Deep Roots

by Ruthanna Emrys

  Ïa, Dagon, Ïa, Hydra, show me what I can be for Innsmouth. You guarded us in life and did not prevent our deaths; can you lead us toward life again? Or do you only watch?

  Ïa, Nyarlathotep, you’ve had your laugh. Now let me recognize when others seek to lead me astray. No. Let me recognize when I’m about to lead myself astray.

  At first, I tried to pretend I was truly alone. I tried to focus on the proper subjects for solstice meditation as I had learned them: myself, my family, the full community of the water; expanding circles of connection with each concentric ring fully encompassing the lesser rings within.

  But that was no longer my life. So much of my family now fell outside the compass of the water. The Kotos, who had welcomed me and Caleb when we’d lost everyone else, when they were raw with their own mourning for father and husband. I’d been so glad of Neko’s company these past six months and missed the others desperately. I loved the confluence, but I’d never wanted to leave Mama Rei and her proud and dutiful caretaking, sharp kindness that pierced and bound all at once, like her sewing needles. I hadn’t wanted to leave Anna, as comfortable following her mother’s advice as Neko was conflicted, or Kevin, still exploring his first freedom. I hadn’t wanted to leave San Francisco, where rain and mist soothed my skin every day, where the hills strengthened my legs and mountains cast long shadows on rocky beaches.

  And yet, if I’d stayed in San Francisco I would have missed my newer family. They were stranger to me than the Kotos, who built their community in a shape much like my own. The Nihonmachi was an Innsmouth of a sort, an oasis of shared understanding and culture. The confluence was different. Deedee avoided her family for reasons she would not name. Charlie spent uncomfortable holidays with his parents, who disliked everything they knew about his life. Audrey was close to her family, and yet I’d never met them—and never would, for we were none of us the sort of friends they would approve. Whether my friends welcomed or repudiated these bonds, they didn’t extend to me. Still the confluence connected us.

  I realized, though, that I had met one relative of Audrey’s, this very week. And she had approved of me.

  I’d met relatives of my own as well, people of the water who weren’t part of that greater circle. Frances, initially reticent, seemed drawn to our offer of community. She’d asked how she could celebrate the solstice herself, and would meet us at Coney Island tonight. We needed to create a ceremony, when we had the time, to welcome her to the family she’d never known. Very few mistblooded children had ever been reclaimed before their metamorphosis, and we’d never needed such a ritual before. But gods willing, the Lavernes would not be the last.

  Freddy. Part of me wanted to interpret his choices, made in ignorance of our connection, as simple self-destructive delusion. But through him I’d seen another tight-knit community, strange and dangerous and utterly at odds with our blood. The Outer Ones and their companions were another ripple spreading outward, intersecting with my own.

  I thought then not of concentric ripples, like a stone dropped in a pond, but of rain on water. Each drop left a mark, some spreading almost invisibly while others grew into waves that would cross the ocean. I stopped trying to ignore the crowds around me, and started watching them, trying to understand the lives that intersected so briefly with my own.

  A young boy, red hair flashing beneath his skullcap, chased a ball out of an alley. Two more boys followed; they scuffled around the ball before retrieving it and racing back between the buildings. A woman beat a scarlet rug over the side of a balcony. I heard a baritone singing in an unfamiliar language.

  I walked south, mindful of the network of trains undergirding the city, and where I had to be at sundown. Neighborhoods shifted and blended—as they did in San Francisco but larger, louder, more multitudinous. Alphabets and chords of scent, line of cheek and tone of skin, flavor of language: these differences marked each cluster of blocks unmistakably, showing where communities settled together to share comfort in an unfamiliar place. But each permeable pool spread rivulets into the surrounding pools, as people intermingled for food or friendship or business or simple curiosity. Without that flow, they might have grown stagnant. With it, they became a thriving wetland of shared strength.

  Those rivulets were the veins carrying the pulse I’d felt since I arrived. I could feel it now, speeding my own heart and making my fingers tremble. It fascinated and overwhelmed me. Even those who lived here sometimes seemed discomfited. An ice cream cart minder shouted at a boy: “Talk English! I ain’t got time to figure out what you want!” A pale man, gangling in a tweed jacket, walked hunched as if against blistering wind, arms tight across his chest. He caught sight of an awning marked in Chinese characters and shuddered, hurrying on.

  Innsmouth, England, had been truly isolated, clinging to the tip of a peninsula that high tide cut completely from the mainland. When nearby towns swelled toward us and brought suspicion with them, we’d sought similar solitude in America. We’d settled for a patch of land girded by bogs that discouraged the Puritans who claimed territory nearby. We’d traded with native towns as well, trying to keep them as a buffer between ourselves and those who knew us better. I recalled our history from faded lessons: decisions treated as inevitable in the schoolroom. What would we have been like, if we’d come here instead of the Massachusetts coast? If we’d given up secrecy for the camouflage of a hundred other mutually unfamiliar cultures?

  I mused, imagining a few blocks claimed beside the ocean. Awnings marked with Enochian runes, carts serving saltcakes and fried fish on skewers. A temple squeezed into a narrow storefront. Perhaps we would have been safer.

  But we’d have been very different, by now. Children on the street shouted in mixed tongues, and most merchants seemed more forgiving of crossed boundaries than the ice cream vendor. In spite of each demarcated oasis, I saw mixed heritage in many faces, and clothes that told nothing of their wearers’ origins. I watched a young Chinese woman, whose dress would fit perfectly among Audrey’s fashionable friends even if her skin would not, argue enthusiastically with a gray-haired negro woman whose peacock-blue skirt flowed past her ankles. Our little oceanside haven would have had permeable edges as well: neighbors sharing apartment buildings for cost or convenience, children playing comfortably alongside men of the air, moving across town to be closer to a job or a lover. We would have gone everywhere in the city, sooner or later. Talked to everyone.

  We would not have lost as much as we had in reality—but we’d have argued endlessly over the trade-offs we’d made. Now, with what little we had left, those trades were unavoidable.

  * * *

  Neko Koto—May 1949:

  Audrey finds me on the beach, trying to figure out how to skip pebbles. I was never any good at it in San Francisco, and the Atlantic is no more cooperative. Deedee and Charlie both have the knack, and Aphra’s grandfather is good enough that I suspect chicanery. Or just a century of practice.

  Audrey finds a sea-polished pebble and turns it round in her hand. She crouches and splashes water over her face—then winces at the salt in her eyes. Aphra’s customs don’t always suit the rest of us, I think, but I can see Audrey finds it comforting in spite of the sting.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Nothing.” She tosses the pebble from hand to hand. “Do you miss your brother?”

  My stone sinks to the sandbar. I think about Kevin, full of life and energy, occupying all parts of a room at once. Of his cries in a small cabin. “Sure, sometimes. But I’d rather be here.” And I think of why Audrey would ask. “Do you miss your father?”

  “Sure, sometimes. But he’s close by. And … I know how to ask him for things, you know? But not how to ask him about things.” She dips her hands again and runs them across her face, pausing with the pebble against her forehead.

  “Your brother,” I say gently. I know he died in the war, little more. I’ve never asked what theater.

  “I’ve been thinking about him. Because he didn’t kn
ow—what I am, what he must have been. I don’t see how knowing could have made a difference, but I keep thinking somehow it might have.”

  I’ve imagined miracles to save my father, sent alone to a dissidents’ camp and dead of flu the first winter, a thousand times. I sit beside her. Around Aphra, I’ve grown used to damp dresses. “Does your family talk about it? I mean—his passing. We talked so much about my father, we mourned him, but without a body or a funeral it all felt unreal. Except when it didn’t at all.”

  She nods. “We had a funeral, of course, but no body either. My family’s not great with funerals, but at least my parents would say his name. I had friends whose fathers and brothers vanished into these big empty spots in conversations, holes you could fall into.” She frowns at her rock, and spins it out over the water. It skips once, barely skimming, and disappears. I think of the prayers we said over my own father—no chance for a funeral, in the camps, only stolen moments for remembrance. Aphra and Caleb guarded our moments of contemplation and mourning, as we guarded theirs.

  Audrey goes on: “Mom and Dad were almost eager to get me out the door for Hall—not because they didn’t want me around, but I think they didn’t want to have something happen to me, too, before I got to live my life. I’m grateful, but…”

  But she almost died on this beach, a few months ago. I need to remember that. Audrey wears confidence like a diamond necklace, and yet she walks the site of her nightmares every day. Mine are safely on the other side of the country, and it doesn’t feel far enough. Sometimes I just want to pick a direction, and keep going until I find that distance. “You can’t tell them that something did happen.”

  “They have pretty narrow ideas about what kind of life I should live. It would never even occur to them that I wanted something else. And even if the circumstances weren’t impossible to explain, it’d kill them to think my life was in danger.”

  “Mama knows. But we’ve been through danger together; I don’t think she expects me to avoid it. To be able to avoid it.” I need to remember that too—however constraining I sometimes feel Mama’s expectations, she knows what my real life is like, and doesn’t think it too strange to bear.

  CHAPTER 18

  The sky had darkened while I walked, and now as the morning waned the sidewalks smelled of petrichor. Clouds lowered tendrils of slate and softest gray, rich with the promise of rain.

  As the sky prepared for storm, the eddies of the land cleared. People retreated from stoops, and restaurants helped those lingering at sidewalk tables bring their meals indoors. Umbrellas blossomed. The first drops came, and I moved aside so I wouldn’t impede the people whose steps sped in response. Water fell cool on my brow and bare arms, and soothed skin rough with the city’s grit.

  The rain quickened, blurring the world’s edges. In the silvering air, a flash of blue caught my eye. Across the street, a woman had retreated under a grocer’s awning. She bent her dark head to examine a box of grapes. It was her skirt, blue as a cloudless noon sky, that had attracted my attention through the rain.

  I’d seen that blue before, peacock-bright, as she argued with a young Chinese girl a dozen blocks past and an hour earlier. Had we both come this way by coincidence? I’d seen thousands of people already today; surely some must have kept walking in my direction. The woman twisted half around. Her eyes met mine briefly before skidding away. She stretched her fingers past the awning’s protection, as if to test the rain, then frowned at the result and returned to inspecting produce.

  Audrey would have been subtle, but I was not Audrey. I crossed the street as soon as traffic permitted and strode to the grocer’s. At the last moment, though, I shied away. Suppose I were wrong? I’d make a fool of myself and likely frighten her as well.

  I steeled my nerves, gathered what dignity I could in a dress rain-plastered to my frame, and released with regret the solstice’s gift of quiet safety. “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  She wasn’t much for subtlety herself. She flinched, and turned to me with an effort that mirrored my own. “Yes, miss?”

  As gently as I could, I asked, “Were you following me?”

  She sighed, and brushed her hand over her pouffed hair. “I told the man this isn’t what I’m good at. But I suppose he didn’t have much choice. He’s got trouble, and he wanted me to track you and find out if you might help. I was trying to decide if I ought to just ask. You’d better come along back, then.”

  She had an umbrella, broad and red, and tried to hold it over both of us. Droplets splashed our shoulders.

  “I don’t mind getting wet,” I said. I wanted urgently to know what was going on, and was willing to follow her as long as she didn’t seem a threat. My hand drifted near Grandfather’s rune. He couldn’t provide reinforcement at this time of day, but I didn’t want to simply vanish traceless. “Who’s ‘he’?” Perhaps she was a friend of Freddy’s.

  “Nnnnnn-gt-vvv, of course. Not an ordinary sort of man, but it’s as good a word as any.” She looked around nervously. “I’ll take you back to my place. He’ll explain the whole thing better. Unless he’s still running scared; then I suppose I’ll do it. This ain’t normal. I’ve known them since I was a little girl. They’re good people. Peaceable.”

  “Are they being … not peaceable?” With effort, I kept from rubbing the rune. Neko.

  “I’m afraid so. He’ll explain.” She pushed back her hair again. “I’m Clara Green. His friend near forty-five years now, and travel-mate just this last year.”

  “Aphra Marsh.”

  “I know. And I know you don’t like them—he told me—but he thinks you can help. For sure no one who does like them seems capable, so maybe he’s right.”

  I was glad of the rain in my eyes. “How did you find me? I’m sure I’d remember if we’d met.”

  She laughed. “During your first visit to the mine? It’s a wonder you remember any of us two-legged folk. But you’ve been part of our rites, and you’re bound in with us a little now. Nyarlathotep knows your mind through the trapezohedron, and so do they. None of us is ever hard to find.” She sighed and sucked on her lip. “Except that he’s done something to hide us. He isn’t sure how long it’ll work.”

  Another thing to hold against them. “I wish they’d told me everything the trapezohedron did. I have bonds already, ones I’ve chosen. It’s good Nnnnnn-gt-vvv knows I’m upset—they weakened those bonds without asking my leave. They must have known I’d refuse, and they didn’t care.”

  “That’s not what they’re like. When they fail, it’s just the opposite—they assume anyone would want their gifts, so they don’t need to ask. Nnnnnn-gt-vvv’s better than most. He doesn’t always remember to ask, but he listens when I warn him off.”

  I thought of S’vlk’s stories. “You’re lucky.”

  “I was just a little girl when I met him. People who come to them older know enough to be awed. I was just excited to go play with the fairies.”

  A friend for forty-five years, and traveling for just one. “They didn’t take you on a grand tour of the universe?”

  “We’d better catch the train back to Harlem, unless you want to walk all that way again. I thought you had to stop some time for sure, but you just kept going!” She led me down between copper posts, into a station. Her umbrella spattered the floor as she slid it shut. “I wanted to go with him, but I warned him off. My papa needed me—and then my babies needed me. I couldn’t very well leave these old bones”—she slapped her arm cheerfully—“lying in bed while I skipped around the stars. I told him I had to wait. But as they grew I told my Nellie and Jack, you find people who’ll take care of you and stick by you. Now they’re both grown and married and have their own babies in tow, and I can finally travel a little.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed the Outer Ones would put up with that.”

  “Maybe you don’t know them as well as you think.”

  From the stories I’d heard, the Outer Ones didn’t normally respect human duty. Was Nnnnnn-gt-vvv di
fferent, then? He’d given her exactly the chance most men of the air never got, to have a second life after she’d fulfilled her obligations. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but I felt safer in her company, knowing she understood what it was to serve duty first. She seemed closer kin to us than Freddy.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  * * *

  Clara’s walk-up was three flights above a tiny pharmacy. The building squeezed rail-thin between its neighbors. If people had to raise children in such places, it was no wonder they ran as rambunctious in alleys and sidewalks as Caleb and I had in the open labyrinth of the bogs. I wondered if she’d find our wetlands as overwhelming as I did her concrete and brick, or if all of Earth’s offerings now seemed as narrow to her as these apartments.

  She knocked, and waited for the muted rattle of the deadbolt.

  Nnnnnn-gt-vvv backed away from her door, pressing against a bookcase to let us in. Clara Green’s narrow living room did not easily accommodate a creature the size of a small horse, and the Outer One hunched its uncountable limbs tight. Wings fogged against the edge of the photo-crowded table and the record player in the corner. Shelves of paperbacks crammed us in tighter: science fiction pulps and romances, and ragged volumes of popular science and history, most of which I’d seen pass across Charlie’s counter.

  Clara buried her fingers among Nnnnnn-gt-vvv’s tentacles, and it buzzed louder and pushed against her like a cat. It wore a brass pendant indented with an ornate pattern of spiraling dots, which swung hypnotically as it moved. Clara chuckled. “How’re you doing, old man?”

  “You found her.”

  “And then she found me. She says the trapezohedron messed with her—” She hmmmed and buzzed with her tongue between her teeth, something in the Outer One’s language that I didn’t catch properly.

  “I’m sorry for that,” said Nnnnnn-gt-vvv. “Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt isn’t always … communicative … about our rites. It doesn’t trust our human compatriots as we should; I’d rather let you make your own decisions, even if they’re wrong. Our small philosophical disagreement has cracked the mine apart. It isn’t right. I must speak with you, and with your allies in the government—no matter that we’re mates thrice over, I can’t countenance what Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s faction is planning.”