Neptune’s Claim by Brad Kelechava
The first splash was like dunking your face into a bed of nails. After the water filled the hollow channels of his ears, Howard shook for a moment, brushing aside any possibility for shock, and prepared for his first lap.
Howard rarely allotted any time to ponder what petri dish substances found their way into the public pool, but they were little concern to him. After a long day’s work, he only cared about two things when it came to his workout: completing his laps–thirty five to be exact, not a violently aggressive pursuit, but a modest and rigorous half-mile–and being able to swim in his own path.
This was a challenge, since–overlooking the possibility that the common swimmer at the YMCA swallowed around one pint of substances released from other swimmers’ bodies–the pool got pretty goddamn crowded. A perpetual broiler of swimming classes, swim team practices, and aged habitual swimmers hell-bent on completing one hundred laps without any regard for whoever they stampeded with their flippers, spit, and skin flakes, 6:30PM was a shit time to swim at the Y.
This Monday was especially fortunate, however. At this moment–6:31PM to be exact–Howard was the only person in the pool. In fact, other than one lifeguard, inadequately positioned and unaware to prevent any life-threatening aquatic issue, he was the only person in the entire room.
It felt good. Howard pushed off the wall of the pool, his lungs swelling with a deep breath. After the alarming sensation of plunging into the water subsided–he had been frequenting this particular pool four days a week for the past two months and still checked the pockets of his bathing suit for the phantom concern of losing his waterproof phone to waterlogging–Howard powered through a freestyle stroke in the center of two lanes.
After his first lap, Howard adjusted his goggles and scanned the room. There wasn’t a peep. The lifeguard’s face was buried in her phone. Howard readjusted his goggles and just went for it, even attempting his own sloppily handled Michael Phelps flip on his next change of laps. His right ankle just barely scraped the side of the pool.
It was easy to shake off. After checking that his silly flip wasn’t rough enough to draw blood, Howard continued on.
The thought of blood dominated his next lap, inciting one of those memories that took place so long ago that it hardly seemed true. His childhood home had a pool. It was nowhere as big as the one at the Y, but it was sizable enough to feel like the ocean when he was a boy. One Saturday, the neighbors came over for a swim, and they were messing around on the diving board.
Above all else, his mother had been adamant about one thing when it came to the pool: if you used the diving board, make sure you jumped far enough to prevent your head from hitting the board. It seemed like a silly thing, one of those warnings a mother picks up on the daily news but never attempts to fact check–DEET causes cancer, eggs are bad for you, drivers behind your car flash their high-beams as part of a gang initiation before they run you off the road and blow your brains out–so Howard never thought much of it.
But this girl changed his perception, his neighbor–O’Neal was their last name. Good Irish family, with cheeks awfully rosy even for a summertime afternoon. He couldn’t recall her first name.
He and the other guys had just thrown out a variety of moves–can openers, 360s, barrel rolls, you name it–and the O’Neal girl wanted to do something impressive. For her, however, impressive was a pencil.
One of the simple moves when it came to the art of the diving board, nobody expected it to be much of a challenge for the girl, but, being a visitor to the household, she was unaware of the basic rule: the mother’s law of distance.
After taking a light spring–far from a jump–the O’Neal girl’s head thumped like a baseball getting hit out of the park. She sank like a bag of stones. It took a moment before the blood came. Rising from the depths of the nine-foot pit, the chlorinated pink had permeated throughout the pool enough by the time the boys fished her out and got the water out of her lungs that Howard was terrified it might attract sharks.
Recalling that fear, Howard looked around the depths of the lap pool at the Y. His vision was limited, but he was confident that there weren’t any sharks.
It was just him.
The crest of the fourth lap was typically the moment when his chest tightened. It wasn’t a shortness of breath or a rising temperature in the lining of his surprisingly feeble lungs, but it still left him winded and in need of a break. Today, having found a stride rare to his aquatic journeys, that fourth lap came and went. His mind, which, unlike his body, was running instead of swimming, only processed this new feat after his shoveling arms had propelled him into his sixth lap.
Maybe he wasn’t so out of shape after all. Maybe he would pass forty today. On practically any swim day, Howard was shamed by the splashing troves of aging, overweight men and women able to carry their bodies forward for miles, while he crapped out after just a few laps. In those moments, when wrinkled old fishmen waddled speedily just behind his heels, he only had one desire: to get out.
Sometimes, though, everything just clicked. When that happened–in the moments when Howard could practically feel his hands and feet morph into fins and the surrounding water leak into an extension of his body–he was prepared for an aquatic eternity.
Things were so perfect that he didn’t take the time to wipe the steam off his goggles. This was a perfunctory action of his–one that began as a last-ditch effort to catch his breath in a less-embarrassing way but had grown into something as habitual as filling his lungs with air.
It was coming up. It always came up–there was no way to skip an entire number when counting by a single integer. Building managers tried to fool themselves by taking that number off their plans and erasing it from elevator panels. 13. The unlucky one. Something to do with Christ or Loki–in truth, Howard really didn’t know. He just knew it was unlucky, and, as his muscles strained to pull his body to the opposite side of the pool, that span–the same distance that he had done twelve times prior–seemed to get longer with each struggle, like those stairs to the final boss in that old Mario game.
After finishing his thirteenth lap, Howard caught his breath.
Something caught his attention. The pool now had another patron. Any person in their right mind, when entering a public pool occupied by only one person, would select all but one lane.
This guy had chosen the one wrong lane. Just to make sure it wasn’t some peculiar mirage, Howard wiped his foggy goggles. He wasn’t mistaken. There was someone there.
Howard permitted his stare to remain for only a second before submerging and paddling himself forward once again. Whoever this jerk was, he’d have to get out of the way. If this guy had any brains–and Howard hoped he had at least some droplets of gray matter under his skull–he would swim in the next lane. Howard didn’t even need to check–the lifeguard would see to their safety if this asshole swam in his lane.
He approached the center of the pool at a rapid rate, resisting the urge to bob his head out of the water for a peak. Such an effort would be useless, he knew, as it would throw Howard out of his groove only to reveal that the guy had taken another lane.
So, he shoveled himself forward, feeling his lungs bellow with enough air to permit him to the other side. Then he felt the crash.
It was more startling than painful, but it still hurt. Howard froze in his tracks and reacted by rubbing the top of his head. The man, wearing neither goggles nor a required swimming cap, gazed at him emptily. His head, a pale ball splotched with pink, was raised like an otter in the water.
Howard looked over to the side of the pool. There was no lifeguard in sight. Damn girl was there a minute ago. Just because it was only his life at risk didn’t give her the right to slack off.
He would have to give her a piece of his mind. But he needed to get out of this pool first.
“Sorry about that,” Howard muttered to the man who held most of the blame for their accidental altercation before paddling off to his initial destination. Concerned more with expedience than the burn of continuing his workout, Howard forgot to inhale before taking his final plunge. Due to this neglect, by the time he beached at the other end of the pool, he coughed wildly, and his overused lungs attempted to expel the droplets of chlorinated water that had found a new home in their air pockets.
He turned around. The pale man was standing in the center of the pool, his pale eyes locked on Howard.
Howard had had enough of this. He thrusted himself out of the water and stepped over to the showers, letting the instantly-piping hot water tumble over his body.
This was, as always, a sublime feeling, as the steaming water blended with the chlorinated liquid that coated his body before cleansing him from his workout.
The other shower turned on.
Howard turned to see the focused eyes of the pale man. His teeth–a disorganized scattering of white bones–remained visible in an expression that wasn’t quite a smile. Water drizzled over his ivory body, falling along an interconnected circuitry of pink veins etched into his skin.
The pale man’s stare persisted.
“You know,” Howard began in a futile attempt to cut the awkwardness, “you really should watch where you’re swimming. Head injuries are serious in the pool.” Howard rubbed the back of his head reflexively, thinking back to the incident one minute ago, although he found his mind drifting to that poor girl who almost drowned all those years ago.
The pale man said nothing. Even his stare was silent. It was endless, though.
Howard switched off the shower, feeling his skin chill the moment he lost contact with the hot water. “You’re creeping me out, okay?” He could hear his inner chills pitching his voice. “What do you want?”
The man opened his mouth to speak, but no words exited. He looked like a cat preparing to cough up a furball. He closed it, still showing his teeth, and tried again with success. “I am Neptune,” he said. “And I have a claim to . . . collect.”
Howard grabbed his towel and rushed out of the pool. Near the door, he reverted for a peek. Neptune switched off the shower and stepped toward him sluggishly. Howard rushed through the door and trotted up the stairs, slipping as he turned onto the next floor. He needed to be quick about this. He would hastily open his locker–he had turned to his combination so many times now that he would have no problem opening it in under ten seconds–and use his cell phone to call 911. This, of course, he would do as he ran out the door. There was no time to change his clothes. Who cared if he was sloppy and wet? It sure as hell wasn’t going to stop the lunatic.
Still hearing dripping water from his would-be assailant, Howard pushed his half-naked body through the door.
Something was wrong with the hallway. It seemed shorter and thinner, but it wasn’t cramped. It was comfortable or . . . homely. Why did that word pop into his head? Was it the walls? They were brown, almost like that of his childhood home. An older design–fake wood panels. When did they install that at the gym?
He heard the soft drizzles of water perpetually dripping from the pale man’s body. Howard rushed through the next door.
This was the locker room, thankfully. Howard rushed to his locker and quickly twisted the lock. He opened the door and rifled through his clothes for his cell phone.
Zero bars. Shit.
The dripping returned.
Leaving his belongings behind, Howard rushed out the other exit of the locker room and passed through the exterior hallway. He made a right, followed by a door to the left, before realizing that something was wrong.
This wasn’t the layout of the gym. He should have been outside by now. And there was water on the floor.
Howard reverted and rushed back the way he came. Opening the first door, he found himself in a new hallway. He ran for minutes that felt like hours–they may have actually been hours, with how things were going.
“Howweee,” Neptune called out with a preternaturally loud echo. “You shouldn’t have come back into the pooool Howweee. You were done, but you came baaack. You caaame baaack for a swiiimmm.”
The water, now rising from the floor, was turning pink. Beginning as a hint of a hue, it grew ever more pronounced. Blood and water. The classic combination, one that dated back to when the world was nothing more than fish and the oceans. In the days just after primordial ooze formed into an organism, that being shattered and fell victim to the perils of early entropy, leaving behind a pink cloud much like this one. All living things were reduced to pink clouds in the ooze at some point.
It didn’t take Howard long to realize that the blood was dripping off him. Running his fingers up the warm streak sliding down his back, he found a fresh hole leaking from the top of his head.
There, his fingers met another set of cold phalanges.
“Right here,” the pale man said. “Wounds heal, but they never close. You were lucky you stayed away from water all these years. I can open these wounds any time if you have even one toe in the water.” He felt Neptune’s icy fingers writhe inside his head. There was a pressure in the back of his eye. Howard’s teeth began to ache. The pale man breathed exultingly. “This is still a fresh one.” Those fingers wiggled around like rigid worms. The water below became ever more red.
Something else wasn’t right here. Howard swirled his foot in the water. It felt dry to his touch.
“Odd for you?” the pale man asked. He removed his fingers, letting out a gushing sound. “The water feels natural to you because you never really left it.”
Howard faced him. “I leave the water every day,” he said.
“This water, yes, but another water is a part of you. You escaped him once, and that was a mistake.”
“The girl hit her head,” Howard said, thinking back to that incident from his childhood. Why would he think about that now? That was all that happened. She almost drowned but was okay.
“The girl was unscathed, the boy hit his head.”
Howard’s fingers motioned to the wound on the back of his head. “It was me,” he said. “I hit my head that day and I . . .”
“Drowned,” the pale man said, expressionless.
“They brought me back. My brother saved me.”
“No.”
“What?”
“Neptune missed your calling. He decided that was not the day for you to return to the sea.”
“I thought you said you were Neptune.”
“I am, but He is as well. As you will be. Neptune is the water, and he breathes in your waterlogged soul. He brings the waves. You have avoided the tides for long enough, but now that you have returned to the water, it is time to come home.”
The water, now a solid red, was rising past their waists. Howard brushed his hand through it. It was warm, but it still gave him chills. “I wanted to get out of the pool that day. I was done, and I wanted to lie in the sun. But I thought I could impress that damn girl if I did one more trick.” The water was approaching his chest. “Why didn’t Neptune take me then? Why let me live this long with hope that I could go on?”
“Neptune behaves as he wishes. He is the original god, as the oceans flourished long before all other elements.”
“Will it hurt?”
“The waterlogged souls are not given any mercy, but it is nothing that you have never felt before.”
As the rising water passed his head, Howard didn’t try to resist by holding his breath. Instead, as the red water filled his lungs, he was reminded of his earliest forgotten memory, when he drowned and almost became part of everything.
—
Brad Kelechava was born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and has a degree in anthropology and environmental studies from New York University. His short fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Bewildering Stories, Utopia Science Fiction, Sunshine Superhighway, and The Night’s End. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their cat.
