The Kraken Waits
written by: Angela Huskisson
Aunt Carol races along the beach- woman in a hurry; age impressive. She pants when she reaches the hut, like a wet dog, where I worry that she might shake herself, with hair flying and swimsuit askew. It’s our first time down under, enjoying a very different kind of holiday, and we’re already missing the sub-zero temperatures. Displaced festive trees sparkle and wink with a grave intensity of too much light and heat. And it’s more than a bit surreal. But Carol stops us sharp in our reverie and our longing for home on this weirdest of Christmas Eves.
‘There’s something in the water,’ she gasps.
We laugh. ‘Carol…’ we splutter and choke after too much beer. ‘There will always be something in the sea.’
We are here, in her crazy upside-down world, where even the stars are in the wrong place, to take care of our beloved aunt following her truncated stay in a psychiatric hospital. At one point, we didn’t think she was going to make it, as life had thrown her far too many acid drops. So here we now are in warm familial company, drenched in pure blonde sunshine.
Yet now the day is slowly darkening, changing itself from golden to ash. Shadows are lengthening as a chill runs in from the sea, letting us know it’s time to light the fire. But Carol is in a fluster because she can’t let this ‘thing’ go.
‘It was this big,’ she says, overextending arms and fingers for emphasis, always the drama queen, being a weaver of stories herself with a love of strangeness which spans from Poe to Wyndham and beyond. Sometimes she is eaten by her own words and wonderings and ghosts which lean in from the past.
We wander down to the shoreline where the water is restless as dying sunlight burns into the horizon and a pink phlox moon rises in juxtaposition. We’re feeling lazy and louche and too full of holiday to want to stoke Carol’s anxiety, so we soothe her with bonhomie while reminding her to take her meds.
Later, when we roll into our sleeping bags and drift off to the scent of wood smoke, she walks. This ‘thing’ is nagging at her, like so many other ‘things’ have done in her past, where she won’t let go- can’t let go. On impulse, she strikes out into the water, like strong swimmers do, and then floats and faces the moon, which beams with benevolence. A new day will begin soon with its own blank page, yet to be written. Then the water shifts uncomfortably as a dark shape moves beneath, the size of a small country. And when it grasps it clings, and all her old horrors return, and ‘it’ is here in the water with a toxic mix of past, present, and impossible future. But it is here where the past replays itself constantly from a place where she can never quite break loose. With fixed determination, she dips beneath a wave, facing ‘it’ -him- grave-faced now as she watches the way this creature changes, constantly teasing, playing with her mind along with her body. All of her stories are merging, morphing, becoming one, where this time, The End will hopefully bring closure.
She feels an icy touch as his tentacles wrap and take her, as the water floods with colour, her colour, for it contains none of its own. This nightmare now owns her, envelops and invades her like a miasma, cold, grey, foul, sapping, with the knowledge that it will take her down. This harbinger of death, which throws up so many pictures as her life flashes by, frame by slow frame. It caresses her but does not soothe. All she has to do is succumb– give up, give in. So, she takes one final inhalation before it removes her to its own murky solitude. She knows that it has followed her all of her life, and now is in its element, where she is not.
In the morning, she’s thrown up on the beach as we all come running- too late. Her story is over, it’s gone. And something whispers from the still darkness of the water as the lights on the promenade switch themselves on and music strikes to begin in her name.
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