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  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  IN THE MIDST OF THE SEA

  “Dark, emotional, and incredibly creepy … In the Midst of the Sea is a haunting debut from a talented new voice.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  “Strong characterizations and startling imagery give powerful dimensions to this riveting novel. A very compelling read.”

  —James Hanna, author of Call Me Pomeroy, The Siege, and A Second, Less Capable Head: and Other Rogue Stories

  “A pitch-perfect blend of psychological realism and horror that will appease fans of literary fiction and horror alike. Trust me, this novel will haunt you long after you put it down.”

  —duncan b. barlow, author of Of Flesh and Fur, The City, Awake, and A Dog Between Us

  “Sean Padraic McCarthy’s lyrical gift contributes substantially to this literally haunting tale. Long after the reader has turned the final page, McCarthy’s portrayals of both heart and spirit will continue to make their presence felt.”

  —Toni Graham, author of The Suicide Club

  “A beautifully written and multifaceted novel … a detailed exploration of the impact of isolation on the human psyche, reminiscent of Stephen King’s novel The Shining, but with lively twists and unique notions that make McCarthy’s characters and story stand on their own. It really is a book that you won’t want to close until the story is over.”

  —Michael Hathaway, publisher, Chiron Review

  “Dysfunctional families, creepy dolls, dangerous ghosts, In the Midst of the Sea creates compelling characters whose tragic lives will haunt you.”

  —Alisha Costanzo, author and editor, Transmundane Press

  IN THE MIDST OF THE SEA

  Sean Padraic McCarthy

  Pace Press

  Fresno, California

  In the Midst of the Sea

  Copyright © 2019 by Sean Padraic McCarthy.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Pace Press

  An imprint of Linden Publishing

  2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721

  (559) 233-6633 / (800) 345-4447

  PacePress.com

  Pace Press and Colophon are trademarks of Linden Publishing, Inc.

  ISBN 978-1-61035-334-2

  135798642

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

  This is a work of fiction. The names, places, characters, and incidents in this book are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental. Whenever real celebrities, places, or businesses have been mentioned or appear in this novel, they have been used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McCarthy, Sean Padraic, author.

  Title: In the midst of the sea / Sean Padraic McCarthy.

  Description: Fresno, California : Pace Press, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019009350 | ISBN 9781610353342 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Ghost stories. | Horror fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.C34586 I58 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009350

  I used to think that after we are gone

  there’s nothing, simply nothing at all.

  Then who’s that wandering by the porch

  again and calling us by name?

  Whose face is pressed against the frosted pane?

  What hand out there is waving like a branch?

  By way of reply, in that cobwebbed corner

  a sunstruck tatter dances in the mirror.

  —Anna Akhmatova, “March Elegy”

  The trouble with our times is that

  the future is not what it used to be.

  —Paul Valery

  This book is for my mother and father, Mary and Richard McCarthy, who introduced me to books, and told me my first stories.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  1

  Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts

  1994

  Diana tucked her chin to her chest and cut down the alleyway that opened into Cottage City. She could hear music coming from the kitchen in the restaurant to her left, but it was still early morning, and the restaurant didn’t open until noon. And sometimes, this time of year, it didn’t open at all. If the owner wanted to take a day off there weren’t many people banging at the door, looking to get in. There was an enormous steel pot lying on its side in the alleyway, steaming in the cold November air, and it looked as though it had just been dropped, left there to drain. Soup or broth of some sort. The door to the kitchen was open as Diana passed, just the wooden screen still in place, and Diana could see a squat, dark man cutting onions inside, the flat of his hand pressing down on the backside of the blade. A small transistor radio beside him. An old song from the seventies. Melissa Manchester, “Midnight Blue.”

  The man didn’t look her way, and Diana kept moving. A faded summer tourist map of Oak Bluffs blew by her in the breeze. She turned and watched as it caught on the steps to the kitchen, hung there for a moment tittering, and then moved on. Most of Circuit Avenue was closed for the winter and there were few people about. Even less in Cottage City. Trinity Park. You couldn’t see Trinity Park from the street. Hidden behind the buildings and stores of Circuit Avenue and the hotels and homes across from the waterfront, it was its own enclosed little village with the open-air tabernacle at its center. The tabernacle was empty now, too, row upon row of benches vacant and cold, and the pulpit and lights long gone from the stage, the Revival at rest, merely the echoes of the voices and testimonies of summer’s preachers and singers hanging in the wind. If Diana listened closely she sometimes felt as if she could still hear them, or glimmers of them. Even in the dead of winter. Nothing ever disappeared completely, not sights, sounds.

  People?

  There was an old man watching her from the veranda of one of the gingerbread houses. A white house with red-and-green jigsaw trim. The sight of him startled her; it was rare you saw anybody in these houses this time of year. The gingerbread houses formed a circle, lining the road that curved around the tabernacle, and they spread off into the distance, forming their own separate village. All small, looking like dollhouses, with carved wood doilies, and cantilevered balconies, pulpit porches, surmounting the front and side verandas. Double doors in front, matching windows to either side. It was a fairyland of sorts, and in the good wea
ther there would be flowers in the window boxes of all the houses, and flowers smothering the gardens of the lawns, everything alive with color, the porches cluttered with furniture. Rockers and tables, and an occasional kerosene lamp, or paper lantern, for decoration. But not now. Now all the flowers were dead, the earth brown and gray, and all the porches were empty except for the house with the old man, and he wasn’t supposed to be here. He looked angry, and he was speaking to her, pointing. Shouting. But Diana couldn’t hear a word he was saying.

  She stopped on the street, not twenty feet away. The man had a white beard and was bald on top. A high collar and bow tie, and long dated suit. A costume. It had to be a costume. He slapped his open palm against the rail. And then, before she had the chance to look away, he faded. Gone. The veranda empty, the rocking chair vanished, and only a rusted steel cowbell remaining. Clanging slowly in the early winter breeze.

  Diana’s heart stuttered. She looked at the porch a moment longer, half expecting him to reappear, wanting him to—so at least she would know she wasn’t seeing things—and not wanting him to, all in the same breath. But there was nothing, the village silent, and then the cowbell came to a stop. But he had been there—she was sure of it. Diana turned and picked up her pace, now just wanting to get home and not wanting to look back. If she looked back and he was there again, she wasn’t sure if she would be able to take this route from town anymore. And she might find herself one step closer to affirming the belief that had been hovering about her for most of the past year, ever since they had moved to the island. The belief that she was losing her mind.

  It was better once she left the park, and she stopped to catch her breath. Now back in the open, beyond the oaks, and the wind moving in off the harbor and across Sunset Pond, a car roared past her as she reached the street, and blared its horn. She hadn’t realized she was in the middle of the road.

  Diana lived on the hill up beyond Trinity Park, above Sunset Pond, the road and sidewalk traversing the hill crumbling from salt and time. Her own home was on a dirt road, hidden by dense growth and trees in the summer, but now just appearing set back in the stark winter landscape. There were small communities like this all over the island, communities that would disappear once everything turned green and began to grow, and then reappear again in winter.

  Ford was on the front porch, doing something with his telescope. He had a drink on the table beside him, whiskey and ice. Diana had thought he would be sleeping still, but if he was up now, it meant he would be up for the day. At least until eight o’clock or so when he would lie down to get a couple hours’ sleep before going in for his shift at eleven. Ford worked at the post office, sorting mail throughout the night. He always drank before going in, and sometimes he drank during his shift, and sometimes he would bring some of his co-workers back to the house to drink and play darts if things were slow. Sometimes they would smoke a joint, and once in a while he would coax Diana out of bed to have her fix them something to eat. “This is my supper,” he would say. “I’ve got to eat some time.”

  Now he barely looked up as she started across the lawn. Ford was good at that—seeing you without acknowledging you. They had been married a little over a year and a half, and Diana was twenty-four.

  She stopped, put her bag down on the porch. Ford’s eyes looked tired. Heavy, hooded, and red. Tired eyes weren’t good with Ford. She thought about telling him what had happened, what she had seen, but then decided to keep it quiet. He would either laugh at her and call her crazy, or if he was in a bad mood, he might get angry; Ford usually didn’t like to talk about anything like that, calling it all a “load of crap.”

  “Is there some type of celestial thing scheduled?” she asked him now. He was adjusting the lens. Ford had been watching the stars for years, and Diana had saved up the money to buy him this telescope two Christmases earlier, their first Christmas. Diana was still working then—had just earned her RN—and the telescope cost her two weeks’ pay. He had bought her a fourteen-karat gold ring, set with an amethyst. A dozen long-stemmed red roses. Now he picked his cigarette up from the small table beside him, still not looking at her. Took a drag and blew the smoke through his nose.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Where’s Sam?” she asked.

  “No idea,” he said. He blew some imaginary dust off the lens, held it up to his eye. “Upstairs, I guess.”

  Diana opened the door and put one foot on the threshold.

  Ford still hadn’t looked up. “Diana,” he said, “I told her if she messes with those dolls again, I’m going to smack her.”

  Diana was silent. Still unnerved from Trinity Park, and not wanting a battle.

  “I found the one with red velvet dress in the back alcove earlier,” he said. “Her face was sticky.”

  The dolls. The dolls had come with the house, relics, antiques, from the nineteenth century. China dolls with real hair and fancy Victorian garb. Ford obsessed over the dolls because he was convinced they were worth a great deal—and he blew a gasket every time Samantha went near one of them. He had never hit Sam, and Diana didn’t think he would, and yet, she wasn’t completely sure. She was no longer sure about a lot of things. She had told him several times that he should lock them up if her was going to make such a big deal out of it, she would buy him a glass hutch. But he insisted that he wanted to keep them out on display. “They’re part of the house,” he said. “They belong out in the open.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” she said now.

  Ford dragged on his cigarette again. “You better.”

  Diana shut the door behind her, sealing off the island and Ford. A fire was going in the fireplace in the den off to the right. Gas. Modern. They had it put it in just a few months back, replacing the original, Ford complaining there was nowhere to cut wood on the island. It was one of the few modern things in the house. They had kept the original fireplace in the dining room. Everything else was old and everything was quiet once the door was shut in the winter. The house was always quiet, and always clean, and that was how he liked it. Both qualities that were broken only if and when Ford decided to break them. And one could always lead to the other. Coloring papers left on the floor by Samantha, a bottle of ketchup left on the counter, and of course, the dolls. Anything out of order could lead to a tirade, and a tirade almost always ended up in a mess. Broken dishes, broken doors. Diana stood in the foyer. She could hear the voice of the little girl upstairs talking to someone, talking to her dolls. And then for a moment she could hear someone else, a voice distant and pretty, and quietly singing.

  2

  The house was a larger version of the gingerbread cottages in Trinity Park—the campground—and it had been in Ford’s family since the mid-nineteenth century, his father’s side. According to family lore, a cousin of Ford’s great-great-grandfather who had built it. It was a light gray, with dark blue trim. A wraparound porch, a wolf with a rose in his mouth carved into the center of the latticework, with more roses carved high in the corners. There was a cantilevered balcony above the front porch, and another off Diana and Ford’s bedroom overlooking the cemetery. Double doors, reminiscent of the entrance to a church, opened onto the front porch, and the downstairs windows, too, were shaped like those of a church, running from ceiling to floor. One on the side of the house faced the rising sun. There was even a stained glass window. The steps needed to be fixed; one of the boards, rotten from time, shifted every time you stepped on it, and Diana had yet to take in the flower boxes for the year. Wilted vines and dried, fragile petals.

  Diana and Ford had moved in nearly a year ago, just months after they were married. The house had been passed along to Ford’s great-aunt, Dorothy, and she had no direct descendants. A woman over ninety, small and crooked, with wispy white hair and opaque glasses. Ford still kept one framed picture of her in the kitchen, and another in the dining room, this one black-and-white. A younger version of the woman, taken on her wedding day. Her husband was a fisherman, Diana had heard, and she
had lost him during the hurricane of ’38, and never remarried. Both Diana and Ford had grown up on the South Shore of Massachusetts, and Ford had come down to the Vineyard sometimes in the good weather to help the old aunt out around the yard, trimming hedges and mowing the lawn, once even building a shed, and that was why the house had been left to him. He had seven siblings, but he no longer spoke to all but one of them, nor did he speak to his parents. “That old bat thought I was the cat’s meow,” he had said to Diana after the aunt had passed. “I liked her, too, though. She was pretty witty, and she made me laugh. And now we have a piece of property we could flip and sell for a million dollars if we want to, and we don’t have to worry about your mother knocking on our door every five minutes.”

  Now, in bed, Diana still couldn’t clear her head of the image of the man in Cottage City, his silent shouts. She replayed the image of him fading into nothing over and over in her head, and it still made no sense. Perhaps if she had been in bed then, she could pin it all a dream—she had read about “lucid dreams” during a neuropsych course she took during nursing school, about waking to apparitions in your bedroom, apparitions that were nothing more than projected dreams, the awake portion of the brain a few steps ahead of the portion still asleep—but she hadn’t been in bed, and she hadn’t been dreaming.

  She peeked at the clock. It was ten thirty. Almost time for Ford to go to work. He put his feet on the floor, and reached over to light a cigarette. He reeked of booze, and Diana wondered how much he had drunk. She had talked to him enough times about drinking before work, but it never got anywhere. Sometimes he would laugh, and sometimes he would snap, but it was always the same thing. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he would say, “I drink. I sleep. Then I work. Then I pay the bills.” And then sometimes he might wink. “If you want to start paying the bills, sweetie, just let me know.” But tonight she hadn’t confronted him. She had gone shopping over in Vineyard Haven with Samantha after dinner, and Ford was asleep when they got home. That much had been good. That way there had been no questions. Who was she buying for? How much had she spent? And it gave her the opportunity to hide things. Most of it in the cellar. Anything she ever wanted kept hidden, she kept in the cellar because Ford would never find it there. Ford didn’t like the cellar.