Harrison Squared

by Daryl Gregory

  “It’s been four days,” the chief said. “That’s well beyond what they usually allow.”

  I wheeled on him. “Get away from me, you useless piece of—”

  “Harrison!” Aunt Sel said.

  “Watch yourself, boy,” the chief said.

  Aunt Sel stepped between us and put a hand on my chest. “Chief Bode, like you said, this is a stressful time.”

  She gave me the tiniest shove, like a ref directing a boxer to his corner of the ring, and I stalked back to my bedroom.

  * * *

  That afternoon I did nothing but fume, sulk, brood, and seethe. Not very productive activities, but at least I was good at them. I refused to talk to Aunt Sel, and I ate in silence. At nine I went to my bedroom again, sure that I wouldn’t be able to sleep—until my body shut down on its own. Evidently I was still recovering from the dunk in the bay.

  I woke up Sunday feeling calmer. All that emotion from yesterday seemed like it belonged to someone else. My temper had caused me problems, but punching a cop would have been a new high point in my career as a juvenile delinquent. Mom would have been so disappointed. We’d talked for years about controlling what she called my “dual nature”: one side calm and analytical, and one … volcanic.

  Aunt Sel immediately read my change of mood. “You look like a man who needs waffles.”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  “Any idea how to make them?”

  She called Saleem. I told her I could drive, but she wasn’t hearing it. He arrived in half an hour and drove us to a diner in Uxton. By the time we arrived we were famished, and I plowed through an order of pancakes, bacon, and fried eggs.

  “Civilization,” Aunt Sel said. “I’ll be glad to get out of Dunnsmouth, I’ll tell you that.” Then: “Did I offend you?”

  I realized I’d sat back from the table. “No. It’s … fine.”

  She frowned at me. “Out with it.”

  “I’m not giving up on her,” I said. “You can leave if you want to, but I’m staying.”

  Saleem looked uncomfortable. “I need to call in,” he said. “See you outside.”

  After he left, Aunt Sel said, “I’m not leaving, Harrison. And I won’t pressure you to leave, either.”

  “Really?”

  “I can put up with bad food, a lack of culture, and zero cell phone service. I do worry about you, though. Running off like that on your own to find that boat. You have a genetic predisposition for obsession. From both sides. No wonder your grandfather was worried about you coming back here.”

  “Well, worried about his son coming back here,” I said. “He didn’t know it was me.”

  “The details were wrong, but the concern was well-founded.”

  “Tell me what happened,” I said. “I only know what my mom told me, and obviously she left things out.”

  “Hmm, like that the accident happened near Dunnsmouth?”

  “And what my dad was doing there in the first place.”

  Aunt Sel crossed her legs. “It’s so hard to finish a meal without a cigarette in my hand. I do miss them. Whatever you do, don’t start.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  She took a breath. “I can’t tell you much. I could never keep up with your father’s enthusiasms. Do you know what a cultural anthropologist is?”

  “Somebody who studies culture,” I said.

  “Close—it’s someone who bores you to death at dinner parties. Oh, I tried to stay conscious as he described the latest cult or superstition he was tracking down, but your mother was the only woman I know who was actually interested. Not very successful on dates, your father. He got lucky when he found a geek as beautiful as your mother. No offense.”

  “None taken. She is a beautiful geek. But you don’t know why they came out here?”

  “Nothing specific. I know he was on sabbatical from Stanford, and couldn’t understand why he was going to spend it in the dreariest location possible. You all came along for the trip. You were just a toddler. Why you all ended up on a boat on the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the night … well, your mother never could explain that. And then when you were hurt…”

  I flashed on an image: a creature with skin like onyx, eyeless, with a round mouth ringed by razor teeth.

  “Are you okay?” Aunt Sel asked.

  “I’m fine.” I didn’t know where that memory had come from. “Go on.”

  “Well,” she said. “The Coast Guard had trouble believing that some shark or squid had attacked you. Probably why she changed her story when she told it to you. She was in shock when she called your grandfather. The size of the creature she described … well, not exactly credible. If she was confused, or had hallucinated some of it, no one blamed her for it. She nearly died of hypothermia. That’s when—”

  “I know what hypothermia is.”

  “Somehow she got you to shore, and you were life-flighted to Boston for emergency surgery. You almost died of blood loss. Then afterward there was some kind of rare infection that kept you in the ICU for weeks.” She exhaled, then smiled humorlessly.

  “Your mother wasn’t the same after that. She did nothing but take care of you for the next two years. And of course she’d lost your father. When she went back to grad school we thought she was finally, well, healing. I had no idea till now that this new focus of hers was still all about what happened to you and your father. I think it’s clear now that she always intended to come back here to find … whatever it is she thinks she saw.”

  “Don’t make her sound crazy,” I said.

  “You have to admit, it’s all rather Ahab-ish.” She paused. “Harrison?”

  “Right,” I said. I’d had a thought. Several of them, actually. There were at least three things that I needed to be doing right now. And most important was to find Lub. He knew something about the Albatross. And he knew—somehow—that my mother was alive. But how was I supposed to find him?

  “Harrison, look at me.”

  “Yeah?”

  She reached across the table to put a hand on my arm. “Promise me you won’t let Dunnsmouth change you. I don’t want to come back here in five years and start searching for you out in the ocean.”

  Oh, but she didn’t understand: I was already changed. I knew things I didn’t know before. I’d met a boy with gills. There were monsters out on the water, and on the land.

  “No promises,” I said.

  11

  She was surrounded by a sea of pale faces. Their eyes seemed to shift in the flickering light of the oil lamps, so even when her captor was gone, as he was now, Rosa Gabriel Harrison felt as if she was being watched.

  Her prison was a cave, but the walls were lined on three sides with shelves made of glossy polished driftwood that held irregularly shaped slabs of white and yellow, some as small as tea saucers, others wide as serving platters, still others long and thin as broom handles. On each surface was a delicately etched portrait: men, women, and children, alone or arranged in family groupings. They stared down at her from shelves that started at chest height and rose into the dark like rows in a coliseum.

  She recognized the materials and the method by which the portraits were made. This was scrimshaw, made by scratching with knife or sewing needle at the material of whales—whalebone or baleen, tusk or teeth—until the picture was complete and the lines were filled with black ink. She’d never seen examples so beautiful, or so awful. The faces were mournful, and they seemed to be pitying her.

  Her wrists were bound in thick, scratchy rope, and a second length of rope encircled her waist and bound her to a rusty, centuries-old anchor that leaned in the corner. It was eleven feet tall, shaped like a pickax, and weighed somewhere north of a thousand pounds. She could move only a few feet in any direction, and could not reach the shelves, or the belongings of her captor.

  He’d assembled furniture worthy of a hermit: a wooden table with a single chair; a chest where he kept his knives and other tools; a collection of nautical bric-a-
brac, like the iron trident that hung from a wooden rack in a place of honor. She lusted for that trident. The sharp tips could have cut through her bonds easily.

  But the only thing in range of her tether was her “bed,” a pile of sailcloth. Some of that cloth had been used like a straitjacket to bind her and drag her from the boat.

  She wasn’t sure how long she had been in the cave, or even if it was day or night. The light never changed, and her watch and cell phone had been taken from her when they pulled her out of the water. Then she’d been brought to another cave, where she met … something. Something gigantic that spoke like a woman but smelled like an abattoir. Rosa had lain in that cave for hours, until she was bundled up again, thrown onto a hard shoulder, and taken here. Wherever that was.

  Her body was the only way to measure time. Her captor had fed her eight times—if you could call what he brought her “food”—and judging from her hunger those meals were eight to twelve hours apart. But could her body be trusted? Adrenaline did strange things to one’s sense of time, and she was already exhausted from the crash and the unrelenting chill of the cave. She knew only that sometimes she slept, and sometimes her captor sat with her for what seemed like hours, talking in that low, insinuating tone, polishing the plate of white bone in his hands … and then he would slip away to retrieve her food and do whatever errands a kidnapper needed to do. He’d left an hour ago, if she was judging time correctly, and she didn’t know how much time she had left before he returned. Better make the most of it.

  For perhaps the two-hundredth time since that hour began, and an uncountable number of times since she’d woken up here, she gripped the rope that tied her to the anchor. Then she crouched, leaned back to take up the slack, and kicked backward. The rope bit into her spine and she suppressed a grunt.

  The anchor did not move.

  She crouched, took a breath, and kicked back again. And again.

  She thought she felt the anchor shift a millimeter. But she only needed a dozen millimeters to reach her goal. She turned toward the nearest wall, and strained against the rope, her arms outstretched for the nearest portrait.

  It was a picture of a couple. A handsome man in his thirties, and his dark-haired wife with wide eyes that seemed both hopeful and deeply sad. They seemed to know what she needed. The edge of the plate was scalloped, and tapered to paper thinness. In the right hands it could be a serrated knife, she thought.

  Rosa exhaled, willing herself to be thinner (and she was thinner, losing weight every day), and threw herself against the rope.

  An inch of air separated her fingers from that portrait.

  The couple regarded her with pity. Rosa looked up at the rows and rows of faces. A child with piercing black eyes. A sailor from the last century, staring in terror. A kind-faced man with thick glasses, wearing a cardigan sweater.

  What about the rest of you? she thought. You want me to live or die? Or do you just want me to entertain you down here?

  The mob remained silent.

  “Vá à merda,” she said.

  She could not give up. Her son was waiting for her. She wasn’t about to make him an orphan.

  She turned back to the anchor, gripped the rope, and took a breath. Then she heard the clank of a metal bucket striking rock. It sounded impossibly close—but sounds were tricky down here.

  Quickly she lay down in the pile of sailcloth. And then, though she hated to make herself more vulnerable, she closed her eyes.

  There was no sound for a long time … and then he was in the room with her. A thunk as the bucket dropped to the rocky floor. A scrape of chair leg, and then a creak as her captor sat.

  “I know you’re awake,” he said teasingly. “Don’t you want your supper?”

  She decided to sit up.

  She’d grown up in a dangerous town, and had traveled in dangerous places; she’d read all the advice about surviving a kidnapping. Her job in this moment was to make her captor feel at ease. To establish rapport. To make him see her as a human.

  If only she was sure that he was human.

  He slouched in the chair, his wide hat pulled low over his face. Watching her. The bucket had been dropped within range of the tether. “Here’s one that didn’t get away,” he said.

  She scooted over to it. The past meals had each been a single can of food—navy beans the first time, then soups, and vegetables, and once, bizarrely and unsatisfyingly, cranberry sauce—rolling about in rusty water that was her ration of drinking water. And when the water was gone, it would become her slop bucket. One bucket for all needs. She tried not to think about that.

  She peered inside.

  It was a whole fish—an Atlantic cod.

  “State fish of Massachusetts,” Rosa said.

  “Aren’t you a smarty girl.”

  There was water in the bucket, and she hoped it wasn’t salt water this time. She lifted out the fish. She could tell by its clear eyes that it was fresh—possibly killed within the hour.

  “You don’t mind a little of the raw stuff, do you?” the captor asked.

  “I love sushi,” she said. Thinking: Joke with him. Put him at ease. “I don’t suppose you’d cut it open for me, would you?” He’d at least had the courtesy to open the lids of the canned food.

  “If you’re hungry enough, you’ll make do.” He smiled. His teeth were bright and sharp.

  He opened the wooden chest and brought out a rectangle of sandpaper and the slab of white whale jawbone he’d been working on for days. “You’re a lucky one,” he said, and ran the sandpaper over the face of the bone. “This is prime canvas. An honor.”

  He’d told her this a dozen times, but again she nodded, showing her appreciation. He’d spent hours polishing that bone. Cooing over it. It was maddening.

  She pushed back the cod’s operculum, the gill cover, and yanked out the gills. She looked for a place to put the organs. He stopped his polishing and watched her. She realized there was only one place he’d allow her to place them. She dropped them into the bucket.

  “Can’t rush the polishing,” he said. “It’s porous, you know, and if you don’t sand it down it’ll suck all the ink. Look how smooth it is! Like pearl.”

  “You do beautiful work,” she said. She tried to make it sound sincere.

  “No one cares about quality these days,” he said.

  She worked her thumbs into the space where the gills had been. If her hands were untied, she’d simply rip down along the belly now, but she had no leverage. She glanced up at her captor.

  “Problem?” he asked.

  “Just considering my options,” she said. If her captor expected her to be squeamish, he’d picked the wrong woman. She’d eaten and cooked fish her entire life, and for the past twenty years she’d studied and dissected scores of species. She knew her way around a straightforward specimen like the cod. And she understood that if she was going to have the strength to escape, she needed all the protein she could get.

  She gripped the head of the fish in her bound hands, getting her thumbs deep inside the gills, then bit into its belly just behind the ventral fin. She tugged down with her hands, and flesh began to rip. She paused to get a firmer bite, tugged once more, and the fish practically unzipped for her. Gore spilled onto her shirt, but she figured it was worth it.

  She quickly dug out the intestines and the other internal organs, dropping those into the bucket as well. She hoped there was enough moisture in the meat of the fish that she wouldn’t have to drink that water.

  “You’ve done this before,” her captor said. He seemed disappointed.

  “Not exactly like this,” she said. “But I’ve cleaned a lot of fish.”

  “You don’t say.” He leaned forward and snatched the cod from her. She almost yelled, but held her tongue.

  He sniffed at the fish, now open for him like a book. “Mmm,” he said. Then he bit down and ripped out a long chunk of white, steak-like flesh. It hung from his pointy teeth, and then he flipped it up like a dog and
swallowed it whole.

  Rosa was too angry to cry. If she could have reached him, she would have strangled him.

  He tore into the fish with gusto. A minute later he looked up, smiling. “You know, I almost had your boy for lunch.”

  Rosa went cold. Her vision blurred, then snapped back into focus.

  “What did you do?” she asked softly.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Missed him by a hair.” He tossed the flapping carcass into a far corner, well out of her reach.

  “Now,” he said, and licked two long, yellow-nailed fingers. “Back to work.” He picked up the whalebone. He held it up to the light and said, “I think we’re ready.”

  She could think of nothing but Harrison now.

  “Turn to the left,” he said. “I said turn!”

  She shifted her body.

  “No, just your face. That’s it. Straight on. Full of grit.”

  She stared at him. The brim still hid his eyes.

  He unsheathed his long knife. Then he pressed the tip to the bone and flicked it lightly.

  Rosa felt a whisper of cold along her cheek, as if it had been brushed by the point of an icicle. She gasped, and her captor nodded.

  “The first cut’s the most important,” he said. “Everything depends on it.”

  12

  “Say quick,” quoth he, “I bid thee say—

  What manner of man art thou?”

  By the time I woke up Monday it was no longer morning. Aunt Sel had decided I didn’t need to go to school. She was wrong about that, but the reasons I needed to go had nothing to do with my classes.

  I showered, ate quickly, and told her that I needed to take a walk—without mentioning that the walk would take me up the hill to school. When I slipped through the doors the atrium was empty. It was just before the end of the school day, eighth period. I wasn’t going to world history in Mr. Waughm’s room, though. I went straight to the library.

  Once again, the place seemed empty. I walked to the back of the room first, and quickly found Professor Freytag in a dark corner. He was sitting on a wooden chair, with a book open on the floor in front of him. He was leaning over his knees, reading with an intense expression.