Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I’ll only be a moment,” Lacey says.

  “You can leave that here, too, if you like,” the woman who smells like wintergreen and mothballs says, and Lacey realizes that she’s still holding the box with the Innsmouth fossil.

  “No. I’ll be right back,” Lacey tells her, gripping the box a little more tightly. Before the woman can say anything else, before the priest has a chance to change his mind and let the oyster-haired woman come after her, Lacey turns and pushes her way along the aisle towards the exit sign.

  “Excuse me,” she says, repeating the words like a prayer, a hasty mantra as she squeezes past impatient, unhelpful men and women. She accidentally steps on someone’s foot, and he tells her to slow the fuck down, just wait her turn, what the fuck’s wrong with her, anyway. Then she’s past the last of them and moving quickly down the steps, out of the train and standing safe on the wide and crowded platform. Glancing back at the tinted windows, she doesn’t see the priest or the crazy woman who gave her the envelope. Lacey asks a porter pulling an empty luggage rack where she can find a pay phone, and he points to the terminal.

  “Right through there,” he says, “on your left, by the rest rooms.” She thanks him and walks quickly across the platform towards the doors, the wide electric doors sliding open and closed, spitting some people out and swallowing others whole.

  “Miss Morrow!” the priest shouts, his voice small above the muttering crowd. “Please, wait! You don’t understand!”

  But Lacey doesn’t wait, only a few more feet to the wide terminal doors and never mind the damned pay phones. She can always call Jasper Morgan after she finds a security guard or a cop.

  “Please!” the priest shouts, and the wide doors slide open again.

  It ain’t me you got to be afraid of, Miss. Get that straight.

  “You’ll have to come with us now,” a tall, pale man in a black suit and black sunglasses says as he steps through the doors onto the platform. The sun shines like broken diamonds off the barrel of the pistol in his left hand and the badge in his right. Lacey turns to run, but there’s already someone there to stop her, a black woman almost as tall as the pale man with the gun.

  “You’ll only make it worse on yourself,” she says in a thick Caribbean accent, and Lacey looks back towards the train, desperately searching the crowd for the priest, and there’s no sign of him anywhere.

  After the gas station, Lacey followed Highway 1 south to Kent Corner and from there she took Haverhill Street to the 1A, gradually working her way south and east, winding towards Ipswich and the sea. The sky beaten black and blue by the storms and the day dissolving slowly into a premature North Shore night while lightning fingers flicked greedily across the land. At Ipswich, she asked directions again, this time from a girl working behind the counter of a convenience store. The girl had heard of Innsmouth, though she’d never seen the place for herself, had only picked up stories at school and from her parents – urban legends mostly, wild tales of witches and sea monsters and strange lights floating above the dunes. She sold Lacey a Diet Coke and a bag of Fritos and told her to take Argilla Road out of town and stay on it all the way down to the river.

  “Be careful,” the girl said worriedly, and Lacey smiled and assured her that she would.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I just want to have a quick look around.”

  Twenty minutes later she reached the dead end of Argilla Road, a locked gate and chain-link fence crowned with loops of razor wire, stretching east and west as far as she could see. A rusty Army Corps of Engineers sign hung on the gate – NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED and THIS AREA PATROLLED BY ARMED GUARDS – DO NOT ENTER. She parked the Jeep in a sandy spot near the fence and sat for a few minutes staring at the sign, wondering how many years it had been there, how many decades since it was hung on the fence. Then she cut the engine and got out.

  The wind smelled like rain and the sea, ozone and the fainter silty stink of the salt marshes, commingled smells of life and sex and death. She sat on the cooling hood of the car with a folded topographic map and finished the bag of Fritos. Below her the land dropped quickly away to stunted trees, billowing swells of goldenrod and spike grass, and a few stingy outcroppings of granite poking up here and there through the sand. The Manuxet River snaked along the bottom of the valley, wandering through thickets of bullrush and silverweed, tumbling over a few low falls on its way down to the mouth of Ipswich Bay.

  But there was no indication that there had ever been a town of any sort here, certainly no evidence that this deserted stretch of coastline had once been the prosperous seaport of Innsmouth, with its mills and factories, a gold refinery and bustling waterfront, its history stretching back to the mid-17th century. So maybe she was in the wrong place after all. Maybe the ruins of Innsmouth lay somewhere farther east, or back towards Plum Island. Lacey watched two seagulls struggling against the wind, raucous grey-white smudges drifting in the low indigo sky. She glanced at the topo map and then northwest towards a point marked “Castle Hill,” but there was no castle there now, if indeed there ever had been, no buildings of any sort, only a place where the land rose up one last time before ending in a weathered string of steep granite cliffs.

  She’d drawn a small red circle on the map just offshore, to indicate the coordinates written on the lid of the old box from Cabinet 34 – Latitude 42° 40” N, Longitude 70° 43” W – and Lacey scanned the horizon, wishing she’d remembered her binoculars, hanging useless in her bedroom closet at home. But there was something out there, a thin, dark line a mile or more beyond the breakwater, barely visible above the stormy sea. Perhaps only her imagination – something she needed to see – or a trick of the fading light, or both. She glanced back down at the map. Not far from her red circle were contour lines indicating a high, narrow shoal hiding beneath the water, and the spot was labeled simply “Allen’s Reef.” If the tide were out and the ocean calm, maybe there would be more to see, perhaps an aplitic or pegmatitic dike cutting through the native granite, an ancient river of magma frozen, crystallized, scrubbed smooth by the waves.

  “What do you think you’ll find out there?” Jasper Morgan had asked her the day before. He’d come by her office with the results of a microfossil analysis of the sediment sample she’d scraped from the Innsmouth fossil. “There sure as hell aren’t any Devonian rocks on Cape Ann,” he’d said. “It’s all Ordovician, and igneous to boot.”

  “I just want to see it,” she’d replied, skimming the letter typed on Harvard stationary, describing the results of the analysis.

  “So, what does it say?” Dr. Morgan had asked, but Lacey read all the way to the bottom of the page before answering him.

  “The rock’s siltstone, but we already knew that. The ostracods say Early Devonian, probably Lochkovian. And that snail’s definitely Loxonema. So, there you go. Devonian rocks somewhere off Cape Ann.”

  “Damn,” he’d whispered, grinning and scratching his head, and they’d spent the next half hour talking about the thing from Cabinet 34, more than a hundred million years older than anything with a forearm like that had a right to be. No getting around the fact that it looked a lot more like a hand, something built for grasping, than a forefoot.

  “Maybe we ought to just put it back in that drawer,” Jasper Morgan had said, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea what kind of shitstorm this thing’s gonna cause?”

  “I think maybe I’m beginning to.”

  “You might as well have found a goddamn cell phone buried in an Egyptian pyramid.”

  Thunder rumbles somewhere nearby, off towards Rowley, and a few cold drops of rain. Lacey glances down at the map and then out at the distant black line of Allen’s Reef one last time. Such a long drive to find so little, the whole day wasted, the night and the time it would take her to drive back to Amherst. Money spent on gasoline that could have gone for rent and groceries. She slid off the hood of the Jeep and was already folding the map closed when something moved ou
t on the reef. She caught the briefest glimpse from the corner of one eye, the impression of something big and dark, scuttling on long legs across the rocks before slipping back into the water. There was another thunderclap, then, and this time lightning like God was taking pictures, but she didn’t move, stared at the reef and the angry sea crashing over it.

  “Just my imagination,” she whispered. Or maybe it had been a bird, or a particularly high wave falling across the rocks, something perfectly familiar made strange by distance and shadow.

  The thunder rolled away, and there were no sounds left but the wind blowing through the tall grass and the falls gurgling near the mouth of the Manuxet River. In an instant, the rain became a torrent, and her clothes and the map were soaked straight through before she could get back inside the Jeep.

  3:25 P.M.

  Handcuffs and a blindfold tied too tightly around her face before the man and woman who clearly aren’t FBI agents shoved her into the back of a rust-green Ford van. And now she lies shivering on wet carpeting as they speed along streets that she can’t see. The air around her is as cold as a late December night and thick with the gassy, sour-sweet stench of something dead, something that should have been buried a long, long time ago.

  “I already told you why,” the man in the black suit and sunglasses growls angrily, and Lacey thinks maybe there’s fear in his voice, too. “She didn’t have it, okay? And we couldn’t risk going onto the train after it. Monalisa’s people got to her first. I already fucking told you that.”

  Whatever is in the back of the van with her answers him in its ragged, drowning voice like her grandmother dying of pneumonia when Lacey was seven years old. There are almost words in there, broken bits and pieces of words, vowel shards and consonant shrapnel, and the woman with the Caribbean accent curses and mumbles something to herself in Haitian Creole.

  “Please,” Lacey begs them. “I don’t know what you want. Tell me what the fuck you want, and I’ll give it to you.”

  “You think so?” the woman asks. “You think it would be that easy now? After all this shit, and you just gonna hand it over, and we just gonna go away and leave you alone?

  Merde…”

  The van squeals around a corner without bothering to slow down, and Lacey is thrown sideways into something that feels like a pile of wet rags. She tries to roll away from it, but strong hands hold her fast, and icy fingers brush slowly across her throat, her chin, her lips. There’s skin like sandpaper and Jell-O, fingertips that may as well be icicles, and she bites at them, but her teeth close on nothing at all, a mouthful of frigid air that tastes like raw fish and spoiled vegetables.

  “We had strict fucking instructions to avoid a confrontation,” the man says, and the car takes another corner, pitching Lacey free of the rag pile again.

  “You just shut up and drive this damn car,” the woman says. “You gonna get us all killed. You gonna have the cops on us.”

  “Then you better tell that slimy, half-breed motherfucker back there to shut the hell up and stop threatening me,” the man snarls at the woman. “I’m just about ready to say fuck you and him both. Pop a fucking cap in his skull and take my chances with the Order.”

  The rag pile gurgles and then makes a hollow, gulping noise. Lacey thinks it’s laughing, as close as it can ever come to laughing, and she wonders how long it’s going to be before it touches her again, wonders if they’ll kill her first, and which would be worse. She presses her face against the soggy carpeting, eyes open but nothing there to see, rough fabric against her eyeballs, and she tries to wipe its touch from her skin. Nothing she’ll ever be able to scrub off, though, she knows that, something that’s stained straight through to her soul.

  “Is it the fossil?” she asks. “Is this about the fossil?”

  “Now you startin’ to use that big ol’ brain of yours, missy,” the woman says. “You tell us where it’s hid, who you gave it to, and maybe you gonna get to live just a little bit longer.”

  “She ain’t gonna tell you jack shit,” the man sneers.

  The rag pile makes a fluttering, anxious sound, and Lacey tries to sit up, but the van swerves and bounces over something, a pothole or a speed bump, a fucking old lady crossing the street for all she knows, and she tumbles over on her face again.

  “It’s in the box,” she says, rolling onto her back, and she kicks out with her left foot and hits nothing but the metal side wall. The rag pile gurgles and sputters wildly, and so Lacey kicks the van again, harder than before. “Haven’t you even opened the goddamn box?”

  “Bitch, ain’t nothin’ we want in that box.,” the woman says. “You already handed it off to Monalisa, didn’t you?”

  “Of course she fucking gave it to him. What the fuck else do you think she did with it?”

  “I told you to shut up and drive.”

  “Fuck you,” and then a car horn blares and everything dissolves into the banshee wail of squealing brakes, tires burning themselves down to naked, steelbelt bones, the impact hardly half a heartbeat later, and Lacey is thrown backwards into the gurgling rag pile. Something soft to cushion the blow, at least, she thinks, wondering if she’s dead already and just hasn’t figured it all out yet, and the man in the sunglasses screams like a woman.

  There’s light, a flood of clean, warm sunlight across her face before the gunfire – three shots – blam, blam, blam. The rag pile abruptly stops gurgling, and someone takes her by the arm, someone pulling her out of the van, out of hell and back into the world again.

  “I can’t see,” she says, and the blindfold falls away to leave her squinting and blinking at the rough brick walls of an alleyway, a sagging fire escape. There’s the heady the stink of a garbage dumpster, but even that smells good after the van.

  “Wow,” the old man says, the grinning scarecrow of an old man in a blue fedora and a shiny gabardine suit, blue bow tie to match his hat. “I saw someone do that in a movie once. I never imagined it would actually work.”

  There’s a huge revolver clutched in his bony right hand, the blindfold dangling from the fingers of his left, and his violet-grey eyes sparkle like amethysts and spring water.

  “Professor Solomon Monalisa, at your service,” he says, letting the blindfold fall to the ground and he holds one twig-thin hand out to Lacey. “You had us all worried, Miss Morrow. You shouldn’t have run like that.”

  Lacey stares at his outstretched hand. There are sirens now.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot about the handcuffs. I’m afraid we’ll have to attend to those elsewhere, though. I don’t think we should be here when the police show up and start asking questions, do you?”

  “No,” she says, and the old man takes her arm again and starts to lead her away from the wrecked van.

  “Wait. The box,” she says and tries to turn around, but he stops her and puts a hand across her eyes.

  “What’s back there, Miss Morrow, you don’t want to see it.”

  “They have the box. The Innsmouth fossil – ”

  “I have the fossil,” he says. “And it’s quite safe, I assure you. Come now, Miss Morrow. We don’t have much time.”

  He leads her away from the van, down the long, narrow alley. There’s a door back there, a tall wooden door with peeling red paint, and he opens it with a silver key.

  Excerpt from New American Monsters: More Than Myth? by Gerald Durrell (Hill and Wang, New York, 1959):

  … which is certainly enough to make us pause and wonder about the possibility of a connection between at least some of these sightings and the celluloid fantasies being churned out by Hollywood film-makers. If we insist upon objectivity and are willing to entertain the notion of unknown animals, we must also, it seems, be equally willing to entertain the possibility that a few of these beasts may exist as much in the realm of the psychologist as that of the biologist. I can think of no better example of what I mean than the strange and frightening reports from Massachusetts that preceded the release of The Creature From the Black Lagoo
n five years ago.

  As first reported in the Ipswich Chronicle, March 20th, 1954, there was a flurry of sightings, from Gloucester north to Newburyport, of one or more scaly man-like amphibians, monstrous things that menaced boaters and were blamed for the death of at least one swimmer. On the evening of March 19th, Mrs. Cordelia Eliot of Rowley was walking along the coast near the Annisquam Harbor Lighthouse, when she saw what she later described as a “horrible fishman” paddling about just off shore. She claims to have watched it for half an hour, until the sun set and she lost sight of the creature. Four days later, there was another sighting by two fishermen near the mouth of the Annisquam River, of a “frogman with bulging red eyes and scaly greenish-black skin” wading through the shallows. When one of the men fired a shotgun at it (I haven’t yet concluded if the men routinely carried firearms on fishing trips), it slipped quietly away into deeper water.

  But the lion’s share of the sightings that spring seem to have occurred in the vicinity of the “ghost town” of Innsmouth, at the mouth of the Castle Neck River (previously known by its Agawam Indian name, Manuxet, a name which still persists among local old-timers). Most of these encounters are merely brief glimpses of scaly man-like creatures, usually seen from a considerable distance, either swimming near the mouth of the river or walking along its muddy banks at low tide. But one remarkable, and disturbing, account, reported by numerous local papers, involves the death of a nine-year-old boy named Lester Sargent, who drowned while swimming with friends below a small waterfall on the lower Castle Neck River. His companions reported that the boy began screaming, and immediately a great amount of blood was visible in the water. There were attempts to reach the swimmer, but the would-be rescuers were driven back by “a monster with blood-red eyes and sharp teeth.” The boy finally disappeared beneath the surface and his mutilated and badly decomposed body turned up a week later on Crane Beach, a considerable distance from the falls where he disappeared. The Essex County coroner listed the cause of death as shark attack.