“It’s not just the town,” I said quietly. Having found Freddy, I wanted him to understand us. More, I wanted him to join us, though his cultish adoration for the Outer Ones seemed a potent barrier. “Innsmouth is the edge of something vast and wonderful, even if it’s an earthly vastness. Innsmouth is our spawning ground, the place where we learn what we have in common with the rest of our species, and learn what it means to be of the water before we grow into it ourselves. Beyond and below the reef is Y’ha-nthlei. The elders dwell in the city’s crystalline caverns during the day, come up at night to teach and protect us and show us the forms we’ll one day wear.” I remembered this past winter, seeing my grandfather for the first time in twenty years. His scent and his scales reminded me that my life—my people, though we’d nearly been wiped out on land—were real.
“Y’ha-nthlei is built into and under the reef. It’s a city of caves and crystal columns where stone drips like icicles, coral halls as grand as any palace. The elders breed giant sea turtles and sharks to draw their carriages, and jellyfish to light and ward their doorways. And for all its wonders, Y’ha-nthlei is only an outpost. The deep cities of the Atlantic outstrip it as a cathedral does a household shrine, and R’lyeh is worthy of the god that sleeps beneath it.”
I paused for breath, and flushed to find the humans staring at me. Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt might have been as well, for all I knew. Trumbull’s eyes were distant. Charlie smiled. “It sounds incredible. I wish I could see it.”
“So do I,” said Neko. “Kappa-sama. I wish you’d talk about it more often. You’ve never said much about how your people live in the water.”
I laughed shakily, and began walking again so we wouldn’t be standing awkwardly in a dingy corridor, discussing miracles. “You’ve never called Innsmouth a hick town, I guess.”
“Have you seen those cities?” asked Freddy.
“No—but I will someday. After my metamorphosis.”
“With our help, you could go today,” he said. He glanced at the Outer One.
“It would take negotiation,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. “Or dodging their border patrols. Cautious creatures.”
“I’ll go,” said Freddy. “I may not want to live in Innsmouth, but I’d like to talk to the elders. We talk to everyone.”
At the end of the corridor an archway loomed, so sudden that I suspected it had been cloaked by magic until the last moment. Blue lights glittered within the darkness, brilliant pinprick stars.
“Come inside,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt, “and see our cathedrals.”
As we entered, the light shifted again. The blue lights grew brighter without seeming closer, and were joined by pale sparks of gold and scarlet. My vision layered with afterimages of other colors, as if fireworks had stung my eyes a moment before: these lights only the remnant sparks drifting groundward. Amid this disorientation, cushions circled a cylindrical altar carved from a single hematite block. Codices and manuscripts piled on a low shelf to the side.
Trumbull pounced on the books. Almost immediately, she found one that caused her to suck in her breath and open its cover reverently. My own watering eyes were drawn by the altar. It held only one object: a metal box glinting in the wisp-light, covered in raised images. Bas-relief Outer Ones and other, equally strange species engaged in incomprehensible acts. Within the box, narrow struts held a polyhedral stone, its many surfaces each a different shape and size. The stone was translucent blue-black, with inclusions of some deep red opalescent material. My vision cleared as I looked on it. But when I turned my gaze elsewhere, the blurring afterimages returned.
“Would you like to begin?” asked Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. I couldn’t tell who it was talking to, but Freddy said, “You want me to lead? Okay, I guess, sure. Thank you.”
“You’ve traveled with us,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. “You know our ways. And they are your family.”
“Thank you,” he repeated. He went to stand at the altar. Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt settled amid the cushions, limbs bending and bending again until it huddled in the shadow of its own wings, outlined in blue lights. I hesitated—but if I let Freddy show me what the Outer Ones had taught him, perhaps he’d be more open to learning our own ways. I sat, and the others followed my lead. Trumbull gave her book a lingering glance, but joined us.
“Nyarlathotep.” Freddy stumbled over the name. I remembered hesitating so, as I learned to speak the prayers of fertile adulthood for the first time, preparing for a ceremony I never got to perform. I missed his next words. “… entreat us to learn from all who will teach, and to enter every unbarred room. You offer knowledge glorious and dangerous. You offer perceptions wondrous and fearful. We flee toward you, always. To you, mighty messenger, must all things be told.”
“To you,” buzzed Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt, “we shall tell all things.”
“Ïa,” I murmured, head bowed. This was not a ceremony of my people, but it was still reassuring, in the midst of strangeness, to hear my gods invoked. And if there was one most appropriate to invoke amid this risk and strangeness, it was the Soul and Messenger.
Freddy hesitated once more, and I had time to remember people who had invoked my gods without sharing my understanding of what they wanted. I should not let myself be so easily swayed. My cousin lifted the polyhedral stone from the box.
“Behold,” he said, and I was lost.
I felt wrenching nausea, as if the most vile things filled my mouth. A smothering fog seemed to envelop me. I struggled to remember how to breathe. Then I felt no more, only saw and heard.
The fog had vanished, and my body with it. I could still tell that it was out there, somewhere, but I had no sense of direction or distance. I floated on the edge of a chasm, looking down. Far below, a cyclopean city curled inward like a many-armed galaxy. Countless stars glowed in and above the streets. Statues thousands of feet high topped temples whose foundations were lost in darkness. Striding Nyarlathotep, Shub-Nigaroth and her close-huddled brood, Cthulhu with claws outstretched, guarded the rooftops, carved in minute detail and limned with luminescent algae. I plummeted. Without any sense of touch or temperature or even control over my own movement, it took a moment to realize I was diving through deep water, no light above to suggest how close the surface might lie. Spires and rune-carved walls rose around me. Squid flashed past, and long fish with strangely shaped fins, all pulsing with light. Deep vibrations and high, fluting melodies emanated from the plazas below. And swimming up to meet me came a cadre of elders, bodies decorated with ochre symbols, spears drawn.
Then they were gone, and I seemed to stand—still without any sense of legs beneath me—in a landscape without color. A bridge stretched ahead, black columns streaked with gray beneath a sky of pure and depthless white. Flakes of white drifted toward the ground, snow cut from sheets of paper. Inexplicable terror overcame me as they slowly fell nearer.
The black-and-white world vanished, replaced by a blaze of color. A thousand unnamable shades filled me with awe and fury. They shifted like clouds, like ink, like fire. In that conflagration I still could not feel heat or pain, and I wasn’t sure whether the emotions—wild and bright as the colors—were mine or belonged to the thing that surrounded me.
Then I stood on a balcony, and watched with casual curiosity as furry white animals writhed over and around each other at the far end. They were legless as snakes. The sky above glowed purple, and music like violins skirled behind me.
At last I felt my body again. A moment of shock, the brief vertiginous sense of falling, and I opened my eyes to the altar room. I took a shaking breath. I gripped my arm, scraped nails against flesh to confirm its existence. Amid the distractions of all I’d seen, the pain felt strangely dull. I wavered between exhilaration and revulsion.
Spector pressed his nails to the floor as I did my arm. Anger showed only in his downturned lips. I remembered that he always asked me, before joining a ritual, whether gods not his own would be named. He might be more distressed by Freddy’s prayer than by the visions themse
lves.
Neko stared at Freddy and the altar, lips parted with pleasure. “Sugoi,” she said with awe, and he grinned back at her. Amazing. Charlie looked much the same, but through the confluence I sensed his blurred perceptions and quickened pulse. He looked at me and mouthed: are you all right. I nodded, doubting my answer. Trumbull, of us all, was the only one who looked serene.
And Mary—between one second and the next, Mary went from still and bland to bent over retching. She gasped between heaves, shaking her head as if to try and clear the disorientation that still lay over my own mind.
Spector scooted to her side but then hovered uncertainly. Trumbull, with less reason for reticence, took her by the shoulders and rubbed them gently. She offered a stream of quiet, meaningless reassurances.
Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt skittered to the side table with the books, and pulled a matte black box from a drawer. “This isn’t a normal reaction,” it said. “Let me look; I may be able to help.”
Spector stiffened and started to get between them, but Trumbull nodded. “Please.”
Spector subsided, his reluctance obvious. The Outer One opened the box to reveal a variety of incomprehensible tools along with a packet of bandages and a set of vials. It opened one of these with dexterous tendrils. Vapors drifted around Mary’s face. The odor was gentler than smelling salts, pungent and herbal. My residual nausea eased.
“Not—the problem,” she gasped.
“It’s her brain, not her stomach,” said Trumbull. “She has these fits sometimes, and she can’t read—backlash from a ritual gone wrong. Can you help?”
Whether from the medicinal gas or the natural passage of time, Mary’s breathing began to ease, and her now-empty retching tapered off. Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt probed her head with a clawed limb, took various instruments from the box, ran them over her. I shuddered in sympathy, weirdly reminded of Dr. Sheldon’s skull measurements.
“That’s very focused damage,” it said. “to surprisingly localized portions of the parietal lobe. What was the nature of the ritual?”
“Inventory equation,” gasped Mary. “We were trying to gather a census of the powers in the area.”
“It was a summoning,” I said. “Overly general—it brought in an outsider.” I felt the guilt of what I did not say.
“Sapients can maim ourselves with any tool,” it said. “We may be able to give some small aid—perhaps better treatment for the spasms. But the injury has scarred over. To restore full function, we’d need to stimulate growth of large segments of the brain and mind. It could change your personality.”
“No, thank you,” said Mary. She rubbed her temples gingerly. “That’s a remarkable device. Are the images real? Are they showing things happening now, or are they like a movie?”
Freddy had found a towel somewhere, and knelt to wipe her vomit. Now that the moment of crisis had passed, my throat stung with the mix of that stench and the Outer One’s natural foetidity. I was grateful for his intervention.
“Usually they’re real,” said Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt. “They’re always things we and our travel-mates see, or think we see. Sometimes they’re things witnessed now, and sometimes they’re older—between stars, the distinction becomes fuzzy.”
“You said they’d explain why you’re here,” said Spector. Trying to care for Mary seemed to have calmed him.
“Yes. The visions are reminder and illustration of our driving mission. Nyarlathotep teaches that there is no species so abominable that it has no wisdom to share. Mad or parasitic or inimical to life from other cosmic reaches, you can always find someone willing to talk. We seek the civilizations capable of living with difference, who can look on the vast and variable universes without fear, who can recognize wisdom wherever it’s found. And we seek wisdom among species who will never transcend those fears. We find individuals among them who can share that wisdom, and take joy in travel and vast strangeness and the company of cosmopolitan minds, and we teach them and learn from them.”
“We go everywhere,” said Freddy proudly. “We talk to everyone.”
“Yes,” said Spector. “But why are you here? In New York?”
I wished I could read the Outer One’s body language. It shuffled its limbs, in ways that might have been fraught with meaning to its own kind, and perhaps even to my cousin who so easily included it in his “we.” “Usually we prefer more private places. But humans are approaching a critical time—new discoveries, new weapons. What kind of species are you? Can you survive your own capabilities, or should we now gather who we can before your fears overtake you? To answer these questions, we have to meet more humans, and observe your centers of power. Thus New York.”
“Ah.” Spector seemed uncertain how to respond, perhaps nonplussed by the answer’s scale. Mary started to get to her feet, and he took refuge in giving her a hand up.
“We should report to our people outside,” she said. “They’ll worry if we don’t come out soon. But we’d like to talk more—and we still need to speak to your other … new recruits.”
We’d planned to do that today—but I could tell Mary was at the end of her well-masked limits. And I needed time myself. I kept seeing that great city, plunged deep in its ocean crevasse. That was R’lyeh tore into frayed threads of Please let me look again and What were they doing there? Are they fighting the guards?, and then circling back to the shock of seeing what I’d only heard about in sermon and story.
Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt blocked my way as I made to leave. “A moment, Ghavn Marsh.” Freddy glanced at us and hurried out. I was all too quickly alone with it.
“Are you more comfortable speaking R’lyehn?” Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt asked in that language.
“Yes.” It was true, I realized—I found the Outer One’s curdling strangeness more tolerable when it spoke the tongue of my childhood.
“Comfortable words are best for uncomfortable discussions. I must ask: your people are beholden to the Yith.”
My muscles molded into iron coils. “Not beholden, but we respect them and are allied to them. Why?”
“You deserve more than to be their tools. They’ll use and dispose of you as easily as they did the shoggoths. But that’s a longer argument. Mrs. Harris’s scar is unmistakable—no one but a Yith would sear a mind in just that way. It’s one of their favorite punishments. I believe you’re lying to her—or she’d know. I don’t share the Deep Ones’ obsequiousness towards the Yith, or the Yith’s ideas about what’s worthy of punishment. Why should I keep your secret?”
I was used to fear in the face of immediate danger, and the cold, long terror of loss. This was something new: a shameful, angry fear that fell into my stomach like a stone. “I am lying to her. But not to protect the Yith; they’re capable of that themselves. Have you ever met one?”
Limbs shifted; tendrils rippled. “They’re among Earth’s many known hazards. When they steal one of our bodies, we encircle their mind in a holding canister and put the body in stasis until they agree to return their captive. It upsets them, and yet somehow they never seem to have enough control over their … trades … to avoid us. I’ve been tapped for that argument thrice, and always convinced them to go home swiftly. They’re arrogant, baby-eating homebodies, but they can be reasoned with when they have no choice.”
If the Outer Ones could thwart the Yith, I needed to choose my words cautiously. “When they’ve a choice, they don’t take kindly to people interfering with their work. You’ve met Mary Harris, who’s a woman of reason and honor, but I had her colleagues wait outside because I didn’t trust them to negotiate civilly. If they knew what the Yith were, they’d try to use them, or attack them outright. They have enough resources to cause real trouble. The FBI could make our whole species seem a threat to the Yith’s mission—and the Yith would do what they needed to continue their work.”
Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt bent to run tendrils over my hair. I bit my tongue and forced myself to hold still. Static tingled my scalp; the Outer One’s skin felt strange and sponge-like where it bru
shed my forehead. “You stand between these poor examples of your species and anyone you fear would take their rudeness personally. That’s charming and admirable. But we’ve walked this world for all humanity’s time on it and longer. We have thick skins.” (That last phrase in English.)
“I’m not worried that they’ll insult you. Or the Yith.” Though I had been. “I’m worried they’ll threaten you. They underestimate people who they don’t consider human, and overestimate them at the same time—assume they’ll act against the state if not intimidated. I’d really rather they keep thinking of the Yith as a legend in old books.”
“You said they work magic. They must read a great many of those books.”
“And yet, they respect no danger they haven’t seen for themselves. That’s how they decided to run an unwarded general summoning, and why the nearest Yith decided they were a danger to the Archives’ local repository.”
“And so they stole her symbols so she couldn’t do it again. The others as well?”
“No,” I said. “Miss Harris is the group’s genius.”
“She’s worked around it, I assume. Humans don’t find illiteracy suicidally shameful.”
“The rest of them take it in turns to read to her,” I confirmed. “And write down what she tells them.”
“And these are the worst of your species?”
“They take care of their own. But please, don’t point them at the Yith. The last time they met one, they never suspected her true nature, but they got it into their heads that she was a Russian spy. They tied her to a chair, blindfolded her, and threatened torture.” Which, it occurred to me now, had probably increased her displeasure with their chancy spell later on. “If they’d demanded the secrets of the Archives instead of treating her as a thoroughly human spy, things might have gone much worse.”
The Outer One’s buzzing rose and fell, rose and fell. “We must meet these people, before we decide what to tell them. It worries me that they know about us at all, if their judgment is as poor as you say—but perhaps we can reason with them. For now, though, we won’t tell Miss Harris who scarred her.”
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