Eddy slipped her arm through Daniel’s. Marsh held his movie star pose, but Sean saw his shoulders rise. “Well, what else would she do, Daniel? She came home.”
Someone tapping magic electrified the air. Was it Daniel, straining his empathy to make sure Marsh wasn’t lying? “To Innsmouth?”
“To this house. For a while.”
“Then—did she die?”
Marsh laughed softly. “Daniel, now. We don’t die that young or that easy.”
“You can get killed, or kill yourselves.”
“Don’t you remember your mother at all? Aster wasn’t the quitting kind. Once she’d wrapped her mind around leaving you and settled into the Change, she did all right.”
“She’s alive,” Daniel said.
“Of course she is.”
It hadn’t been “of course” for Daniel, not after his father’s lies. He sucked in a huge breath and held it, bent over his knees. If he did a face-plant on the table, it would be right into an elaborately iced cake—he’d drown in the frosting, gills or no.
“Daniel,” Marsh said. He broke his pose and leaned forward.
Daniel sat back, safe from the cake. “Where is she?” he got out.
“She’s gone to Y’ha-nthlei. You know of the place?”
“I’ve read about it. A city underwater, off Devil Reef.”
“In the chasm beneath the reef, to be exact. Much deeper, secret and secure.”
Sean cleared his throat. “It’s like that sculpture over there?”
“Yes. That shows our family’s property below.”
Daniel went to the aquarium. Eddy turned to Marsh. “Lovecraft wrote that the Feds imprisoned Innsmouthers and torpedoed Y’ha-nthlei. But Geldman told Daniel that didn’t happen.”
“If you’re faced with one assertion from Howard Lovecraft and another from Solomon Geldman, believe Geldman. His statements may be tricky, but essentially they’re true.”
Without turning, Daniel said, “How long’s my mother been down there?”
“Since she completed her Change.”
“Does she ever come up?”
“Once or twice a year, maybe. Aster likes it better below.”
“You don’t, Mr. Marsh?” Eddy said.
“Oh, I like it fine, but I’ve got business to look after air-side. The town, the refinery.”
“And dealing with the Order?”
“When someone’s got to.” Marsh lifted the silver teapot that had been cooling its heels since the maid brought it in. You’d think the tea would have been cold, but maybe Geldman had taught Marsh some of his tricks, because the amber liquid he poured, one and two and three cups full, was steaming. He handed one cup to Eddy, one to Sean, left the third for Daniel, Sean supposed.
Daniel remained at the aquarium.
Not wanting to deal with the fancy creamer and sugar bowl, Sean gulped his tea straight. His throat was dry, and he didn’t want his voice to crack when he asked the touchy obvious question: “Mr. Marsh, so. You’re a Deep One yourself?”
“Thank you,” Marsh said.
“Sir?”
“For the compliment. My illusioning skills suffice to fool most humans, but I don’t expect them to fool other magicians. Not for long.”
“Count me as almost fooled. Some people in the main square, I could kind of tell they were illusioning themselves. You, the only hint I got was when I shook your hand. The magic sparked me then.”
“Count me as totally fooled,” Eddy said. “I was starting to think Daniel’s grandmother might be, um, Shn’yeh? Not you, sir.”
“And thank you, Miss Rosenbaum.”
“Is that who’s in there, my grandmother?” Daniel asked, his voice sharp. He’d stepped from the aquarium to the pocket doors—he must have noticed the Changer smell.
As if Marsh had been expecting the outburst, and why not, the telepathy thing and all, he merely redirected his gaze. “No, Daniel. She’s like Aster, spends most of her time below.”
“Then who is it? Another one of your spies?”
“It’s your cousin Tom. Your aunt Elspeth’s boy. But you won’t have heard of Tom and Elspeth. Why should Eli mention them while he pretended we were dead, your grandmother and I, and, in the end, your mother?” He walked toward the pocket doors. “Don’t mistake me. I’m not saying your father’s a bastard, though you may think he’s one at the moment.”
“You know what I think.”
“That’s a fact, and you know what I feel. I’m glad you’ve come. And no, I couldn’t go to you. Aster didn’t want me interfering with Eli. She knew you’d eventually show up in Innsmouth. The place our people first pulled out of the sea, we all come back to it. Biological imperative, you could say.”
Like salmon returning to their birth streams? Only Daniel hadn’t come to Innsmouth to spawn. Even though Eddy had come with him.
That was a line of thought Sean had better cut short.
Daniel had stared at the floor while Marsh was talking. What he finally lifted weren’t his eyes but his right hand, to slip its fingers into the gap between the doors. “I want to know what could happen, if I stopped Geldman’s treatments.”
“What would happen, no could about it.”
The one Daniel glanced at was Eddy. “How old is my cousin?”
“Twenty-five, and yes, he’s been Changing for a while. He’s come to the last stage, when things get rough and a Changer needs looking after.”
Daniel gave the door beside him a tentative pull. Well oiled, it slid without a squeak into the wall—the simultaneous groan came from the darkened room beyond, maybe a second parlor, maybe a dining room, though who’d ever want to eat in a room that exhaled such a reek? It was worse than the Servitor’s stench in a way, because at least the Servitor had smelled like one thing, itself; this was the ultimate Changer amalgamation of fish and putrefying skunk and human misery.
When Daniel gave another tug, widening the gap to a yard, Marsh gave the other door a shoulder shove that propelled it all the way into the wall. The room he revealed looked like the twin of theirs, but with the heavy draperies drawn and no fixtures lit except for a pair of sconces that bracketed the fireplace. A wingback chair loomed on the hearthrug, with a folded wheelchair nearby.
“Go on in, then,” Marsh told Daniel. “I told Tom you were coming. He’s willing to meet you.”
Willing maybe, but was he able? With the doors open, the sound of his gasps and gurgles made it to where Sean and Eddy sat. If Tom wasn’t already on a respirator, he needed one.
Daniel eyeballed Marsh, who eyeballed him back without a blink. Magical energy was condensing between them, probably telepathic challenges and defiance, but listening to Tom, Sean couldn’t concentrate on it. At last Daniel broke the staring match by walking into the second parlor. Marsh stepped in after him and pulled the pocket doors back out. He left a gap wide enough to walk through, from which he nodded at Sean and Eddy before receding into the dark.
“What should we do?” Eddy said. She’d risen on one knee so she could see over the sofa back. With Marsh’s retreat, she slid down and gave Sean the rarest of all Eddy looks: the anxious one that meant she really didn’t have an answer.
“I think Mr. Marsh left the doors open so we could go in, too.”
Eddy folded up as tight as Tom’s wheelchair, knees clamped together, shoulders drawn forward. “What if we were wrong to help Daniel come here?”
“He would’ve come anyway.”
“Maybe he should have come alone. Now we’ve seen and heard things he might wish we hadn’t. I don’t know if we should look. At his cousin, I mean.”
Because that could be looking at Daniel’s future, the one Geldman was trying to prevent. “I want to look,” he said.
“God, Sean, this isn’t a freak show.”
Anybody else saying that, it would have rocketed him through the roof. But Eddy knew him. She’d earned the privilege. “Yeah, I might have been like that before the Servitor. It’s different now
, because we know reality’s weirder than anything in a book or movie. You said it when we came to Arkham—we’ve got to learn to face that. And Daniel’s in the same boat, even if he’s further along than us.”
Eddy stayed folded. “Weird stuff’s worse when it’s somebody you know.”
“Yeah, but you know me, and I’m weird.”
“You’re still human.”
“So? Look at Mr. Marsh. He’s not human, but I don’t know, he doesn’t seem like a bad guy.”
“He looks human.”
“If looking human’s all it takes, Nyarlathotep’s cool in a whole bunch of his avatars.”
Eddy gave herself a final scrunch, digging her chin between fisted hands. “I know it’s—,” she began, but talking with her cheeks punched in made her sound like a Munchkin. She sat up. “I know it’s stupid. But this is Daniel.”
The guy she was probably falling in love with. “I think it’ll help Daniel if one of us sees. I’m going in, Eddy. You don’t have to.”
She picked up a sofa pillow. Her fingers sank deep into it. Then she hurled the pillow at the chair where Marsh had sat, and, soft as the thing was, it would have put a hurt on him if he’d still been there. Sean grabbed it as it bounced back toward the china-laden table. “You don’t have to go in,” he said again.
Eddy stood. “Yeah, I do.”
Sean parked the pillow, and they went into the second parlor together.
* * *
Somebody had switched on a floor lamp that threw a truncated cone of light over the wingback chair but left Daniel and Marsh in shadow. They faced Tom, who continued to rasp and gurgle. And stink—as shallowly as Sean was breathing, the back of his throat burned. To control his nausea, he fixed his eyes on the portrait above the fireplace and made up his own little docent lecture about it. Life size. In oils. From back in the days when people dressed like Dickens characters. Dude in a bay window overlooking Innsmouth, complete with the harbor and Plum Island and beyond both a reef of jagged black rock. Dude pointing at the ships in the harbor, or maybe at the reef. And smirking. He had to be Obed Marsh, sea captain, merchant, and Deep One collaborator, but not a Deep One himself. He had died at a normal human age, but his descendants would live for centuries, including this Barnabas, who’d been Old Man Marsh since the 1920s.
Sean and Eddy had taken each step in unison, and they halted together a few feet from the chair. Daniel had disappeared behind it, as if to kneel in front of his cousin. Marsh motioned them to come forward but to the side of the fireplace.
It would be close enough, maybe too close. While Eddy followed Marsh’s direction, the raw magic pulsing from the chair made Sean hesitate. It wasn’t because the energy was so strong, but because it felt so messed up, one second an airy sucking at his skin and the next a zap of static discharge. Between that and the smell and the respirator soundtrack, he would have run if it hadn’t been for Eddy. He’d talked her into this. He couldn’t leave her—or Daniel—to see it through alone.
His eyes on the carpet (which was scarier than Geldman’s, with fleshy red carnivorous-looking flowers), he made it to Eddy. It wasn’t reassuring to hear how fast she was breathing or to see the quake in her knees. Screw it. He raised his eyes to the guy in the chair, who looked a lot like Daniel, actually, as Daniel might look in a few years. The impression faded as Tom began to blur and jitter, one second in full-color focus, the next graying into a humanoid smear with parts that overlapped all wrong.
Either he was a ghost, or he was a living magician whose attempt to illusion himself had gone haywire.
The illusion theory won out when the illusion dropped. Eddy’s breathing didn’t hitch; while Sean was hanging back, she must have already seen the real Tom. Sean’s breath clogged in his throat, and the wall thrust into his back. It was covered with thick-flocked wallpaper but hard underneath, something that wouldn’t collapse while he took in the person in the chair.
That Changer in New Church Green? Compared to Daniel’s cousin, he’d barely started to morph. Sean’s brain struggled to make sense of Tom by imagining that someone had merged a shark with a frog, then flayed it, then stuffed the flayed-off hide with a human whose bones and muscles were bending and breaking, straining and tearing, in order to fit in his new skin. Tom’s head, stretched elliptical, had no hair (though it did have a finlike ridge that ran from forehead to nape and then out of sight down his back) or ears (unless you counted the pinkish drumheads where ears should have been) or nose (apart from two tight slits of nostrils). His eyes had migrated toward the sides of his head, where they bulged from telescoping orbits. A milky cataract covered the left eye. Maybe the film was an “under construction” shield that had already fallen from the right eye, which was all shark-black pupil edged with a narrow blue iris. Neither eye had a lid to blink. More mobile, the lipless mouth gaped from drumhead to drumhead. The teeth were serrated arrowheads. The chin receded into a neck as wide as the head, slashed on either side by five gill slits that flared with every hissing exhalation and oozed a viscous yellow fluid onto the towel around Tom’s sagging shoulders. Where the human skin hadn’t split and peeled away from his emerging gray-green hide, a similar fluid swelled pustules to bursting, then hardened and flaked like orange resin.
Was it this gunk that put the extra kick in Tom’s stink?
The rest of his body hid under an oversized T-shirt and jeans. Enormous mitts covered his hands, and sacklike socks his feet. It was only a partial mercy: Sean could still see the convulsive flex of crazily elongated fingers and toes.
Though Daniel had done some Changing himself, Sean gave him huge credit for having the courage to put his hands over Tom’s mitted fingers and still their jerks. His face was blank. His lips shaped silent words. It looked like he was trying telepathy, and maybe it was working. At least he didn’t seem to be mouthing the same thing over and over. As far as Sean could tell, Tom’s gasps weren’t an attempt at speech but the sound of air bellowing in through his mouth and out through his gills. As if in sympathy, Daniel’s gills flared beneath his bandage.
Marsh sidled to Eddy and Sean, deftly herded them into the first parlor, and shut the pocket doors. The maid must have come in while they were gone, because the food and tea things had vanished. Eddy’s missile was back in its former place on the sofa, too. She snagged the pillow, not to hurl it at Marsh as he settled into his armchair but to hug it to her belly.
“You both did very well,” Marsh said.
Because, what, they hadn’t passed out?
“Is he in pain?” Eddy asked in a strangled voice.
“Tom? Well, he’s not comfortable, obviously, but we have medicines to ease the transition. If he were stranded in your world, it would be another story.”
“He won’t die?”
“A caterpillar doesn’t die when it changes into a moth.”
Eddy sniffed. “That’s not the same. Humans don’t naturally turn into Deep Ones.”
“But hybrids aren’t human, not altogether. That includes Daniel, miss, and it always will include him, no matter what Solomon Geldman does.”
Tears busted through Eddy’s dam, but she let them run unswiped down her face. “You wanted us to see Tom so we’d be scared away from Daniel.”
“Exactly wrong. I wanted to see if you had the nerve to look at the truth and still stick by him. His father already hates what he is. He doesn’t need friends doing it, too.”
“I’m not going to hate him.”
“Good, then. You, Mr. Wyndham?”
“Not even a chance,” Sean said. “I mean, I might get freaked sometimes, but why should I hate him? You guys aren’t evil, are you? Deep Ones. That other word you said.”
As you’d figure from his old-school outfit, Marsh carried a cloth handkerchief, which he handed across the table to Eddy. “Shn’yeh,” he said.
“Right. You’re not monsters. You’re just another species.”
“Tigers are also another species.”
“Tigers are coo
l.”
“Except when they eat you.”
“Shn’yeh eat people?”
“I can’t guarantee it’s never happened,” Marsh said. “But it would be an aberration, and very few of us would approve.”
“That’s all right, then. I mean, sometimes people eat people. You know, Jeffrey Dahmer.”
Normally Eddy would have said “Jesus, Sean” by this point, but she remained muffled behind Marsh’s handkerchief. “Miss Rosenbaum,” he said. “If you’d like, there’s a powder room in the main hallway, the door under the stairs.”
Eddy nodded and took off.
Marsh watched her go, shaking his head the least you could and still get caught at it. With an equally quashed sigh, he turned back to Sean. “Where were we?”
“Eating people, sir.”
“And we don’t do that. We don’t particularly want to kill people, either, or take over the world.”
“That all works for me.”
“We do at times mix with humans, but as I said earlier, it’s disastrous to do so with uninformed partners. Look what’s happened with my own daughter. She had no business marrying Eli Glass, and she’s not the only one who has to pay for the mistake. Daniel’s paid. He’s still paying.”
As much as Sean wanted to stay diplomatic and open minded, the idea of Deep Ones hooking up with humans was squicking him out. Maybe it happened only when the hybrids were still human looking, like with Aster and Eli Glass? Though to have hybrids in the first place, 100 percent Deep Ones would have had to mate with 100 percent humans, right? “You said something about the treaty you’ve made with the Order.”
“Not something you’ve heard of before?”
“Not the details.”
“The Order of Alhazred likes secrets. We do, too, of course. I hate to admit it, but things got out of hand in Innsmouth back in Obed’s time, and they stayed out of hand until the Order intervened. Some folks thought Innsmouth wasn’t enough of an air-side foothold in this part of the world—if our magic was strong enough to let us hide in plain sight, we should keep expanding. Others of us saw how you humans were getting new weapons, new ways to communicate and travel, even underwater. At the same time, most of you were as primitive as ever about accepting strangers. Take Howard Lovecraft. Smart fellow, with a heart that pulled him toward the truth of the worlds, but at the same time the truth scared him silly. If he felt like he had to bad-mouth us in his stories, what would the rest of you do in real life? Or try to do and force us to make a damn mess.”
Fathomless Page 21