“We can help you!” interrupted Carla. “Whatever’s wrong we can get you help, people who understand, maybe treatment. You’ve obviously had a terrible time, losing your friends like that, but it’s not your fault. You aren’t to blame. Why don’t you stay here and let us get you the help you need?”
He laughed at that. “You gonna fix me right up, yeah? You’re not from `round here, are you doc? You wanna be careful.”
“I want to be careful? Why?”
“Just watch out for the Order is all. Just ... don’t get involved.” He waved a hand, dismissively. “Leave me alone.”
Carla persisted. “You keep mentioning `the Order’. Is that the Order – what is it called ... the Evangelical Order of David?”
Gary gave a derisive little snort. “Yeah, if you like.”
“I’ve seen their building, down near where I met you. You said your mother’s a member, right?”
Gary sat forward and grabbed hold of her sleeve. There was no derision in his voice when he spoke now. “Stay away from them. Just keep away, lady!” His small, black eyes stared into hers. “Leave Innsmouth alone. If they think you’re causing trouble, you’ll –“
The door of the room burst open so hard that its handle clattered against the thin partition wall. Behind it stood a hulking, middle-aged woman, dripping with rain water, her eyes slitted in fury. Carla rose apprehensively from the bed.
“Mom!” exclaimed Gary, in a strangled voice.
The woman stared around the room, taking in the surroundings, pausing briefly to evaluate Carla and finally coming to rest on the wretched figure in the bed. Her lip curled and she strode aggressively towards him. “Up!”
“Wait, Mrs Taub ...” Carla laid a hand on the advancing woman’s arm. The woman came to an instant halt and her head snapped round, the belligerent stare now fixed on Carla’s face. Carla hurriedly removed her hand with a placatory, surrendering gesture. “I’m sorry. Your son has suffered a very serious injury, I don’t think –“
The woman ignored her, turned back to her son. “Up!” Gary sat up hurriedly and reached into the bedside cupboard for his shoes.
Carla tried again, moving around, trying to renew eye contact with the woman. “Look, I really don’t think it’s a very good idea for Gary to leave right now. There’s still a risk of infection developing and he’s lost a lot of blood, at least let us keep him in overnight and maybe see how he’s doing tomorrow?”
She was close enough to smell the foetor rising from Mrs Taub’s chunky-knit, black jumper. The wool, impregnated with sweat and cigarette smoke and gobbets of food, had probably smelled better when it was still on the sheep. Gingerly and reluctantly, Carla risked putting her hand on the hostile woman’s arm once more.
Mrs Taub whirled around, her greasy black hair flailing behind her, and for a second Carla thought she was going to be attacked, but they were interrupted by a lilting, gurgling voice from the direction of the door. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five!” Carla turned to look, keeping half an eye on the wrathful Mrs Taub.
A man in a torn yellow raincoat, presumably Gary Taub’s father, was lurching into the room. He was completely bald, with a large, round belly, and a moon face that petered out in a succession of roly-poly chins. His expression was blissfully vacant, his eyes seemingly looking in completely different directions. More peculiar yet was his walk, a stiff-legged, waddling gait that pitched his entire body from side to side, his sandals slapping against oedematous feet with every step. “Once!” he announced brightly, “I caught a fish alive!”
Carla exhaled slowly. Perhaps the husband would be more amenable to reason. He did, at least, look less antagonised than his wife. She went to meet him at the door. He beamed at her as she approached. “Why. Did. You let. It go?” His voice was thickly rhythmical, like his walk.
Carla chose to ignore the rhetorical question, trying instead to reassure him about his son’s state of comparative health, her voice rising as his attention seemed rapidly to drift. He resumed his listing progress towards the boy’s bed. “Because”, he burbled “it bit my finger so! Ahhhhh! Which finger did it bite?” He grabbed Gary’s mutilated hand, eliciting a yelp of pain. “This little finger on. My. Right!” Chortling happily, he began pulling Gary towards the door.
Knowing better than to resist, Gary shuffled quietly alongside him, and, knowing better now than to stand directly in Mrs Taub’s way, Carla tried one last time to persuade them to stay. “Look, I’d be happy to address any concerns you have! We can arrange for you stay here with Gary! He’s going to need more painkillers, at least let us give you some to take home with you!”
Mrs Taub turned around as they reached the door and jabbed her index finger hard into Carla’s sternum. “Stay away!” she hissed, staring at Carla for long seconds and then striding off after her husband and son.
Carla exhaled slowly. Her heartbeat began to slow as the threat of violence receded. She was annoyed that it had accelerated at all. Annoyed to admit that she had been intimidated. In a hospital as well, an environment she had always regarded as her home turf. She rejoined Dr Khalil at the nurse’s station. He had a file in his hands, but over the top of his glasses he was watching the Taubs lumber back down the corridor towards the elevators, Mr Taub’s absurd, wallowing saunter casting spastic shadows on the wall.
“Unbelievable!” said Carla, angrily. “I can’t believe they’re just swanning out of here with him! As if we’re interfering by stopping him from sawing off his own fingers!”
“Well,” offered Khalil, putting his file down, “I don’t know about `swanning’. The swan is a graceful animal, whereas that ...” He nodded after the family.
“He confirmed it was suicide you know. The Ramsgates and the girls. He confirmed that they drove off the road on purpose. He says he wanted to go with them. There you go, that’s suicidal ideation! We can hold him!”
Dr Khalil put up a hand wearily. “We cannot detain him. I can tell you now, the hospital will not sanction it. They have had legal problems with the Innsmouth church before. It cost them a lot of money. If we were to detain him, he’d be released with one phone call from their minister.”
Carla rounded on him. “The church? I’m sorry, do we take medical instruction from them now? What the hell does it matter what they think?”
“I know, it is unfortunate. The hospital though is `once bitten, twice shy’. There was an issue with a termination performed on an Innsmouth girl. The church got her to retract her consent, claimed it was done without her permission, made all kinds of noise about sectarian persecution – they are aggressively litigious in their dealings with outsiders. The hospital now prefers to leave them alone.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous” fumed Carla. “Which church, anyway? That warehouse near where we went this morning? The Evangelical Order of David? That one?”
Khalil nodded. “Yes, the EOD runs the old part of Innsmouth to a large extent. There was an attempt, a few years ago, to use them as a liaison. The church penetrates the community there in a way that officialdom has never managed. We thought we could use them to collect information on health problems in the congregation, provide us with an idea of the levels of social need in the town.”
“They refused to play ball?”
“Oh no. They agreed readily, but then they just reported back to us that everyone was fine. No-one had any symptoms of respiratory disease, everyone had central heating. There was no drug use, no psychiatric problems, no poverty and no crime. After a few weeks it was abandoned. They had just seen another opportunity to keep us outsiders at arm’s length.”
“Hmm.” Carla pondered for a few moments. “The Taub boy had a lot to say about that church. He even hinted that they were in some way responsible for his condition. And the other kids. He seemed afraid of them. I think that tomorrow I’ll have to go and have a look, talk to whoever’s in charge.”
“They won’t talk to you” said Khalil, quickly. “It might be better to tread a little carefully.
”
“Oh, they’ll talk to me” Carla assured him. “I’m a federal employee. If they’re as keen on avoiding publicity as you say they are, it would be better for them to talk to me than have me come back with a posse of doctors and police.” Privately she doubted that she would be able to raise a posse like that. Her boss considered this a punitive assignment, to be wrapped up quickly and without fuss. The threat of action might get her somewhere though. She got up to leave.
“Well, I wish you luck, Dr Edwards. I would come with you, but tomorrow I must work here. If I can be of any other assistance ...”
“I’ll be fine. You keep on looking for congenital defects in the birth records. I’ll see if I can find anything that links our cases to the EOD. Since they seem to be the only people who know anything about what happens in Innsmouth anyway.”
*****
She regretted that parting shot later. It was a little unfair. Khalil was, after all, the one who had alerted the CDC in the first place. Or the EPA, at least. It had irritated her though, to see how reluctant he became in the face of the Evangelical Order of David and their enthusiasm for litigation.
It was still pouring with rain by the time she got back to the hotel, with no sign of it lifting. Carla decided to call it a day and eat at the hotel with the two or three other disconsolate, travelling souls. The food was indifferent, to say the least: frozen fish, despite the proximity of the sea, tinned vegetables, sauce from a catering-size, plastic tub, and a flavourless Viognier loaded with sulphites.
She kept her laptop on the table while she ate, partly to discourage anyone from trying to make conversation and partly so that she could look for information on the Evangelical Order of David.
Perhaps slightly surprisingly, they had no homepage at all. Or at least none that Google could find. The only hit was a link to a cult survivors site. Carla followed the link and scanned the page until she found a throwaway reference halfway down. The EOD was included in a list of active cults, that was all.
Google also suggested that she might have meant the “evanjelicul order of david” and offered another link to that, but when she followed it she just got a 404 error. It seemed that the target site no longer existed.
Carla chewed her food thoughtfully for a few moments and then tried Googling for the url she wanted instead. As luck would have it, the search engine had stored a copy of the page in its cache. She loaded it and scrolled down the page until she found what she was looking for.
It was a post in a thread about conspiracy theories on some long-abandoned forum. There had been pictures among the text at one point, but the links to whichever hosting service the author had used were no longer valid.
so a irl friend of mine told me about this dangerus secret socity called the EVANJELICUL ORDER OF DAVID in MA. it is a secret socity about the cult of dagon their God with links to FREEMASONS and the VATICAN CHURHC and other secret socitys and they have something todo with SCIENCEOLOGY. he said it started way back and was close down by the FBI who used a submareen to bomb the headqarters but then it came back in 1970 disgised as a church. they do experments on people by holding them underwater or sumthing and he reckuns they use special poisons from the sea to give u branewashing but if u talk shit about them they sue you. LOL i will probably get sued for this post lol!!1! ohh and they also believ in the end of the world something that they call CTHULHU and only they will servive because they will go and live in the sea!!!
The other posters in the thread were less than impressed with this story, some seeming to take rather personally the fact that someone had announced a cult of which they had never heard. Yet, there was that word again that she had seen sprayed on the wall near the docks. Cthulhu. Coincidence? Maybe the author of this illiterate internet screed was a local, repeating some youth meme peculiar to the area.
“Special poisons from the sea”. Carla could think of dozens of poisons found in fish and algae – saxitoxin, ciguatoxin, cholera toxin, tetrodotoxin, brevetoxin, pectenotoxin; many of them with profound neurological effects - but she couldn’t conceive of a role for them in “branewashing”.
Her phone began to ring with the special bleating tone she had assigned to calls coming from her boss. He must be back from his bioterror seminar, no doubt full of good Italian food and wine, and implausible tales of how he had been the hit of the conference, putting the Europeans in their place and impressing everyone. Carla shoved her plate away, closed her eyes and reluctantly answered it. “Hi Terry.”
“Carla! Hi, Terry here. Just back from Florence, not seeing any e-mails here from you, thought I’d better check in with you. You still down in Massachusetts?”
“That’s right. Still here.”
“Right, right ...” he sounded distracted, and she could hear him typing away in the background. “And, er, how’s that going? Progress?”
Carla sighed. “I don’t know, it’s a tough one Terry. I’m seeing a lot of symptoms, but the locals aren’t exactly co-operative and there’s no kind of pattern I’m picking up.”
“Uh-huh, alright. Well, you found any kind of infectious process? Any evidence of transmission? What’s the epi like?”
“Well, no. I think we’re looking at something hereditary, maybe environmental. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I might know more in a few days.”
“Sure, I get you. Well, look, if it’s not contagious then just shove it back to the EPA would you? They caught this one, we’ve sent you down there, they can’t ask for more than that now. I need you back here. Rod managed to break his leg in Colorado. The others are wrapping up there, but he’s going to be out of action for weeks now and we’ve got casework piling up.”
“How’d he do that?”
“Who, Rod? Took a tumble on the slopes. Nothing too major, but enough that he can’t really go crawling through the ventilation system with a respirator on anymore, y’know what I mean? Anyway, they’ve nailed the source, they’re all heading back before the weekend. How about you?”
“Er, well, I need at least a few more days to get to the bottom of this one. Even to get enough data to write the report. I mean, you booked me into the hotel here for two weeks. I’ve not even been here two days yet.”
“Did we? Well, things change Carla. I’m short-staffed at the best of times, I need you back here. So, if you can’t find anything that puts this town, whatever it’s called, on the big map, then shunt it back to EPA. I want you back here by the end of the weekend, I want these cases written up and forgotten about by Wednesday next week. We good?”
“So, I’ve got two more days?”
“Stay for the weekend if you really want to, but be back in the office Monday morning. OK? Look, Carla, I’ve got to shoot, going round to John Cowley’s for dinner, want to update him on Florence. I’ll see you Monday.”
“OK. Bye T-“
“Take it easy.” And he was gone.
Carla blew out her cheeks and dropped the phone back into her bag. Typical. Half a week ago, when his obsession had been demonstrating inter-agency cooperation, getting an investigator down to Innsmouth had been a matter of top priority. Maybe he’d forgiven her for applying for that promotion, but more likely he’d just forgotten he was punishing her.
The other diners had all vanished and she was alone in the restaurant. Feeling petulant, Carla ordered a half bottle of champagne. If they felt no compunction about jerking her around all over the country, they could damn well pay for a few luxuries along the way.
She stood by the window, flinching slightly at the chill radiating through the glass. At least the rain had stopped, the wet tarmac glinting orange beneath the town’s few working streetlights. Carla wondered if Gary Taub was back out on the wet streets already, mourning his friends. She had two days to finish her investigation or find a good enough reason to prolong it, unless she wanted to work through the weekend and go straight into the office on Monday. Two days. And the EOD, with their “special poisons from the sea”, were still the nearest thin
g she had to a lead.
*****
The next day dawned grey and blustery, but dry. A thick quilt of cloud stretched to the horizon and it was so dark that some of the streetlights were still on when Carla left the hotel at half past nine.
She had discovered that there was a Hertz office just off the I495, and she made driving inland the first order of business. Exchanging the vandalised Honda for an identical, intact one, she was back in Innsmouth shortly after eleven. Taking a few minutes to grab a cup of coffee, she decided to leave the EOD until the afternoon and check up on Gary Taub first. The boy seemed willing to talk to her, if she could only get him away from his parents for a while.
She rang Khalil to find out where the family lived. He sounded worried about the idea of her going alone, even offering to accompany her if she would wait. Eventually he relented and gave her the address. Washington Street. Far side of the river.
The Innsmouth Syndrome Page 5