Chapter Six

The Horn of Ceto was a pretty thing. It was a small, pale iridescent pink shell that had black markings on it that looked like a very ancient language. There was something vaguely familiar about it but Melissa couldn’t put her finger on it. She didn’t think she’d ever seen it before but now it seemed she had. She turned it over and over in her hands.

 

They were in a seafood restaurant a few minutes from her parents’ house. Her shrimp linguini sat untouched in front of her but Domma’s dinner of fish and chips were nearly gone. She ate voraciously.

 

“What do we have to do now?” Melissa asked.

 

Domma looked up at the horn. There was a gleam in her eye, just for a second, then it was gone. Melissa missed it. She was looking at the horn.

 

“We take it to the home of the Eleiomomae,” she said. “And then, you blow it.”

 

“Where’s the Eleiomomae?” she asked.

 

“In the Everglades.”

 

Melissa had never been to the Everglades. Her parents weren’t outdoorsy people and the closest thing she’d ever gotten to nature was the beach. She’d always wanted to go camping, though. She’d always wanted to go to the Everglades and take one of the nature walks through the swamp land. Her parents, though, had repeatedly told her of all the horror stories about the area and eventually the subject had been dropped.

 

Had she always wanted to go because she felt some special kinship with the area? Did she know that she was from the Everglades? What did that even mean anyway? She wasn’t sure she was completely convinced that she wasn’t still drugged. That made slightly more sense to her and was the reason that she was still able to go along with all of this, that she was able to remain so calm through what had been a very strange day.

 

Yet, she couldn’t deny the feeling of exhilaration as she turned the car down Alligator Alley and started passing towns like Big Cypress and Immokalee. The sky here seemed larger and the clouds were large cotton balls with shadows underneath. There were only a few other cars running along the narrow highway through the dark swamplands on either side. Alligators, true to the name of the highway, were sunbathing on the banks of the primordial shores among the cypress knees and would silently slip into the emerald green water.

 

Melissa had a certain kinship with alligators and wasn’t afraid of them as other people seemed to be. When, a few years back, that picture came out of the Everglades of the python who’d eaten the alligator whole, the alligator had ripped through the side of the python, and both died, two giant beasts locked in mortal combat, she’d wanted to go to the Everglades even more. But, at that point, Ben had wanted to go to Arizona. She’d been miserable.

 

Now, she was here, running along next to the alligators in the swamp. She could, if she stopped the car and rolled down the windows, smell the earthy wetness of the ever-moist earth, hear the buzzing of mosquitoes that never bothered her, feel the wet humidity on her face.

 

She felt alive. Her hair, the green tendrils, floated jubilantly. And as much as she was still somewhat clinging to the idea that this, all this, was all a dream, an hallucination, she felt at home. More at home than she’d ever felt behind the wrought-iron gate of the gaudy mansion her parents lived at. She felt alive here.

 

“Here.”

 

Melissa obeyed Domma’s orders and pulled into a parking lot on the side of the road. It lead back to a boardwalk into the marshland. She got out of the car and stretched. The air was thick and wet and alive with noises that scared most people. Somewhere in the marshland a bull alligator was either defending his territory or mating. The deep booms startled some of the white egrets.

 

Melissa smiled.

 

She turned to Domma who was still in the car looking out over the marshland with a twisted look of disgust. She looked as if she were trying to get herself used to the idea that she would be unclogging a used toilet with her bare hands. Melissa felt slightly insulted and didn’t want to understand why.

 

“Are you coming?” she asked.

 

Domma nodded, took a deep breath, and stepped out of the car. For the first time since she’d met her, Domma looked uncertain. This was not her territory and she didn’t seem at all comfortable here. She led the way into the Everglades, following a trail that Melissa only saw after they’d been on it for a moment, but she seemed hesitant, even afraid. It was Melissa, for the first time, that knew, as if by instinct, where she was going and what the next step would bring.

 

The stinging insects were swarming around them but it seemed that neither Melissa nor Domma were affected by them. They landed but didn’t bite then flew off again looking for better blood. There were other dangers and annoyances in the swamp though. There were the saw palmettos with their razor sharp palm fronds that cut through clothing, the muck that sucked at their shoes, the heat that seemed almost oppressive.

 

To Melissa, though, the heat was nothing. She usually felt cold and now felt warm for the first time. Domma, however, was sweating, her face hot with exertion, and she’d started muttering to herself what seemed like nonsense. Melissa assumed she was cursing to some god that she’d never heard of. They continued on.

 

The Everglades is not actually a swamp, nor is it really a marshland. In fact, it’s a wholly unique ecosystem. The lower part of Florida has only been out of the ocean for a few hundred thousand years, before that, it was a coral reef more vast than Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Only recently, geologically speaking, did it rise from the ocean’s depths and on it’s surface grow mangroves and palm trees, cypress and poisonwood pines. It became dry land only in theory. Okeechobee often overran its banks and flooded the area with fresh water and hurricanes flooded it with salt. Interspersed with the periodic floods were times of relative drought when the muck would dry proving to be very

fertile.

 

It was the fertility of the ground that attracted men. It was the fertility that caused them to try to tame the Okeechobee and to raise the water levels so that farming year round could happen. Now, the vast flood plain was regulated to a small patch, a fraction of the land that it used to have, and huge cities like Miami and Hialeah grew up from the swamp.

 

Melissa knew this as she walked through the primordial swamp. She knew it and it hurt her to know it but the area was so beautiful and peaceful here, a land lost in the eddies of time, harkening back not to some nostalgic age of man but of giant lizards with terrible names, that she could only feel grateful that at least this part had been saved. In the darkness there were beasts that people wrote horror stories about. Giant alligators, the largest on record being seventeen feet five inches long, Florida panthers, and now huge pythons released by their owners, the largest being only slightly smaller than the alligator at fourteen feet.

 

Melissa, far from being afraid of these beasts, felt thrilled. She wished she could find one, to see for herself the awesome majesty of a creature so large and so old. Alligators that large, she always thought, must be wiser than the owls that were supposed to be so sagacious. And only the Everglades could be home to such a creature.

 

The Everglades were home to many creatures and kept them safe for thousands of years. When Europeans came in with their guns and diseases, she opened her doors to the Native peoples, offering them a place that they could live free. Many were still here, though their freedom was changed to cohabitation. It still housed and secluded the last remaining panthers.

 

Was it so strange to believe that it would also be the sanctuary of beings that had been written about for thousands of years and never seen? Melissa didn’t believe in Bigfoot sightings or in Nessie but the enchanted and eerily silent swamp, the strangeness of the day, made her feel open to explanations that had been previously deemed madness.

 

“Stop.”

 

Melissa stopped, nearly running into Domma, who’d stopped in the path. She crouched in the muck with a grimace and looked through the knees of a stand of cypress trees. Melissa felt a glimmer of excitement and she kneeled down as well. She couldn’t see anything for a moment. The sunlight here was filtered through the brown-green leaves and cast everything in a hazy auburn glow.

 

Something moved in a small area between three cypress trees. It flitted and was gone, a shadow of something, gone so quickly that she wasn’t sure she’d seen anything at all. She was about to ask Domma what she thought she saw when the thing flitted again and

this time she saw it.

 

The creature wasn’t human. In no way was it human. Yet, she had the impression that it was. It was too large and too diffuse to be human. It was a blackish green shape, a verdant shadow, that flitted between the trees and disappeared. There was the impression, though not the reality, of fluidity to it, like a sheet of water, only walking

upright.

 

Domma’s eyes were black in the shade of the trees and her hair was undulating violently. Her shark grin pulled her mouth back over sharp teeth. Suddenly, Melissa was afraid. She was crouched in the swamp an hours long hike away from Ben’s car with a woman who had either drugged her or who was really a powerful, and very angry, creature. Before she had time to think about what foolishness she’d gotten into, Domma turned to her and grabbed her arm.

 

“Eleiomomae!” she shouted. Her voice was no longer the voice of a woman but of a thunderous crash. It was the sound of a wave coming ashore during a hurricane. The swamp stilled. In the clearing ahead the shadow hesitated. As Melissa watched, the shadow solidified and transformed into a very tall woman. She was ugly in a beautiful way. Her skin was the russet brown of the cypress trees, craggy and deep like the bark, and her hair the tea-color of the water. She looked at Domma with fierceness in her eyes.

 

“Ceto,” she said.

 

Domma stepped into the clearing with Melissa held tight in one fist. Her eyes flashed defiance. The Eleiomomae looked at Melissa, blinked once, then, to Domma’s satisfaction, crumbled slightly. She shrank in size.

 

“Ellioae,” the woman said. She looked as if she were about to cry but then she looked at Domma and her face hardened.

 

“You have Ellioae, Ceto, and you may even have the Horn, but you can not make me do what you want, not as long as I live,” she said.

 

Domma threw her head back and laughed. It was the high, mocking, demanding laugh of the seagull.

 

“You’ll do whatever I want. I’m more powerful than you and all your kin,” she said.

 

As if mentioning the rest of the Eleiomomae was some sort of call, more people-creatures appeared from the darkness. They all looked, vaguely, like their surroundings. They were water people, and so almost formless, their shapes shifting and undulating slightly, but they were all distinct. As Melissa watched she could make out what part of the park each person was most at home in, which part was their domain. One old man, clearly, was at home with the spirits of the living dinosaurs, the alligators. His skin was gray-green and cracked and his eyes a violent yellow.

 

Domma seemed pleased that they were all here now. She swung around showing Melissa off. Her nails dug painfully into Melissa’s arm and Melissa was too shocked by the change in circumstances to even be afraid. She had no idea what was going on or who these people, who all seemed to recognize her and who all seemed to be slightly familiar, who were standing around were. Only the first woman, the cypress woman, seemed utterly familiar and Melissa had the impression that the woman’s name, her personal name, was Monnaie.

 

“I have found her and recovered the Horn,” Domma said. “It’s fitting that you should all be here to witness your destruction at the hands of the one that instigated this mutiny against me. You,” she pointed to a man that looked like a palmetto, “bring me my bones.”

 

The man, fresh green skin, rail thin, wispy, looked at the cypress woman. She made no indication whether he was to do as Domma said or not but he made the decision for himself. He seemed to melt in front of Melissa’s eyes and she could see him moving through the swamp. The cypress woman didn’t watch him leave. Her eyes remained

trained on Melissa.

 

“You are very strong, Ceto, but when we combine our strength, we are stronger. You can’t make us change our decision. No matter what.”

 

The last sentence was said with a slight crack in her voice. As if she wished that she could relent. Melissa felt for the woman though she had no idea what was going on or what her role in all this was. She stared around at the faces, so human and yet not at all human, with expressions of determination and also pity. She wondered at the pity and at whom it was aimed.

 

“You’re a fool. All of you. All of the Eleiomomae! That’s why your numbers are

dwindling and you’re all getting weaker. You thought, you really thought, you could capture me - me! And make the humans understand. They understand nothing. They understand only what they want to. Your gamble failed. And now, I’ll be free, and you’ll know my anger.”

 

Domma wrenched Melissa’s arm and twisted her around, grabbing the Horn from where she’d put it around her neck, she yanked it off. At that moment, the palmetto man came back with a handful of bones in his arms. They were the bones of a human, Melissa could see a skull gleaming too white from the top of the pile, but of a human hideously malformed. The skull had a hole in the center where something like a horn could fit. The palmetto man put the bones on the ground and the others stared at him with loathing. With bloodthirsty triumph, Domma picked up the bones and arranged them to make a skeleton and thrust the Horn into the hole in the skull.

 

Then, she faced the cypress woman.

 

“Sing the song, Monnaie,” she said.

 

It was a command and there was no breaching her authority. Though Melissa had no idea of the song or the consequences she found herself wanting to obey. Monnaie shook her head.

 

“I won’t. What you want is impossible. It will kill us all, including yourself,” she said.

 

Domma laughed.

 

“What I want is to crush the humans that dared to pollute my oceans, that use the waters as a garbage dump, that kill my animals. Any of you should want the same.”

 

Some of the others, a golden skinned man with pale luminescent eyes that lurked in the shadows, seemed to agree, but others looked at her with loathing. Monnaie stood her ground.

 

“The humans have harmed me as well. They aren’t innocent. But, they are a part of nature as much as we are, as much as any creature. We can’t annihilate one out of hatred. I’d like to get rid of the pythons in my own area but I can’t.”

 

Domma’s eyes narrowed into slits.

 

“The pythons are not as destructive as the humans. What creature is? What creature can spread this much suffering? Sing the song.”

 

“I will not.”

 

Suddenly, Domma smiled. Her teeth were now long and jagged and there were rows and rows of them all the way back. She turned to Melissa who stared at her with wide-eyed horror.

 

“I’ll kill her, Monnaie. I’ll rip her flesh and I’ll make her suffer.”

 

Monnaie turned pale and she seemed to want to intervene. Her eyes turned to Melissa’s and there was unspeakable agony in those eyes.

 

“I can’t,” Monnaie said in a whisper.

 

Melissa was on the ground, her arm caught in the death grip of Domma. Only she wasn’t Domma, anymore, she was Ceto. The image of Ceto as she would be if the song were sung was conjured in Melissa’s imagination. A terrible monster, half shark, half fury, a thousand feet tall and angry. The skeleton was near her, close enough for her to touch it and smell the salt stench of it. She could touch it.

 

Before Domma could move, Melissa grabbed the Horn and wrenched if from the skull, she kicked the bones and they scattered into the water, sinking. Domma let out a horrible banshee scream and transformed as much as she could into the monster that she was. Her flesh became the pale gray of a shark’s underbelly and her eyes black discs, her hair black and sharp, and her fingers lashed out with poisoned talons. She lurched herself at Melissa who shrank back, preparing for a death she hardly understood, but the blow never came.

 

Instead, she felt warm water covering her but not making her wet. She looked up and there was a wall of tea-colored water between her and the hideous monster of Ceto. Even trapped in the human size, her powers contained by the Eleiomomae, Ceto was a terrible sight and only barely contained by Monnaie. The other Eleiomomae shape-shifted as well, each holding the terrible creature who thrashed and bit and clawed at them, her screams drifting into the swamp.

 

Melissa held the Horn in her hand and didn’t know what to do. Any minute now, Ceto would prove stronger than the weaker water spirits, she would escape and this would happen again. All of the water spirits were busy locked in the battle. She knew that it was this moment that would determine it all but she had no idea what to do.

 

She looked at the Horn. It looked like a shell. A pretty pink shell with writing on it in some ancient language. She thought that they’d blow into it. Isn’t that what Domma said she’d do? Was that the beginning of the song? If there was no song, then, there could be no Ceto. With a flash of insight, Melissa smashed the Horn against a cypress knee. It splintered into three pieces.

 

Seeing this, Ceto let out a howl of rage and sank to the ground. Defeated. She wept in impotent anger. Two of the Eleiomomae took her and dragged her into the swamp and the rest disappeared. Only the cypress woman, Monnaie, stayed with Melissa.

 

Melissa stood and handed Monnaie the Horn fragments.

 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do,” she said.

 

Monnaie took the pieces of Horn and threw them in the water with the bones. She smiled at Melissa and touched her face.

 

“Ellioae,” she said. “You did what was necessary.”

 

“Is she dead, then?”

 

“Ceto? No, darling, Ceto can’t die. At least, not by our hand. She’s much more

powerful. In fact, it’s her anger that floods the Everglades on occasion, we’re beholden to her anger. No, we can only trap her in a human body for a few years.”

 

Melissa felt like the world was spinning. She wanted to sit. She felt like she hadn’t sat for years and that the whole world had stopped making sense. The woman standing next to her was watching her, waiting.

 

“You’ve grown so,” she said. “When we left you with that family, we hoped you’d return, but you’ve grown so. You don’t remember me.”

 

Melissa shook her head. The woman nodded and looked off into the swamp. There were tears in her eyes.

 

“I understand. Why would you, of course. But you have to understand. We were taking a risk, a gamble. We needed a human to see the plight of humans on the Everglades and so we hoped your nature would change them.”

 

Monnaie smiled at Melissa.

 

“Did it work? Are your adoptive parents conservationists?” she asked.

 

Melissa shook her head.

 

“Oh.”

 

“But there are others,” she said. “People care.”

 

Monnaie nodded.

 

“I care,” Melissa said.

 

Monnaie smiled, then laughed.

 

“Of course you care. You’re my daughter. You’re Eleiomomae. You’re my Ellioae. A changeling. You aren’t human, Ellioae, we sent you to live with the humans so that we might have a chance to change them. Ceto wanted to kill them all but we wanted to change them just a little. We need humans in a lot of ways. I suppose that she was right, though, our gamble didn’t pay off.”

 

Monnaie moved off into the swamp and Melissa watched her leave. She didn’t know what to say. She needed some time to think. The whole world had changed and she wasn’t sure what exactly had happened. She sat down on the cypress knee and stared into the water where the deformed skull grinned back up at her.

 

She stayed there for a long time trying to find some meaning in the days’ events. The sun dipped low and the night sounds of the swamp started to be heard. She wasn’t afraid. She knew that, no matter how late she stayed in the swamp, she would be safe here. Nothing would harm her here.

 

She was home.

Author's Note

This was supposed to be a short story. This is a rough draft so there are probably grammatical and continuity errors, please point them out as well as any tips to shorten this. Thanks.