by Neil Gaiman
“I see you follow the old ways, that’s good. I expect Alma taught you? It’s a cryin’ shame you can’t do the baptizing out on Devil Reef, like Our Lord intended, but the Navy blasted the bejesus out of it in twenty-eight. But if you do it with the right spirit, you can perform a baptism even out in the middle of Kansas.”
I had spent sleepless nights struggling with that point of theology, and her words took an enormous weight off my soul.
Before I could thank her, she said, “Love that name! Bob. I do believe I can prophesy a truly glorious future for you. So tell me all about yourself, Bob.”
I did. My God! I never thought I could have revealed such secrets to a stranger unless I had gone stark, raving mad, but they just tumbled out. And she accepted them. Instead of ordering me out or screaming for help, Old Lady Waite nodded and murmured… approval. Often I knew that she was smiling gently behind her veil, amused by my account of my clumsy efforts to be true to my heritage, but her amusement was in no way contemptuous.
Even as I spoke so unguardedly, I wondered about the spell she had cast over me. The unfamiliar emotion I felt was as strong as love is reputed to be, but it would be crazy to suppose that I had fallen in love with a woman almost three times my age whose face was veiled. She was in fact concealed completely in dark, old-fashioned clothing, and might have been a mannikin if she hadn’t murmured from time to time, if her rocker hadn’t moved rhythmically.
I was forced to the conclusion that I felt at home, and that I had never felt that way anywhere, not even in my boyhood home with my own parents. The feeling seemed to be generated by a combination of subtle influences that I didn’t perceive until I tried hard to sort them out. Nothing around me, not the spare furniture of colonial design, the home-hooked rugs on the mirror-polished floor with its wide and irregular boards, the huge, unlit fireplace that doubled as an oven with its iron doors, was inconsistent with the eighteenth century, a time that has always seemed more congenial to me. I saw no television set, no tawdry magazines, no brightly-packaged products of mass consumption. I believed that the unlit lamps were fueled by kerosene, for I saw no electrical outlets or wires. Despite the absence of air conditioning, the house was comfortably cool and dank behind its small windows, beaded by the river’s mist, and under its huge roof this atmosphere, together with an indefinable odor that came from the woman herself and all she had touched, must have been responsible for my profound sense of comfort.
But none of these factors really explained my feelings as well as my first impression, that I had fallen under a magical spell.
“Alma must have passed over,” she said. “I’m surprised she hasn’t come by. We were best friends, and I thought she’d just love to tease me about the long time I’m taking.”
“It was fourteen years ago when I helped her with the last rites, but it was a long ways off. Puget Sound.”
“Oh! Then I expect she’ll be by one of these days.”
“Actually it was a river that runs into the Sound,” I admitted a bit guiltily. I have a deep aversion against speaking the name, but I forced myself: “The Green River.”
The name provoked no special reaction. She just said, “Fresh water is okay.”
“But pretty swift.”
Her laughter was surprisingly youthful. “This river out here is pretty swift, but it doesn’t stop old friends from coming to call on me when they’re of a mind.”
“Do you suppose I could…?”
“Meet them? Sure, why not! How long you plan to be in town? You can stay right here with me, so’s not to miss anyone.”
“I wish I could, but I came here to take advantage of the federal reparations. I have to stay at—”
“Not the Facility! Oh, my,” she groaned. She stopped rocking for the first time since she’d sat down.
“What? What’s wrong? The program was sponsored by President Kennedy, and he seemed—”
“He was a friend to our kind, a real true friend. You ever wonder how he happened to survive so long in the ocean, injured as he was, after his PT-boat got sunk? And did you ever see a picture of his daddy’s mistress, Gloria Swanson? Those eyes of hers say it all, if you know what to look for. But what he seems mostly now is dead, and laws have a way of getting amended. This one got amended with bells on, to say nothing of books and candles. The Facility caught some local folks when they first set up shop, but I saw right through them, and I wanted no part of it. I told that wicked Dr. Saltonstall take his stethoscope and stick it. Fortunately Ramon Medeiros, he’s the mayor now, is a good friend to all of us, and he’s moving heaven and earth to get that place shut down.” She chuckled. “He leaves the sea to me. I’d give Ramon a call right now if l had one of those goddamn telephone machines—”
Someone knocked on the door. It was a loud, peremptory, no-nonsense knock.
“I bet that’s not Ed McMahon and Dick Clark, come to make me rich,” she said.
“What should I do? Is the back—”
“You don’t really suppose they’re not out there, too, do you? If you were foolish enough to sign anything you better go, because Uncle Sam is an alligator: dumb as hell and easy to avoid, but once he gets his jaws set, he won’t let go. Your best bet is to go along with them now so you don’t get hurt, and let me do what I can on the outside.”
The sight waiting for me at the door was unnerving, for the heavy-set older man and his grinning, dapper companion bore a skewed likeness to the pitchmen she had named.
“Mr. Smith?” the dapper one said. “We heard you might need a lift to the Facility.”
“Want to go for a nice ride, too, Mrs. Waite?” the other one said to the woman standing just behind me. “That would save everybody a lot of hassle.”
“You don’t know what hassle is, sonny-boy. You’ll find out if you do Mr. Smith, here, any harm.”
“Harm? We’re here to help you people, don’t you understand? How long do you think you can fuck with the U.S. Government?”
“How deep is the ocean?” she laughed.
“Ed” hummed the tune she had quoted all during the ride. It was proof that spells of a sort really can be cast on others, and I tried to take that as a good omen.
I was unprepared for the Facility, a Victorian fantasy of sooty bricks that managed to look both brutal and whimsical, a bad combination. The high fence around the grounds, capped with broken glass, was part of the original design, but the electronic gate looked brand new. The guard who controlled it was armed. As I was hurried up the front steps, I saw that the new sign over the door only partly concealed the original name in bas-relief:
MANUXET ASYLUM FOR THE INSANE.
The interior corridors were huge and ill-lit, wainscotted in dark wood and smelling of dust, disinfectant and century-old misery. Most alarming was the emptiness. Except for my escort and a few attendants who were trying to avoid notice or look busy, I suspected that I might be the only one here.
This suspicion was born out in the days that followed, but I didn’t regret my isolation. The first thing they did was take away my false hair and give me a chemical shower that aggravated my rash. Bald and scabrous, clad in an orange jump-suit, I might have been an imperfectly fashioned android under study by the normally-dressed people and white-uniformed keepers who hustled me here and there to determine where my creation had gone wrong. Under these circumstances, I wanted to meet no one whose opinion might have mattered to me.
Forced to choose the one thing about the Facility I liked least, I would have picked Dr. Isaac Mordecai Saltonstall, the director. A long-faced, long-fingered scarecrow in tweeds, he treated me like a child, or worse. Sometimes when he stared at me blankly over his tented fingers I imagined he was trying to decide whether to have me gassed now or later. At least he didn’t quack, but he swallowed his vowels, except for an occasional “a” as broad as a barn door. His diplomas said he had gone to Harvard and identified him, curiously enough, as a psychiatrist.
“The Seattle police questioned you in
July of eighty-three and again in September of that year,” he asked as he studied my distressingly thick dossier.
This was the first time that subject had come up. I was sorely tempted to babble, but I followed the rule I had observed since arriving: say nothing unless asked a direct question. That had always worked with the police.
“Why do you suppose that was?” he said at last.
“I guess they were being thorough.”
“But why you?”
“I was there.”
“At the murders?”
That was a low blow, but I took it without flinching. “No, not at the murders!” It seemed reasonable to inject a little anger into my voice. “I drove by the Strip, where many of the girls were abducted, in my ice-cream truck every day. The hookers were my customers, I recognized some of the victims. Maybe the Green River Killer was a customer, too. But it turned out I couldn’t help. I was never a suspect!”
“No need to get excited,” Dr. Saltonstall said: ‘We have to be thorough, too. Now your grandmother went missing from the nursing-home not long before the first murder, didn’t she?”
“She wandered off, yes.”
“You didn’t help her pass over, did you?”
I tried to conceal my shock at his use of these words with more anger: “What, killed my Grandma? I loved her!”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Yes, you did. People use euphemisms for dying, like pass over. Do you think I helped her commit suicide or something?”
“People do?”
“Other people. I always try to say what I mean. So, do I get my money? When do I get out of here?”
“Do you still have your rocks?”
The previous interviews had covered only medical details. I guess he had been trying to lull my suspicions. Today he was coming at me from all sides, jabbing me where I least expected it.
“Rocks?”
“You had some rocks in your pocket when you came here.”
“Oh. Those.” I made a show of searching the deep pocket of the jump-suit. “Yeah.”
“Why do you carry rocks in your pocket?”
Better than in my head you know-it-all son of a bitch! “I picked them up in town.” I smiled. “Genuine Innsmouth rocks. Souvenirs. I don’t know why I do it. If I see an odd-shaped rock or a bird-feather, or, I don’t know, an unusual bottle-cap, I pick it up. For luck, I guess.”
He wrote something in my dossier. If he had believed me, it was “obsessive-compulsive.”
“Where is everybody?” I asked, deciding to go on the offensive. “Do you have a Mr. Marsh here?”
“He left. How do you know him?”
“The clerk at the hotel told me he never returned for his bag. If he left here, why didn’t he go back for it?”
He wrote something else: Have clerk killed? No, the hotel-clerk was one of their spies. He must have told them I was at Old Lady Waite’s house.
“Mr. Marsh left the day you arrived. He probably picked up his bag after you spoke to the clerk.”
It pleased me that his lie should be so transparent, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Maybe he didn’t care if he was believed by a man who would soon follow Mr. Marsh into limbo.
“What about a girl named Gilman?”
“Ondine Gilman? She’s here. Haven’t you met her?”
“No,” I said evenly, “I haven’t.”
“It’s a big place. You’re sure to run into her.”
It was no surprise at all when I went to enter the cafeteria that evening and saw, for the first time, another person seated at one of the plastic tables. She wore a jump-suit like mine, but she exhibited no pathological symptoms.
I was reluctant to enter, not just because of my appearance but because I knew that she or I, or both, was being manipulated by Dr. Saltonstall. I forced myself.
“Ondine Gilman,” she responded when I brought a tray to her table and introduced myself.
“Really?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I heard the name, and I thought… well, I thought Dr. Saltonstall might have planted an impostor.”
She laughed. “He makes me paranoid, too.”
She tried to avoid looking at me directly, but I stared hard at her. Her blue eyes were large and rather protuberant, but not so much as Grandma’s or mine. I saw no hint of extra skin between her fingers, no rash, and certainly no alopecia: her auburn hair was real.
“You don’t look like an Innsmouth person,” I said.
She grimaced. “I’m not. And since they know I’m not, I wonder why the hell I’m still here!”
She had raised her voice for the benefit of the bored server at the counter, but he continued to look bored.
“It’s none of my business—”
“Sure it is, we’re in this together. You’d think if they won’t let me go home, they’d at least let me have a goddamn cigarette, it’s not as if this place is bursting at the seams with people whose lungs I can pollute. Why can’t I go home?”
The last remark, in her flattest, hardest quack, was also addressed to the server, who retreated to the kitchen without comment.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“If you’re not an Innsmouth person—”
“Then why am I here? It’s embarrassing. No, it isn’t, it’s funny, actually. My father looked sort of like you before he….”
“Passed over?”
She seemed startled. “That was what he said he was going to do, that’s the phrase he used. Only he didn’t die, he ran away. I never knew why, but maybe I do now.”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t my father, that’s why. They found that out as soon as they took my first blood-test, and then they confirmed it with DNA. My father, Wade Gilman, had Innsmouth parents, but my biological father must’ve been the mailman or somebody. I never even suspected that until they took the blood-test, but maybe my father suspected it long before, and that’s why he left.”
She strove for a light tone, but her voice shook. I said, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s a bitch. I just came here to get some money for art school in Providence, so they lock me up without cigarettes and tell me my mother was screwing around. Have they put you in the tank yet?”
“What’s that?”
“They truss you up and dump you in a tank full of water to see how long you can hold your breath. They make damn sure you’re not faking, too, they keep you under till you pass out. And they do it again and again. They put me in the tank even after they knew I wan’t a Kermie!”
“A what!”
“I’m sorry, that’s not nice, I guess. That’s what they call Smouthies—Innsmouth people, I mean—in Rowley, where I come from. For Kermit the Frog?”
“Why don’t they let you leave?”
“That’s my question, Dr. Einstein!” Annoyed by the close scrutiny I had given her, she stared back at me and added coldly: “You’ve got enough problems of your own, I guess.”
“There were some other people—applicants—when you came here, weren’t there?”
“Oh, yeah, this place was really hopping….” She looked as if she wanted to bite her tongue.
“They looked like me, you mean?”
“No, I meant…. Okay, if that’s what you want, they looked like you.” She didn’t like being put on the defensive, and she stopped trying to hide her contempt for me. “It should have been obvious that I didn’t belong.”
“What happened to them?
She shrugged. “One day they were gone. We didn’t become best friends. Nobody said good-bye. I guess they just took their money and hopped away.”
“Did you see them leave?”
“No.” She glanced uneasily toward the counter, but we were still alone. “What’s your point?”
“Maybe they didn’t leave.”
“Huh? Oh, come on! You mean they killed them?” Her surprise was overdone. I think she had considered that possibility on her own and was trying
to reject it. “But they wouldn’t kill me. I’m not like them!”
“I guess it was all a terrible mistake,” I said mildly. “They’ll ask you to promise not to tell anybody that they tortured you, or that all the Kermies disappeared, and let you go. Tomorrow, probably.”
“You son of a bitch. Being sarcastic doesn’t help.”
“Do you want to go? Without waiting for them to tidy up all the paperwork, or whatever it is they say they’re doing?”
“Damn. Are you serious? You don’t look exactly like a….”
“A knight in shining armor?”
“A man of action, I was going to say.”
“My looks are deceptive.” This misplaced nitwit had irritated me. Born in an earlier time, she would have egged on the thugs who massacred the detested “Smouthies.” My tone was bitter as I added, “Just think of me as the Frog Prince.”
“Jesus, don’t look at me like that!” She failed to repress a shudder. “I think I believe you.”
The second floor of the wing where my room lay had originally comprised four cavernous wards, but the one on the end had been divided with drywall into thirty cubicles under a false ceiling, each barely large enough to contain a single bed, plastic chair and fiberboard writing-desk, all of them bolted in place to discourage their use as weapons. A reproduction of a bland Matisse seascape was similarly bolted to the brick exterior wall. Mine could be considered a first-class accommodation, I suppose, since it shared one of the old madhouse windows, heavily barred and screened, with an adjoining cubicle. Standing on the chair, I had a view of the gatehouse in the distance and, under the window, most of the parking lot.
The door was the most interesting feature of my cell, for it wouldn’t have met the security standards of a dollhouse. I believed the lock could be spread with one of the long but sloppily-installed bolts I had extracted from Matisse. I hadn’t experimented, though, for fear of marking the door or even splintering it.
Swathed as he was in medical degrees and patrician breeding, I don’t think Dr. Saltonstall ever considered that anyone would mistrust him or try to escape his prison. And if they did, his omnipotent drugs would stop them. Every night I had been given a big red capsule that I dutifully swallowed, and every night it knocked me out within ten minutes. Tonight I concealed it under my tongue until I could spit it out.