Harrison Squared

by Daryl Gregory

  Morning was … interesting.

  By the time I woke and hopped out to the kitchen, Aunt Sel was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, and Saleem was in the kitchen—making breakfast. He noticed me, then did that over-chipper thing people do when they’re nervous. “Morning, Harrison!”

  Then he noticed my leg. Or rather, my lack of one; I hadn’t put on the prosthetic yet. Aunt Sel had told him about it on our way back from the lobster dinner, but the first glimpse of the stump can throw people. Fortunately, we’d pretty much maxed out on awkwardness.

  “How do you like your eggs?” he asked.

  The same way you like my aunt, I thought; over easy. Instead I said, “Scrambled is fine.”

  Aunt Sel pushed her coffee over to me. “It looks like you need this more than I do,” she said.

  I’d had trouble falling asleep, and when I finally did I’d dreamed of walking through downtown San Diego, and everywhere people were sprawled on the sidewalks and streets, unconscious. Coma city. Not too hard to analyze, I know.

  “Saleem,” I said. “You study stars, right?”

  “Astrophysics covers that, yeah.” He dropped an egg into the pan. “Mostly I’m trying to figure out what happened in the first couple nanoseconds after the big bang.”

  “But you’ve studied astronomy, right? Have you ever heard of the ‘Ashen Light’?”

  “How’d you hear about that?” Saleem asked.

  “So it’s real?” I tried to hide my excitement. “I heard somebody talking about it, but I didn’t know what it was. Or when it’s going to happen again.”

  “Nobody knows,” he said. “It’s random—or at least unpredictable with the knowledge we have now. There’s a green glow that can be seen around Venus in certain conditions. The earth and the moon have to be in the right position, partially blocking Venus so we can see just the edge of its atmosphere. A crescent moon works best.”

  I thought of a line from “The Ancient Mariner”: “The horned moon, with one bright star within its nether tip.” I said, “So that’s the Ashen Light, this green glow? I thought from the way they were talking that it had do with the stars, not a planet.”

  “Well, the ancients thought that the planets were stars.” He worked the spatula under the egg and turned it. “People still call Venus ‘the evening star.’ Then again, people used to think the Ashen Light came from Venusians lighting huge fires to burn their crops. That theory’s not in favor these days.”

  “What is it, then?” Aunt Sel asked. She seemed amused by this scientific conversation.

  Saleem looked over his shoulder at her and grinned. Oh jeez.

  “Lightning,” Saleem said. “That’s current thinking, anyway. Huge amounts of electricity, lighting up Venus’ whole atmosphere. When it’s happening, you can see it with the naked eye, if the sky’s clear. But like I said, it’s random, and almost nobody catches it in action.”

  “What if it’s not random?” I asked. “What if somebody had figured out the schedule on Venus, and when it would be visible on Earth?”

  “If you figure that one out, let me know,” Saleem said. “I’ll make that my dissertation.”

  * * *

  I itched to tell Lydia and Lub about what I’d learned from Saleem about the Ashen Light, but Lydia was in school, and Lub—I had no idea on how to reach him. We’d have to work out some system for contacting each other; he couldn’t just keep showing up at my bedroom window. What was the Aquaman equivalent of the Bat Signal?

  I didn’t know what to do with myself. I took a shower and got dressed. I walked around the house, trying not to think of what might be happening to Mom right now. Had she known before we came here how dangerous Dunnsmouth could be? The last morning I saw her, she’d found that note in the truck. Stay out of the water. Then she’d tried to send me off to Grandpa. But she wasn’t going to leave. She’d been determined to get to this town as soon as possible and get the buoys in operation the very next day after we arrived.

  Why the rush? I’d chalked it up to AMP mode, but now I thought she was working on another deadline. Did she know about the Ashen Light?

  I went to her footlocker, opened it, lifted out all the file folders, and set them in piles in front of me. Where to start?

  “Hey, Ahab.” Aunt Sel was leaning in the frame of my bedroom door. “Saleem’s here. I thought all of us could go up to Uxton, get some lunch, see the sights.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said. She squatted in front of me. “Seriously, kid. Are you okay?”

  “I told you—”

  “Yes, you’re stupendous, top form, absolutely smashing—except when you’re actually smashing someone.”

  Waughm. Right.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I just thought I’d get Mom’s notes in order for when she gets back. She was never that organized.”

  “Right.”

  “Go, have fun,” I said. “Just don’t throw Saleem off a balcony if you find out he has a girlfriend.”

  “Hmm. Distracting banter. Excellent tactic.” She frowned at me, then stood and frowned some more. “You have my cell number, yes? I should be able to have a few bars in Uxton.”

  “I’ll call if I get any news,” I said.

  I started opening folders. The papers represented every facet of my mother’s obsessions: There were articles on every large shark, whale, squid, and octopus, including several on “abyssal gigantism,” which described the evolutionary trend of creatures in the deepest depths of the sea to grow huge.

  After two hours of reading, I’d found nothing on the Ashen Light, or Venus. Out of desperation I started opening the sample cases. I used to love when Mom let me look through these. I opened up one to find my favorite oddity: a sealed glass jar, filled with formaldehyde, that preserved a section of a colossal squid tentacle. The thick, faintly pink tentacle had a dozen white, tooth-like hooks that were capable of rotating. Sperm whales had been discovered with raking scars in their hides that were probably made by these hooks. The sperm whales usually won the battle, Mom said, but the squids put up a fight.

  I started repacking the footlocker. There was one box I didn’t recognize; it was metal, with a little padlock on it. None of the other cases were locked.

  I stared at it for a long moment. Was Mom trying to hide something from me? Or from other people? It wasn’t much of a lock. I’d seen bigger ones on luggage. I could probably bang it open with a hammer.

  I decided she’d forgive me.

  In the end, it took a pair of pliers and some work with a thick screwdriver. The lock popped off, and I opened the box. Inside was a leather journal. I opened the first page and saw a signature I didn’t recognize.

  If found, please return to Harrison Harrison, 2824 Hiker Hill, San Diego, CA.

  My dad’s journal.

  I read the first few entries, which were notes about his first trip to Brazil where he met Mom. Then I started flipping pages. I’d learned from Tobias Glück’s journal to skip to the end. And I wasn’t disappointed.

  Folded into one of the late entries was a loose page of onionskin. It was a pencil rubbing of some engraving he’d found. At first I thought it was a drawing of a squid fighting a sperm whale; then I realized that it was a drawing of one creature: a giant thing with the head of a squid and the thick body of a whale. Under it, my father had written: “Inscription: U’glth m’eh rtalgn. Same as Urgaleth?”

  Dad had come to Dunnsmouth looking for this. And Mom had come back for it. She wasn’t chasing the colossal squid—she was after this thing. She’d been lying to me the entire time.

  Well, I thought, I’d lie to me too.

  * * *

  That night I was one of the first to arrive at the basement hideout of the Involuntaries, but Lydia had already been there for some time. She’d taped up maps of Dunnsmouth—mostly of the shoreline—and had marked several areas with red Xs.

  “What’s t
his?” I asked.

  “I’ve been going over Glück’s diary. It’s not too clear where, exactly, he entered the Scrimshander’s cave, but these are the likeliest places.”

  “Wow. Thorough.”

  The others slipped into the room one by one. When Flora arrived she marched to me and planted a kiss on my lips.

  “Oh. Hey. What was—?”

  “That was for choking Waughm,” she said.

  “Too bad you couldn’t finish the job!” Garfield said, laughing.

  “Well, I didn’t mean to … uh…”

  Lydia looked annoyed. Bart solemnly shook my hand. Then Ruth approached, carrying Isabel. For a second I thought she expected me to shake hands with the doll, but then Ruth whispered, “You’re famous. Everybody’s talking about it.”

  “Next time bring a knife,” Isabel intoned.

  “Okay, let’s get started,” Lydia said. “We have a lot to cover.” Everyone took their seats. Ruth again placed Isabel on her own chair. Lydia said, “We now know that Harrison’s mother is being held by the Scrimshander.”

  Garfield’s eyes went wide. “That’s not good.”

  “But that means she’s still alive,” I said. “And we know a few other things as well.”

  I told them about the fire at Ruck’s garage that sent Micah to the church, leaving out the part about how it was set by a Dweller who happened to be a friend of mine. Lydia then told them about Waughm’s meeting, and the sudden appearance of the Toadmother.

  Bart squinted at me as if he had a headache.

  “Minds blown?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Some blown-age.”

  “Waughm was running the meeting?” Flora asked.

  “Waughm,” Lydia said.

  “Let me get this straight,” Garfield said. He couldn’t stay in his seat. “The Intercessor, the secret controller of the inner circle of the Congregation, is a ten-foot-tall woman with super strength?!”

  Lydia nodded. “You’ve gotten it straight.”

  “Who swims up inside the school. In the pool we swim in.”

  “Again, couldn’t be more linear,” she said.

  “I thought it would be Montooth calling the shots,” Flora said.

  “The Intercessor is working with the Dwellers because she thinks they can summon Urgaleth,” Lydia said. “And something Urgaleth is bringing back with it. We don’t know what that is, but she called it ‘precious cargo.’”

  “I know now that my mom was looking for Urgaleth before she disappeared,” I said. “Maybe she found out something they didn’t like. But they evidently need my mom to do the summoning.”

  “They will sacrifice her.”

  “We don’t know that, Isabel,” Lydia said. “But she’s definitely part of the ritual. It’s supposed to happen soon, whenever this ‘Ashen Light’ occurs.”

  “I have some info about that,” I said, and relayed what Saleem had told me.

  “If it’s random, then how do we know it’s so soon?” Bart asked.

  “No, it seems random to us,” I said. “The Dwellers know different. Maybe they’re like Mayans or Druids, with their own weirdly accurate calendar system.”

  “Regardless, the Toadmother thought it would happen very soon,” Lydia said. “So that’s what we’re going to assume too. Now. We have to attack this on four fronts.”

  I looked at Bart. I was expecting him to take control as the leader—or at least be annoyed that he was being pushed aside—but he was listening to Lydia as attentively as the others.

  “Team One has to find the Scrimshander’s cave,” Lydia said. “We know it’s somewhere near here. I’ve outlined a search strategy. Team Two has to keep eyes on Waughm. We have to know where he goes and who he’s meeting. Team Three—”

  “I have a question,” Gar said.

  “No, the teams cannot have names,” Lydia said.

  “How about colors?”

  “I’ve got a different question,” Flora said. “What are we supposed to do if we find the Scrimshander?”

  Ruth looked stricken.

  “Bring knives,” Isabel said.

  “I’ll lead the search team,” Bart said.

  “Nobody’s bringing knives,” Lydia said. “When we find the cave, we call in the authorities. Not Chief Bode, obviously.”

  “I have the number for a police detective in Uxton,” I said. “We can trust him.”

  “How do you know?” Garfield asked.

  “Because he’s not from around here.”

  “What’s Team Three do?” Flora asked.

  “We have to keep watch on the Albatross. As soon as it even looks like it’s leaving Ruck’s garage, we have to know about it. I’ll be spying on my uncle as much as possible, but I can’t be at home all the time. That means we’re going to have to trade off sick days.”

  “‘Truancy is a crime,’” I said. “Someone told me that.”

  Lydia shot me a look.

  “Extraordinary circumstances,” Isabel said.

  “Harrison’s the only one who’s got all the free time,” Garfield said.

  “Maybe we should all get expelled,” Flora said. “I’ve got some ideas about that.”

  Ruth said something I didn’t catch. “What was that?” I asked.

  “I can stay home as much as I want,” she said a bit more loudly.

  Flora and Gar exchanged a look I couldn’t interpret. I waited for a waggle of fingers, but then realized that wouldn’t work to talk about other Involuntaries—everyone here spoke fingercant. Everyone except me, but I was picking up a few phrases.

  Bart had been staring at the floor, and looked up. “You said four fronts.”

  “That’s right,” Lydia said. “Team Four is secret.”

  “The team’s secret, or what it’s doing is?”

  “Both.”

  Bart thought about this. “Okay, then.”

  I raised a hand. “Guys? We have a problem here. There’s only six of us.”

  “Seven,” Isabel said.

  “Right. But that isn’t nearly enough to do all this surveillance, much less search all the cliffs in Dunnsmouth Bay.”

  There was a moment of silence—but now the fingers were moving overtime.

  “We thought you understood,” Lydia said. “This is just the inner circle. There are many more Involuntaries.”

  “Oh,” I said. “In that case, team away.”

  “Dibs on Team Black,” Garfield said.

  * * *

  The others left, and I stayed behind in the basement with Lydia. “So,” I said. “That went well.”

  Lydia looked up at the ceiling. “You can come out now.”

  From above us came a clunk, and then the door at the top of the stairs opened. Lub bounded down the stairs. “O great leader, please tell me my assignment!”

  “The Involuntaries don’t have a leader,” she said.

  “Right. Just tell me I’m on Secret Team Four.”

  “You are Secret Team Four,” she said.

  “Could you hear everything?” I asked.

  “Mostly. The vent worked great.”

  “Just remember it goes both ways,” Lydia said.

  “Hey, did they suspect a Dweller above? I think not.” Lub plopped down in one of the chairs. “So. What’s my assignment? Raid a munitions dump? Smuggle arms across the border? Fight a giant robot?”

  “What are you talking about?” Lydia said.

  “Too much manga,” I said.

  Lydia said, “We need you to watch your people.”

  “The Elders? Ugh. I already do that. They’re boring. There’s a reason I spend all the time I can on land.”

  “It’s still spying,” I said. “You need to find out if the Ashen Light is coming. And if they start gathering together for the ritual, then you have to tell us. Besides, you’re the only one who can do this.”

  His gills flapped open, and a fine spray shot out. “Okay. Fine. But you have to call me Team Aquaman.”

  18


  I moved, and could not feel my limbs:

  I was so light—almost

  I thought that I had died in sleep,

  And was a blessed ghost.

  That Sunday afternoon, I found myself climbing the cliffs on the north side of Dunnsmouth Bay. It was the third day of the search, and Lydia and I were working our way up a long chimney between the rocks. Below us, over twenty students, most of them kids I’d never met, clambered over boulders. It knocked me out that so many of them were willing to spend their weekend searching for caves, even though we couldn’t explain exactly why we needed them to do this. Lydia had said not to worry about it. The Involuntaries, especially the newest or most auxiliary members, were used to secrets within secrets, and we’d promised them we’d tell them someday. All they needed to know now was that it was for a good cause.

  I’d been so wrong about Dunnsmouth Secondary—the students of the school, anyway. On my first day I’d seen nothing but zombies, brainwashed cult kids. I’d been taken in just like the teachers. All that time, these high-schoolers were sending secret messages to each other, right under the noses of the teachers. And they’d come together, to help an outsider.

  Bart and several other students were wading in the water at the base of the cliffs. Every time someone found a hole, Bart was the first to go in. So far they’d found no actual caves, but if the Scrimshander’s hideout was here, that’s probably where it would be. In Tobias’ diary, the entrance to the Scrimshander’s cave sat down near the shoreline. Then again, that was a hundred and fifty years ago, and we didn’t have a clear idea of how high or low the waterline was then. Maybe the cave entrance had collapsed long ago. Maybe the Scrimshander moved from hole to hole, like an eel. Maybe he’d found himself a nice condo.

  It was nearly 5:30 p.m., high tide. Even if the Scrimshander had kept his home in the same place, the entrance might be underwater right now. We could be walking right past it. I felt a little guilty that I wasn’t down there in the water. At the beginning of the search, when we split up to cover more ground, I chose the high ground. The dry ground.

  From up here, though, I could see the whole bay. The sun was going down, lighting up a bank of storm clouds. Two lobster boats where chugging into the bay. I was happy to see the clouds moving in. With no Ashen Light visible, we’d get another day to keep searching.