That Ain't Right: Historical Accounts of the Miskatonic Valley (Mad Scientist Journal Presents Book 1)

by Emily C. Skaftun

  In my fashionable red coat, spotless white scarf, and multicolored wool cap, I reckon I cut an odd figure walking down the streets of the moldering port town. I trudged through drifts of brownish snow, my red-stocking legs shockingly bare against the cold. Breath steamed from my mouth as I went, and I could feel it turning greasy against my cheeks after less than a second in the polluted air. Over the last decade, Innsmouth had resumed its use of coal to heat its homes and rolled out gas-guzzling, oil-dripping cars that dated from the industrialization era. Not since the second Civil War that smashed the Union had I been in a place quite so filthy. It was as though Innsmouth had returned to a previous incarnation: the dark soul of the place, timeless and inescapable.

  As the sun rose a little higher--it never seemed to get particularly bright in Innsmouth--I started to see a few others on the street. Mostly tourists, who ranged from boisterous, mostly drunk college students to foreign tourists here to see one of the most haunted cities in America to the occasional pale, dark-clothed teenagers or twenty-somethings, who lurked in the alleys and soaked in the ambiance. Many of them lurked near one of the storefronts advertising "Ghost Tours" or "Lair of the Deep Ones" or some other gimmick. Actual natives of Innsmouth were a rare sight: stooped, shuffling forms in dark coats and hats, crossing to the other side of the street when an outsider came near.

  During my whole stay, I can't say that anyone native to Innsmouth--a town that seemed to take xenophobia to the speaking-in-tongues and cuddling-with-snakes level--seemed to like me very much. With my red hair and freckles, my propensity for sundresses, and of course my missing lower half, I stood out among the drab, wilted inhabitants of the coastal dive like a painted rabbit in a pack of 'coons. None of them made much of it, though, except to stare at me a trifle uncomfortable-like when I smiled, spoke, or otherwise did anything that required breathing.

  That suited me--and my work--just fine.

  I headed along the mostly frozen over Manuxet River down to the docks, which had gone through more than one reconstruction and collapse. The rusted out corpses of motorboats shared moorage with the moldering hulks of century-old cogs. A few seaworthy vessels were tied up at the docks, but even after a few days they would start fading to match their rotted neighbors. I saw one such yacht, which had been in town only a couple days, which bore the unlikely name of the Hydra. It was a luxury vessel with impressive lines and a deep draft. I'd never been much on the sea--my daddy always said if God wanted man to swim, He'd have given us flippers--but I had a sudden sensation of wind in my hair, a salty breeze on my skin, and an awesome sort of freedom. I shook my head, however, and returned to the dreary task at hand.

  I made two circuits of the nearby coastline and found plenty of broken shells, garbage, and one dead jellyfish. The sea stretched out before me, gray and languid but for sharp white caps that appeared every so often. I stooped in the gray sand to investigate a pile of sludge, prodding it apart with a metal probe, but it was only a fish skeleton and some tattered cloth. Nothing I needed.

  "Well, don't that beat all," I said. "A week freezing mah arse off, and what've ah got to show fer it? Squat."

  I started to stand, but I caught sight of someone else on the beach and froze. He was standing at least a hundred yards away: a tall dark figure, black coat flapping in the cold breeze. It was the stark contrast of his visage against the sand and sky that caught my attention, as well as a blood red scarf that flowed from around his neck. I don't think he saw me; he was just gazing out over the waves, like a romantic vision from a long ago past.

  Much as I would have loved to be all sociable-like, I had a job to do, and the Bureau's per diem wouldn't last forever. I made my way back into Innsmouth and along the Manuxet River, paying especial attention to connections to the sewers. The town had been built long before environmental protections, so most of the city's sludge got dumped straight into the river, where it then flowed to the sea. In the winter months, when the river mostly froze over, the ice radiated stink, as though the putrid water beneath was diffusing up through its patina of normalcy. The river was a stinking cesspool that no sane person with a fully developed sense of smell would go near.

  I didn't expect to find anything, and for a long time I didn't. I headed along the river in my loping gait, peering over the grimy crenellations down at the gray ice. It stank to high heaven, but it wasn't so bad with a scarf wrapped around my nose and mouth. Amongst the piles of rubbish and feces, I saw a surprisingly large rat that scurried across the gray ice, looking for something. It was an ugly thing, all bushy fur and asymmetric features, with one big milky eye. I tracked the rat's progress until it settled on an object in the middle of the river, something that made my neck prickle and my bowels go all watery. Whatever it was, I needed to get a closer look.

  "Hey!" I shouted at the rat. "Scat, y'mangy thing! Shoo!"

  The rat looked up at me, sniffed the air, and went right back to gnawing.

  I grumbled and headed over to the nearest entrance to the river: a rickety ladder that looked as if it hadn't been used in half a century. The rungs were slippery with collected lichen, sludge, and ice, and half of them looked of dubious load-bearing ability at best.

  Didn't wear my climbing legs today. I sat on the ground and detached my legs one at a time. These I tossed down onto the icy stone below, then levered my diminished body onto the ladder. Least I was lighter this way.

  Hand over hand, I made my slipping way down into the river. I grasped each rung tightly, and I could feel the grime soaking through my mittens. "Sorry, Aunt Paula," I murmured. "You'll have to make me another pair--"

  The sixth rung groaned and buckled under my weight. I slipped right off.

  My stomach curdled. I hit the frozen stone six feet below, and the impact jarred the air right out of me. I stayed on the ground a while, blinking up at the gray sky, gasping for breath. When I could move, I curled my fingers, and was relieved to see them do it.

  Then I heard a squeak, and I remembered where I was. "Darn rat."

  I flipped myself over to see that the creature had left off what it was doing and come a few feet in my direction. At least no one else was around to witness my entirely undignified distress. The rat stared at me, its matted fur bristling. It hissed, and I'm not ashamed to say I hissed right back. The rat scampered away, its claws clicking on the ice.

  After a moment to compose myself, I put my legs back on and took a shaky step out onto the gray ice. Years of operating on two prosthetics had given me an excellent sense of balance, and at least I'd remembered the crampons this time. The ice groaned under my weight, but held.

  "Here we go, then," I said to steady myself, and headed toward the object.

  Ten feet out onto the river, it poked up through the ice, half entombed in a frozen grave. It looked much like the other hunks of trash in the river, wrapped in something gray-black that looked like old fabric. And yet somehow, I knew it was what I was looking for. Slowly, I knelt down beside it, just within arm's reach, and touched it with my metal probe. With a waft of stink, the wrapping peeled away like a gelatinous membrane, leaving ...

  A hand.

  It was mostly skeletal, reduced to bones and sinew by the elements, and frozen in place as it reached toward the sky. It had three fingers and one digit that looked more like a dewclaw than a thumb. Patches of scaly flesh clung to the thing, molded and mostly rotted, webbing the fingers together like the fins of a fish. But it came from no sea creature I had ever heard of.

  I retracted the probe and slid it into my pocket, then replaced my mittens with latex gloves. The hand had stood out here on the river for quite some time, but one couldn't be too careful. I repositioned myself nearer the hand and took out a Mason jar as well as a small chisel. Archaeology had never been my favorite field--too slow moving--but I recognized the value of some of the techniques. I tapped experimentally on the ice, which flaked off around the hand without sending any significant cracks outward. Good. Diligently, I freed up the hand until i
t could just move, then gently closed my fingers around it and pulled. No luck. More tapping, breaking the ice little by little like a piece of crust left in the oven too long, and the hand started bobbing. I took hold of it again and worked at the base.

  "C'mon, Sugah," I said. "Just a little bit ..."

  The hand closed around mine in a sudden grip tight as a bear trap.

  I must have shrieked in surprise. I tried to jerk away, but the hand held me in a death grip. I flailed on the ice for a second and heard a cracking sound. Then I was in the water.

  The sluggish dark waters of the Manuxet closed around me like a cold blanket, and I was sinking in a world where all I knew was cold. My body fought to breathe, to move, to keep functioning. But even if I could swim, I saw only an endless expanse of gray ceiling, like clouds without air beneath them. The chill burrowed into me like a thousand voracious insects, digging under my skin to the warm flesh beneath. My legs and sodden clothes became dead weight, worse than useless, pulling me down, down into the dark reaches.

  There was something down there. The thing I'd almost seen in my dream. If only I could grasp it. It was pulling me down by the skeletal fish hand I still grasped tight, and I couldn't have let go even if I wanted to. Words echoed in my brain--nonsense syllables I could almost parse, if only my mind would open to them. If only ...

  Something caught my other hand, close to the surface, and pulled. My muscles stretched in both directions, toward light and toward darkness, and for a second, my body screamed in protest. I fought against rescue, longing to get down to that ... that thing. To know it and understand it. My shoulders and arms strained to the breaking point. Darkness uncoiled beneath me.

  Then I felt something give: the scaled corpse hand broke off, and abruptly the force pulling me down vanished. I shot toward the surface, slamming my numbed midsection into the ice even as my face broke into the air. A dark figure hauled me up and out of the frozen river, grabbing me by the shoulders for a better grip. The world felt icy and everything was white and I couldn't breathe.

  "Thank--" I said to my rescuer. I focused on a floating pair of bright emeralds, which happens to be my birthstone, and which at the moment provided the core of a frost-choked world. "Thank you--"

  Then a massive force seized my left leg and ripped me back under the water. It dragged me down with an irresistible strength that brought my rescuer crunching down to the ice to maintain his hold. This time, not a single part of me wanted to go down to join the thing beneath the water. The world vanished in a sea of bubbles and shadows. The frigid water stung my eyes and exposed skin, and a great pressure closed on my chest. My lungs were running out of air and my prosthetic tore painfully into my hip.

  Slowly, I pulled one hand away from rescue and reached down to the straps of my left leg. I unclasped them, and the leg tore violently free. A dark shadow darted through the water under me, and then I was up and out of the putrid river, my one remaining leg dangling limply from my shivering body. I looked up into a dark face with vivid green eyes and tried to breathe.

  #

  The next few minutes were a blur. There was a long period of muddy light and moving shadows, and then I was somewhere comparatively warm, where the wind no longer howled. Warm hands stripped me down to my unmentionables, then lowered me into a chipped tub where water flowed over me. It was cold at first, but it gradually warmed up, and that was good--a shock to my system would have knocked me flat.

  Instead, I shivered gradually back into awareness and found myself in a Jacuzzi bath in a small but comfortable bathroom, with warm water flowing over me from a copper shower head above. I wore only my sodden underthings, and I heard a small clothes dryer rumbling away in the corner. The world rocked gently from side to side like I'd gotten into granddaddy's rye again.

  A fuzzy white robe that looked very warm hung on a peg by the tub, and one of my walking legs was leaning against it. Reckon the other was at the bottom of the river. There was a pair of crutches too, which looked a little big for me. I put my one leg on, then shrugged into the robe, took up the crutches, and hobbled to the door. Outside the little room was an airy room, and I could see out the big windows that I was on the water. The gray clouds hid the sun, but it was still day.

  "Explains the sea legs," I murmured.

  "Oh, you're up," said the man in the little kitchenette. He ran one gloved hand through his dark hair. Steam rose from an old iron kettle on the rusty stove. "I just put the kettle on."

  His dark, threadbare suit blended so well with the furnishings of the room that I hadn't seen him before. He was lanky with dark hair, handsome in a tortured artist sort of way. Now that he had turned to me, I saw his green eyes like polished stones worn smooth in a river bed. Somehow, they'd seemed brighter when I was drowning. He was the man I'd glimpsed on the beach, staring out across the waves as though looking for something no one else could understand.

  "Reckon you're my hero, then," I said. "Callie-Anne Ceres. Circe, if you like. Pleased to make your acquaintance."

  "Edwin Olms. Most people call me Ed." He gestured around. "This is my boat. Your clothes are in the dryer." The kettle whistled angrily, as though it didn't like being ignored, and he pulled it off. "Tea? It's English breakfast."

  "Much obliged." I was still shivering a little and that sounded excellent. If he'd had warm cherry pie, I might have lost my marbles entirely.

  "Sugar? Honey? Vodka?" He opened a very extensive liquor cabinet. "Absinthe?"

  "Just two sugahs, Sugah."

  Ed poured us two cups of steaming tea, and his own got a little shot from a flask he kept in his breast pocket. We sat down by an observation window, where we could see Innsmouth squatting like a cold sore on the coastline. We sat in companionable silence, sipping our tea.

  "Weird, ain't it?" I asked at length. "The two of us complete strangers, bein' so familiar, like ah didn't almost die an' you rescued me. Thank ya kindly, by the way."

  "Don't mention it. I'm just glad you're all right." He inhaled the warm vapors of his tea. "I heard you fall down the ladder and came to investigate. Thank God."

  "You heard that, huh?" I cleared my throat. "Not mah most graceful hour."

  "Could have happened to anyone." He gazed out the window toward the decrepit town. "Not a lot interesting happens around here. Thanks for livening up an afternoon."

  "Ain't what ah heard," I said. "All manner a'strange creatures luring tourists. Monsters from the black lagoon an' the like. Or have ah heard wrong?"

  Ed was still staring out the window, and he betrayed no reaction. He didn't seem to notice that I'd spoken. "You aren't from around here, I take it?" he asked. "You couldn't pay locals to go near the river, much less walk out on the ice."

  "It was an exploration of a scientific nature," I said. "I'm lookin' for ..."

  Again, Ed looked away, as though the topic not only held no interest for him, but simply didn't compute in his brain. I thought I saw the slightest twitch in his neck muscles when I pressed: a single nerve impulse screaming at me. A warning? Wish I'd paid more attention in behavioral psych.

  I changed the subject. "You're a native, then?"

  He nodded. "I'm in town visiting relatives for the holidays. It's miserable. I couldn't wait to get out of this town when I was a kid. Haven't been back practically since I started at Miskatonic."

  "Oh? What do you teach?" I asked.

  He looked at me oddly, and I bit my tongue. Of course he was too young to be a professor. Just because I got my first PhD at fifteen doesn't mean everyone's on the same schedule.

  "I'm a grad student," he said. "Archaeology."

  "Ah see." For a second, I thought of my dream--of the dark thing I couldn't quite see. Mentioning either the dream or the creature beneath the water seemed like a bad notion just then. Again, I changed the subject. "This has got to be the longest conversation ah had all week, not to mention the strangest."

  "Why so?" Ed looked intrigued.

  "We get this far in the conve
rsation and you haven't mentioned mah condition." I gestured down at my bottom half, with one prosthetic leg and the other missing entirely. "Most gentleman callers at least say something about it within about twenty words."

  Ed seemed unfazed. "I grew up in Innsmouth, where you're strange if you don't have a disability." Ed held up his stiffened left hand, and drew the glove off one finger at a time. He only had a thumb and three fingers, two of which were webbed together. I flashed on the desiccated hand in the river. Damn traumatic stress.

  "Fascinating. Is that hereditary?" Instantly my cheeks felt warm and I practically kicked myself for my rudeness. "Sorry. Scientist."

  He shrugged. "Yes, all the men in my family have it." He put his glove back on and gave an awkward little smile. "Do you always blush this easy, or just in the presence of deformity?"

  I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. "Ah'll have you know, ah'm a lady. Ain't nuthin' about me that's easy."

  "How about drinks and a night on the town?" he asked. "Promise I'll work hard."

  "You always go for the girls this hard, or just tourists? Redheads?" I gave him the one quizzical eyebrow raise. "Ah could come up with a dozen more characteristic vectors, but not knowing your post-pheromone receptor configuration, ah can't rightly say."

  Ed leaned in close. "Why don't you say that again, and I'll pretend I know what it means?"

  Cute. "You know me goin' on five minutes and already you're asking me out."

  "Well, fifteen, but you were unconscious for most of it."

  "Ah'm mighty obliged for savin' mah life and all," I said. "But that don't make me owe you."

  "No," he said. "Of course not." He looked faintly flustered, as though he hadn't considered that at all, and the very concept made him very uncomfortable. Point in his favor.

  I couldn't help but smile. "Well, ain't you just the tom-cat's kitten?"

  "I'm rusty on my southern," he said. "Does that mean yes?"

  I was about to flirt some more when a sharp knock sounded on the door to the ship's deck. Bundled up against the bluster was none other than Marian, my blockish landlady. Her dark eyes glared at us through the window, and I realized they were the same as Ed's eyes. Shared genetics. Obvious.