Harold Black, The Nature of Tidal Phenomena: How Jaws Beyond Death Retreat and Advance the Seas

We were wrong about the moon.

There are tides which exist beyond her influence. For the coming and going of those waters leaves a shadow, and the shadows of that tide are ruled by a titan of rot. This is why the moon is bare: each phase of darkness runs its teeth along those craters and valleys to wilt whatever lushness may attempt to grow there.

The Rotjaw, as we call this female alligator specimen, defies the physiology of any known aquatic reptile, or creature descended from “living" taxonomical orders. Putrefaction has encompassed her skull, leaving it bare and smooth. It is easily capable of crushing three men. The jaws instill in one a paleolithic fear, something felt by the first mammals to witness their parents eviscerated by reptiles.

Moreso, the exposed skull is a tuning fork for energies unknown to man. The inept refer to it as electricity, though necrophagic energy is more appropriate.

A constant tearing of physics roils inside the reptile's abdomen. I believe she has ingested some sliver of cosmic firmament. This allows disease and organic compounds from a “Land of the Dead" to summon themselves around the Rotjaw when provoked. This black primordia may be the source of all known decay.

Some madmen have amplified the abomination's “creative" energies by means of an electric cage. But no cage can contain such a mother for long. For the Rotjaw has tread lands beyond extinction and returned with physics that repulse my scientific sensibilities; some fragment of God's abandoned grace that's now found the fertile loam of our souls to fester in, to make itself home.

+++

Enola's Diary

Day 2: 1812

Mama taught me to act like a queen, and a queen does not wish people dead.
The Redcoats invaded Fort Saint Philip during the hurricane. They trampled every small creature I've raised: my turtles, newts, frogs, snakes. Mamma'd be happy about that, always said people'd know we're poor if I played in the dirt. But they shot her. So I rowed the boat out to sea so hard I broke my shoulder.

Better to drown than be British.

The blockade fleet was confused in the storm. Their cannons fired at each other. I saw a sailor take an iron ball to the chest. He sloshed into the rain and misted red and covered me. I could taste him.

But I wished him dead. He died. And for going against my teachings, I've been cursed.
In the center of the wind and rain something poked its gigantic eye through the storm. Like a gigantic insect. It blinked. And it swept my rowboat underwater. I came out the other side to somewhere else. It's not home.

It's not any place at all.

Day 15: 1812

The trees are wrong here and I blame them for everything. The beetles scream at me from the banks of this forever swamp.

I don't need to eat in this place. I can remember thirst, the feeling of a cold glass in July. But I don't feel it here either.

The marsh channels change direction when I'm not looking. There are shadows that move on their own and flick long tails. They look like the shadows of alligators.

Day 25: 1812

The Redcoats are here. They found me and started shooting. All I have is a pen, these pages, and of course, the only egg I could save from the fort.

+++

Enola's Diary

Day 4,345: 1812?

One of the smaller Redcoat ships got “swept" here with me. Their cannon is always firing. They planted their flag and think they've claimed this land, too. A squad of them found me, called me a witch, raised their rifles.

But those gator shadows swam up and ate them from toe to head. They rotted and turned into puddles of black.

Day 14,677: ??

I'm not growing old. My mind is growing wide with holes, and teeth are filling those holes right up. That's the only word for it. Teeth.

The spirits of those reptiles follow me like a parade. It feels like they want to crown me.

Day 28,900: ??

It hatched. The shadows of those hundred alligators slid onto the rowboat and wriggled into the egg. Then lightning, lots of lighting.

She's a baby alligator. I'm calling her Princess.

Day: ??

Princess was born wrong. She's so angry. I watched her grow the length of my arm in a few minutes, or days. She burrowed into one of the lost soldiers and ate him from the inside out. She likes me. I put the sailor's funny hat on her skull, one with nice gold trim and vellum.

Then I rode her for the first time.

Day: ??

Today we attacked the boat. I practiced holding my breath for a week, a month, a year. I swam slow down the channel, across a river, an ocean, whatever it is here. And I held onto the bottom of their ship. Princess follows me wherever I go.

The boat rocked like a crib as she ate them and broke the thing in half. I sipped the blood that leaked through the hull boards.

Wish Mama could see me now. I'm gonna be a queen here.

+++

Enola's Diary

Day: ???

I won't ever sleep again. Even though Princess tries to sing me to sleep with her coos. They rumble the water so hard my body goes numb when I float beside her. That's the closest I get to sleep. Being paralyzed in her wake, sliding quietly under the moon that won't move.

Day: ???

The soil rotted the flesh off Princess's snout. It's cold when I kiss it. Her skin feels like dead flowers. But her blood can bloom in the way things bloom here, with black sickness and bubbles that are fun to pop with a stick.

If the bubbles touch your skin, it stings you and your eyes go all silver.

Day: ???

Princess won't stop biting at the sky. I tried crawling in her mouth to stop her, but she wouldn't let me. Something in our home is changing.

Day: ???

Another ship has come. It's unlike any I've ever seen. It has a big wheel of paddles that spin. Princess smells the blood of people on it. She growls and I know she thinks two of them are dangerous.

Day: ???

They took her. They took her away. They took her away from me and did something that has ripped the sky in half and my heart in two and I will not forgive them.

Day: ???

I'll be alone forever. I wish I could drown.

Day: ????

A woman with hair as white as the moon found me. Her eyes are blacker than the dirt. She wants to be friends, so I'm giving her my diary. She said she can bring me back to Princess. But I won't be the same. Princess won't be the same.

I wonder, when a queen dies here, what kind of flowers grow on her grave?

+++

Algiers Ice Repair Invoice
Statement #0234
Supervising Electrician: Frederick Dellowit

If miracles exist, we've made one here.

When Mrs. Carmichael got trapped in the cage around the alligator, she flashed into lightning, a screaming, human lightning. I've never seen lightning crawl before, but she did, it did, and the gator bit her, roiled her current through its veins. I think she's trapped inside the cage now.

I can smell her scratching through the copper.

The cage was built to channel electricity from enough field coils, alternators, and makeshift voltaic piles to power a town. The Relic promised me this would work. It promised to show me truth and fame and discovery.

It promised me my name would be remembered.

The alligator's “animal electricity" is generated by rot. I've learned this through the jolts of its arcs tasting me. They are diseased, organic lightning.

No amount of shooting could stop the alligator, not with that girl commanding it from shore. The thing swiped down the columns that support the hurricane deck and caved the roof. It electrified the whole ship.

We're trapped now. We're all evaporating in a moment of time that stretches as slow as the moon moves. All that will be left is this invoice, my scientific legacy.

I think this creature will never die. Its decay will come in seasons.

This alligator will have ten thousand lives because of what we've done. Each time a storm bolt strikes a wayward cow, a sailboat, a miner who stopped at the throat of the mountain to smell a flower-it will be the jaws of this thing finding a home.

I'll name this energy: Arc Bloom. I hope it makes something beautiful out of all of you.

+++

Reptilian's Journal
1895 July,
Trail Scent: Loam - Pear-Swelter - Mulberry Ash

I licked the open spines of each reptile I caught. Kissed their eyes. Carved my symbol work onto them. Cast my wishes onto each yellow, wet bone. I was the last thing they saw when they died and sank to that place where the worst of worst men are trapped forever, fiddling their knives.

I sent them there to find the one: the grail of gator kind that sludged down troughs of swamp before man took form from clay, learned to spit and scalp. I sent them alligators to prepare their queen for me, feed themselves to the birth jaws from whence they came.

And they've done my work well. They obeyed me as an animal obeys the direction of blood in the water. They followed my will and brought her to me.

She's a big one.

Attempt One: lured her to the Mint Parish Baptism. Bit the preacher and sent him flying with his arms out like a cross. Boiled the rest of them alive when she purged her shackles. Her rot's a hot black tar that sparks lightning underwater. Smells like incense. Made me sneeze n' my bolt missed.

Attempt Two: made waxed dynamite, strapped it to a broke-legged horse, floated it downstream. She bit it half in two and bloomed to burn them equine entrails. She flung the dynamite off. Almost popped me instead.

Attempt Three: caught her alone at night. Just nipping at the stars. Coulda jabbed her with my lance, got it over with. But she growled deep, and it comforted me like singing to a child. It was something beautiful, and I don't even know what that word means anymore.

So I let her go this once. I wanted her to do it again.