Across the channel, streetlights bobbed like anglerfish lures in the mist. The city sat patiently on the water, alluring; it was just a few minutes away by boat from the town shore. Towers and tall buildings were visible in the faint morning twilight, and were silhouetted against the horizon, dark shapes ominous yet promising.
It had not been there the day before. Sometime in the night, it had risen, gently gliding upwards through the deep dark water, pushing aside fish and vast rafts of seaweed, sending nought but a gentle lapping wave towards the small, isolated fishing town nearby.
We were going to investigate it. We set out on our fishing boats, steering and tacking and letting the briny wind carry us closer to the new, floating island.
We steered in carefully, into ports long and thin, jetties of weird stone, spinelike and jutting from the main body of the city, waiting, patient, accepting, then turning inwards towards the city like so many inwardly-inclined teeth. I stood at the prow, looking for submerged stones or pieces of detritus which could hinder our passage or damage our boat.
From my first look at it, I shuddered. The outline was too massed together, the buildings too bloated and curved, rough houses made of soft clay mashed into a city.
It stank, as well; smelled like dead fish, not quite covered by the salty sea air. That would pass in the days to follow, but it still stuck in my head, and I couldn’t help but pick up faint wifts of it on later visits, even when others had gotten used to it.
The boats docked safely, tied to weird ivory-colored mooring posts, shaped like towers with smoothly-crenelated tops or like weird blunt spines. The piers themselves merged seamlessly into narrow streets leading deeper into the city. The streets were slippery and smooth, pavement overlapping, the stones thin and wet and slick and angled, patterned, each partly over another, shiny with moisture.
The streets twisted inwards into the city proper, where buildings as large as the town church crowded for space, forcing the streets to narrow and wind. We got lost in there easily, and for a while we wondered whether we would ever get out of the tangle of roads, but we were able to find our way back after a while. Thank goodness for the streetlights; however disgusting they were up close, they were better than the darkness. The high, crowded building, all bulging and touching and grown together, blocked out the light, and the overhangs and jettied floors only made it more obscured. A strong, milky light, however, came from the streetlamps, which were randomly scattered throughout the throng of roads. They had been visible from the shore, of course, bobbing gently from the faint wobble of the piers, but only now did we pay close attention to them. The base merged seamlessly into the ground, a bony mess of garbled stone coalescing, like roots into a tree trunk, into the stem of the streetlight; the stem itself was as slick as the back of the beetle, and had the same semi-metallic sheen. The worst part, however, was the glowing part itself; it looked simply like a bloated sack dangling from the bent stem, and gave off a sickly cold light, which made the streets look even more alien than they had in the sunlight. It wavered, casting some parts randomly into shadow and others into brighter light, like waves do to the sand on the ocean floor.
We prodded them. They were soft and almost doughy in our hands.
It was like the parody of a streetlight, made by someone that had never seen one.
We made our way to something that I think might have been a graveyard, might have been supposed to be a graveyard; the stones were age-worn and featureless, eroded by seawater, covered in a thin layer of some aquatic moss. They jutted out from the ground like old blunt teeth, tilted but not fallen.
Later, after more people had come, somebody would try to dig a new grave here; they would find that the still-living seagrass had no dirt beneath it, just more of the city’s strange stone. It was the same under the other graves.
A few days after they would make that discovery, somebody found a graveyard where there was dirt, or some equivalent, like half-rotten wood. That was where they would bury their dead from then on.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
The houses themselves, when we were brave enough to go in them, had other surprises for us. We were afraid at first, of course; the windows, on those few houses that had them, were curved, circular, and slick with moisture, like dead and sightless eyes lolling in their sockets. There were curtains behind them, dangling still, like flaps of skin, like we were looking at flaccid eyelids from the inside of the head.
The walls bulged, curved, making the houses look bloated and tumid. We thought we would open the doors, the only things in the whole city with any real rectangularity to them, to find some thing reminiscent of humanity, fish-people or things with melted bodies which shambled out onto the streets at night, a mockery of people living in a mockery of a city.
There was nothing in them.
They were empty, vacant, waiting for something to fill them, waiting for somebody to come by and drop in.
They were still disgusting enough that we decided not to stay long; they had strange wallpaper bulging and blistering and tumorous, big bladder-like pockets of miasma trapped underneath, moldy and diseased, in parts peeling and flaky, bits like skin, like fluffy strands of mold growing from the deadness of the wall.
We thought that would be it, but then we found the church.
It was, by far, the largest building in the city. Stained glass windows which glowed in a nonsense myriad of color, without form, without angle, just splotches of luminescence without art or parable. We would find later that the insides were lit by candelabras made from the same stuff as the streetlights, vast dangling jellyfish aglow with that same cold and alien light.
We entered with much fear in our hearts.
The insides were bare except for pews and the vaulting of the ceiling. The pews were cushioned, though it made us squeamish to sit on them; they felt like balloons, or blisters on the stone which jutted solidly from the floor. The vaulting was similarly weird, like great ribs, featureless and smooth, some of them not even connected to anything but the roof, providing structure but not support.
We emerged from that mockery of a city and returned to the town before nightfall, most of us slightly sick at what we had seen. There was a fundamental wrongness to it that we couldn’t quite put our fingers on; it felt inhuman even to those of us who had never been to a real city, which was common enough back then.
We told our townsfolk about what we had seen, the strangeness of the architecture and the layout, the weirdness of it all. They listened, but heard only that there were large buildings and good streets, streetlights like the gas lamps of cities richer than our little fishing town, heard that there was space and safety.
They decided to live there. Idiots.
The next day, when they set out to look at it for themselves, it still stank of the depths of the ocean, though a little less. They found it disgusting as I did.
But it sat there still, alluringly, lights bobbing in the darkness of the night whenever they looked out of their windows.
They started moving there slowly, fishing nets and bedrolls but then furniture and heirlooms, making up their minds to stay in the city the sea had given them. They were used to finding things washed up on the shore, brought there frequently by the currents. They made their living off of the gifts of the ocean. Why shouldn’t they live in the city, then?
I lived alone, in the remnants of the old town, a ghost town now, populated only by my memories of the still-living. Sometimes I would look across the sea and wonder whether or not I should join them. I never did.
One day, I woke up to find that it was gone. It had sunk, deep into the sea from which it came, its citizens trapped within.
I combed the shores regularly, but never found anything. Not a body, not a piece of furniture, not even a boat. It had disappeared.
Sometimes, when I stare out onto the ocean, I imagine I can still see the lights.