When she told him how they might be able to use that to their advantage, she expected Escovedo to say no, out of the question. Instead, he thought it over for all of five seconds and said yes.
“I don’t like it, but we need to fast-track this,” he said. “We don’t just eyeball their alignment in the pit, you know. We measure it with a laser. That’s how we know how precisely oriented they are. And since last night they’ve shifted. Whatever they’re cued in on has moved north.”
The next morning, dawn came as dawn should, the sky clear and the fog blown away and the sun an actual presence over the horizon. After two days of being scarcely able to see fifty feet in front of her, it seemed as if she could see forever. There was something joyously liberating in it. After just two days.
So what was it going to feel like for Barnabas Marsh to experience the ocean for the first time in more than eighty years? The true sea, not the simulation of it siphoned off and pumped into the pit. Restrained by a makeshift leash, yes, three riflemen ready to shoot from the shore, that too, three more ready to shoot from the parapet of the prison . . . but it would still be the sea.
That it would be Marsh they would try this with was inevitable. It might not be safe and they might get only one chance at this. He was cunning, she had to assume, but he was the oldest by far, and a direct descendant of the man who’d brought this destiny to Innsmouth in the first place. He would have the deepest reservoir of knowledge.
And, maybe, the arrogance to want to share it, and gloat.
Kerry was waiting by the shallows when they brought him down, at one end of a long chain whose other end was padlocked to the frame of a four-wheel all-terrain cycle that puttered along behind him—he might have been able to throw men off balance in a tug-of-war, but not this.
Although he had plenty of slack, Marsh paused a few yards from the water’s edge, stopping to stare out at the shimmering expanse of sea. The rest of them might have seen mistrust in his hesitation, or savoring the moment, but neither of these felt right. Reacquainting, she thought. That’s it.
He trudged forward then, trailing chain, and as he neared the water, he cast a curious look at her, standing there in a slick blue wetsuit they’d outfitted her with, face-mask and snorkel in her hand. It gave him pause again, and in whatever bit of Marsh that was still human, she saw that he understood, realized who was responsible for this.
Gratitude, though, was not part of his nature. Once in the water, he vanished in moments, marked only by the clattering of his chain along the rocks.
She’d thought it wise to allow Marsh several minutes alone, just himself and the sea. They were midway through it when Escovedo joined her at the water’s edge.
“You sure you’re up for this?” he said. “It’s obvious how much you don’t like the idea, even if it was yours.”
She glanced over at Marsh’s chain, now still. “I don’t like to see anything captive when it has the capacity to lament its conditions.”
“That’s not what I mean. If you think you’ve been keeping it under wraps that you’ve got a problem with water, you haven’t. I could spot it two days ago, soon as we left the mainland behind.”
She grinned down at her flippers, sheepish. Busted. “Don’t worry. I’ll deal.”
“But you still know how to snorkel . . . ?”
“How else are you going to get over a phobia?” She laughed, needing to, and it helped. “It went great in the heated indoor pool.”
She fitted the mask over her face and popped in the snorkel’s mouthpiece, and went in after Marsh. Calves, knees . . . every step forward was an effort, so she thought of Tabby. The sooner I get results, the quicker I’ll get home. Thighs, waist . . . then she was in Marsh’s world, unnerved by the fear that she would find him waiting for her, tooth and claw, ready to rip through her in a final act of defiance.
But he was nowhere near her. She floated facedown, kicking lightly and visually tracking the chain down the slope of the shoreline, until she saw it disappear over a drop-off into a well that was several feet deeper. There he is. She hovered in place, staring down at Marsh as he luxuriated in the water. Ecstatic—there was no other word for him. Twisting, turning, undulating, the chain only a minor impediment, he would shoot up near the surface, then turn and plunge back to the bottom, rolling in the murk he stirred up, doing it again, again, again. His joyous abandon was like a child’s.
He saw her and stilled, floating midway between surface and sand, a sight from a nightmare, worse than a shark because even in this world he was so utterly alien.
And it was never going to get any less unnerving. She sucked in a deep breath through the snorkel, then plunged downward, keeping a bit of distance between them as she swam to the bottom.
Two minutes and then some—that was how long she could hold her breath.
Kerry homed in on a loose rock that looked heavy enough to counter her buoyancy, then checked the dive compass strapped to her wrist like an oversized watch. She wrestled the wave-smoothed stone into her lap and sat cross-legged on the bottom, matching as precisely as she could the latest of the southwesterly alignments that had so captivated Marsh and the other sixty-two of them. Sitting on the seabed with the Pacific alive around her, muffled in her ears and receding into a blue-green haze, as she half expected something even worse than Marsh to come swimming straight at her out of the void.
Somewhere above and behind her, he was watching.
She stayed down until her lungs began to ache, then pushed free of the stone and rose to the surface, where she purged the snorkel with a gust of spent air, then flipped to return to the seabed. Closer this time, mere feet between her and Marsh as she settled again, no longer needing the compass—she found her bearing naturally, and time began to slow, and so did her heartbeat in spite of the fear, then the fear was gone, washed away in the currents that tugged at her like temptations.
Up again, down again, and it felt as if she were staying below longer each time, her capacity for breath expanding to fill the need, until she was all but on the outside of herself looking in, marveling at this creature she’d become, amphibious, neither of the land nor the water, yet belonging to both. She lived in a bubble of breath in an infinite now, lungs satiated, awareness creeping forward along this trajectory she was aligned with, as if it were a cable that spanned the seas, and if she could only follow it, she would learn the secrets it withheld from all but the initiated—
And he was there, Barnabas Marsh a looming presence drifting alongside her. If there was anything to read in his cold face, his unplumbed eyes, it was curiosity. She had become something he’d never seen before, something between his enemies and his people, and changing by the moment.
She peered at him, nothing between them now but the thin plastic window of her mask and a few nourishing inches of water.
What is it that’s out there? she asked. Tell me. I want to know. I want to understand.
It was true—she did. She would wonder even if she hadn’t been asked to. She would wonder every day for the rest of her life. Her existence would be marred by not knowing.
Tell me what it is that lies beyond . . .
She saw it then, a thought like a whisper become an echo, as it began to build on itself, the occlusions between worlds parting in swirls of ink and oceans. And there was so much of it, this was something that couldn’t be—who could build such a thing, and who would dream of finding it here, at depths that might crush a submarine—then she realized that all she was seeing was one wall, one mighty wall, built of blocks the size of boxcars, a feat that couldn’t be equaled even on land. She knew without seeing the whole that it spanned miles, that if this tiny prison island could sink into it, it would be lost forever, an insignificant patch of pebbles and mud to what lived there—
And she was wholly herself again, with a desperate need to breathe.
Kerry wrestled the rock off her lap for the last time, kicking for a surface as far away as the sun. As she shot past Barnab
as Marsh she was gripped by a terror that he would seize her ankle to pull her back down.
But she knew she could fight that, so what he did was worse somehow, nothing she knew that he could do, and maybe none of these unsuspecting men on the island did either. It was what sound could be if sound were needles, a piercing skirl that ripped through her like an electric shock and clapped her ears as sharply as a pressure wave. She spun in the water, not knowing up from down, and when she stabilized and saw Marsh nearby, she realized he wasn’t even directing this at her. She was just a bystander who got in the way. Instead, he was facing out to sea, the greater sea, unleashing this sound into the abyss.
She floundered to the surface and broke through, graceless and gasping, and heard Colonel Escovedo shout a command, and in the next instant heard the roar of an engine as the four-wheeler went racing up the rock-strewn slope of the island’s western edge. The chain snapped taut, and moments later Marsh burst from the shallows in a spray of surf and foam, dragged twisting up onto the beach. Someone fired a shot, and someone else another, and of course no one heard her calling from nearly a hundred feet out, treading water now, and they were all shooting, so none of them heard her cry out that they had the wrong idea. But bullets first, questions later, she supposed.
His blood was still red. She had to admit, she’d wondered.
It took the rest of the morning before she was ready to be debriefed, and Escovedo let her have it, didn’t press for too much, too soon. She needed to be warm again, needed to get past the shock of seeing Barnabas Marsh shot to pieces on the beach. Repellent though he was, she’d still linked with him in her way, whispered back and forth, and he’d been alive one minute, among the oldest living beings on the earth, then dead the next.
She ached from the sound he’d made, as if every muscle and organ inside her had been snapped like a rubber band. Her head throbbed with the assault on her ears.
In the colonel’s office, finally, behind closed doors, Kerry told him of the colossal ruins somewhere far beneath the sea.
“Does any of that even make sense?” she asked. “It doesn’t to me. It felt real enough at the time, but now . . . it has to have been a dream of his. Or maybe Marsh was insane. How could anyone have even known if he was?”
Behind his desk, Escovedo didn’t move for the longest time, leaning on his elbows and frowning at his interlaced hands. Had he heard her at all? Finally he unlocked one of the drawers and withdrew a folder; shook out some photos, then put one back and slid the rest across to her. Eight in all.
“What you saw,” he said. “Did it look anything like this?”
She put them in rows, four over four, like puzzle pieces, seeing how they might fit together. And she needed them all at once, to bludgeon herself into accepting the reality of it: stretches of walls, suggestions of towers, some standing, some collapsed, all fitted together from blocks of greenish stone that could have been shaped by both hammers and razors. Everything was restricted to what spotlights could reach, limned by a cobalt haze that faded into inky blackness. Here, too, were windows and gateways and wide, irregular terraces that might have been stairs, only for nothing that walked on human feet. There was no sense of scale, nothing to measure it by, but she’d sensed it once today already, and it had the feeling of enormity and measureless age.
It was the stuff of nightmares, out of place and out of time, waiting in the cold, wet dark.
“They’ve been enhanced because of the low-light conditions and the distance,” Escovedo said. “It’s like the shots of the Titanic. The only light down that far is what you can send on a submersible. Except the Navy’s lost every single one they’ve sent down there. They just go offline. These pictures . . . they’re from the one that lasted the longest.”
She looked up again. The folder they’d come from was gone. “You held one back. I can’t see it?”
He shook his head. “Need to know.”
“It shows something that different from the others?”
Nothing. He was as much a block of stone as the walls.
“Something living?” She remembered his description of the sound heard across three thousand miles of ocean: The analysts say it most closely matches a profile of something alive. “Is that it?”
“I won’t tell you you’re right.” He appeared to be choosing his words with care. “But if that’s what you’d picked up on out there with Marsh, then maybe we’d have a chance to talk about photo number nine.”
She wanted to know. Needed to know as badly as she’d needed to breathe this morning, waking up to herself too far under the surface of the sea.
“What about the rest of them? We can keep trying.”
He shook his head no. “We’ve come to the end of this experiment. I’ve already arranged for your transportation back home tomorrow.”
Just like that. It felt as if she were being fired. She hadn’t even delivered. She’d not told them anything they didn’t already know about. She’d only confirmed it. What had made that unearthly noise, what the Innsmouth prisoners were waiting for—that’s what they were really after.
“We’re only just getting started. You can’t rush something like this. There are sixty-two more of them over there, one of them is sure to—”
He cut her off with a slash of his hand. “Sixty-two of them who are in an uproar now. They didn’t see what happened to Marsh, but they’ve got the general idea.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to order his execution.”
“That was for you. I thought we were protecting you.” He held up his hands then, appeasement, time-out. “I appreciate your willingness to continue. I do. But even if they were still in what passes for a good mood with them, we’ve still reached an impasse here. You can’t get through to them on our turf, and I can’t risk sending you back out with another of them onto theirs. It doesn’t matter that Marsh didn’t actually attack you. I can’t risk another of them doing what he did to make me think he had.”
“I don’t follow you.” It had been uncomfortable, yes, and she had no desire to experience it again, but it was hardly fatal.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what that sound he made meant,” Escovedo said. “What I keep coming back to is that he was sending a distress call.”
She wished she could’ve left the island sooner. That the moment the colonel told her they were finished, he’d already had the helicopter waiting. However late they got her home again, surely by now she would be in her own bed, holding her daughter close because she needed her even more than Tabby needed her.
Awake part of the time and a toss-up the rest, asleep but dreaming she was still trying to get there. Caught between midnight and dawn, the weather turning for the worse again, the crack and boom of thunder like artillery, with bullets of rain strafing the roof.
She had to be sleeping some of the time, though, and dreaming of something other than insomnia. She knew perfectly well she was in a bed, but there were times in the night when it felt as if she were still below, deeper than she’d gone this morning, in the cold of the depths far beyond the reach of the sun, drifting beside leviathan walls lit by a phosphorescence whose source she couldn’t pin down. The walls themselves were tricky to navigate, like being on the outside of a maze, yet still lost within it, finding herself turning strange corners that seemed to jut outward, only to find that they turned in. She was going to drown down here, swamped by a sudden thrashing panic over her air tank going empty, only to realize . . .
She’d never strapped on one to begin with.
She belonged here, in this place that was everything that made her recoil.
Marsh, she thought, once she could tell ceiling from sea. Although he was dead, Marsh was still with her, in an overlapping echo of whispers. Dead, but still dreaming.
When she woke for good, though, it was as abruptly as could be, jolted by the sound of a siren so loud it promised nothing less than a cataclysm. It rose and fell like the howling of a feral g
od. She supposed soldiers knew how to react, but she wasn’t one of them. Every instinct told her to hug the mattress and melt beneath the covers and hope it all went away.
But that was a strategy for people prone to dying in their beds.
She was dressed and out the door in two minutes, and though she had to squint against the cold sting of the rain, she looked immediately to the prison. Everything on the island, alive or motorized, seemed to be moving in that direction, and for a moment she wondered if she should too—safety in numbers, and what if something was driving them that way, from the east end?
But the searchlights along the parapet told a different story, three beams stabbing out over the open water, shafts of brilliant white shimmering with rain and sweeping to and fro against the black of night. A distress call, Escovedo had said—had it been answered? Was the island under attack, an invasion by Innsmouth’s cousins who’d come swarming onto the beach? No, that didn’t seem right either. The spotlights were not aimed down, but out. Straight out.
She stood rooted to the spot, pelted by rain, lashed by wind, frozen with dread that something terrible was on its way. The island had never felt so small. Even the prison looked tiny now, a vulnerable citadel standing alone against the three co-conspirators of ocean, night, and sky.
Ahead of the roving spotlights, the rain was a curtain separating the island from the sea, then it parted, silently at first, the prow of a ship spearing into view, emerging from the blackness as though born from it. No lights, no one visible on board, not even any engine noise that she could hear—just a dead ship propelled by the night or something in it. The sound came next, a tortured grinding of steel across rock so loud it made the siren seem weak and thin. The ship’s prow heaved higher as it was driven up onto the island, the rest of it coming into view, the body of the shark behind the cone of its snout.
And she’d thought the thunder was loud. When the freighter plowed into the prison the ground shuddered beneath her, the building cracking apart as though riven by an axe, one of the spotlights tumbling down along with an avalanche of bricks and masonry before winking out for good. She watched men struggle, watched men fall, and at last the ship’s momentum was spent. For a breathless moment it was perfectly still. Then, with another grinding protest of metal on stone, the ship began to list, like twisting a knife after sticking it in. The entire right side of the prison buckled and collapsed outward, and with it went the siren and another of the searchlights. The last of the lights reeled upward, aimed back at the building’s own roofline.
New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird Page 5