Harrison Squared

by Daryl Gregory

  “Anyway, the humans on the Albatross —there were two of them I could see—ran back inside the cabin. The lobster boat kept coming, moving that light over the water. The Albatross swung about, gunned the engines, then … bam.”

  “They rammed them?”

  “Oh yeah. The lobster boat practically split in half. There were two people on board, a man with a white beard, and a man with long black hair. At least, I thought it was a man until I started listening at the docks and heard the story of a woman gone missing.”

  “Wait, you can’t tell the difference between men and women?”

  “Not from a distance. Unless they’re wearing dresses or a beard—that’s the only way I can tell you apart.”

  “Do you know the word ‘racist’?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah? I’ll test you when you meet some of my people.”

  “So what happened to my mother?”

  “She went into the water with her life vest on. But the old man with the beard, he was on the other side of the boat when it split, and I lost sight of him. Later I swam down to the wreck, but I couldn’t find him.” He shrugged. “There’s a lot of, uh, beasties down there.”

  “But my mom?”

  “Oh, the people on the Albatross picked her up. They threw down a rope ladder, and she climbed out herself. The Albatross was taking on water by this point, but it could still move, and it headed for shore.”

  “Why didn’t you follow?”

  “How was I supposed to know who she was?”

  “This makes no sense,” I said. “Why would they ram her boat, then rescue her?”

  Lub had no answer to that. He watched me pace.

  “What about the humans on the Albatross?” I asked. “Did you see them?”

  “They weren’t wearing dresses,” Lub said. “Or beards.”

  “So you have no idea.”

  “They were all ugly,” he said.

  “Again, there’s this word…”

  Lub started choking, but he was smiling as he did it. “Is that your laugh?” I asked.

  “This is the traditional expression of amusement among my people,” he said. “You racist.”

  * * *

  I snuck back into my room sometime around 1 A.M., thinking that Aunt Sel was right: Everything good did happen after eleven.

  But then, after I pulled off my clothes and climbed in bed, thoughts started churning. Chief Bode had lied to me, or someone had lied to him; the Albatross had definitely been damaged that night, not weeks before like he said. I kept picturing Mom, swimming away from Hal Jonsson’s wrecked lobster boat—and then climbing up into the Albatross. Someone was holding her against her will. Either that, or she was now—

  I couldn’t think about that.

  I stared into the dark for a half hour, then an hour, my mind still running like a hamster wheel. Finally I turned on the light and looked for something to distract me. In desperation I opened Tobias’ diary.

  The kid’s drawings kept getting better and better. The later pages of the journal were crammed with drawings that in my opinion could have been in a museum. After about ten minutes I felt my concentration drifting. I kept turning pages, and finally came to the last diary entry. It was dated May, 1832, when Tobias was 21. It was titled “Out of Dunnsmouth Mass.”

  I sat up. Tobias Glück had been here? In Dunnsmouth?

  12th May, 1832, at sea Out of Dunnsmouth Mass.

  I am done with knives. I am done with scrimshaw and ink, with the teeth and bones of whales. Every piece I have made, I have thrown overboard. The crew stared at me like I was mad. Even now I can hear them above decks. They whisper, Murderer.

  Something terrible had happened to Tobias’ friend George—and to Tobias.

  There was no way I was not going to read the rest of the diary that night. I scanned each page, struggling to decipher the words because his handwriting had gotten so erratic. But in an hour I had the story.

  I knew where the Scrimshander lived. And I knew who owned the Albatross.

  13

  This seraph-band, each waved his hand,

  No voice did they impart—

  No voice; but O, the silence sank

  Like music on my heart.

  I could hear the students singing in the language of the Dwellers. I put my hand against the auditorium door, and before I could change my mind, I walked inside.

  The singing stopped. Mr. Montooth, standing at the podium, glanced up from his book. Mr. Waughm’s mouth dropped open. The students, almost as one, turned to look at me.

  I scanned the rows. So many pale faces under dark hair. And then I saw Lydia.

  I walked to her row. The boy sitting on the end, the tall boy with the slab-like forehead, looked sideways at me. Then he realized that I wanted to sit down, and he pulled back his knees. I scooched along sideways, my big backpack bumping against the students.

  No one said a word. Not even Principal Montooth.

  Lydia stared up at me with those huge eyes—and this time I was sure that she really was surprised. She was sitting next to Flora, the girl with the red lipstick. I gave Flora a significant raise of the eyebrows, and she moved over a seat. I put my pack on the floor and sat down.

  “Hi, Lydia,” I said.

  She glared at me and whispered, “What are you doing?”

  Mr. Montooth looked around at the students and smiled. “Let’s finish with ‘Rise, Oh Rise!’ Page twenty-eight.”

  Flora shared her book with me. On the page were bars and staves as in a normal piece of music, but instead of the usual whole-, half-, and quarter-note symbols, the measures were filled with blobs, triangles, stars, and one shape that looked like an eye. And as for the words, they were written in a strange alphabet of jagged lines.

  I tried to hum along anyway. Lydia sang without looking at me.

  At the end of the song, the students closed their books and set them on their seats. Mr. Montooth said, “We are one day closer. You may go to your classes.”

  Everyone filed toward the exit. Just as I reached the door, Mr. Waughm called me over. The vice principal swiveled his head, looking at me with one eye, then the other. “So,” he said. “What brings you to Voluntary?”

  “I was just curious,” I said. “I’d heard the singing, and, well…”

  “That made you so curious you had to disturb all the other students by coming late?”

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “I meant to come early, but I was up so late reading.”

  “I thought you looked a bit tuckered out,” Mr. Montooth said. He’d walked up behind me, and now he put a hand on my shoulder. “Everything all right at home?”

  I realized he knew about the swim in the lake, too. Lydia was right: It was a small town.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Good, good. Any news about your mother?”

  “We’re still hopeful,” I said.

  “We all worry about our mothers,” Mr. Waughm said.

  Montooth frowned at Waughm and then said, “I’m glad you came this morning, Harrison. But I have to tell you, Voluntary may not be the best fit for you. It won’t be easy to pick up the language in the songs. These children have been singing them their whole lives, and even they have trouble.” He smiled to show how amusing this was.

  “And what language is it, exactly?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t have heard of it,” Mr. Waughm said. “It’s pretty obscure.”

  I thought: Mr. Waughm, hipster.

  “But as I said, it’s a little late in the game,” Mr. Montooth said.

  “I don’t know, I’m pretty good with languages,” I said. “I speak Portuguese, Spanish, a smattering of Terena, a little French, and I know how to order beer in Gaelic.” I plastered a smile on my face. “So see you tomorrow?”

  * * *

  Montooth and Waughm ruined my chances for catching up to Lydia in the hallway. By the time I got to Cryptobiology class, she was at her seat with her back turned firmly toward me. She cont
inued to ignore me for the rest of the day, and I couldn’t get close to her: A buffer of kids seemed to surround her at all times.

  My little stunt at Voluntary had earned me nothing but stares and possibly some discussion on the fingercant network. In other words, it was pretty much business as usual for me at Dunnsmouth Secondary.

  It wasn’t until English class that I managed to get next to her. I followed her to her seat. “Lydia Palwick,” I said. “We have to talk.”

  She gave me an exasperated look. “No,” she said. “We don’t.” She opened the textbook for the class, The Catastrophes of New England. Evidently we were on chapter seven, “The Great September Gale of 1815.” A page showed an engraving of buildings burning and several corpses draped over the limbs of a tree.

  I showed her my own my book. “Ever hear of Tobias Glück?”

  She ignored me.

  “It doesn’t matter. He lived almost two hundred years ago. They accused him of murdering his best friend.”

  “Tragic,” Lydia said dryly.

  “But he didn’t do it. They ran into someone else, someone they called the Dunnsmouth ’Shander.”

  She glanced at me, then turned back to her book. “You don’t say.” For a moment I swear she was surprised.

  “And you know who else Tobias runs into, Lydia Palwick?”

  A sound like a gunshot made me jump. Mrs. Goody-Brown had slapped her cane down across Lydia’s desk, nearly smacking my fingers.

  Our English teacher was a tiny, ancient woman with a face like a desiccated apple and eyes set so far back in her head she might as well be looking through binoculars. I’d never seen her lean on that cane. She wielded it like an épée.

  “Take your seat,” Goody-Brown hissed. She leaned toward me. Her mouth opened, revealing a set of large, perfectly even, brown teeth. “And open your notebook.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and went to my desk in the third row.

  “Everyone take out your notebooks,” she announced, and pointed the cane at the head of a nearby student. “We are having a vocabulary quiz.”

  Goody-Brown stalked between the rows, calling out words. “Number four,” she said. “Squamous. Squamous.” Her cane whacked the side of a desk. “Five. Rugose. Rugose.”

  After the quiz it was silent reading time—dead silent reading time. Instead of concentrating on the Great Gale of 1815, I snuck out the diary and reread the section that had kept me up last night. Tobias and his pal George are in a tavern in Dunnsmouth when George starts bragging about how good a scrimshander Tobias is. The locals, though, aren’t impressed, and one old sailor says his etchings are no match for the “Dunnsmouth ’shander.” George demands to see this “great artist.” Tobias wants to go back to his ship, but George is having none of it, and so by midnight they’re walking down by the shore, “to caves that opened at low tide, full of crabs and eels and creatures I did not recognize.”

  The old sailor leads them into a certain cave, “a twisty tunnel through the dark,” until suddenly the passage opens to reveal a cavern:

  Shelves were larded with Ivory and Bone, each piece of purest white. The old sailor bid me to bend close, and cried out, “Behold the handiwork of the Dunnsmouth Scrimshander!”

  Oh, and such handiwork! The knifework was so precise, the lines so delicate. This artisan’s tools, whatever they were, were an order more fine than my blunt needles. As with all Scrimshaw, the bones had been rubbed with some dark liquid, to make their Designs visible. The old sailor waved his lamp, and the pictures floated into view, like baitfish drawn toward a ship’s lantern.

  The artist’s subject was not ships or whales, as in my own work, or the work of most sailors I had seen: the Dunnsmouth scrimshander drew only human portraits. Here was a beautiful woman, every hair in place, with large eyes that seemed to watch me. Here an old man, every wrinkle rendered distinct. And oh, so many children! A crowd of them pressed to the wall, as if gathered for school. The Art was so detailed, so lifelike, that I could see each of their expressions.

  And each expression was the same. Despair.

  Drunk George is close to passing out, but Tobias is fascinated. “My art was nothing compared to his. This man was a da Vinci or a Devil.”

  Then the artist himself shows up, wearing “an oilskin coat, as many whalers do, and a broad hat of the same material.” Tobias can’t see the man’s face, but his voice “seemed to slip through the dark like a water snake.”

  The Stranger asked me, “What do you think of my work?”

  I could not speak. The air had left me, as if I were sitting at the bottom of the sea.

  “Be honest,” the stranger said.

  At last I said, “I have never seen its like.”

  “You are too kind,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. He said, “The secret is all in the materials. You have to find the right bones, and prepare them with utmost care. Don’t you agree?”

  The old sailor who had led us here began to laugh. And George, stupid stupid George, began to laugh with him.

  Things go downhill from there.

  The Scrimshander takes out his long knife, and Tobias panics. (I certainly understood that.) He grabs George and starts leading him through the pitch-black caves. They immediately get lost, but Tobias keeps running, because he can hear the Scrimshander calling to them. At one point Tobias smacks his head against a rock and nearly knocks himself out.

  And when he gets up, George is gone.

  * * *

  The class ended, and Lydia was again surrounded by friends: Garfield, Flora, the tall kid with the bulldozer forehead—basically the same crew she ate lunch with. She walked in the center of them, and I could see her fingers moving. Whatever they were saying, Lydia was running the conversation, and her friends were acting like bodyguards keeping the paparazzi away.

  Lydia couldn’t hide from me in history class, though. She sat directly in front of me, her back straight as the blackboard Mr. Waughm was writing on. I leaned forward and said quietly, “How long have you Palwicks lived in Dunnsmouth?”

  She ignored me.

  “Forever, right? Probably live in the same family house. I bet you even give your family boat the same name, generation after generation.”

  She looked over her shoulder at me. “What is the matter with you?”

  One of the last passages in Tobias’ diary; that was the matter. Tobias stumbles out of the caves, and it’s past dawn. He’s really late. His ship is out in the bay, getting ready to depart, and all the ship’s boats have left. He’s stranded.

  I would have gladly let the Ship go, if I were anywhere but Dunnsmouth. I begged for help. A local fisherman looked at my bloodied face and hands with disgust, taking me for a drunken brawler. But he agreed to row me out to the ship on his skiff, which cut through the water as swift as the sea bird for which it was named.

  His son, a black-haired boy with the largest eyes I have ever seen, kindly bound my hands with cloth. Something about that boy reminded me of the figure of the beautiful woman I had seen in the cave. “Tell me your name,” I demanded. “I will repay you when I can.”

  He told me reluctantly his name, but it was clear he wanted nothing more to do with me.

  In the margins of the diary, Tobias had written a sentence, then underlined it: “For services—Elias Palwick, The Albatross.”

  “Tell me, Lydia—who was on the Albatross the night it crashed into my mom’s boat?”

  I expected her to pretend confusion or deny everything. I was even braced for a slap to my face. But I wasn’t prepared for Lydia’s big eyes suddenly filling with tears.

  She turned away from me, and I sat back in my seat, feeling guilty—which didn’t seem fair at all.

  Mr. Waughm finished the diagram he was sketching on the board and turned to us with a pleased smile. With his scrawny neck and baggy suit, he looked like a man who’d lost three hundred pounds in a crash diet but had no money for a new wardrobe.

  He opened his arms. “P
eople throw around these words as if they’re interchangeable. But who can tell me what they really mean?”

  The room was silent.

  “Come now,” Waughm said. “Let’s start with ‘dictatorship.’ That’s the easy one.”

  Again, no one said anything.

  “A dictatorship,” Mr. Waughm said, sounding a little put out, “is rule by one person or a small group. But a dictator is a single, absolute ruler. Like, say, a CEO, or the matriarch of a family, or even”—he smiled at his cleverness—“the teacher in a classroom.”

  No one spoke.

  Waughm’s smile faded. “Okay then,” he said. He rubbed his hands as if to restore his circulation. “Now the tricky ones. Dictatorships can come in two flavors. What’s the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism?” He swung his head about, each eye taking in a separate swath of the room. “Someone. Anyone.”

  No one even looked like they were thinking of an answer. Fingers, however, were moving.

  “I need a response,” Waughm said. “Yes, both are effective forms of government, but they are different.” He pointed to the boy with the wide forehead. “Bart. Illuminate us.”

  “I’d prefer not to,” he said. His voice was a cave-like bass.

  “What do you mean, prefer?” Waughm said. “I don’t care what you prefer. Answer the question.”

  I held up my hand, and Waughm instantly swung an eye in my direction.

  I said, “Both are rule without consent of the people.”

  “Harrison. Yes. Go on.”

  I hesitated. I knew the definitions—I’d learned all this stuff back in seventh grade, plus the terms were discussed in the opening chapter of the textbook Waughm had given me on the first day—but if the answers were so easy, why wasn’t anyone else talking?

  “Is that the extent of your knowledge, Mr. Harrison?” Waughm smirked at the other side of the room, as if saying, Can you believe this guy?

  “Totalitarian governments,” I said, raising my voice, “attempt to rule everything about their citizens’ lives. Not only what they do publically, but privately too. That’s the ‘total’ part. The system depends on a charismatic leader with some kind of ideology that he gets everyone to buy into.”