Deep Roots

by Ruthanna Emrys

  “It sounds reasonable so far,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Really. What happened to them?”

  “Grandpa said his grandmother eventually got lonely and wanted to go back to her family. Maybe she heard the call herself. But his grandfather didn’t want to go, and wouldn’t let her take away his firstborn son. She left swearing her family would track them down. He must have believed her, because he spent the rest of his life moving from town to town, dragging his kid along. It didn’t work, because his son—my great-grandfather—disappeared when Grandpa was little. Or that’s how Grandpa always told it. Honestly, I think—thought—it was just a way to explain his dad running off. Men do that, after all. But Freddy … where do we go, when we disappear?” She glared, as if defying me to refuse an answer.

  It took me a moment to respond to her challenge. I imagined the scene: a woman of the water, not yet come into her strength, trying to take her child home, forced away by the man she thought she’d loved. Coming back with a posse of elders to discover them gone, following them for years … I glanced sidelong at Caleb, wondering if he sympathized with the woman of his own race, or the man unwilling to give up his child. I shook my head, pulled myself back to the present. “Your family legends aren’t far off. We are Chyrlid Ajha, the people of the water, and those of us with enough water in our blood go into the sea when we’re older. No seal-skin required.”

  “Huh. That sounds pretty crazy.”

  “So did your story. I’m just telling you that it’s true.” My shoulders trembled. I wasn’t at all sure how this should go. “That’s probably not what’s happening to Freddy, but it’s not impossible. Even—” We had few polite ways to describe someone with so little water in their veins. “Even mistblooded, like you and him, sometimes undergo metamorphosis. And when you do—when we do—the ocean protects us from age and illness. Your great-grandfather and your great-great-grandmother are likely alive in the deep cities. You could meet them.”

  “If Freddy’s changing, is that where he is? In the ocean? Could one of them have come for him?”

  I shook my head. My voice caught on the ashen air. I coughed, trying to make my words come clear. “We’re the only ones who know about Freddy, and we expected to find him with you. The change takes weeks. But if he didn’t know what was happening, it would be frightening. I can imagine him running away, going to ground.”

  “Have you noticed him changing?” demanded Caleb. “Hair falling out, eyes growing more prominent, folds in his neck?” He ran fingers along his own thick neck to illustrate. Minuscule wrinkles, barely perceptible, lined the skin beneath his ears. I touched my own, unthinking. They were more prominent, but not yet tender. I remembered my father wincing as Mother pressed wet cloth to burgeoning gills.

  Frances’s eyes widened. The tip of her cigarette flared. “Nothing like that.”

  We watched each other a long, silent minute. Suspicion sharpened her regard. I’d imagined sharing with her and her son the secrets of their past, a taste of our treasure. But the explanation of her birthright seemed inadequate. Her glare carried silent accusation: You’re here. He’s gone. Why can’t you explain? Why won’t you explain?

  In my own desperation, I reached for things I could explain. About life in Innsmouth, about the schools and families and the rituals. About R’lyeh and Y’ha-nthlei, Lhadj’lu and Mach-richyd. All the things her great-great-grandmother would have wanted for her child.

  She allowed me to change the topic, even asked questions. When do people change? How many cities are there in the ocean? But not infrequently, she glanced at the door or the phone with prey-quick eyes. I suspected that she tolerated us not because of the benefit of the doubt, but out of a desperate conviction that we could still help her.

  I wanted to offer that aid, however little it might be worth. To understand what we could do, though, she needed to know the full truth behind our presence. So I told her about the camps. About why we were here, now, looking for distant relatives.

  “And what do you want from me?” Her tone was nervous, perhaps a bit curious. She lit another cigarette. “From Freddy?”

  “What we want…” I said. “If you came back to Innsmouth with us, you’d have a place with your own people. You could help us rebuild. You’d have a house of your own, and all your share from our family’s wealth. We could offer an education for Freddy, and for you if you wanted it, from people who’ve been teaching for a thousand years—who’ve seen firsthand the history glossed over in books, and invented arts half-remembered on land.” I caught back my eagerness, mindful that she’d just met us and didn’t trust us. “If you don’t want that … then talk with us. Get to know your family, on land and in the water. Don’t stay lost. And we would still have resources to offer you. No one of our blood should go hungry, or want for shelter. We agreed on that, before we came here.” Caleb nodded firmly, and gripped my hand.

  The ember between her fingers glowed brighter. “There’s a catch.”

  Caleb shrugged, letting go my hand. “You’d be admitting a relationship to people the government tried to kill a decade ago. Our neighbors think we’re monsters. And we’re trying to build a town from the ruins up, when developers want to sell it all to war vets. That should be enough catch to satisfy anyone’s cynicism.”

  She frowned and puffed. “If you can help find Freddy, maybe I’ll think about it.” She stubbed the cigarette into the ashtray, and leaned forward empty-handed. “I haven’t gone to the police. I don’t want to get him in trouble. But I asked around, tried to get the neighbors to keep an eye out for him. No one’s seen anything. Though I suspect most of them aren’t looking very hard.”

  “Dr. Sheldon said he was spending time with a ‘bad crowd.’” Caleb’s voice took on an ironic lilt.

  “I … yes, but not how you’d think. They didn’t seem like a gang. Or mobbed up, or anything like that. Just—off. They all look smug about something, and don’t have any time for anyone who doesn’t know their secret. Freddy started acting the same way, dropping hints that he’d learned something big. A couple of weeks after all that started, he just disappeared. And then you show up.”

  Something about her description of Freddy’s new crowd tensed the muscles in my neck. They didn’t sound like a gang—they sounded like a cult. I wanted to think I was being paranoid, but I knew from my own experience that such people could be dangerous companions, especially if they knew less about their “secrets” than they thought they did.

  I glanced at Caleb. Our efforts at genealogical research proved our ineptness at tracking people down. I hoped we’d find it easier to look for a specific person, one who’d vanished last week instead of decades past. And perhaps his new friends had left other traces. The alien presence I’d felt the night before could have been the sign of some working gone wrong—or right.

  But it was our arrival that Frances had latched onto. “Us being here now—that is a coincidence. I wish it wasn’t—that we’d come with the news you were waiting for. But we’ll do our best to help, if you’ll let us.” We could try a summoning. If magic didn’t work, we had other resources. I hated the thought of asking Spector for more, but wasn’t finding lost people supposed to be one of the things FBI agents were good at?

  She bobbed her head, half nod and half unnerved twitch. “Help me find him, and we can talk about the rest.”

  * * *

  Nnnnnn-gt-vvv of the Outer Ones—June 1949:

  “Here, look at this.” Pleasure thrums in Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s voice, cutting through my disorientation. The new-delved mine is an opportunity to change everything about the old that subtly grated—even if I had adapted to the mistuned electromagnetic generators, the imperfect proportions of the guard console. It was wrong to forget the possibility of improvement. To accept, without trying to change, the errors of the universe.

  Worse, though, to let our haven enforce the illusion that the universe can always be altered. Architecture as debate. Very much
my thrice-mate’s style.

  “This,” at the moment, is the new conversation pit. The broad steps are comfortably lit, and elegantly sculpted to encourage intimate interaction within the larger shared space. Perception still warps where that space was pulled in tight for easier construction. Dust leaps in microscopic whirlwinds as newly cooperative planes unfurl into their final configuration.

  Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt brushes the floor with its cilia. Limbs vibrate, and topology suddenly shines clear.

  “Oh, that’s perfect.” The steps have been marked with small depressions, each precisely shaped to stabilize the base of a canister. Our wings brush affectionately.

  “Shelean’s idea,” it says. I’m not surprised—she spent our most recent flight enthusing about these designs to our newest travel-mates. The surge of recruitment, of new minds and ideas, has been one of the pleasures of this move. And one of the goals. Vermont’s vein of humanity was close to tapped out—another place where we’d grown complacent. New York is rich, unplumbed. If there’s anything about Earth’s minds that we don’t yet understand, we’ll uncover it here.

  Our new travel-mates, and the older ones who originally hail from this area, have been vital to our delving. I’m not old enough to remember the first construction on this world, but I remember when the Vermont mine was the Hoosac mine, and I remember the constant flux of new growth and as we adjusted to human settlement. Back then, we were the first to claim our hills. Here, our foundations are laid beneath a bedrock of deeds and permits, everything skimming close to the membrane of the city outside.

  I think about the argument immanent in these choices, as Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt shows off the chapel, brightly worthy of its gods, and the upgraded corporeal monitors. Beneath the surface shimmer of new equipment, we came here to argue. Only the argument’s importance—not only to the survival of the species among whom we dwell, but to our own integrity—makes such close quarters worth the risk. Here we’ll contend, reason against reason and perception against perception, until we grasp each other’s philosophies in full and gain the consensus on which our own preservation depends. It’s working: I’m starting to better understand Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s convictions. And they worry me.

  CHAPTER 3

  The summoning failed. Caleb and I crowded into the boys’ room with Charlie, late enough that Spector’s “aunt” wouldn’t hear about it. We sketched a diagram, and laid on it hairs Frances Laverne had given us from her son’s hairbrush. Blood would have been better, but Freddy wasn’t accident-prone enough to have left any bloodstained bandages behind in their trash. Frances’s look of revulsion, when I’d asked, had made me regret bringing it up at all.

  The problem, of course, was that Freddy was mistblooded. Easy enough to calculate the precise degree of mixture—if the star-crossed affair of Frances’s story was unique in his ancestry. More likely, though, his father’s family had carried a trace of the water or his great-great-grandmother had a wisp of air in her veins. If we’d been trying to find either of them it wouldn’t have mattered, but the combination made a difference.

  As we chanted the words that should have shaped the call, we hit another barrier. The city itself clung to our spell like mud. It sucked at our magic and slowed our speech. I found myself short of breath, my heart speeding and voice cracking with smothering memories. The rhythm that had reassured me briefly in the night now pounded so loudly that I couldn’t hear my own words, and couldn’t imagine our target hearing them either. I tried to push against that pressure, but my chant stuttered into silence. While I gasped, the others closed off the abortive spell, avoiding the risk of true disaster.

  “What was that?” I whispered hoarsely. I thought again of the strange disruption I’d sensed on the edge of the dreamland. Could the strength of the city’s rhythm today be backlash in the wake of that passage, or even the disruption’s purpose? But I’d sensed no such compensation last night.

  “I was going to ask you,” said Charlie. “I wish we’d brought more books.”

  I had to know whether he’d felt the same thing. “Did you pick up anything odd last night, during your meditations?”

  He shook his head. “The dream realm feels more intense here than at home. But so does the waking world.”

  “I thought I felt something strange go by, just at the end. But there are so many natural hazards there that I don’t know if it was really out of the ordinary.”

  “I don’t think what we just hit is all that extraordinary, either.” Caleb stood, stretched awkwardly, and leaned against the narrow window, forehead pressed to forearm pressed to glass. He looked out on brick, but I could still feel that dangerous pressure behind the stirring rhythm I’d sensed before, simultaneous and contradictory.

  “Well, go on,” I demanded, my voice harsh with fatigue.

  “The city is so big, bigger than any place we’ve worked before. If there are a million people between us and what we’re trying to summon, and some of them have a little air, or water…” He trailed off, glanced over his shoulder.

  “Then you get too much that’s almost like what you’re looking for,” I finished. It was, in fact, a plausible explanation for our failure. “And any of that could be ten people, or a hundred, who together have enough of the water’s blood in them to trip the spell.”

  “That’s interesting enough,” said Charlie. “From the perspective of magical theory. But how does it help us get around the problem? Those million people aren’t going to make it easy to track down your cousin—or his friends—the ordinary way, either.”

  “We have to find him,” I said. “For his own sake, as well as his mother’s. And for ours.” Fail Freddy, I was sure, and we’d lose them both. Frances would refuse to have anything to do with us—or worse, decide that we’d stolen her son and call down authorities to destroy Innsmouth once again.

  Caleb gave up on the window, and slouched back against the sill with arms crossed. “If we’ve compromised to get this far, we may as well keep compromising. I imagine Mr. Spector, unlike us, actually has experience with this sort of thing.”

  “I know he does.” Charlie’s cheeks flushed, barely perceptible in the dim light. I smelled an edge of sweat. “He’s told me some stories. From Europe.”

  Which would make it during the war. He wasn’t normally prone to boasting of his exploits. I wondered what he’d confided in Charlie.

  I was eldest-on-land, and it was ultimately my decision who to trust with our weaknesses. But I could see no other options.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” Spector said. We sat in a corner of the lobby, voices soft, and I wished we had more privacy. “I can’t.”

  “Freddy Laverne is just a boy,” said Charlie. “He needs help to get out of whatever stupidity he’s gotten himself into.” His intent gaze, focused on Spector, seemed to carry more signal than his words. Knowing what they risked with their affections, I thought they might have particular troubles in mind, narrowly avoided in their own boyhoods.

  “I know. But I still can’t do it. You’d be better off with the police—and they might be more sympathetic than you’d think. They were all boys too, after all.”

  “Mister Spector.” My voice barely rose from a whisper. “Freddy’s disappearance might have nothing to do with his ‘bad crowd.’ He could be starting his metamorphosis. Even the FBI coming in officially—at least they’d know what they were looking at.”

  He ducked his head, not meeting my eyes. “I’m sorry. I can’t. Officially or unofficially—I’m not sure which would be worse.”

  “Why the hell not?” asked Charlie. I was glad for the heat in his voice—he could risk letting it show more safely than I could.

  “Because we need to keep working in New York!” Heads turned throughout the lobby, then bent to murmuring. An older lady cocked her head and started to push herself up. Spector shook his head at her and forced his voice low again. “I’m sorry. But you don’t know what we go through to convince local police that we’re wor
th calling in—to convince them that we’re not going to tread on their toes or steal their cases, that they can cooperate with us and not lose anything. I come in officially, and I go over their heads exactly the way we swear we’ll never do. I come in unofficially, and it looks like we’re going behind their backs. Either way, next time some asshole decides to kill half a dozen women in Manhattan and then hide out in New Jersey, they’ll wait twice as long before asking the FBI for help. Excuse my language, Miss Marsh. I wouldn’t pay that price even if it were mine to pay.”

  “Oh,” I said. Still tired, I let slip anger that I should have kept bound and hidden. “I should have known better. It may look like the state goes wherever it wants, but it’s only we who have no say.”

  Spector took a deep breath, put his hands on the table, one hand cupped over the other. Met my eyes. “I’m sorry. Even within the Bureau, anything I do requires layers and signatures and dividing tasks just the right way to salve egos. Between state and federal is much worse. The raid—you wouldn’t like to see how many people signed off on that.”

  “Oh,” I said again. I imagined a file, thick as the one that held my mother’s remains, full of approvals preserved in cold ink.

  Spector frowned at the table, at his drumming fingers. He shifted in his chair. “I don’t like it either. Boys run, but this doesn’t sound right. Sometimes when a mother doesn’t like a kid’s friends, it’s harmless enough, but the way she describes them…” He frowned again. “You really think something is wrong.”

  “I—yes, I do.” Under the intensity of his demand, my responsibilities pressed in around me. “He could be starting to change. But it would be sudden. And I agree with you about his mysterious ‘bad crowd.’ Maybe it’s my imagination, but the description reminds me of…”—I hesitated, knowing my fears could raise the stakes of Spector’s involvement even further—“… of Oswin Wilder.”