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This book is dedicated to:
MAX GOLDSTEIN—arrived in New York City from Russia, date unknown
IDA HACKER GOLDSTEIN—arrived in New York City from Russia, date unknown
GUSTAV FISCHER—arrived in New York City from Germany, date unknown
EDWARD ROSENBAUM—arrived in New York City from Bavaria, Germany ∼1850
ROSETTA HIRSCH ROSENBAUM—arrived in New York City from Bavaria, Germany ∼1850
HANNAH PLAUT STERN—arrived in New York City from Germany ∼1852
AARON STERN—arrived in New York City from Germany ∼1853
MORRIS WEISENFELD—arrived in New York City from Roumania sometime between 1897 and 1899
RACHEL FRIEDMAN WEISENFELD—arrived in New York City from an unknown origin, 1899
SOLOMON NEDELMAN—arrived in New York City from Chernobyl sometime between 1900 and 1906
ROSE ELMAN NEDELMAN—arrived in New York City from Russia sometime between 1904 and 1906
… and all my other immigrant ancestors.
His solid flesh had never been away,
For each dawn found him in his usual place,
But every night his spirit loved to race
Through gulfs and worlds remote from common day.
He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind,
And come back safely from the Ghooric zone,
When one still night across curved space was thrown
That beckoning piping from the voids behind.
—H. P. LOVECRAFT, “ALIENATION,” Fungi from Yuggoth
Why fades a dream?
That thought may thrive,
So fades the fleshless dream.
—PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, “WHY FADES A DREAM?”
The shadow of the half-sphere curtains
down closely against my world, like a
doorless cage, and the stillness chained by
wrinkled darkness strains throughout the Uni-
verse to be free.
—YONE NOGUCHI, “AT NIGHT”
PROLOGUE
Nnnnnn-gt-vvv of the Outer Ones—May 1949:
There is a world—a planetoid, chosen for ease of camouflage among thousands like it—where wind whispers through air cold as the vacuum. The nearest star is a distant candle. Radar, radiation, subtle folds of gravity: these are the best ways to perceive the cities tucked into crevasses, the spiderweb bridges spanning jags of icy mountain.
The bridges, aeons old, were here when we arrived. They offered omen and reminder: Life persists everywhere. Life vanishes everywhere. Find it and listen, or it will pass unknown. I spread my wings, furl my claws, and spring from Yuggoth into the void behind and between worlds.
Here is neither cold nor heat, only form. Shimmers of color, more perfect than any permitted by surface physics, mark direction; bubbling shapes carry messages left by travelers past and yet to come. From deeper still drifts a faint fluting. The pounding, pulsating trill wavers on the edge of understanding. Pay too close attention, and the friction will wear your mind smooth.
Conversation between winged and wingless is our best distraction from that distant melody. Embodied travel-mates fly beside me. The disembodied, in their canisters, come encircled in our clasped limbs. Amid reality’s foundations, we speak with equal ease of the deepest philosophy and the most immediate gossip.
We break through the dimensional membrane on the edge of atmosphere. Through heat and wind I plummet, extending just enough of myself to enjoy the physicality of speed, before landing lightly on a granite cliff shadowed by pines. Here, on a hill that humans avoid as much from habit as from half-remembered fear, I feel the mining colony shifting beneath me. Travel-mates and cross-mates and offspring and research clusters, the ever-changing rivalries and friendships and political debates through which we adapt to this place as to a trillion others.
Soon there will be a shorter journey to our new-delved mine, in a city richer and denser than any human habitation we’ve dared before. Soon there will be new recruits who can help us understand what’s happening on this world we’ve adopted, and unwelcome insight into what we must do about it. But for now, I am in Vermont, and I am home.
CHAPTER 1
June 1949
Grand Central Station stretched beyond human scale, and the crowd within matched it. Amid the swift current of travelers Neko held tight to my hand, even as she craned to glimpse columns and golden statues. Trumbull and Audrey and Deedee took the lead, a confident vee to navigate the turbulence. I trailed in their narrow wake, overwhelmed by the stench of a thousand perfumes, a thousand joys and worries and attractions, a thousand bodies flavoring New York’s overpowered air.
“This way,” Audrey called back. She led us toward an archway.
“How can you tell?” Caleb muttered.
“Let’s hope she knows,” said Charlie. “We can’t very well stop to check.” His cane thumped the marble floor as he worked to keep up. He was right—Audrey’s speed merely kept us in pace with the crowd.
“You have to know,” she called back cheerfully. “Otherwise, you get lost.”
After the first shock, the crowd began to resolve into people, variety too great to seem truly monolithic. There were pale-skinned women in well-fitted dresses and neatly jacketed men like those who dominated Arkham; others whose features reminded me of Morecambe County’s Polish communities. Such immigrants, I’d been told as a child, would make signs against the curse they saw in our faces, but it was the long-settled descendants of Puritans whose superstitions were most dangerous.
Beyond these familiar types, I saw every kind of face and dress I’d encountered in San Francisco and a few I hadn’t. Scandalously short skirts and faces hidden by scarves, eyes heavy-browed or framed as neatly as my Nikkei family’s, fabulous beards and unlikely hats. A woman who barely came up to my shoulder carved a determined path with a pram, cooing at her child and glaring at all who brushed too close. Two clean-shaven negro men in brown robes backed against a pillar, bent over maps they protected with jutting elbows. A rotund white man carried a trombone under one arm and hoisted a bag of papers with the other. He checked his watch, and hastened his step.
In Arkham and Boston, we’d drawn stares—for my face or Audrey’s magnetizing effect on men, or for the variation within our group. Here we received only the scant attention needed to avoid collisions. I began to believe that we might really, after so many false leads, discover some distant cousins overlooked by the government during Innsmouth’s destruction. Our expatriates could easily have settled here unremarked.
And so they might remain, if the press of the station gave any taste of what awaited us outside.
“There it is!�
� Audrey pointed above the sea of heads, and when I stood on tiptoe I could see the pillar of the station clock where Spector had promised to meet us.
In the grand hall surrounding our landmark, I pulled even closer to the others. Trumbull glanced back. “Look up.”
I drew breath: above, across the vast ceiling, stretched a painted sky. It was stylized, constellations imposed on line drawings of Pegasus and ram and skittering crab. These stars were trod by the comprehensible, human-image gods to which the station was a temple, not the distant suns that birthed mine. And still, it was holy.
Caleb glanced at Professor Trumbull. “Are their cities like this?”
She smiled. “This is as close as humans come to the Yith’s capitol.” I wondered how close the comparison came, what remembered glories she now excavated from her mind’s sojourn among that ancient, inhuman race.
The clock topped a ring of counters. Behind them, harried clerks dispensed guidance to equally harried travelers. Charlie tensed; through our confluence I felt him shiver with fear or joy, or both. I followed his gaze to where a thin, black-clad figure waited, a branch parting the current. That perfection of stillness melted as we approached, and quick strides brought Ron Spector easily through the press of bodies. Spector’s decisive movements and energy, startling in San Francisco or Arkham, seemed born of the station’s rhythm. He clasped Charlie’s hand and Caleb’s with equal apparent pleasure, offered to take Trumbull’s suitcase and slung my shoulder bag across his chest as well. The rest of us fell into step behind him, save for Deedee, who kept pace by her old colleague’s side.
“You find us a place near this doctor, the one who thinks he’s found Caleb’s wayward cousin?” she asked.
He shook his head. “There’s a boardinghouse that I trust near my family in St. Mary’s Park. Clean, and good food, and willing to put up with people coming and going at odd hours. And cheap enough not to scare Miss Marsh.” He glanced back only briefly, but his voice was teasing. “It’s a quick enough ride to Brooklyn on the IRT Lexington Avenue line, and who knows where you’ll have to go once you talk with your doctor.”
“That’s fine,” I said, though I wondered at the way Deedee pulled herself straighter, the hint of shortened breath that passed sudden and vivid through the confluence. It might be better not to ask; for all the intimacy of our connection, Deedee preferred to keep her distress private.
A newsstand halted Spector’s momentum; he swung aside to examine the headlines. I wasn’t surprised: they were full of the Hiss trial, Soviet spies infiltrating the American government through mundane stealth. Spector likely knew the agents who’d tracked the man down. He must be immersed in both the rational fear of further collaborators and the hysteria that President Truman warned against at the bottom of the page.
There was an edge to the headlines that I didn’t like. Even knowing a fraction of what Spector’s masters feared, I could guess at the tensions swelling. Frightened people would look for enemies, and find them.
Spector straightened, shook his head, and led us down to the subway station. Tiled walls created an echoing cave of footsteps and muddled conversation, but the crowd was sparser. I was relieved to see signs forbidding cigarettes and pipes; my throat still stung after the ride from Boston. Even so, the platform air was a stew: half-spoiled food, urine, sweat, faded perfumes and musks. It cloyed and teased, wavering curtains of rot blowing aside for a moment to reveal hints of lust and roses.
“We’d better move farther down the platform—more room for your luggage near the front of the train.” Spector’s voice recalled me to practicalities. I followed, watching his confident stride. This was why, despite all my doubts, we’d asked for his help finding our way around New York: on his native soil, he offered the best chance of finding what we sought. That, and the pleasure his company brought Charlie, were sufficient arguments for his presence.
Still it rankled. I’d come to like Spector the last time we worked together. But until now I’d never gone to him for help—he’d always approached me first. And while he’d proven himself largely trustworthy, he was an agent of the state, and some of his colleagues were far less honorable. He was here with us now on his own time, but he could not be counted on to offer help alone, even if he wanted to.
The state had destroyed Innsmouth. Asking for Spector’s help as we tried to rebuild came perilously close to suggesting they could make up for that crime.
The train cried its arrival: a long piercing scream like a monster in mourning. Inside, bodies pressed close. The smell was worse than anything in the station. It was nothing like the ticketed train up the coast, one passenger per seat, nor like the open cable cars in San Francisco. I held my breath and clutched my valise. Far better to think of the train from the camp to San Francisco, full of familiar sweat and freely mixed Japanese and English chatter—and not of an earlier trip in boxcars smelling of rotted fish. I closed my eyes, listened: around me voices rose in a dozen accents of English, some Eastern European tongue, the unmistakable weaving rhythm of Chinese. My ears rang painfully, but my breathing slowed: it sounded more like San Francisco than like anywhere else I’d lived. Eventually, I opened my eyes.
The train shook and rattled. Spector shifted easily with the movement, rocking slightly as if on a boat. Deedee kept a hand lightly on the back of a nearby seat; she too adapted easily to the ragged sway. A pale young man gave up his seat to Charlie, who settled in with a nod and pulled his cane close to avoid others’ legs and ankles. The rest of us gripped poles and handbars, trying our best not to trip into the sea of strangers. Neko caught my eye and nodded, wan smile betraying her own nerves.
The press eased as we left Manhattan. The remaining riders wore darker clothes, more mended, with scarves or strange small hats pulled tight against their skulls. Finally Spector led us out onto a smaller platform, then up to the street. For the first time I tasted the city’s open air.
“Welcome to the Bronx.” Spector sounded uncharacteristically shy.
San Francisco, the city I knew best, stretched over ancient hills and endless fog. It was easy to imagine its topography stripped of human habitation, grown wild with the strange plants and stranger animals that would cover it through aeons without witness—and to imagine it reborn long after humanity was dust, hills only a little eroded, as a new city for another species.
Not so, New York. I knew we stood on an upthrust of bedrock, scarcely five miles from the open water of the Atlantic. But the honking cars, the grocers and delis and hardware stores and veterinarians squeezed together with no apparent pattern, the sidewalk crammed with food carts and families—all seemed crafted on a foundation of human whim alone. Newsstands blared civilized horror: bloodshed in China, Soviet spies in America, magazines speculating about “push-button warfare.” Exhaust mingled with tobacco smoke and the scent of hot dogs and pickles, sweat and aged dirt and oil and disinfectant. No hint of salt water could wind through that tapestry.
And yet, Spector relaxed into this rhythm. The street hummed. Its shifting vibration made me want to pull off my shoes and let the energy course through me. I wanted to ride and gentle it as I might a thunderstorm, or drink from it like the ocean. It made its own topography, seductive as it was terrifying.
“Thank you,” I said to Spector.
Neko stretched her fingers to catch the air. “Does your family live around here?” she asked.
“Five blocks north,” he said. “But Tante Leah’s boardinghouse is closer.”
“Are you going to introduce us?” asked Charlie. His voice had grown tight. Caleb too looked nervous; his neck twisted, owl-like, at every surge of sound.
Spector ducked his head. “I’m sure you’d get along with them, but Mama and my sisters … they aren’t the most discreet people in the world. Downright nosy, really. Leah’s more likely to let people keep to themselves.”
Caleb humphed, and Deedee brushed his elbow. People hurried around us, seeming too caught up in their own worlds to care about an
yone else’s business. Then again, each pause to buy a hot dog or read a flyer must rub against five others doing the same; only gossip would make the friction bearable.
My throat stung. If I let myself start coughing, the fit would bring me to my knees. I swallowed, forcing saliva, and focused on the tantalizing hum. It seemed blasphemous to treat it like anything natural, but when I pushed past my reluctance I found it easier to navigate the breaks in the crowd, and to catch miserly breezes that eased the tightness in my lungs.
We turned onto a side street. The mosaic of signs and awnings gave way to simple row houses of worn brown stone, each narrow facade flush with those on either side. Tinny music wafted through open windows. Trees stood isolate in sidewalk grates; herds of dandelion and grass pushed tendrils through every crack.
Spector led us to a house fronted by steep concrete stairs. Inside, I blinked against suddenly dim light. The lobby reminded me, painfully, of the old Gilman House hotel: the tiled floor and cool shadows, and folk looking up curiously from card tables to examine the newcomers. Gilman House had always been as much local gathering place as residence for Innsmouth’s occasional out-of-town visitors. The people here—bearded men in dark hats, women in shawls and scarves—seemed thoroughly settled, and I wondered if they lived at Tante Leah’s or simply accreted from apartments nearby. Stale cooking oil and old smoke permeated the air with a peculiar, almost plastic smell, bearable largely by comparison with the miasma outside.
An elderly woman rose from her chair. “Ron, zenen di deyn gest?”
“Ya, zey … zenen.” Spector spoke more slowly, hesitating over his words. “But they only speak English.”
She looked us over. She was short—barely past my shoulder—but she had an air of hospitable authority. “Well, I figure that. Shvartse girl, a couple of shiksa … doesn’t matter. You have strange friends, I have rooms, I have food. Just tell me, your mama asks, you have a Jewish girl somewhere?”
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