She took a minute to highlight her mental notes, then resumed.
“Okay, let’s just say that it is one of these first dwellers, but according to your mythology, the things disappeared. Now this one wasn’t exactly avoiding us. Where have they been hiding until now?”
“They haven’t,” Copperseed refuted. “We’ve been getting reports of footprints and sightings since the fifties.”
“That’s still only forty years; why did no one see them before?”
They locked eyes, and said together, “We weren’t digging mines before.”
“I got there before you, don’t pin on any medals,” she warned. “Do you have a freezer? A kitchen freezer; we don’t need to keep the whole thing. I’ll extract some tissue samples to deep-freeze them; the rest will probably be lost tomorrow, but that and the pictures will be enough to bring scientific attention.” She stood up, breathed in the last chestful of clean air before going back to work. “Whether these are legendary hellspawn or a gross error on nature’s side, they need to be dealt with.”
—
Dunia slid the Polaroid back across the sequoia table.
“Horrifying,” she pronounced, before reading the room. “Are you gonna ask me if I ever saw one of these rummaging our trash cans in Deboën Mansion?”
“No,” Andy said apologetically. She had not foreseen that Nate would be flashing the picture around. “I mean, you didn’t, did you?”
“No,” Dunia said. “My father would’ve been interested, though. It’s a real pity they didn’t meet.”
“What do you mean?” Nate prompted.
Dunia tapped her cigarette in the vicinity of the ashtray, took another drag, and leaned back in her seat.
“Daniel Deboën was convinced that mysterious beings hid under the hills,” she said. “Old, forgotten beasts unknown to modern science. He actually looked for them.”
“How do you think he got that idea?”
“His books,” she short-answered. “The family owned a large collection of works by ancient scientists and philosophers—so ancient that most of the knowledge in them is myth. But my father used to think there is always some stratum of fact beneath any legend; that the remote lands described by Persian alchemists and Andalusi theologists were actual regions of this continent, glimpsed or intuited by pre-Columbian explorers. The Deboëns were fond of ancient wisdom like that.”
“Do you still own those books?” Nate asked.
“No. They might still be in the house, in the attic. That’s where he had his alchemy lab; he practically lived there.”
“Just to clarify,” Andy probed, “when you say ‘alchemy,’ you mean…?”
“Primitive chemistry,” Dunia thesaurusized. “Physics tinted with magic. Science that still considered incantations and the current phase of the moon as part of the equation. Pretty much what any menopausal New Age nut would happily embrace now, but when it’s done by men who also live alone in the woods, it looks weird,” Dunia said, flicking the joke off the tip of her cigarette. “My father was convinced that there was some overlooked, revolutionary knowledge in the arts of the first philosophers. He kept all sorts of chemical products and samples and astronomical charts, and tried to re-create the experiments.”
“Could it have been one of his experiments that caused the fire in nineteen forty-nine?”
“Perhaps.” She shrugged. “But the attic was mostly undamaged, I heard. Police said a freak accident caused the oil tank to blow up, taking the east wing and my father with it. He was buried on the isle, as per his instructions. You may have seen his grave,” she said, acknowledging Andy’s nod.
“There is a rumor,” Nate began, in a way that passed as tactful for somebody accustomed to the bluntness of Arkham patients, “that your father’s father, Damian Deboën, was a sorcerer.”
“I’ve heard that one. And he was a pirate too.” Dunia smirked. “Oh, and do you know why he set sail in the first place? He was running away after his witch mother was trialed and burned in Salem.”
“Fuck shit goddamn testicles, always fucking Salem,” Nate ranted.
“There is also a theory,” Andy argued, “that Damian and Daniel Deboën were the same person.”
“That’s not very original,” Dunia retorted. “I mean, it’s kind of a vampire trope, isn’t it? Leaving the country and returning as your own son? It’s been done before.” She put out the idea along with the cigarette, then recrossed her legs and added, “Anyway, he didn’t look a hundred and fifty to me. I wonder where those agelessness genes went.”
“Mrs. Morris,” Nate started, “back during our investigation of Sleepy Lake thirteen years ago, we spent a night in your house.”
“Not my house.”
“Deboën Mansion. That was the night when we caught Wickley, who had been pretending to be a lake creature while he searched your—the mansion for your father’s gold.”
“Yes, I read the story.”
“Right. Anyway, despite what the papers said, we’re pretty sure we saw…some strange things.”
Dunia held a chilling Hollywood-producer kind of stare.
“Things like that in your picture?” she prompted.
“No,” Nate answered, realizing that Andy had said yes at the same time. It took him several seconds to reformulate. “I spent some time in the attic that night. I saw your father’s lab. His books. I even…well, I was eleven, but I used to call myself a detective, so I did what I believed to be my job. I went through that stuff. And…I found things that wouldn’t sit well with even the most liberal conceptions of chemistry or alchemy.”
Dunia nonchalantly held his look across the sequoia table, smoking like the Great Sphinx of Giza.
“I mean, the biological samples I saw…” he continued. “I would be amazed if they had been all obtained legally. The figures and symbols drawn on the floor had nothing to do with astronomy; they were pentacles, sort of…metaphysical phone booths designed to communicate with other existential planes. And the books I saw around weren’t normal philosophical treatises; half of them are so ancient no one alive today can read them. They are rumored to explore the sublimation of life and the suspension of death.”
A clock on the mantelpiece metronomed the pause that followed.
Curled up on her seat, Dunia gazed alternately at both visitors, Nate tensely holding his ground, Andy too conscious of the taut leather on the underside of the hostess’s pants.
At last she unfolded her legs and leaned forward. “Well, you kids already know he was a sorcerer, right? The whole town knows that.”
Tim marched past between them, ignorant of the tension.
Andy began good-copping: “We didn’t mean to—”
“The whole town doesn’t know shit,” Dunia snapped. “If they did, they would’ve burned the house themselves with Deboën in it, and we’d all be better off. I wasn’t allowed in his lab, I never opened his books. I only peeked into his lidded flasks one time, but even I know his alchemy had nothing to do with searching for the philosopher’s stone or turning lead to gold. He was raising the dead. He wasn’t a sorcerer; he was a necromancer.”
Even Tim lifted a skeptical eyebrow at that. Andy and Nate checked with each other. She tried some follow-up.
“You mean…‘raising’ as in he actually did—”
“He talked to them,” Dunia said, her voice almost unhinged. “He kept urns of human ashes, stuff I don’t know how he obtained, and at night I heard him chanting his spells, words in dead languages whose mere sounds made my skin crawl, and then I listened to him talking. And I was on the floor below, lying in my bed, terrified, because whatever went bump in my room could not be worse than what was happening above me, what my father was talking to, what my father was shouting at. What I sometimes heard replying. What I heard replying in fear.”
Andy inserted the first syllable of an apology.
“You should’ve asked my mother!” Dunia shouted. “Ask her how a miner’s widow could be blackmailed
into marrying Deboën because he was in possession of compromising secrets that only her dead husband would know. How do you think he learned to read books that no one alive today can read?”
She turned to Andy, forcing her to stare into her vertigo-deep eyes.
“You think he lived a hundred and fifty years? I’m not sure he’s dead today! I grew tired of lawyers and solicitors telling me how sad it was that my father had failed to arrange things before his death; I’m sure he arranged things, but not for me! If he arranged anything, it was for his own return!”
“How?” Nate asked, aware it’d be the last question he would fit in. “How would he return? Who would bring him back willingly?”
“Do you think the ones he brought back for questioning submitted willingly? Willingness is overrated!”
Andy stood up, signaling they would be leaving. Tim took the clue even before Nate, running for the door.
“Mrs. Morris, I hate to ask you this, but…if we could have the key to your house—”
Dunia cut him short for the third time: “It’s not my house and I don’t have a key. No way I’m going back there. If he’s dead, good riddance; if he isn’t, we’re all better off not finding out.”
—
Before they could notice the ellipsis, they were out on the porch again, frowned upon by the somber, wrecked garden. The wooden wind chime above them clopped gently right on cue.
Andy zipped up her jacket.
“Was everybody in Blyton Hills this messed up when we were young?” she wondered.
Nate said nothing. Tim was already at the gate, waiting for a butler to open it and hand him his coat and hat. They followed him, and Andy stopped by the rusty mailbox.
“Mrs. Morris got mail. No, wait. It’s not for her.”
The white envelope in her hand had the initials BSDC written on front.
She spun on her heels, scanning the empty street and widowed gardens. She tore the envelope open and pulled out a single sheet of paper, handwritten, all caps, in a single line.
“DO NOT LISTEN TO HER—GO TO THE HOUSE.”
“Who the fuck?” Andy swore, shoving the message into Nate’s hands. “I don’t know who this is, but I’m not following his orders again. No way. He almost got us killed at the lake. We’re not stupid enough to fall for this again, right?”
Nate looked up from the sheet. Color had ebbed from his face.
“Actually, glad you bring that up.”
A breeze carrying the distant rumor of old sky battles made the wind chime clop again and brushed his hair.
“Remember that night thirteen years ago? I think I fucked up astonishingly bad.”
Nate chucked two more quarters into the pay phone and tried to mute the restaurant noise by squatting behind a flock of roadworkers lunching at the counter while he argued with the operator.
“No, madam; Arkham is the city. Ark-ham, Massachusetts; that’s where the clinic is,” he said into the phone. “The patient’s name is Acker.”
Joey Krantz appeared on the other side of the counter to unload some dirty glasses and trickle a fistful of coins for him. Nate thanked him with a nod, put off by the grin on Joey’s face, and continued into the phone: “No, Acker. I don’t remember the first name. Wilmarth or something ridiculous like that.”
Joey marched away with a tray, left a couple of beers along the way, and went on to drop the lunch special and the straight whiskey at the detectives’ table by the window, where their Weimaraner sat tall on the seat, scouting other people’s plates with the loftiness of a Zagat critic.
“Here we are—rice and beans,” Joey announced, serving the lunch special for Kerri while she helped herself to the whiskey from his tray. “Anything else?”
“Thanks,” she said, vaguely sketching a smile. “We’re fine.”
Andy, sitting across from Kerri, waited until Joey had drifted away before resuming the pep talk.
“So, anyway, I think we’re doing fine,” she said, while Kerri gulped down the whiskey with barely a chance for it to graze her tongue. “I mean, we got here twenty-four hours ago and look where we are now.”
“Nearing a nervous breakdown?”
“Yeah, that too, but…with what we gathered from Dunia, and Copperseed, and the dissection, we made some progress.”
“No, we didn’t. All we did was obey an anonymous message, almost get killed by a lake creature, and then poke at its carcass with a stick.” She held the empty glass. “I need another one. And a cigarette.”
Andy chose to adjourn the motivational talk and stayed silent, watching Kerri sit curled up in the booth nibbling at her nails, ignoring the steaming food Andy had ordered for her, much to Tim’s wide-eyed indignation.
Nate rejoined after five minutes. He addressed Kerri: “How do you spell Thtaggoa? T-h-t?”
“I don’t know, Nate; it was Copperseed speaking; there were no cheerleaders to spell it.”
“Right. Look, I just talked to Professor Acker in Arkham.”
“Is he your shrink?” Andy asked.
“No, he’s not staff, he’s one of the nutjobs.” He spread out the notes he’d scribbled on napkins over the table. “He used to teach anthropology; he’s familiar with all this stuff, and he knows the name. This thing, Thtaggoa, and the lake creatures; they exist. I mean, they exist in literature.”
“Flying monkeys exist in literature, Nate,” Kerri said. “Horror writers who get laid exist in literature.”
“Just fucking listen for a second, okay?!” he shouted, bringing this and two conversations in other booths to a stop.
Tim raised an eyebrow disapprovingly. Nate went on, this time below the background of Top 40 pop hits.
“We just killed something none of us, possibly no one outside mental hospitals, believed to be real. You just spent an hour examining its corpse; is it such a damn stretch to accept there might be other things out there?”
“Okay, Nate,” Andy soothed him. “Go on. We’re listening.”
Nate swallowed, leaned closer, and lowered his voice a little more, down to Italian job planning volume.
“Okay. There is a sort of literature cycle, a loose collection of texts written in different countries and eras, going as far back as Gilgamesh times, that recounts events that supposedly took place before recorded history began, about races that roamed the world and calamities that occurred before the dawn of men. That’s not uncommon; all civilizations have their genesis myths; what’s uncanny is that many of these works mention the same fallen gods and sacred places by name, both the ancient sources from the Fertile Crescent and the modern ones written by rogue alchemists, accused sorcerers, demon worshippers, and plain madmen. And in these sources, something called Thtaggoa exists. And a race of amphibian monsters called the spawn of Thtaggoa exists.”
He exhaled, amazed to have made it this far without an interruption. The frown on the girls’ faces could pass for belief.
“Have you read these texts?” Kerri asked.
“No. I tried, but the older ones require fluency in Koine Greek or Uto-Aztecan languages, and others only exist in a few private collections. Too much of it was destroyed for being ‘too disturbing,’ ” he fingerquoted. “But at the turn of the century, when the occult fad was in vogue, several high fantasy and horror authors in America and Europe discovered this material while searching for obscure mythological references they could use. They borrowed the names and some fragments, either verbatim or wildly distorted. Then others came along and built upon those foundations, and thus tidbits of mythical history ended up in pulp paperbacks.”
“But that’s exactly what you used to read,” Andy said. A second later she noticed the loose ends she was supposed to tie.
“That’s why you read Cannibal Nymphs from Pluto and Conan in the Desert of Shub-Niggurath?” Kerri asked.
“Indirectly, yes,” Nate answered. “In Deboën Mansion I saw a lot of those books. I didn’t know back then, but they were extremely rare, practically mythical, all bl
acklisted: owning such a collection would have put you in a bonfire not two hundred years ago. So while I was there I read names, memorized words. Later, when I returned home after that summer, and we’d caught Wickley and everything was supposed to be right, but it wasn’t, I hit the library. Because that’s what you would have done,” he said to Kerri. “And you’re the smart one. So research led me to Victorian occultists who mentioned this material, and Gothic authors who quoted it for the sake of verisimilitude, and pulp writers who quoted the Gothics, and comics based on the pulp stories, and video games based on the comics, and so on. There is quite a subculture around the whole thing—many aficionados trying to piece it all together. Also, in the end I developed a taste for the stuff,” he admitted, glancing away.
Tim yawned and laid his head on the table, wishing someone would remember him, or the lunch special, or ideally both.
“God.” Kerri squinted at her cousin like she would at a door in her house she had never noticed. “I always thought you just…shut yourself in your Dungeons and Dragons world because that was your way to cope.”
“It was,” he said. “Kerri, all we do is try to cope. I coped by studying it. Like when you were six and didn’t like bugs, so you read everything there was about bugs and now you’re a biologist. I did the same.”
“I didn’t cope with Sleepy Lake that way,” Kerri said. “I just ran away.”
“I ran away too,” he tried to comfort her. “It’s one thing to study it; it’s another thing to be on the same coast with it. Look, I’m just trying to apply reason here: according to Copperseed, the Walla Walla have a story about the things in Sleepy Lake featuring Thtaggoa. And I am telling you that Thtaggoa also appears in short stories by Bob Howard, in a forbidden book by a Swiss monk from the seventeenth century, and in a Mayan crypt in Palenque.”
“But what is Thtaggoa?” Andy asked, careful not to trip on the name.
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