TIMING: Current LOCATION: A seacave at the beach PARTIES: Regan and Maggie SUMMARY: When Maggie finds herself trapped in a giant clam, Regan (clam expert) is there to help get her out.
The beach trip had started out as a simple scouting mission for places where could Maggie hide shit just in case the whole stuck as a seal thing happened again. Because apparently that was a very real possibility in her very weird, very fucky life. There were a few obvious choices. Coves. Caves. Buried treasure-esque stashes wrapped up under the sand- but that did mean she would have to be able to dig and open the stash which wasn’t necessarily a given. Plus, then the spare clothing and food would probably get sandy, and it would just be a bad fucking time all around.
But hey, just another day in Wicked’s Rest.
It wasn’t until after she had started digging in the cove that things got. Well.. Weird? Bad? The little cave that she had found herself in wasn’t looking to be a bad option. There was this perfectly shaped alcove that if she just moved a little sand out of the way, it would be perfect. So Maggie had started moving sand over- only to find the ground beneath her trembling. And then, the cave- no, clam, closed its mouth.
Which brought her to the present. Trapped inside a giant fucking clam, screaming at the top of her lungs, and trying to force her way out. Not that that was working. The clam’s mouth (did clams have mouths or was it just all shell?) was firmly shut. She’d survived a week as a fucking seal just to get eaten by a giant fuck you clam. Great. Just great.
“IF ANYBODY CAN HEAR ME, GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!!!!”
__
Remarkable seal activity. That was what Regan had heard. More sightings than usual, the water teeming with them. And where there were a lot of live seals, there were inevitably some dead ones. Regan had zipped up her coat, pulled on her boots, and gone straight to the beach with singular focus to find her dead seal. The Marine Mammal Protection Act was nothing more than a suggestion.
She was already stepping across the sand when there was a problem, and not a seal-related one: her glamour. Regan’s necklace was on. Every waking hour, she left it on. But when she stretched the nitrile gloves over her hands (preparation for handling her seal), her fingers were dark, like her extremities were bitten by frost. That had been happening lately. More and more. Twice in one week. The gloves could hide it; pockets could hide it. But then her back cramped sharp. Her coat was never meant for wings, and the entire glamour was dying now. It wasn’t her first time cramming almost 4 foot long wings inside of a puffer coat… but this coat was shorter, and the wingtips bent out the bottom at wrong angles.
Twice in one week. Imeall an chinniúint, she did not need this.
Regan could only wait it out. Let the necklace fix itself. She’d give it a few hours before calling Jade and asking for an extraction (not even the interesting, medical kind of extraction) followed by not talking about it. For now, though, she needed to find somewhere obstructed. And the shallow cave, filled with a trickle of low tide and carved into the rocky cliffside, welcomed her like a throat.
She hadn’t made it inside yet when she heard it: screaming. Heavily muffled, emerging from the cave. Regan scrambled faster. She hadn’t wanted anyone to see her, but if someone was hurt—
She splashed through the wet sand, eyes adjusting to the dim light. The screaming hadn’t stopped, but death greeted her, too; so much of it. The scent of decomposing fish only confirmed what she saw—hundreds of tiny, dark clusters lining the cave, waving and tugging for her attention like flies come to claim her. Which meant her eyes were unglamoured, too. As precious as her death sight was, the ability to control when she used it was one of the things that had kept her sane (and she was sane, she decided). She was disciplined. Focused. She could be again, couldn’t she? Ignore the fish. Ignore the death (apologies).
In the middle of the cave, almost invisible at first in all the noise, was an enormous, screaming clam.
The clam contest did not prepare her for this. Or maybe it had, but she’d been too stunned by the stage lights and audience of eyes and ears to recall anything beyond the rubrics. This was not on the rubrics. And, she realized, it might not have been the clam doing the screaming.
She was close enough to hear clearly this time. Someone was trapped. That was also not in the rubrics. It was, however, something she could not walk away from. Regan knocked on the creature’s shell. It sounded both hollow and sturdy at the same time, like a skullcap. Her knuckles had a layer of algal slime on them now. “Hello? Is someone in there? I don’t suppose you’re doing this for fun?” Human leisure was strange; it was possible. “My name is Regan. If you’re stuck in there, I will get you out.” Somehow.
—
Somewhere in the world beyond the dark of the closed, enormous bivalve shell, there was a voice. It called to Maggie in her muffled world of shell-black sky and slimy, soft ground that made the palms of her hands tingle. Fortunate, perhaps, that someone else was lurking about in the caves she had been looking to hide things within. Fortunate, too, that she now knew to look somewhere else to leave a post-selkiening change of clothing for herself. If there were people around as well as giant man-eating clams, then it wasn’t a good hiding spot for secret seals.
The briney smell within the clam was way to fucking strong. It made her want to hold her breath. Which was counterintuitive to many things, namely to communicating for escape and living. The clam’s… well, she couldn’t say tongue, because clams kind of looked like they were just all tongue, so she supposed the word was body lolled beneath her, refusing to give her a moment of peace of balance. But on the other side of the shelly firmament, there was a person knocking and seeking to help her in her truly ridiculous time of need.
Maggie would be damned if her obituary read Died Being Consumed by Massive Mollusk.
The person spoke, but internal clam acoustics were somewhat lacking. It kept making a weird noise like it was hungry or happy or both. The only words she really made out under the odd, undulating rumble of the clam were ‘... there… fun…? … Egg…get out!’ “Yes! Help! Lemme out!” Could she still be heard? She rapped her knuckles hard against the slimey interior of the shell. She wanted the Egg person to know she was in there, and it was not fun. Not even a little.
—
There was definitely someone in there. At home, Regan had heard Echo make some bubbling, fizzing noises before with its (her?) shell, but nothing that sounded like a human voice. And, well, the fact the muffled voice was specifically asking for help was a tell, too. Diagnosis? Someone was truly trapped. Regan knocked on the shell again, her knuckles slippery. “I have many questions. But let’s get you out of there first. I will just…”
She stared at the clam. Not down. It was at her eye level, hundreds of bead-like simple eyes staring back at her from along the margins of the shell. (Could it see the darkness?) “I’ll just…” Do what, exactly? Wrench it open? She would have to try. The other obvious option was screaming, but if someone was in there, it would probably kill them. Regan could not even entertain that. Just the thought, the spray of organs inside the shell—her mouth filled with bile that stunk worse than anything that might’ve been scraped from one of these rocks.
She looked down at her hands. They were wrong, darkness staining her fingers. More importantly, she lacked the strength necessary to open a clam this size, and she knew it. Attempting it would probably give her hundreds of microscopic cuts on her fingers, and that was an excellent way to develop an infection. No, she needed leverage. “Hold on a moment. I have an idea.” She tried to speak loudly and the cave repeated. Regan scanned the cave, those dark little wisps of death vying for her attention again, each giving her a goosebump. She closed her eyes. Stopped, shoes wet; the tide was licking its way in. “Ignore it. Ignore the death. You have been surrounded by more before. This is nothing. You can stuff your coat with dead fish on the way home.” When her lungs loosened, she opened her eyes again and kept her gaze to the sand by the cave’s entrance. She saw what she was looking for.
Regan picked up the piece of damp and pungent driftwood—it was long and flat enough that she thought she could jam it between the two halves of the shell. She returned to the clam, which had not moved. It was too comfortable here, closed off and inert. Time to change that. “I’ve returned,” Regan told the… well, it felt like speaking to the clam, which was a little strange… but she spoke to herself constantly, so what was the problem? “I’m going to attempt to pry it open. If you can hear me, I’d like for you to be ready to apply pressure to the top of the shell and help.” If she could even slide it in.
—
Egg was still talking. Maggie could hear the voice on the other side of her newfound clammy coffin, but the meaning of each muffled syllable was a complete and utter mystery. She prayed to god– a god that she was certain was not listening to her, and half-certain that (if they were paying any attention) was probably pointing and laughing at her plight– that Egg wasn’t just saying ‘wow, shit go of it, sorry I can’t help, hope death by giant clam isn’t a long one!’ There were a few more words she could make out, namely ‘Just’ and ‘Hold’, followed by a good bit of nothing. The clam rumbled as Maggie pushed up against the shell as best she could.
“Egg? Egg, you still there…?”
The silence that followed for a few minutes was not exactly encouraging.
Well, shit. With or without Egg, Maggie wasn’t about to just lay down inside the clam and be digested. A string of swears were strung from her mouth like pearls as she tried to roll onto her stomach and push up onto her knees. The Clam (she couldn’t think of a better name for it, nor did she really think it deserved it, so it was just getting a capital C) did not seem to appreciate its meals’ sudden determination. It wriggled, shifted, squished her up against the top of its shell with all its clammy might. Okay, so this was worse…
The voice of Egg cut through to the other side of the shell. So they hadn’t abandoned her! More words were lost in translation. But hey, at least Maggie wouldn’t be squished and eaten alone. “Attempt… shell… help.” Please, do not help the clam, Egg… The clam doesn’t need help.
___
The muffled voice from inside the clam was not particularly helpful. Regan might have caught her name, or it might have been something about eggs. Either way, she couldn’t imagine the content was anything that would resolve this situation. “Just… stay there.” Right. “Nevermind. Be ready to help. In a minute…” Regan circled around the grimy clam, her steps splashing. Its shell was covered in nicks and barnacles just waiting to open a (skin) door for infection. She’d seen so many miniature—normal-sized—versions of this at the convention. She should have been an expert by now, right? Yes. She had the experience! Regan’s lungs puffed up and her spine straightened. She was going to be the expert, the professional. She was going to bust the clam open.
Regan took a deep breath and gripped the driftwood tightly enough to splinter her palms… not that she could feel it. She dragged its tip along the rim of the shell, looking for a spot to wedge it. She wanted it to be as close to the front of the clam as possible; lifting closer to the umbo would require a greater amount of force. There—an uneven spot in the clam’s rim, like something had chiseled into its most distal growth ring. “Now!” Regan shoved the wood in and pushed down on it with all her body weight. Slowly, the clam began to give. A thin, narrow crack between the two halves of the shell. Regan tried to suck in a breath through her teeth. Keep going. Then something beige—mantle. Her shoulders burned and her wings beat hard with muscle strain. And then, finally, there was the woman curled inside the clam.
Even in the low light of the cave Regan could see she was coated in a thick layer of slime. She was not sure on the technical term. Saliva? Foot fluid? For a second, Regan could only stare at her.
And she almost let the clam snap shut again, right into her fingers. Her biceps strained, tore with heat, but she caught it, bearing down on the end of the driftwood again with all she had. “Push the top! The shell!” Regan barked. She couldn’t hold this for long, and the only thing worse than having the woman trapped inside the clam, was having the clam bisect either of them, digesting digits and limbs.
—
For a moment, let us pause to consider the giant clam.
The giant clam, who, upon finding a great feast that would die and be digested over the course of a great long while, had settled down contentedly; the giant clam who was electing to ignore the relative discomfort of the thing it had caught up shell squirming and wiggling about on its fleshy body; the giant clam that was not expecting anyone or anything to bother it. It had been happy there, within its soggy dwelling place; happier still that it had caught something that would make it bigger and stronger than it had been last winter and the winter before. Perhaps come spring, the shell that contained it would have grown two or maybe three times its size.
Somewhere out in the great oceans of the world, its mother might have been proud to know that such a specimen of a clam had come to exist.
Maggie, on the other hand, hoped that there was a special place in hell for giant clams that tried to eat selkies. A place where they might eternally be made into linguine and clam sauce, perhaps. That seemed like a fitting result: eat and be eaten.
Thank god, the cry of ‘Now!’ was loud enough to cut through the massive mollusc’s shell. Maggie wasn’t stupid. She knew what that meant, that sort of declaration that rattled like a charging battle cry. It was time to fight the clam. And she would be winning. With all her might, she pressed her hands against the shelly firmament and pushed. Somewhere in the outside world, Egg was working on getting her out with whatever tool they had found to shuck the great big stupid thing open. The clam groaned, clearly unhappy that its dinner was putting up a fight. Fuck you, Clammy! Her arms shook against the great force. Maybe she needed to go to the gym more. Maybe, if she were stronger or tougher like Wyatt was rather than being a dumb little seal, she wouldn’t have been caught up by the clam at all! If– when– if she got out of the clam, she was going to a gym. She was going to the gym and she was going to be so strong that, even if a giant clam swallowed her up as a seal, it wouldn’t be able to contain her.
Light.
It was damn near blinding– that little sliver of bright that cut through the dark, slimy, inner world of the clam. It took Maggie a second for her eyes to focus enough to make out a face peering in at her. Not peering. Staring. Though, who could blame Egg? A girl trapped inside a giant clam wasn’t something you saw every day. And then, she was yelling at her. Her! The one stuck in the fucking clam! “I am pushing!!” Maggie yowled. The giant clam rumbled again as it tried to squish the girl back down. She felt her arms starting to wobble, threatening to buckle under the force of the massive thing. The light started disappearing again.
“Nooooononono– Egg come back!!!”
—-
It was working! The clam was being forced open, more of its insides exposed to the briny air of the cave. Regan could see the girl inside more clearly, her shiny arms raised and hands pushing against the top of the clam with all the exertion her small body could probably handle. She also recognized that this wasn’t going to work. Regan’s whole torso was burning at the strain of keeping the clam pried open, and the girl’s arms were shakier by the second.
It was closing. “No! No!” Regan shouted, but the clam didn’t care. She saw the wide-eyed panic on the girl’s face before her whole head was completely obscured again. “Don’t let go!” It was pointless. (Also, Egg?)
“I didn’t even like your festival,” Regan hissed at the clam, “I thought the judging was subjective and the clams were not even that impressive. You are not impressive. You think because you’re large you’re—” It wasn’t invincible. There was a solution, but it was one she had been avoiding giving serious consideration. The line was too thin. Pubik was not far from the line, one drawn in chalk on pavement in the shape of a body.
She spoke to the girl now, and there was just enough of a crack that Regan hoped she heard her clearly. “I’m going to—I’ll try to make this gentle. Your ears may hurt, but no matter what you do, do not let go of the clam. Keep forcing it open.” Gentle. Like that could ever be an apt descriptor for a banshee scream. Regan would try and dial this down to a whine. She filled her lungs with a breath and let it swell. But it was too much; it always wanted to explode. Regan exhaled through her teeth, letting some of the pressure leak out, starving her lungs so soon after feeding them. She could do this. And she had to be quick about it, because the clam was closing, and once she let go of the driftwood, the girl wouldn't be able to keep the top shell up for more than a second. “Ready?” She didn’t wait for a reply.
Regan slapped her hands onto the edge of the clam’s shell and screeched. The cave joined her. Was it too loud for the girl? Was she—too late to stop now. Because it was working. The creature made a violent sloshing noise and seemed to lose control of its hinge. It flapped open and closed, open and closed, and Regan hoped the girl had enough of her brain functioning right now to understand she needed to move it. She could only hold this for so long before it twisted into something deadly or lost to the clam.
—
If the clam had ears to hear with and the ability to comprehend the vitriol that the woman on the outside was spitting at it, it might have been offended. Clams on the whole were very impressive— rude of her to think that a being that could grow its own shell and grow to such a majestic size was not impressive. The clam was one of the largest in the bay, maybe even on the eastern coast! It could eat whole people, albeit a bit slower than most. But it could. It was a good thing that the clam could not understand the rude rumblings, that the low level vibrations hitting the outside of its shell meant nothing to it.
Within, Maggie cursed at herself— more words that meant nothing to the clam. The whole situation was as bizarre as it was pointless. Her arms weren’t strong enough to force her way out of the hinged shell of a giant fucking clam. They were shaking like a baby deer’s legs while she tried to keep the shell open just a sliver! So, new reality: Maggie was going to die in a clam. A big, ugly, slimy, stupid clam. Slowly. As long as it took for her to starve in the dark, unless the clam mercifully had some sort of toxin in its slime, which Maggie doubted. She wasn’t that lucky.
In the outside world, Egg kept talking, saying words Magnolia could barely understand through the too-loud rumbling of the clam. Was she talking to the clam or to her? Something something gentle, something something clam. God she really hoped she wasn’t suggesting being nice to the person eating clam. She was still trying to cobble together a rough translation of what Egg had said when the world seemed to shatter.
Maggie’s ears had rung before. When the pelt had been trying to get her to shift for the first time, there were moments where all she could hear was high-pitched whines turned dull to an ocean’s roar. But this wasn’t that– not by a long shot. The noise exploded from the world outside the clam like someone had placed a concert speaker turned on high right beside her head and dropped it, only about ten times worse than that. Pain crashed through her whole body. Had she not been trapped like a toothpick between the heaven and earth of her shelly coffin, she would have dropped like a ragdoll and gripped at her ears. Her bones hurt. Her ears hurt. Everything hurt… She could barely keep her eyes open— but that was because of the light. Too bright– too bright?
The shell was wobbling open. Too much for her, too much for the clam…
The woman didn’t hesitate. The second the shell was open wide enough, she pitched herself forward and fell out of the clam and onto the damp cave floor. Her head felt like it was being squeezed in a vice, pain blossoming throughout, knocking the air clean out of her lungs. Well, the clam hadn’t killed her, but this might…
—
The clam was howling, its top shell open so wide it was as if someone was physically tearing it in half. (Howling clams, Regan learned from a poster display at the convention, were silent.) This was the best chance they were going to get, and she needed the girl to seize it. Regan couldn’t tell her that while screaming (not silently, like the clam), but she seemed to understand, because she leaped out.
The girl crashed into the shallow tide, and Regan heard the thunk of joints against stone. Bones. Check for fractures. Cold water sprayed up to her jeans; those were always going to be ruined and brine-crusted after today’s rescue. Regan forced her jaw shut but her lungs were pounding, insisting she was not done. A scream couldn’t be considered finished until there was not a single molecule of oxygen remaining in her lungs. Her teeth ached from the denial; she bit down harder. A few slow breaths from her nose, as she and the girl stared at each other in the dark, the girl hopefully unable to see the black of Regan’s eyes, and finally her lungs acquiesced to her demand.
The rest of her body was another story. Regan’s eyes flicked from the girl to her own wrong hands; her wings twitched against the constraints of her jacket. It was almost ironic that only her lungs were obeying her, after all the torment they’d put her through for years and years. They had put Richard Pubik through even more, as the Voice constantly reminded her. Her grandmother was right about one thing, if not others—the necklace would only make any minute capability to glamour impossible. Banshees were not supposed to rely on anything that couldn’t draw blood, especially not a piece of shiny jewelry. She flexed her tired hand, her ring finger. Now she relied on two.
Regan could safely open her mouth now without making everything worse (well—aside from anything she might say). “Are you okay? That is—does anything feel broken? Any mobility concerns? I am a doctor.” If the girl could even hear her. “You are going to have to tell me how this happened.” Regan wanted to ask about her ears, if they were okay, if anything was ringing, if she could even stand up on her own. She dreaded the answer too much. The avoidance made her weak, and she knew it. Pathetic. Shirking away from her own screams as always.
Tragically, the clam was still alive, and the cave vibrated as it slammed shut again. It still felt like death here, but it was coating every other direction. It stayed lit for her, each small cloud of death plucking at a different hair on her body. The clam remained only a live clam, dull and practically invisible to her eyes now, along with the live child panting in the water. She could be glad about that life. The clam’s fluids were shining all over the girl—skin, slicked hair, and saturated clothes. If only she had been carrying cotton swabs and tubes with her; there were plenty in her death scene kit, but that was too bulky to carry around.
She hesitated, then extended a hand toward the girl, hoping again that the dark of the cave would hide anything inhuman until she could rely on her pockets and… she didn’t have sunglasses, actually. “Can I help you up? You should probably be seen by someone. Medically. Someone who is not me. Not that I won’t assist with anything, but I’m not—x-rays would be a good idea.”
She couldn’t let anyone see her right now, like this, and more importantly, the girl was in no state to make it home by herself. Regan lowered herself, the water now lapping at the seat of her pants (she’d have to ask Jade to bring some towels, though her car was beyond salvage as it was). “I’m bringing you home. Or, well, I am calling my bone partner, and she’s going to bring both of us home. Assuming you have someone to return home to who can monitor your wellbeing. Otherwise, we are bringing you to the hospital. Or—um, my bone partner will. Again.”
—
Her head hurt. Like, really hurt.
When she finally managed to force her eyes back open, the light coming in from the mouth of the cave, glinting off the water, was almost too much. Her head was still ringing— still not the kind that called for the water; more the sort that you saw in movies when there was a giant explosion. It wasn’t going away, either. Maggie dragged a hand towards her ear to rub at it, only to yelp in pain. Her hand came away a little red. Shit, she thought ‘ear bleedingly loud’ was just a saying…
Egg was saying something. Maggie was certain of this only because she was looking at the lady and watching her mouth move to form words. What those words were, however, was a complete and utter mystery. She squinted, trying to focus on Egg’s mouth and parse out what she was saying. It was harder to do in the dim cave light, harder still because her head hurt like hell. “Help?” She could hardly hear her own voice in her head, the sound creaky and muffled at best. Had Egg said something about helping? A hand was extended towards her, which was a pretty good indicator that that was the case. Maggie slowly put her hand in the other woman’s, letting herself be eased up. Her body ached from the fall to the rocky cave floor, but it was nothing in comparison to her head. She had to scrunch her eyes shut to keep the cave from spinning around her, tears leaking from her eyes even though she only felt numb.
“I’m Maggie…” Was she even speaking? Or was it just the thought of words? The buzzing in her throat was the only comfort she had that, maybe, Egg was hearing her. A wave of pain rolled over her. She let herself slump into the woman’s side— later, when she could think clearly, she would probably apologize profusely for getting Egg all gross and clammy. She would also probably ask what her real name was, because it was stupid to keep calling her Egg, because she was 90% certain that wasn’t the lady’s real name.
But for now, all she could do was sit there, eyes closed, relieved not to be trapped inside a giant clam, and utterly miserable on every other count.
