“Hunts Point,” said Spector, looking over his colleague’s shoulder.
“Your stomping grounds, right?” asked Barlow.
“Maybe they hide their wings under those scarves,” said Peters. He mimed the head coverings I’d seen on women around the boardinghouse, tying an imaginary knot under his chin. My hands clenched, unseen. How long can I keep an eye on him before I lose all self-control?
Spector drew back from the map. “It’s next to St. Mary’s Park, sure. But there’s a stretch of old factories in between, and it’s full of abandoned buildings. You could hide anything in there.”
* * *
The area where we came out of the subway wasn’t quite as Spector described. In an ordinary town, the traffic by foot and car would have seemed ordinary; it was only in contrast to the city around it that Hunts Point could be described as unpopulated. The map led us not to abandoned warehouses, but to low buildings with flat roofs and shuttered or boarded windows. People spoke with animated gestures, laughed raucously on stoops—but even so the city’s energy felt muted.
Here in the waking world, the Outer Ones’ abode wasn’t obviously marked. I lifted my nostrils, trying to catch a whiff of green, but smelled only New York’s pervasive dust and smoke. Nor did vining mushrooms announce the presence of something wondrous and alien. But on the stoop of one clearly uninhabited building—windows shattered on the first floor, empty even of cheap boards—loiterers looked not at each other but at the street. And they stood out just as we did. An Asian man and a white woman bent their heads together; two black men sat on the step below them, one older and bearded, the other young and clean-shaven.
A fifth person sat beside the Asian man, reading a book. I couldn’t see his face clearly. But the Asian man—Chinese, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure—elbowed the other’s side. “Hey, I didn’t know you had littermates!”
The man looked up. His skin was darker than his mother’s, the far end of Innsmouth’s spectrum from my own. It padded his bones well. Long fingers wrapped his book. He had large eyes set high in his face, a thick neck, and a wide mouth just now gaping open. He was unmistakable. Freddy Laverne elbowed his companion back and said, “Of course I do. Too smart for anyone to drown us!” But he stood when I came over. My companions waited across the street, even Spector’s colleagues giving me this moment on my own.
If I’d been unsure how to talk to Frances, I found myself utterly tongue-tied with her son. He stared back, seeming equally uncertain, equally fascinated. Eventually he asked, quietly, “Are we related?”
“Yes. Distantly.” I hesitated. At last I said, “Cousin. We’ve been looking for you.”
“You brought a lot of company,” said the white woman. She was thick-set with graying hair, and clearly none of our kin.
“Did you, um, come looking here last night?” asked Freddy.
“Yes,” I said again. “It seemed like the best way to find your … hosts?” Do you need rescuing?
“They detected an intrusion.” He turned the book over, and over again, passing it hand to hand. Science fiction pulp, I noted, the sort we’d sell for a penny at Charlie’s store. “That’s why they sent us out. I’d better take you to meet them.”
“We’d like that,” I said. “But why don’t we talk first?” I tilted my head toward a spot on the sidewalk a few feet away, within sight of his friends (if friends they were), but out of earshot if we kept our voices low.
He glanced nervously at the others on the stoop. I couldn’t tell whether he sought their support, or feared their interference. If they were captors, I might be grateful for the gaggle of FBI agents at my back. “I can talk right here.”
I wanted to press. But a confrontation could easily blossom out of control—some of my own companions no more trustworthy than his. “Your mother’s looking for you, and those people back there say a dozen others have gone missing. What’s going on?”
“Mom doesn’t get it. She doesn’t think much of me when I’m home—anyway, it doesn’t matter. You went looking in the near spaces, so you’ve got to know what’s below.”
“The Outer Ones,” I said. Mindful of all the witnesses looking on, potential interference as well as backup, I continued: “I’ve heard stories about them. If you don’t want to be here, we can help, in ways no one else could.”
That earned glares from his companions, and he shook his head vehemently. “All of us ‘missing’ people, we’re here because we want to be. There’s so much wonder and glory in the universe, why would we stay in the neat little holes our families make for us?” He peered over my shoulder. “Those guys look like a bunch of cops. Can you get them to go away? I tell you we’re not ‘missing,’ we’re just not where we were.”
“They’re going to want to see that for themselves, I’m afraid,” I said.
“I can’t introduce them to everyone,” said Freddy. “Not everyone’s here in the mine. Not everyone’s even on Earth.” He announced this last with whispered relish. “I’ve heard stories about you. I always thought Mom made them up. If you try to make me go back or take me into the sea, they can stop you.”
“We’re not going to force you to do anything.” His fervent enthusiasm for the Outer Ones made my skin prickle, seeming to confirm my worst suspicions. I couldn’t fully articulate the sense of danger, but I wanted to stay out here, with friends and backup close to hand. But I could already tell that I’d learn nothing that way. Another push, and he’d retreat behind that boarded-up door. I held out my hands. “If you can promise our safety, we’d like to meet your new friends.”
“That would be great,” he said. Another glance across the street, pupils wide and eyes narrow. “How many of these people do you need to drag along?”
The answer to that question took extended negotiation. It would have stretched longer if Barlow had been willing to look indecisive. He wanted to bring his whole team, but I feared what he—or worse, Peters—would say to these creatures we barely understood. I didn’t know what we’d meet below, but I didn’t expect anything as simple as violence. Barlow and Mary had an argument that never rose to the level of words. In the end, Mary and Spector were chosen to represent the state’s first deliberate contact with creatures from another world.
I was grateful for Caleb’s absence; I knew what Grandfather would have said if we both descended into such unknown territory. Trumbull wanted to see for herself people who could so distress the Yith. I didn’t want to do without either Audrey or Charlie, but reluctantly delegated Audrey to stay behind and ride herd on the FBI agents.
“If you think I’m coming all the way to New York and then hanging out on the street while you talk to people with wings, think again,” said Neko.
The deliberations kept me from thinking too carefully about what I’d agreed to. Like Neko, I could hardly imagine finding our cousin allied with otherworldly creatures, and then avoiding them. Even if that might be the wiser course. We knew that they were old and powerful, and that the Yith despised but had not destroyed them. We knew very little else.
All this, to gain the trust of a boy we’d just met. He couldn’t possibly understand how valuable he was.
Freddy led us inside. The hall was dingy, scattered with plaster pebbles and broken glass. Rickety wooden stairs descended into bare-bulbed shadow. His fellows stayed behind. I could only guess what messages they’d sent ahead, and what powers might now watch over him, invisible and immanent.
“It’s a long way down,” he warned. Then, shyly, “Tell me about our family. Are there a lot of us?”
I was grateful anew that Barlow and Peters remained above. Mary had already met my elders, and seen us vulnerable. “In the water, there are. On land, I know of none except for my brother, and you and your mother. You’ll meet Caleb later.”
He listened as I told him about the raid, and about what it meant to go into the water. Where his mother had twitched, questioned, doubted, Freddy soaked up these ideas in stillness, even as he directed us
down a labyrinth of increasingly clean and well-lit corridors and stairs. We were beyond the building above, I thought; these must be new excavations.
“Is Mom going to do that?” he asked. “Grow scales and gills? Am I?”
“You both might,” I said. I wanted to give him a more certain answer—no. I wanted the more certain answer myself, to know whether this new relative might someday dive beneath Union Reef and swim Y’ha-nthlei’s carven streets, or stand with intimidating confidence born of centuries’ experience. “Anyone with even a little of our blood has a chance. But the more generations that blood’s been diluted, the smaller the chance.”
“Well, I suppose if I really want scales, I can ask them.”
“It’s more than scales,” I said. I ran my hand across the whitewashed wall beside us, reassured by its cool solidity. We were deep underground. “It’s more than the metamorphosis. You’ve always stood out, I know. Men of the air think we’re strange and ugly. Getting our heads measured is about the best we can expect. Imagine living surrounded by people like you. People who think you’re normal and reasonable, and who won’t judge what you can do based on the shape of your eyes.”
He stopped at a door more solid than any we’d come across thus far. “I have imagined that. All my life. And I’ve finally found it.” The certainty in his voice, the confident awe, were things I’d heard before—and they confirmed my premonition of danger. For I’d heard them from a woman shining with faith in Shub-Nigaroth’s love, eager to walk into the ocean and drown herself for an imagined immortality.
Freddy looked over the party that trailed behind us. “They’re through here. Show respect.” And he opened the door.
CHAPTER 7
The room within was dim, lit by panes that glowed violet and indigo on counters and walls. Humans, working at some of those counters, barely glanced up at our arrival. I smelled the now-familiar swamp-scent, but with some putrescent gas mixed in, as if bodies decayed amid the rotting greenery.
A low-pitched buzzing stung my ears. That too, I recognized: it was the sound that had assailed me on my first night in New York. I’d been right, then. Whatever else about them might be rumor, the Outer Ones passed easily across the barriers between worlds.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the light silhouetted inexplicable shapes—equipment with unknown purpose. It took long seconds for me to process some of the shapes as living beings. Then they moved. I flinched, would have stepped back if there had not been so many people behind me; the movements looked wrong in a way I could not describe.
Two of them moved around the purple-lit tables toward us. They didn’t look like Peters’s illustrations, but I could not imagine drawing them more accurately. Their claws were long, tipped with pincers, glossy as a beetle and mottled with wartish bumps. I thought they had at least two fore and one at the rear. Above the claws bent unlikely joints, shadowing their torsos (if torsos there were). Their heads were masses of gently waving tentacles like anemone stalks, studded with narrow spikes that flexed as they moved.
Worst of all were the wings. I could not bring them into focus. When I tried to force shape on them I saw membranous shadows, bat wings with too many joints, mist strung on an ichorous skeleton. My stomach clenched and turned.
But I could find a dozen people at will who would swear my own looks a nauseating justification for distrust. I’d come here to speak with Freddy’s allies, and speak with them I would. As always, in the face of strangeness I fell back on etiquette.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Ghavn Aphra Marsh, and these are my friends Charlie Day and Neko Koto. Professor Trumbull of Miskatonic University. And Ronald Spector and Mary Harris of the FBI.” Proper even to my full title. Normally I avoided the uncomfortable reminder that I was the youngest senior-on-land in history; now it seemed best to wield every sign of authority at my disposal.
Freddy approached the nearest Outer One, and I repressed a shiver. Fortunate that I was working to keep my face impassive, for the thing bent its head and engulfed his hand in those worm-like tentacles. He smiled and his whole posture relaxed.
“Aphra is my cousin who I just met,” he said. “These are the guys who set off the alarms last night. Aphra, these are Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt—” He spoke the names with a clear effort of concentration, each a humming, buzzing concatenation clearly not intended for human tongues. “—and Nnnnnn-gt-vvv. They’re sort of ambassadors.” I repeated the names to myself, to master them as well as I could on one hearing.
“Emissaries and miners,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. Its voice was carried in modulations to the constant buzz that, I now realized, came from the Outer Ones themselves. “We seek like minds among the races of Earth. If you come to share company in peace, we welcome you.”
“We do,” I said, glad anew for Peters’s absence. I pulled over myself, shield-like, the dignity I still thought of as my mother’s. “We also come to check the safety of people who’ve vanished. My cousin assures us he’s well, and we hope the others are also.”
“They’re our willing travel-mates,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. “Is this why the American government is here?”
“Yes,” said Spector. I heard the quaver in his voice, but it was subtle. He fumbled belatedly to show his badge.
“I told you,” said Nnnnnn-gt-vvv. “New York is different from Vermont. The comings and goings of most inhabitants are attended to by only a small fraction of the city, but that’s many more than in the hills.”
“And yet,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt, “this is no time to stay safe underhill. Mr. Spector and Mrs. Harris—are those the correct titles? I hope we can ease your minds about our companions.”
“I’d like to speak with them,” said Spector. A sidelong glance as he considered whether Mary’s title was worth correcting; she shook her head and waved him to continue. “Maybe you can tell me a little about what they’re doing here?”
“We’re traveling,” said Freddy. “And talking, with the most amazing people from everywhere in the universe, and some from outside it. You have no idea—Miss Marsh talked about fitting in with people just like you. I fit here, even if some of my friends look less like me than the Outer Ones do.”
A sharp inhalation behind me, Trumbull’s only reaction.
“Traveling where?” asked Neko. “How?” She craned her neck, as if some pulp-cover rocket might be hidden in the room’s shadows.
“Only our minds travel,” said Freddy. “They have wonderful machines to hold them while our bodies stay safe here. You can see, and hear, and talk, and go places that would be too dangerous otherwise.”
“It’s dangerous anyway,” I said. I should have been more diplomatic, but the excitement in Neko’s voice frightened me. It echoed Freddy’s, and reminded me how little I’d provided to sate her wanderlust. “Mortal minds can’t travel the voids without losing themselves.”
“I can,” said Freddy. “I’ve done it. I’ve been to Yuggoth and seen the cities of ice, and water that flows like lava. I’ve seen Outer Ones dance to the music that fills the space between. I’ve talked with people who are colors, who don’t have our sort of bodies at all. And I’m still me—more me than I’ve ever been.”
Nnnnnn-gt-vvv drifted toward me, claws soundless on the tiled floor. I took a step back, then forced myself still against the charnel breeze of its wings.
“I know your superstition,” it said. “Clinging to this rock and claiming that humans can never live beyond it. You’ve learned to fear the universe outside this one little globule. Those who taught you had their own purposes for instilling that fear. Doesn’t Nyarlathotep tell even you to ask the most dangerous questions, and travel as far as you need, wherever you need, to find the answers?”
“I’m of the water,” I said. “So is Freddy. It’s not superstition to say we need that water to survive. A planet’s a big place. We’ve found all the danger we need to satisfy Nyarlathotep’s purposes.”
“If being of the water means staying on Earth, I’m not inte
rested.” Freddy gripped Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s limb. “I want to know my family, but I won’t trade the stars for some hick town in Massachusetts.”
“You don’t have to,” said Nnnnnn-gt-vvv. Cilia rippled in Freddy’s direction. “She’s parroting what she’s been told—you’re proof it isn’t true.”
Charlie put a quelling hand on my wrist. Mary swept between me and the Outer One. “We believe you that Mr. Laverne is fine,” she said. “We’d still like to see the others, talk with them, make sure they’re okay. And we’d like to learn more about what you’re doing here. New York is full of immigrants and the United States is used to taking them in—we may be able to help you.”
“Sweet youth,” said Nnnnnn-gt-vvv. “There have been Outer Ones on this land since before North America was a continent. Humans lived among us long before the United States was a country, or New York a city. We are used to taking you in.”
“We’ve no desire to cross the local authorities,” put in Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. Claws shuffled, and one limb snaked around Freddy’s side. “You’ll have the interviews you desire, and we’ll come to an accord. Nnnnnn-gt-vvv, find out who can speak with them today. I’ll show them why we’re here, and then the stasis tables so they can see our travelers well cared for.”
Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt herded well. Even frightened, I was impressed by how quickly it (He? She?) diverted the confrontational Nnnnnn-gt-vvv and shepherded us into the corridor, heading deeper into their complex. As we left I heard human voices murmuring elsewhere in the room, answered by Outer One buzz-hums.
Freddy let go of Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s side and walked next to me. With his patrons near, he seemed more comfortable with my presence. “Tell me more about our family?”
“And our ‘hick town’?” I asked, regretting my sarcasm at once. His dismissal shouldn’t have stung so.
Freddy hunched his shoulders, and it came to me suddenly how young he was. “I still want to know.”
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