulb dangling by a thread, but the rest of the cellar was hidden in shadow.

Carefully, with one hand trailing along the plaster, I went down the creaking steps one by one. My eyes kept darting to the dark corners where I thought something might be shifting, waiting for me.

My heart was pounding by the time I got to the cord for the light. I had to stretch to reach it, and the bulb came on with a burst of crackling light.

It smelled dusty and wet down there, and I wanted to get out quickly. I scanned the shelves. They were lined with cans with faded labels, but seeing as I didn’t know if I could open one myself, I reached for a jar on the top shelf.

When I could look at it more closely, I saw that it was full of little green-gray fish, bobbing upright in a thick liquid. They still had little black eyes.

But I was so hungry I didn’t care. I unscrewed the lid and stuck my fingers into the slime, and without thinking about it too long, popped two of the fish into my mouth. I swallowed without chewing.

I brought the jar back up to Granda, who had gone back to sitting in front of the wood stove, watching the flames leap and move. He was awake, but barely, with his flask resting against his hip.

“I found these,” I said, holding the jar out to him. I looked at the little fish in the jar and thought about how trapped they must feel, how if they could see us their vision would be all distorted.

He didn’t even look up at me or the jar. “I’m taking the boat out tonight.”

My heart leapt to my throat. I knew if he went out on the water again in his state, something terrible would happen.

“There’s nothing out there, Granda.” I said it firmly, the way my father spoke to me when I was afraid of monsters in the closet.

Then he did look up at me, blinking with heavy-lidded eyes. He gave a sudden, barking laugh. “You saw well as I did—”

“I didn’t see anything,” I said, my face feeling hot. For that second, I hated him. “You’re sick, just like she was.” 

He smiled wide and poked me in the chest. I recoiled. “Whatever’s in me and her is the same as what’s in you, laddie. Don’t you see?”

“It isn’t!” My hand was balled into a fist, trembling. He was wrong. My father had always promised me that I wouldn’t end up like her.

“You want the truth about your Ma, Kieran?”

“She’s dead,” I said, too quickly. “She’s not coming back.” It was what I’d been told over and over, and what I repeated to myself to believe.

Granda shook his head slowly. He pressed a finger to his lips, and his eyebrows scrunched up his forehead playfully.

“Better not let her hear you say that.”

“She’s dead!” I hit him in the chest, hard as I could. At first he looked stunned, and then he started to laugh. Angry tears pricked in my eyes. I went to hit him again, but he grabbed my wrists and held them.

“You’re angry,” he said. “Good! You should be.” He let me go slowly, then patted the chair next to him. I sat.

“Your father lied to you, Kieran. You deserve the truth.” 

I folded my arms around myself. The words came to me from a long distance away. Still, I listened.

His mouth moved slowly around the words. “See, your mother always understood things other people didn’t. She knew this world has its secrets, and sometimes they showed themselves to her and not anybody else. It was a beautiful gift.” He looked solemnly at his hands. “But your father, he couldn’t see that. Couldn’t stand things he couldn’t make sense of. So he told her what she saw wasn’t real. He made her sick, Kieran. But it was him that was sick in the first place.

“He told you he sent her away to some doctor in England who could help her get well. Told you that’s where she died, because she just wouldn’t get better.”

He glared into the flames, his beard twitching around the corners of his mouth. He took a drink from his flask.

“But she didn’t, not like he told you. You know where Shan went? She came right back here. Came home like she should’ve a long time ago.”

The floor tilted underneath me. I watched it tip, my stomach twisting. I held tightly to the chair as everything slid further away. I thought I might throw up.

“She was here?”

He nodded.

“You didn’t tell me?” Heat was rising up in me again, making me want to break something.

“I made a promise. But now… Now it’s better you know.” He leaned back, craning his neck toward the ceiling, like he could see it all happening again. “God, I was so glad she’d come back to me. Thought she was starting to get better, you know. Got some of her color back. She was laughing again, even went out on the boat with me. Still, there was something not right about her.”

When I looked at him, I saw that his eyes were glassy and wet.

“One night I came home and couldn’t find her. Looked everywhere around the house, so then I went down to the beach. That’s where she used to collect stones. I found her down there, just standing in the water.

“I yelled out after her, but she didn’t hear. She just walked out into the water until it was too deep, and she went under.”

His voice broke, and he took another drink. His hands trembled. “I went in after her, Kieran. Believe me, I did. I called after her, told her to come back to me!” His voice rose like he was calling to her now. It made me shudder in my skin. We both sat there in the quiet, listening for an answer.

“I took a boat out the next day and the next, said I wasn’t leaving ‘til I found her. Sunup to sundown, I searched. The day after that I went out with Locky and we took two boats out with a net stretched between us and just turned up seaweed and some whitefish. She was really gone.” 

His shoulders heaved up and down, even though I should have been the one crying. 

After a long time, he quieted down. He rubbed his beard. “She never wanted you to know, Kieran. Made me promise never to tell you. But I need you to understand.” His eyes were red when he looked at me, and sharper than I’d expected. “She’s my daughter, a stórín. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to bring her back to me.”

________________________

When I went up to bed, I stared at the wire-frame cot and the rickety stool with the lamp on it, the curtains made of patchwork cloth. I hadn’t really looked at it before. But my mother had been here only months before me. She had slept in this bed, and probably left the sheets messy on the morning she went away. She had curled up under the same blankets and looked through the same cracked window over the bluff and into the ocean that I had looked through all this time, and didn’t know it. She had been here all along.

________________________

I dreamed I was floating on the open water, drifting gently. I was calm. I felt her weaving underneath me, shimmering skin flexing over ropy flesh. All those eyes, open and searching. 

When I woke, I found I was drifting—bobbing up and down. It was dark even when I opened my eyes, and all around me smelled like rotten flesh. I tried to turn, but found my knees pressed tight against my chest.

My breaths came short and shallow. My hands searched, finding cold plastic. And then I pounded, I cried, I pleaded. I could hear the rolling of the waves and the creaking of the boat, and I thought I heard Granda crying.

________________________