Ma Ranlett's Home for Wayward Girls

Bairstow is an isolated harbor town at the end of a peninsula on the Coast of Maine, organized as a self-governing Plantation, a law unto itself. It is a blue-collar place, with a dark past and dormant secrets. A place of mutant horrors, of terror beyond the breakwater and reefs, where the warming ocean and over-fishing is denuding the sea floor, urging lobsters north, weakening the Deep Ones, driving them to despair. Ignorant or dismissive of its murky history, nervous tourists slum here in fair weather, looking for elusive monsters. College boys visit, looking for a good time at Ranlett’s Home for Wayward Girls, where 15 minutes with a Dupe cost a guilt-free $50 in peak season. It is late summer.

I am Rhoda Terranova. I am a Phebe, a Dupe, passing well enough that you'd think me quite fine. I was stolen from the Deep by the Carters. I was exploited and abused by the Carters. I killed Reggie Carter, my uncle, so-called. I’ve been captive so long that I’ve forgotten how to swim beneath the sea, so I can never go home. I sit in the middle of the muddle, at the intersection of the Spectra, a resident at the Home for Wayward girls and part of the Sisterhood.

The Bairstow Plantation court was assembled in the high school gym. The girls’ locker room was the holding-cell. Thankfully the showers worked, because I looked like a million bucks when freshened and dressed up in a gray pencil skirt and jacket. A Dupe Sister did my hair, whorehouse style, brushing out the rope coils so that a golden curtain fell on one side of my face. Lipstick, bright red, sultriness around the eyes. 

“Lauren Bacall,” said the sister, standing back to admire her handiwork. I squeezed her hand, we laughed. “Best you put on the gloves,” she said, and laughed again. Doffing cream-silk elbow-length gloves, I concealed the webbing between my Phebe fingers.

Joe Frey, the Police Chief, escorted me to the court room, prideful, like the father of the bride. The Chief was an ally or on the spectrum; there was a glaucous tint to his eyes, and a pleasing contour to his thick neck. “There’s justice, there’s the law. Let’s hope justice prevails,” he whispered as we left the locker room. It filled me with hope.

The hot steamy court room gallery was sharply divided. At the rear, spilling from the gym bleachers were bait-fish men, F150 boys, the holier-than-thou, the tea party. Ma Ranlett sat in the middle of this hostile group, tut-tutting, and staring daggers at me. I saw red. 

Mostly though, I soon realized, the packed-out gym was populated with the gentle folk of Bairstow, kind-hearts, Phebe and Dupes, and the red haze faded in the glow of goodwill. 

There were also two Deep Ones, old-world Phebes, front and center, hunched over like penitents, their big bulging eyes unblinking. They were ambassadors from Devil’s Reef, but I shuddered at the sight and odor of them. I needed the Phebes to keep a low profile and blend in, not stir up old grievances with long-forgotten tragedy. 

Beady-eyed, wet and frothy at the mouth, Cyrus O'Shea, Worshipful Master of the Masons Lodge, threw the trial into a circus-like whirl. O'Shea was a frequent visitor to Ma Ranlett’s Home for Wayward Girls, a Carter buddy-buddy, and every inch the whorehouse sadist, treating the sisters as spittoons. To O’Shea, to Ma Ranlett, we were soulless reptiles. He spoke for the bigots on the bleachers, for the dead man, Reggie Carter, my uncle, the victim, so-called.

It was my turn. “I am Rhoda Terranova, and I am representing myself, your Honor”.

“Yes, your Honor, I do understand the serious nature of these charges against me.”

Hang ‘em, drown ‘em, or let ‘em go. If guilty, they hang the Phebes and drown the Civilians. The Innsmouth Pact, enshrined in the duality of Bairstow Plantation law there is a legal and ethical chasm between Phebe and Civilian, when – in reality - the worm is busy and there is a continuum of identities, across gender, across the tense skin that separates the waters from the air. Spectra.

“Yes, your Honor, I killed Reggie Carter, but it was not premeditated, and it was not in cold blood”. 

It was in that red haze of anger that I spiked Reggie in the kidneys and watched him die slowly in a pool of his own dark blood. In that stark moment even the Bait Men, gathered at the forced-open door of the boudoir, could see this was right, and this was just. They did not send for a doctor or for the cops, they watched Reggie die. They remembered the beatings and the screams of the pretty little Phebe girl from before. Carter had it coming to him.

Alas, their heads were subsequently turned by Cyrus, by Ranlett, by zealots at the harbor bars, by the threat of lost income, by the Carter family’s control over the bait-fishing boats and their opiate supplies.

Cyrus O’Shea, the Prosecutor, ring master, went straight to the heart of things with that amphibian jibe. Pointing a fat finger in my direction, “A cold-blooded lizard, cunning and heartless, she planned this outrage”. 

“You can’t have it both ways, O’Shea,” I raged, out of turn, “you can’t treat me like an animal, but hang me like a man”.

The Mayor and Selectmen were judge and jury, sitting at three of the lunchroom tables They looked like they’d rather be anywhere else, doing anything else but preside over this murder trial. They flicked haplessly through the Plantation law books as the trial proceeded, looking for a way out of the mire, wistfully staring at the red Exit sign at the back of the gym, while Cyrus O’Shea squawked insults, stirring up trouble where there’d been peace for generations, ever since the Innsmouth evacuation, nearly a century ago.

Calmer now, facing the Mayor, the Judge, my turn. “Like I said, your Honor, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t treat me like an animal and hang me like a man. I am one, or the other, or both, and you cannot choose when I am one or the other, or – worse still - change your mind just for the sake of expediency.”

This elicited a hubbub of approval, and a brief fizzle of applause. Silence in the court, the Police Chief, Joe Frey, called for it. The two Deep Ones were animated; their skin shone luminescent green for a moment, flashed blue and red, then returned to the dull green gray. The F150 pick-up boys were stupefied by the complexity. 

“Yes, your honor. I was brought up from the Deep when I was six years old, dredged up by Carter on one of his bottom-scouring raids, along with a net full of fish.”

It was hell. Crushed and asphyxiating, all I could see were gasping mouths and panic-struck eyes, full of fear, not windows to the soul, but witnesses to terror. Bait fishing, Carter was reckless and a scofflaw, we came up so fast that eyes swelled and burst, bladders ballooned and split the sides of the deep-sea creatures. I blacked out but woke later in a holding tank. This was the first crime. I was a child.

At the back of the gymnasium, the bleachers were emptying slowly.  

Sentiment in the court room shifted. 

“Eleven years ago, your Honor.” 

Reggie Carter said I was his niece, said he would look after me, provide me with an education, teach me the catechisms, the duality, where we sit in the Spectra. Uncle Reggie. The sun blessed me, the air soothed me, he clothed and fed me, he gave me a bed a small room. On Sundays I went to the Church of Dogon. Uncle Reggie.

But things changed, time were hard, he put me to work. No friends, no church, first awake, to light the fires and make the breakfast, last to bed mending the linen. It was a life of drudgery, of constraint and beating. When I was eleven, Uncle came to my room at night, every night and wormed me. This was the second crime.

Mrs. Enright, clerk of the court, let out a cry and fainted. Shouts of “shame” directed at the bleachers, and at Ma Ranlett. 

Cyrus O’Shea complained of the theatrics, but the Judge, a wizened old man with a white beard, was dismissive, insisted that the women be given time to recover. The Phebes and Old Ones glowered at the Carter and O’Shea boys and at Ma Ranlett.

“I’m sorry, your Honor, I do understand that these are indelicate words for the ladies and gentlemen in the, being fathers with daughters, and all.”

“Uncle Reggie grew bored of me, so I was sent to Ma Ranlett’s Home for Wayward Girls. He dredged a new child from the deep.” This was his third crime.

Ma Ranlett left the gymnasium faster than an eel through the harbor sluice. Sentiment was spiraling. Cyrus O’Shea was desperate, his red face covered in a film of sweat.

“Your Honor,” he said, paused, it was his ace card, “When a dog kills another dog, or – God Forbid – mauls a small child to death, we don’t ask whether the dog was justified, whether it understood right from wrong. There is no culpability on the part of the dog. The dog is an innocent, but we have the dog destroyed. Seen through the lens of humanity, Rhoda Terranova, is guilty. Seen through the lens of common sense, she – it - is an animal and should be destroyed”.

It took some time for Joe Frey, the Police Chief, to restore order in the court room. Cyrus O’Shea, beaming with self-congratulation, was ushered outside by a deputy until things cooled down. 

The trial was adjourned. The Judge ordered that a study be performed to determine my true identity, as a matter of law.  Experts in their field, from around the County and as far away as Portland and Augusta were called in to perform a study, to determine my identity on the Spectrum. A panel of technical experts.

 It was a weekend; I was held captive in the locker room. Outside, I could hear the protesters chanting, all of the day, much of the night, Saturday and Sunday, but goodwill and prayers outside the window did nothing to protect me from these experts and specialists, serious and stern men all, that rotated through the metal door of my makeshift holding cell.

“Consider her hands and feet,” said the quack from the Department of Health. 

“Her blood and urine samples are inconclusive,” it was the retired veterinarian from Camden Harbor, just up the coast.

“See here, see how she jumps when I apply these probes to her feet?” It was the marine biologist from the Bigelow Labs.

“Two standard deviations away from the mean”, it was the phrenologist from the University with the metal rule and the pointed calipers, examining the relative position of my eyes and ears.

The first day was humiliating and degrading. My protests were ignored. I tried to sleep but it was a living nightmare from which there was no escape.

On the second day they threw me in a tub of salt water and filled it with ice. They pushed my head below the water until I passed out. The pried at the corrugation in my neck, once gills, now scar tissue. The marine biologist excised a sample of the webbing between my toes and studied it under a microscope that he produced from a small leather hold-all. Under the watchful eye of the learned panel, the veterinarian performed a gynecological examination, like the butcher might evaluate a slab side of beef.

“She has no hymen,” he pronounced. Another crime, the last crime.

On Sunday evening, checking in on the on-duty deputy, Joe Frey, Chief of Bairstow Police discovered that the girls’ locker room had been turned into a bloody torture chamber. He found me cowering and shivering in the corner of the shower room. He wept for me, for the Phebes and for the depravity of the Plantation.  I silently vowed that he would be spared the terror to come.

Death came swiftly and immediately for O’Shea the Prosecutor. The Two Deep Ones leapt at him with feral fury, they shredded him with their claws, tore his limbs from him, and – still alive – they defiled him with excretion. It was right and it was just.

The Trial was abandoned, and the court slunk shamefully away, its proceedings lost to the world, and the Town of Bairstow lost its soul. The rift, ignored for nearly one hundred years, re-opened. The Deep Ones vowed that a wrathful avenging army would return to the Plantation within the year.

It's winter now, frigid. Sea smoke drifts across the heavy-metal surface of the still Ocean, and it is precipitating upwards on the horizon. Dark bruise-colored clouds whelming.

The F150 boys, the Carters and O’Sheas are running scared now. The holier-than-thou crowd lies low. Ma Ranlett fled inland, but we’ll find her. Bairstow Plantation is an unsafe place and lawless place now. What authority is there in the law? Death stalks the streets and alleys. The tourist business has mostly dried up, but there’s always the odd visitor or two, some find their way to the Home for Wayward Girls.  Femme fatales, Lauren Bacall look-alikes, the Sisterhood; we Phebes do kill in cold blood, and the Police Chief looks the other way.