Harrison Squared

by Daryl Gregory

  Waughm nodded, happy to get an answer, even if it was from me. “Yes! Charisma! Every great leader has it. Am I right, people?”

  No one spoke.

  Waughm coughed and moved toward my side of the room. “Authoritarians are unpopular with their citizens,” he said. “They rule for ruling’s sake, just to keep control. But a totalitarian is going somewhere. If you want to reduce crime, eliminate terrorism, keep your enemies at bay, and create some lovely palaces, there’s only one form of government that will do the job.” He scanned the room. Everyone seemed to be staring into space.

  “Totalitarianism?” I said.

  Now Waughm was getting annoyed with me. He turned to address the rest of the room. “You may ask yourself, why is that so, Mr. Waughm? Well, I’ll tell you. These governments work because the people are united not only behind a great leader, but a great idea. It doesn’t matter what the idea is, as long as it appeals emotionally. The citizens can feel a sense of purpose that guides everything. ‘Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ Benito Mussolini said that.”

  “Didn’t we kick his butt in World War Two?” I asked.

  All the fingers in the room stopped moving. Mr. Waughm slowly turned to face me.

  “That’s true…,” he said, drawing out the word. “However, that doesn’t mean Mussolini was wrong. Human beings need a sense of purpose. A hierarchical organization—like say, a church—can provide that. Obedience to the organization relieves stress and provides happiness. Ipso facto, people are happiest when they can stop worrying and learn to love their leader.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said.

  Faces turned toward me. I hadn’t meant to swear, but come on. Waughm was being ridiculous.

  “True power derives from the consent of the governed,” I said. “Thomas Jefferson. Declaration of Independence.” If I’d been holding a mike, this would be the point at which I dropped it and walked away. Unfortunately, I had no microphone, and the class gong did not ring.

  “Language, Mr. Harrison!” Waughm said. “Report yourself to the office, immediately.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I will not be disrespected.”

  “That’s another thing,” I said. “Totalitarian regimes tend to collapse as soon as people speak up.”

  “Out! Out this moment!”

  I picked up my backpack. Lydia turned in her chair to look up at me. I couldn’t read the expression on her face.

  I walked straight to the office. Then straight past it. Then straight out of the building.

  * * *

  Aunt Sel was stretched out on the couch when I banged through the front door. “You look like a man who needs a drink,” she said. I didn’t laugh. “Right, inappropriate,” she said. “I’ll have yours.”

  “I’ll be in my room,” I said. It took some effort not to slam the bedroom door too. I fell into the bed and stared at the ceiling. The brown paint was peeling away like dead skin.

  I was prepared for a good long session of fuming and seething—I’m only good because I practice—when those lost hours of sleep rushed me from the blind side and clobbered me.

  Seconds later Aunt Sel was shaking me awake. At least it felt like seconds.

  “You have a visitor,” she said. She was smiling weirdly.

  The sky outside the window was black. I wasn’t sure what time it was. I sat up groggily and asked, “Who?” Then thought: It better not be Lub.

  “You look fine,” she said, and walked out.

  What did that mean?

  I got to my feet, tightened the strap on my non-meat leg, and went out to the living room. Lydia Palwick was standing inside the front door. She wore a heavy black coat with a wide collar, and a black beret. Her hands were tucked into her pockets.

  “You two are school friends?” Aunt Sel asked.

  “We have all the same classes,” Lydia said.

  “Do you want to come inside? I have crackers, and the most interesting cheese I found in the market. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever tried.”

  “I actually came to pick up Harrison for the study group,” Lydia said. I opened my mouth, and Lydia quickly said, “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “He’s been asleep since school ended,” Aunt Sel said. “I didn’t even wake him up for supper. How about I feed you two before you take off?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Lydia said. “We have plenty of sandwiches.”

  “Your mother made sandwiches for your study group?” Aunt Sel said. “That is so lovely.”

  “I live with my aunt, actually,” Lydia said. She nodded at me. “It’s how we bonded.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “Bonded.”

  Aunt Sel opened the door for us and said to Lydia, “I have to ask. You have such lovely hair, and it just shines. What kind of product do you use?”

  Lydia blinked her big eyes. “Soap.”

  “Ah,” Aunt Sel said. “I’ll have to try that.”

  Lydia said to me, “Don’t forget the diary. We’ll need that for homework.”

  “Right,” I said. I went back to my room and retrieved Tobias Glück: A Scrimshander’s Diary. Then we walked outside into the cold dark. “I’m guessing there’s no actual study group,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “So what’s going on here?”

  “You said we had to talk,” she said. “We’re going to talk.” She started walking up the road, toward town. “This way.”

  14

  But tell me, tell me! Speak again,

  Thy soft response renewing—

  What makes that ship drive on so fast?

  What is the Ocean doing?

  Dunnsmouth was a town too small for streetlamps, but our way was dimly and sporadically lit by the windows of houses tucked behind the trees. Lydia walked fast, thank goodness. The damp had almost instantly worked its way under my hoodie, and I was shivering.

  “What’s the matter with your leg?” Lydia asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  She glanced back at me—I was still having trouble keeping up—and said, “This will go better if you don’t lie to us.”

  Us? I thought.

  She said, “I can see the way you walk. You hide it well, but there’s obviously something wrong with your right leg.”

  No one back home noticed my gait. Or if they did, they were too polite to say anything. Lydia, it seemed, occupied a data point on the top right corner of the Observant / Rude chart.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” I repeated. “It’s just made of advanced space-age materials.”

  “How’d you lose it?”

  “Just careless, I guess. Listen, could you just tell me—” To my right, a shadow slipped from tree to tree. I lost a step, and Lydia kept motoring up the hill. I jogged to catch up.

  “That’s where I live,” Lydia said. She pointed at a two-story house to our right. The top windows were dark.

  “Do you really live with your aunt?” I asked.

  “And uncle.” She walked past the house without pausing.

  “Okay, now I really don’t have any idea where we’re going,” I said.

  “Let me see the book,” she said.

  I handed her the diary. “I’m not making up the stuff about the Palwicks.”

  She put the book in her shoulder bag without opening it. “I didn’t say you were.”

  “I do have to return that,” I said. “Eventually.”

  “I’m a fast reader.”

  At the Standard Grocery she took a hard left into an alley between the store and a tall, narrow house. We cut through a parking lot, then into another alley. I couldn’t see a thing. Lydia reached back, seized me by the shirt, and said, “Almost there.”

  We emerged at a backstreet that was almost as dark as the alley. She walked toward a house with unlit windows. Stairs led down to a basement entrance. Lydia fished out a chain she wore around her neck. More than a dozen keys dan
gled from it.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “I collect them.” She chose a key and unlocked the door.

  “You mean you steal them.”

  “People are careless.” She pushed open the door.

  “Is this breaking and entering?” I said.

  “Just entering,” she said. “It’s my house.”

  “But I thought you lived with—?”

  “Get in here.” She shut the door behind us. We were in an unfinished basement of cement floors and cinderblock walls, lit by a single bare bulb. Overhead, copper pipes and valves zigzagged through the floor joists. Several pipes dropped to connect to a huge metal tank that could have been a water heater or a fuel oil container. Against one wall, wooden shelves on stacks of cinderblocks were filled with hand tools, jars of nails and screws, and mechanical parts I didn’t recognize. One shelf was occupied entirely by a dozen manual typewriters.

  I nodded at the ceiling and lowered my voice. “Are we going to wake anybody up, or…?”

  “No one lives here anymore.”

  I followed her across the room, thinking, Does everybody have a secret hideout but me?

  She opened a wooden door and gestured; four people were waiting on the other side. I recognized three of them: Flora, with her painted eyebrows and red lipstick; eager-faced, bat-eared Garfield; and the tall, long-haired boy with the Frankenstein forehead. Bart. The boy who preferred not to answer Mr. Waughm.

  The fourth person was a short, pinch-faced girl in a dress as long and shapeless as a nightgown. She looked to be a freshman, maybe younger. It didn’t help that she held a large porcelain doll in one arm. The doll wore a similar long dress, and her features looked a lot like her owner’s. Maybe they’d mail-ordered the doll to match. Girls were weird about this kind of thing.

  Both the girl and the doll stared at me coldly. Nobody was looking friendly, except for Flora, who seemed amused.

  “Wait,” I said. “There is a study group?”

  This new room was almost as unfinished as the one we’d entered through. The walls were drywalled, though, and the floor was covered by a faded carpet. A collection of beat-up chairs formed a semicircle in the middle of the room.

  “It looks like you’re set up for Voluntary,” I said.

  “Just the opposite,” Flora said.

  Tall Bart frowned. “We’ve never let an outsider in here.” His hands hung at his sides, his fingers fluttering. The others behind him signaled in response. “However…,” he said.

  “Extraordinary circumstances,” the girl with the doll said. “Extraordinary measures.” Her voice was deep yet hollow, like wind through a cave.

  “Agreed, Isabel,” Bart said. He held out his hand to me. “We’ve never spoken directly,” he said. “I’m Bart.”

  I shook his hand, and winced. His grip was crushing. “Sorry,” he said, and seemed genuinely apologetic.

  I held out my hand to the young girl. “We’ve never met, Isabel. I’m Harrison.”

  “She’s Isabel,” the girl said in a whisper. “I’m Ruth.”

  “Uh…”

  “What are you, Indonesian?” she said in that subterranean voice.

  “Isabel!” Ruth exclaimed.

  Lydia cut in. “And you know Flora and Gar.”

  “We’re the Involuntaries,” Flora said.

  “Oh. ‘Just the opposite.’ Right.”

  “See? He’s quick,” Garfield said, grinning. “Kids have no choice about going to Voluntary, but they can decide for themselves to join us.”

  I laughed. “Wait, are you telling me all those kids in Voluntary are faking it?”

  “Most of them aren’t,” Lydia said. “They believe in the Congregation.”

  “And some are on the fence, but we don’t trust them completely,” Flora said.

  “So you’re telling me it’s basically you five,” I said.

  “Six,” the girl with the doll said. But she’d used that low, spooky voice instead of her whispery one, so maybe it was more accurate to say, “the doll with the girl.”

  “Who’s the leader?” I asked, and looked at Bart. “You?”

  “We don’t have a leader,” he said.

  “Come on, there’s always a leader. Who decided to bring me here?”

  “Too many questions!” Isabel said.

  “We have questions for you,” Bart said. “Take a seat.”

  “You sound like a leader to me. What if I prefer not to?”

  Garfield laughed. Lydia didn’t. She raised her eyebrows as if to say, Are you going to fight me on this?

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll play along. But it’s question for question. Every one I answer, you have to answer one of mine.”

  Fingers fluttered. Bart nodded. “Deal.”

  The group parted and directed me to sit in a wide, ratty armchair that had seen better days.

  “Tell us how you know about the Albatross,” Bart said.

  “I found it down in J. Ruck’s Marine Engineering,” I said. “It’s got a big hole in it.”

  “How did you know to—?”

  “Uh-uh, my turn. Who owns the boat?”

  “That’s complicated.” Bart exchanged a look with Lydia. “Technically the Albatross is owned by Lydia’s uncle Micah.”

  “Okay, but who actually owns it?”

  “The Congregation.”

  That name again. “Who or what is the Congregation?” I asked.

  “My turn,” Bart said. “Why do you think the Albatross had anything to do with your mother going missing?”

  I was not about to tell them about Lub. “I got an anonymous note telling me to look for the Albatross.” I told them about going down to the docks and asking Chilly Bob about the boat, then following him to Ruck’s. “I saw the Albatross there. And that’s when I had my run-in with the Scrimshander.”

  The Involuntaries—including Isabel the porcelain doll—stared at me.

  “Don’t try to tell me he’s a myth,” I said. “Chief Bode called him a boogeyman.”

  “Where’d you learn about the Scrimshander?” Gar asked.

  “He read about him in a book,” Lydia said.

  “Yes, I did,” I said. “But before that he tried to slit my throat.”

  “You didn’t run into the Scrimshander,” Bart said. “Because if you did, you’d be dead.”

  “Or worse,” Isabel said.

  “How’d you get away?” Flora asked.

  “I dove into the water.”

  Bart looked at Lydia. “And that’s how you got away—by swimming? That’s like outrunning a cheetah.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what happened,” I said. “I guess I got lucky. Now, tell me about this Congregation. Who’s in it?”

  “That’s complicated,” Bart said.

  “You could stop saying that now,” I said.

  “Most of the town is technically in the Congregation, so—”

  “You can also stop saying ‘technically.’”

  Garfield laughed again. I was killing it with the bat-eared demographic.

  Lydia said, “You have to understand, there are circles. Most of the families of Dunnsmouth belong to the Congregation, and they go to the major services. But there’s an inner circle of people who run everything.”

  “Kind of like you guys running the Involuntaries,” I said.

  “But we think there’s an inner inner circle of people who really run the Congregation,” Lydia said.

  “Wheels within wheels,” Isabel intoned.

  “Sounds like a university,” I said. “My mom’s an academic. She said no matter how many committees there are, all the decisions are made by three white guys in a room.”

  “Sounds about right,” Flora said.

  “As ‘children’ we’re not supposed to know anything,” Bart said. “But the Involuntaries have made it their job to know what the church is up to. We don’t trust them. We just can’t buy into the religion anymore.”

  “So you’ve stopped believing in
God,” I said.

  “Gods,” Isabel said.

  “Of course we still believe in the gods,” Ruth said in her breathy voice.

  “We just don’t believe in what the Congregation wants to do for them,” Bart said.

  “Listen,” I said. “I just need to know one thing—who was on the Albatross that night? They kidnapped my mother, and I need to know where they’re keeping her.”

  “Back up,” Flora said. “Kidnapping?”

  “Who told you they had your mother?” Lydia asked.

  “Don’t say, ‘an anonymous note,’” Bart said.

  I thought for a moment. “I can’t tell you.” Bart started to object and I said, “I promised confidentiality, okay? You’re going to have to trust me.”

  “We do not even know you,” Isabel said.

  “She means, not that well,” Ruth whispered.

  “But we liked the way you stood up to Waughm,” Flora said.

  “Oh yeah,” Garfield said. “That was great. It sounded like the kind of thing Bart’s saying all the time. This is what the Involuntaries stand for.”

  “We keep the Congregation in check,” Bart said.

  “So does that mean you’re going to help me?” I asked.

  * * *

  They each took a seat—Ruth put Isabel the doll on a seat by herself—and I told them everything I knew about the night Mom disappeared, except how I knew it. None of the Involuntaries could tell me who’d been on the Albatross when it rammed Mom’s boat, but Lydia had another part of the story to share.

  “My uncle Micah got a call that night,” she said. “It was late. He went out, cursing. And when he came back it was nearly dawn. He was soaking wet.”

  “Who called him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If I’d thought it had anything to do with the Congregation when the call came in I would have listened in on an extension.” She said this matter-of-factly. I wondered how many times she’d spied on her family. She said, “It wasn’t until later that I realized it might have something to do with your mother. And when you brought up the Albatross…”

  “The boat was damaged, so they called Micah to take care of it,” Bart said.