“That’s a start, I guess,” she said. “Is that particular episode why I’m here? You figured since I did that, I wouldn’t spook easily with these prisoners of yours?”
“I imagine it was factored in.” The gravel that lined the path crunched underfoot for several paces before he spoke again. “If you don’t think of yourself as psychic, what is it, then? How does it work?”
“I don’t really know.” Kerry had always dreaded the question, because she’d never been good at answering it. “It’s been there as far back as I can remember, and I’ve gotten better at it, but I think that’s just through the doing. It’s a sense as much as anything. But not like sight or smell or taste. I compare it to balance. Can you explain how your sense of balance works?”
He cut her a sideways glance, betraying nothing, but she saw he didn’t have a clue. “Mine? You’re on a need-to-know basis here, remember.”
Very good. Very dry. Escovedo was probably more fun than he let on.
“Right,” she said. “Everybody else’s, then. Most people have no idea. It’s so intrinsic they take it for granted. A few may know it has to do with the inner ear. And a few of them, that it’s centred in the vestibular apparatus, those three tiny loops full of fluid. One for up, one for down, one for forward and backward. But you don’t need to know any of that to walk like we are now and not fall over. Well… that’s what the animal thing is like for me. It’s there, but I don’t know the mechanism behind it.”
He mused this over for several paces. “So that’s your way of dodging the question?”
Kerry grinned at the ground. “It usually works.”
“It’s a good smokescreen. Really, though.”
“Really? It’s…” She drew the word out, a soft hiss while gathering her thoughts. “A combination of things. It’s like receiving emotions, feelings, sensory impressions, mental imagery, either still or with motion. Any or all. Sometimes it’s not even that, it’s just… pure knowing, is the best way I know to phrase it.”
“Pure knowing?” He sounded sceptical.
“Have you been in combat?”
“Yes.”
“Then even if you haven’t experienced it yourself, I’d be surprised if you haven’t seen it or heard about it in people you trust—a strong sense that you should be very careful in that building, or approaching that next rise. They can’t point to anything concrete to explain why. They just know. And they’re often right.”
Escovedo nodded. “Put in that context, it makes sense.”
“Plus, for what it’s worth, they ran a functional MRI on me, just for fun. That’s on the season two DVD bonuses. Apparently the language centre of my brain is very highly developed. Ninety-eighth percentile, something like that. So maybe that has something to do with it.”
“Interesting,” Escovedo said, and nothing more, so she decided to quit while she was ahead.
The path curved and split before them, and though they weren’t taking the left-hand branch to the prison, still, the closer they drew to it, darkened by rain and contemptuous of the wind, the greater the edifice seemed to loom over everything else on the island. It was like something grown from the sea, an iceberg of brick, with the worst of it hidden from view. When the wind blew just right, it carried with it a smell of fish, generations of them, as if left to spoil and never cleaned up.
Kerry stared past it, to the sea surging all the way to the horizon. This was an island only if you looked at it from out there. Simple, then: Don’t ever go out there.
She’d never had a problem with swimming pools. You could see through those. Lakes, oceans, rivers… these were something entirely different. These were dark waters, full of secrets and unintended tombs. Shipwrecks, sunken airplanes, houses at the bottom of flooded valleys… they were sepulchres of dread, trapped in another world where they so plainly did not belong.
Not unlike the way she was feeling this very moment.
* * *
As she looked around Colonel Escovedo’s office in the administrative building, it seemed almost as much a cell as anything they could have over at the prison. It was without windows, so the lighting was all artificial, fluorescent and unflattering. It aged him, and she didn’t want to think what it had to be doing to her own appearance. In one corner, a dehumidifier chugged away, but the air still felt heavy and damp. Day in, day out, it must have been like working in a mine.
“Here’s the situation. Why now,” he said. “Their behaviour over there, it’s been pretty much unchanged ever since they were moved to this installation. With one exception. Late summer, 1997, for about a month. I wasn’t here then, but according to the records, it was like…” He paused, groping for the right words. “A hive mind. Like they were a single organism. They spent most of their time aligned to a precise angle to the south-west. The commanding officer at the time mentioned in his reports that it was like they were waiting for something. Inhumanly patient, just waiting. Then, eventually, they stopped and everything went back to normal.”
“Until now?” she said.
“Nine days ago. They’re doing it again.”
“Did anybody figure out what was special about that month?”
“We think so. It took years, though. Three years before some analyst made the connection, and even then, you know, it’s still a lucky accident. Maybe you’ve heard how it is with these agencies, they don’t talk to each other, don’t share notes. You’ve got a key here, and a lock on the other side of the world, and nobody in the middle who knows enough to put the two together. It’s better now than it used to be, but it took the 9/11 attacks to get them to even think about correlating intel better.”
“So what happened that summer?”
“Just listen,” he said, and spun in his chair to the hardware behind him.
She’d been wondering about that anyway. Considering how functional his office was, it seemed not merely excessive, but out of character, that Escovedo would have an array of what looked to be high-end audio-video components, all feeding into a pair of three-way speakers and a subwoofer. He dialled in a sound file on the LCD of one of the rack modules, then thumbed the PLAY button.
At first it was soothing, a muted drone both airy and deep, a lonely noise that some movie’s sound designer might have used to suggest the desolation of outer space. But no, this wasn’t about space. It had to be the sea, this all led back to the sea. It was the sound of deep waters, the black depths where sunlight never reached.
Then came a new sound, deeper than deep, a slow eruption digging its way free of the drone, climbing in pitch, rising, rising, then plummeting back to leave her once more with the sound of the void. After moments of anticipation, it happened again, like a roar from an abyss, and prickled the fine hairs on the back of her neck—a primal response, but then, what was more primal than the ocean and the threats beneath its waves?
This was why she’d never liked the sea. This never knowing what was there, until it was upon you.
“Heard enough?” Escovedo asked, and seemed amused at her mute nod. “That happened. Their hive-mind behaviour coincided with that.”
“What was it?”
“That’s the big question. It was recorded several times during the summer of 1997, then never again. Since 1960, we’ve had the oceans bugged for sound, basically. We’ve got them full of microphones that we put there to listen for Soviet submarines, when we thought it was a possibility we’d be going to war with them. They’re down hundreds of feet, along an ocean layer called the sound channel. For sound conductivity, it’s the Goldilocks zone—it’s just right. After the Cold War was over, these mic networks were decommissioned from military use and turned over for scientific research. Whales, seismic events, underwater volcanoes, that sort of thing. Most of it, it’s instantly identifiable. The people whose job it is to listen to what the mics pick up, 99.99 per cent of the time they know exactly what they’ve got because the sounds conform to signature patterns, and they’re just so familiar.
&n
bsp; “But every so often they get one they can’t identify. It doesn’t fit any known pattern. So they give it a cute name and it stays a mystery. This one, they called it the ‘Bloop’. Makes it sound like a kid farting in the bathtub, doesn’t it?”
She pointed at the speakers. “An awfully big kid and an awfully big tub.”
“Now you’re getting ahead of me. The Bloop’s point of origin was calculated to be in the South Pacific… maybe not coincidentally, not far from Polynesia, which is generally conceded as the place of origin for what eventually came to be known in Massachusetts as ‘the Innsmouth look’. Some outside influence was brought home from Polynesia in the 1800s during a series of trading expeditions by a sea captain named Obed Marsh.”
“Are you talking about a disease, or a genetic abnormality?”
Escovedo slapped one hand onto a sheaf of bound papers lying on one side of his desk. “You can be the judge of that. I’ve got a summary here for you to look over, before you get started tomorrow. It’ll give you more background on the town and its history. The whole thing’s a knotted-up tangle of fact and rumour and local legend and God knows what all, but it’s not my job to sort out what’s what. I’ve got enough on my plate sticking with facts, and the fact is, I’m in charge of keeping sixty-three of these proto-human monstrosities hidden from the world, and I know they’re cued into something anomalous, but I don’t know what. The other fact is, the last time they acted like this was fifteen years ago, while those mics were picking up one of the loudest sounds ever recorded on the planet.”
“How loud was it?”
“Every time that sound went off, it wasn’t just a local event. It was picked up over a span of five thousand kilometres.”
The thought made her head swim. Something with that much power behind it… there could be nothing good about it. Something that loud was the sound of death, of cataclysm and extinction events. It was the sound of an asteroid strike, of a volcano not just erupting, but vaporising a land-mass—Krakatoa, the island of Thera. She imagined standing here, past the north-western edge of the continental US, and hearing something happen in New York. Okay, sound travelled better in water than in air, but still—three thousand miles.
“Despite that,” Escovedo said, “the analysts say it most closely matches a profile of something alive.”
“A whale?” There couldn’t be anything bigger, not for millions of years.
The colonel shook his head. “Keep going. Somebody who briefed me on this compared it to a blue whale plugged in and running through the amplifier stacks at every show Metallica has ever played, all at once. She also said that what they captured probably wasn’t even the whole sound. That it’s likely that a lot of frequencies and details got naturally filtered out along the way.”
“Whatever it was… there have to be theories.”
“Sure. Just nothing that fits with all the known pieces.”
“Is the sound occurring again?”
“No. We don’t know what they’re cueing in on this time.”
He pointed at the prison. Even though he couldn’t see it, because there were no windows, and now she wondered if he didn’t prefer it that way. Block it out with walls, and maybe for a few minutes at a time he could pretend he was somewhere else, assigned to some other duty.
“But they do,” he said. “Those abominations over there know. We just need to find the key to getting them to tell us.”
* * *
She was billeted in what Colonel Escovedo called the guest barracks, the only visitor in a building that could accommodate eight in privacy, sixteen if they doubled up. Visitors, Kerry figured, would be a rare occurrence here, and the place felt that way, little lived in and not much used. The rain had strengthened closer to evening and beat hard on the low roof, a lonely sound that built from room to vacant room.
When she heard the deep thump of the helicopter rotors pick up, then recede into the sky—having waited, apparently, until it was clear she would be staying—she felt unaccountably abandoned, stranded with no way off this outpost that lay beyond not just the rim of civilisation, but beyond the frontiers of even her expanded sense of life, of humans and animals and what passed between them.
Every now and then she heard someone outside, crunching past on foot or on an all-terrain four-wheeler. If she looked, they were reduced to dark, indistinct smears wavering in the water that sluiced down the windows. She had the run of most of the island if she wanted, although that was mainly just a licence to get soaked under the sky. The buildings were forbidden, other than her quarters and the admin office, and, of course, the prison, as long as she was being escorted. And, apart for the colonel, she was apparently expected to pretend to be the invisible woman. She and the duty personnel were off-limits to each other. She wasn’t to speak to them, and they were under orders not to speak with her.
They didn’t know the truth—it was the only explanation that made sense. They didn’t know, because they didn’t need to. They’d been fed a cover story. Maybe they believed they were guarding the maddened survivors of a disease, a genetic mutation, an industrial accident or something that had fallen from space and that did terrible things to DNA. Maybe they’d all been fed a different lie, so that if they got together to compare notes they wouldn’t know which to believe.
For that matter, she wasn’t sure she did either.
First things first, though: she set up a framed photo of Tabitha on a table out in the barracks’ common room, shot over the summer when they’d gone horseback riding in the Sawtooth Range. Her daughter’s sixth birthday. Rarely was a picture snapped in which Tabby wasn’t beaming, giddy with life, but this was one of them, her little face rapt with focus. Still in the saddle, she was leaning forward, hugging the mare’s neck, her braided hair a blonde stripe along the chestnut hide, and it looked for all the world as if the two of them were sharing a secret.
The photo would be her beacon, her lighthouse shining from home.
She fixed a mug of hot cocoa in the kitchenette, then settled into one of the chairs with the summary report that Escovedo had sent with her.
Except for its cold, matter-of-fact tone, it read like bizarre fiction. If she hadn’t seen the photos, she wouldn’t have believed it: a series of raids in an isolated Massachusetts seaport that swept up more than two hundred residents, most of whose appearances exhibited combinations of human, ichthyoid, and amphibian traits. ‘The Innsmouth look’ had been well known to the neighbouring towns for at least two generations—“an unsavoury haven of inbreeding and circus folk”, according to a derisive comment culled from an Ipswich newspaper of the era—but even then, Innsmouth had been careful to put forward the best face it possibly could. Which meant, in most cases, residents still on the low side of middle-age… at least when it came to the families that had a few decades’ worth of roots in the town, rather than its more recent newcomers.
With age came change so drastic that the affected people gradually lost all resemblance to who they’d been as children and young adults, eventually reaching the point that they let themselves be seen only by each other, taking care to hide from public view in a warren of dilapidated homes, warehouses and limestone caverns that honeycombed the area.
One page of the report displayed a sequence of photos of what was ostensibly the same person, identified as Giles Shapleigh, eighteen years old when detained in 1928. He’d been a handsome kid in the first photo, and if he had nothing to smile about when it was taken, you could at least see the potential for a roguish, cockeyed grin. By his twenty-fifth year, he’d visibly aged, his hair receded and thinning, and after seven years of captivity he had the sullen look of a convict. By thirty, he was bald as a cue ball, and his skull had seemed to narrow. By thirty-five, his jowls had widened enough to render his neck almost non-existent, giving him a bullet-headed appearance that she found all the more unnerving for his dead-eyed stare.
By the time he was sixty, with astronauts not long on the moon, there was nothing left to
connect Giles Shapleigh with who or what he’d been, neither his identity nor his species. Still, though, his transformation wasn’t yet complete.
He was merely catching up to his friends, neighbours and relatives. By the time of those Prohibition-era raids, most of the others had been this way for years—decades, some of them. Although they aged, they didn’t seem to weaken and, while they could be killed, if merely left to themselves, they most certainly didn’t die.
They could languish, though. As those first years went on, with the Innsmouth prisoners scattered throughout a handful of remote quarantine facilities across New England, it became obvious that they didn’t do well in the kind of environment reserved for normal prisoners: barred cells, bright lights, exercise yards… dryness. Some of them developed a skin condition that resembled powdery mildew, a white, dusty crust that spread across them in patches. There was a genuine fear that, whatever it was, it might jump from captives to captors, and prove more virulent in wholly human hosts, although this never happened.
Thus it was decided: they didn’t need a standard prison so much as they needed their own zoo. That they got it was something she found strangely heartening. What was missing from the report, presumably because she had no need to know, was why.
While she didn’t want to admit it, Kerry had no illusions—the expedient thing would’ve been to kill them off. No one would have known, and undoubtedly there would’ve been those who found it an easy order to carry out. It was wartime, and if war proved anything, it proved how simple it was to dehumanise people even when they looked just like you. This was 1942, and this was already happening on an industrial scale across Europe. These people from Innsmouth would have had few advocates. To merely look at them was to feel revulsion, to sense a challenge to everything you thought you knew about the world, about what could and couldn’t be. Most people would look at them and think they deserved to die. They were an insult to existence, to cherished beliefs.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 23