Daniel started down the side of the reef, nearly slipping.
The Deep One waved him back. She climbed the algae-slick rocks like they were a staircase, reaching the spine of the reef a few yards north of Daniel. There she crouched again.
There, one sleepwalker’s step at a time, Daniel joined her, and crouched, and let Aster enfold his partly webbed hands with her fully webbed ones.
And that was how they stayed, gazes locked. The great thing about telepathy, they could say whatever they wanted, whatever had piled up over half Daniel’s life, without worrying Sean and Eddy would overhear them. Even so, Sean yielded to Eddy’s elbow pokes and scrounged around on the boulder until they’d both put their backs to Daniel and his mother. Like you’d expect out on the water, in the middle of even an August night, it was cool enough for Sean to wish they’d brought the space blanket from the Montauk’s locker. There was no going for it now. They could only wait, hunched together, too aware of the soundless conversation behind them to attempt one themselves.
The memory that hit Sean in the absence of other distractions was old but unfaded. He and Eddy sit next to each other on the bottom step of her front porch, seven and seven years old. Her mother, Rachel, sits on the top step and stares at the cell phone she’s laid on her unopened book. It rings once in a while, but she doesn’t pick it up. Sean doesn’t ask which caller will be important enough to make her answer. Since early morning, when Uncle Gus and Aunt Celeste left him with the Rosenbaums, he hasn’t asked a single question. He’s eaten waffles and blueberries. He’s helped Eddy draw a dragon on the sidewalk. They would still be working on it except they made the outline so big—spanning five squares of pavement—that they’ve run out of chalk for filling it in. Anyhow, they’re kind of beat. Eddy leans against him, scuffing blue chalk from the dragon’s wing into her bare soles. Normally Rachel would get on her for making a mess, but Rachel’s like Sean today, mainly just waiting. Because Dad has been at the hospice place all night. Because that’s where Uncle Gus and Aunt Celeste have gone, and Grandpa Stewie and Uncle Joe. Sean hasn’t been there since Mom went to sleep and stayed asleep, breathing funny. That’s okay. The next time they all come back from the hospice place, Mom will come with them.
And he really had believed Mom would die and then get better, good as new. Seven was too old to believe in shit like that. Seven knew what dying was. It was never coming back, and never coming back was the worst thing, the black hole horror.
Or was the worst thing having a chance to live, to stay, and turning it down?
“Sean?” Eddy whispered.
Of course, just when a huge chunk of pain had lodged in his throat. He coughed it out.
“You okay?”
“Getting a freaking cold, maybe.”
“Tell me about it.” And Eddy really was shivering.
He put an arm around her and chafed her opposite shoulder. Her narrow bare feet smeared with blue chalk. All those years back, saying nothing (being a kid, not knowing what to say), she’d also waited. “Daniel will be all right.”
“What if he decides to go with Aster? I mean, he can’t this second. But he could give up the treatments. He could go stay with his grandfather while he Changes.”
“His dad won’t let him.”
“He’s eighteen. Legally, he can do what he wants.”
“He hasn’t wanted to go against his dad before.”
“Before, he didn’t know he had somebody else to go to. Soon as he found out about his grandfather—” She shut up. She sniffed.
Sean smelled it, too, the fresh brine and the faint fish and an elusive sweetness. Pulling apart, they stood and turned. Daniel had remained where he’d crouched, while Aster had slipped around him and approached their boulder. Sean was glad now they’d had the run-in with Elspeth’s gang—it had gotten them over the shock that came from the sheer strangeness of a Deep One. Up close, as long as they weren’t attacking you, Deep Ones were cool. They were their own species, not just a sharking away of humanity. Sean would even bet that, with the scattering of emerald green and turquoise in her scales and the extra height of her dorsal fin, Aster Marsh was a Deep One babe.
The thin rings of iris that surrounded her huge pupils were the same blue as Old Man Marsh’s, and Tom’s, and Daniel’s. The Marsh blue. Sean worked not to blink while Aster appraised him. She then appraised Eddy for so long, he started getting nervous by proxy. Unnecessary: Eddy didn’t falter. She didn’t even flinch when Aster touched her cheek with one clawed and webbed hand.
Returning to Daniel, Aster touched both his cheeks and pressed her forehead to his. His arms rose as if to hug her. They dropped back to his sides. Brow connection unbroken, he started shaking his head. Sean’s empty stomach rolled. Aster had to want Daniel to choose her and the Change. Maybe she was thinking to him how much his father and the Order sucked to put him through Geldman’s treatments. How much Eddy and Sean sucked, compared to the friends he could have in Y’ha-nthlei. How selfish they were trying to hold on to him. Stuff like that, and you couldn’t even blame her. She was his mother. She couldn’t let go.
She’d let go before.
The Change had forced her to.
But his own mom hadn’t saved herself through the Communion. She had let go instead.
But she must have been too sick to understand what Orne was offering her, and Dad, and Sean, everyone who loved her. There hadn’t been time for Mom to get used to the idea of immortality. You couldn’t throw that in someone’s face all of a sudden without them thinking you were crazy, without them running scared—
“Sean,” Eddy said.
He’d closed his eyes. Opening them, he saw that Aster had climbed back down to the tidal pools. Daniel was sliding after her. Seals humped away with indignant barks as he blundered through their cordon.
“He’s going!” Though Eddy’s voice stayed low, her words carried the sharp despair of a wail.
“He says he can’t.”
“Well, what’s that?”
It was Aster diving, then surfacing a dozen yards off and looking back at Daniel. It was Daniel teetering on the edge of the reef. It was Marsh, come back out of the cabin, and Abel on the flybridge, both watching from the railings.
Then it was Aster swimming swiftly back to the edge. Daniel hesitated. She was going to pull him in!
She pushed him backwards, so he fell onto the thick carpet of seaweed that clung to the tidal rocks. He fell unhurt, but he stayed down while she dived again and this time didn’t come up.
He stayed down, arm over eyes, chest heaving.
Trying not to slip and brain themselves on the rocks, Sean and Eddy took several minutes to reach Daniel. For another quarter hour, while the seals regrouped and the cutter chugged cautiously nearer, they knelt watch and listened to him choke out grief that Aster had gone and gratitude that she’d read his heart for him.
24
It was almost dawn when Sean guided the Montauk to a private pier in Innsmouth Harbor. Marsh would give it docking space until Sean or Orne came to retrieve it. The way Sean foresaw things going down in Arkham, it would probably be Orne.
Their cell phones were so packed with frantic messages from Helen and all their parents that they had to turn down Marsh’s offer to crash at his house and start back without delay. Abel drove them to the Newbury marina in his kiwi Bug. They dozed through the stink, even Sean riding shotgun. In the backseat of the Civic, Eddy and Daniel fell asleep again. No invisible third person separated them now—his head lolled on her shoulder, her cheek nestled in his wild Frodo-in-Mordor hair. To keep from disturbing them, Sean blasted his obnoxiously loud STAY AWAKE playlist through an earbud instead of the car speakers.
Stopping for coffee twice, he did stay awake. He also made a brief call to Helen, which meant she and Marvell were waiting outside the Arkwright House when they pulled into the driveway. Another man stood, or rather shifted from foot to foot, beside Helen. His curly black hair was a close-clipped version of Dan
iel’s, which took any surprise out of how he went into full rant mode the second Daniel emerged from the Civic. Stalking across the gravel, poking the air with a forefinger, he snapped, “This was unacceptable! You know that. Absolutely unacceptable!”
Eddy was brave enough to get out and stand next to Daniel. Sean wasn’t that much in love. He stayed in the car.
“Dad,” Daniel said. “You drove from New York?”
“When Ms. Arkwright told me you were gone, what did you think I was going to do?” Glass was up in Daniel’s face now and pointing at the fresh bandage Marsh had wrapped around his throat. “Tell me you didn’t go into the ocean again.” Then he noticed the fresh scratches on Daniel’s arms and legs. His voice rose: “And did those things attack you?”
Daniel answered the second question first, semi-truthfully. “Nobody attacked me. And I didn’t go in any water. We stayed in the boat until we got to the reef.”
“Out on a reef? Are you insane?”
Helen approached Glass with bomb-squad wariness. He must have been chewing her out for hours. “We should go inside,” she said. “Have Mr. Geldman come over to look at Daniel.”
“Daniel’s going inside to pack,” Glass said—to Daniel, not Helen. “We’ll go over to Geldman after. That is, if you want to, Daniel. If you’re not ready to throw all our work away for those things.”
Though his hands were shaking, Daniel kept his voice steady. “If I wanted to Change, I would have stayed in Innsmouth. And they’re Deep Ones, not things. Unless you want to call them Shn’yeh—that’s their right name, my grandfather told me. I met him. And I saw my mother.”
Not even Glass dared to jump into Daniel’s pause. His hands were shaking, too.
“I saw my mother,” Daniel repeated. “She’s not dead. You knew that, though.”
“Daniel.”
“She’s alive. Changed. But she told me to come back here and stay human. She told me I’m not ready to Change. Maybe sometime. Not now.”
The way Glass bowed his head must’ve convinced Helen his fuse had burned out, for the moment. She moved in and got Daniel by the elbow. “Come on. We can go down to the kitchen and talk over breakfast.”
“Fine with me,” Daniel said. “As long as Eddy comes.”
Glass really looked at Eddy for the first time. Just like Elspeth, he said, “That girl?”
“Eddy Rosenbaum,” Daniel said. “Remember I told you about her, Dad, when we talked after the harbor accident?”
Glass had apparently assumed that after learning his son’s secret, Eddy would be long gone, at least as Daniel’s girlfriend. He shook his head, then gave an exaggerated shrug. Helen took Daniel and Eddy by the elbows and went into the house. Glass followed.
That left Marvell to deal with Sean. During the confrontation between Daniel and his father, he had moved to block the driveway behind Sean’s car, as if Sean might make a run for it in the Civic. Sean had considered it. But if Daniel could stand up to his father, he could stand up to Marvell. First step was getting out of the car, which he did. Helen would’ve met him halfway. Marvell’s only move was to fold his arms across his chest as Sean trudged up to him. Then he said, “Solomon Geldman didn’t see fit to inform us of your plans until after your curfew last night.”
Good for Geldman.
“Right afterwards, of course, I called your father.”
“What did he say, sir?”
“He told me to take your car key as soon as you came back.”
“For how long?”
“Until he decides you should have the option of driving people into dangerous situations.”
Sean detached the Civic key from his ring and handed it over. “What did he really say, Professor?”
“Until he comes to get it himself. He hasn’t finished work on the church, but he’s willing to fly back early if he has to.”
“Why should he? I’m okay. We’re all okay.”
“He might have to come if the Order dismisses you as its student. I warned you under what circumstances we’d do that. Do you remember?”
“I remember that taking Daniel to Innsmouth wasn’t one of them, sir.”
“So you’re telling me that’s all you did. You didn’t do any practical magic? You didn’t have any contact with Orne’s familiar or Orne himself?”
On their ride in from Devil Reef, he and Daniel and Eddy had agreed that they’d keep Sean’s involvement in their adventure to a minimum and not mention Orne or the seed world. Instead of learning about his grandfather through the spy-hole, Daniel had gone to Innsmouth on the mere chance he’d find relations still living there. It was Old Man Marsh who’d lent them the boat. When they were harassed by the anti-Order Deep Ones, it was Marsh and Abel who’d driven them off. That was their story, and they were going to stick to it, mainly for Sean’s sake, as he realized now. The only point that would get Daniel in trouble was how he’d spied on the Order meeting.
From where Sean stood, he could see the Founding’s Plexiglas shield and the stained glass beneath it, dark in the early morning shade. The only lies he had to tell were the ones that would protect Daniel and the seed world, and those were actually one big lie of omission—
Impatience and suspicion ground together into Marvell’s voice: “Sean, those weren’t hard questions. You used practical magic, yes or no. You had contact with Orne, yes or no.”
When Daniel had faced down his father, it had been with the truth. Suddenly, maybe stupidly, Sean wanted to hit Marvell with some of the same. “Yes and yes,” he said.
The truth punched Marvell’s jaw slack. While he was recovering, Sean laid a hand on the whistle under his shirt, pressing its coolness into his skin. “Daniel’s going to say his grandfather lent us a boat to go to Devil Reef. He’s going to say Marsh’s patrol cutter ran off some Deep Ones that wanted to kidnap him. All that’s to keep me out of trouble. What really happened is Orne was watching us through his newt, and he had it invite me to meet him in Newbury. I did, and he offered to help. He got the boat for us so Daniel could go meet his mother. He gave me this.”
He pulled the chained whistle over his head and dangled it between them. As it spun, the sun climbed over the Arkwright House and bounced light off the spiral of alien script, making its toothy characters glow like embers.
Marvell stepped back from the whistle. He stayed back while Sean told him how he’d used it to impress and intimidate the hostile Deep Ones. The first thing he said after Sean shut up was, “Why admit to all this?”
Why was he screwing himself, in other words. Great question, and to Sean’s own amazement, he had an answer. “I don’t want to get thrown out of the Order, Professor. I want to stay, and I want to come back next summer, and then I want to go to MU.”
“So you confess to the very things that could get you thrown out?”
“So I’m telling you the truth. Like, just because Daniel went to see his grandfather and mother, he’s not jumping into the ocean and Changing. Well, just because I met Redemption Orne doesn’t mean I’m going to side with him against the Order. If he even is against it. I kind of don’t think he is.”
“‘Kind of don’t think,’” Marvell echoed.
Sean ignored the sarcasm. “I’m giving you the whistle to keep until I can use it better. To prove I trust the Order.”
“And you do? You choose us over Orne?”
Another great question. “I’m not choosing anyone yet. But I want to stick to the Order for now, and I won’t do anything to harm it. I can totally promise that.”
Marvell took the whistle. He turned it in every direction and even pulled a tiny magnifying glass out of his pocketknife to scrutinize the script. He didn’t try to blow the whistle, however. “You can promise not to harm the Order knowingly, perhaps.”
“Can anybody do more than that, Professor?”
Marvell wrapped the whistle in a clean handkerchief before putting it in his breast pocket. “Well. I have to admit I’m impressed by your honesty, and by the
pledge of Orne’s whistle. You realize it’s a hugely important artifact, worth a great deal of money?”
To tell the truth, Sean was starting to feel sorry he’d let the whistle go, but not because it was a priceless museum piece. Orne had given it to him, and look how it had saved Daniel. Still, he had something else from Orne, something he wasn’t giving up. “I figured. That’s okay. I know you’ll take care of it for me.”
“I’ll get the archival process started at once. But before the Order can formally accept a loan like this, from a minor, I’ll have to get permission from your father.”
Hell yeah, Dad. “Could you let me talk to him first, Professor? I better call him right away, anyhow.”
“Yes, you’d better.”
He took a deep breath. “Should I, like, tell him anything about coming back early?”
Marvell touched his breast pocket, then the trousers pocket where he’d stowed the Civic key. “No. I’d hate to interrupt his work. And as long as your wings are clipped, I think we can wait until the Order meeting in September to decide about your position with us. Barring any further troublemaking, of course.”
It had worked? Marvell wasn’t going to be a complete dick? “Thanks, Professor. No troublemaking.”
Marvell had to be just a little bit of a dick. Though at first he hadn’t been able to hide his excitement over the whistle, he’d slowly worked his way back to a stern glower. “We’ll see. Well. Would you tell Helen about the artifact? She’ll want to come to the Archives and have a look.”
“Sure, Professor.”
* * *
Like Marvell, Mr. Glass avoided being an absolute complete dick. Relieved that Daniel would continue treatment with Geldman, he gave him permission to go on living at the Arkwright House. In fact, he decided to stay a couple days himself. That he wanted to hang out with Daniel was great; that he probably also meant to scope the hell out of Eddy, not so much. Sean’s call to England went as well as could be expected. First Dad yelled about Sean endangering himself and his friends. Then he yelled about Orne interfering again. It took an hour for Sean to calm him down to the point where they agreed to discuss everything when Dad got home, and then that they loved each other et cetera. Sean didn’t say a word about how Orne and Mom had known each other. That would have to wait until they had a lot of time, face-to-face.
Fathomless Page 27