Fathomless (26 page)

Daniel was too restless to enjoy the view for long, and so they headed into Innsmouth. From the overlook to an iron-bedded bridge flung over the river gorge, the road was smooth blacktop. Beyond the bridge, the semicircular square opened out. Someone with brain cells (or a sore butt) had paved over all but a few decorative strips of the original cobblestones. The strips marked off a central parking lot, two dozen slots that the Civic shared with a battered pickup and an SUV. The kiwi-green Bug that had passed them earlier stood in front of J. Waite, Groceries and Produce, ignoring the
NO PARKING
signs posted the length of the sidewalk.

Besides the grocery, Sean scoped out a drugstore, a diner, a five-and-dime, and three fish dealers. The shops were in two-story brick buildings much older than their jaunty striped awnings. Capping the row was a three-story building with the marble portico of a bank or library. “Your map say what that place is, Eddy?”

“Town offices, refinery offices, and post office all in one. And that's the refinery.” She pointed to an industrial block on the edge of the gorge. Its buildings loomed above a chain-link fence crowned with razor wire: classic redbrick New England factories with mile-high smokestacks and huge windows that glared in the noon sun, as white as acid-blinded eyes.

Sean turned off the Civic, killing the AC. Rolling down his window let in humid air thickened with fish stink, but since they were parked opposite the fish dealers, he didn't put that down to Deep One infestation. “The refinery office would be closed on Sunday?”

“Nothing else is.”

And plenty of people were out shopping, too. One clump were obviously fan tourists, two geeky dudes and a Goth couple trying to look cool while simultaneously taking pictures like crazy. Most of the apparent townies looked normal. A handful looked, to varying degrees, like Curious Changer: mouths stretched too wide, feet and hands too big, eyes shielded with wraparound shades (or worse, exposed and way bigger and more protuberant than Daniel's). They dressed in clothes too warm for summer but perfect for concealing mutations in progress; the universal fashion statement was neck covering, whether a turned-up collar or a scarf or a bandage, like the fresh gauze Geldman had wrapped around Daniel's gills that morning. There was also a Changer gait: a bent-kneed shuffle, as if the Changers' joints were getting rubbery, their feet too floppy for easy land locomotion.

And, of course, there was the smell. When a normal woman and a Changer approached the adjacent pickup, the Changer brought with him a stench distinct from the purely fishy one the dealers' shops exhaled. Sean's nose worked: fish base, yeah, and sweat, and a skunk-musky nastiness. He had to close the Civic windows and restart the AC, with the exhaust fan on.

The Changer getting in on the truck's passenger side paused, bent, and stared into the Civic, throat bellowing under a saggy turtleneck collar. Great, had he empathically overheard Sean's disgust? If so, why was it Daniel his frog eyes locked on?

Daniel stared right back, and the Changer climbed into the truck. When it had driven off, Daniel said, “He could tell about me. That I'm a Changer, too.”

Eddy scanned the crowd, frowning, in full alert mode. “Could you tell how he felt? Angry?”

“No. Just curious.”

Sean caught his own eyes darting, like Eddy's, in all directions. The normal townies paid little attention to the Changers. Sure, you had to factor in familiarity, but shouldn't some of the normal people act more like the fan tourists, whose nonchalance was an obvious mask for their nervousness? Even weirder: since they'd arrived in the square, sparks of magical energy—directed, intended energy—had been nipping Sean's skin like minute gnats, barely noticeable except that there were so many nips, and they kept coming. People were doing magic all around them, and his sense was that the magicians were the
normal
adults more than the Changers. Like that woman who kept passing the Civic, sparking him every time. There: she stepped from building-shadow into an alley-fall of sunlight, and for a second, she went out of focus, blurring at her edges. Did that mean she was wearing an illusion, and if she was, did it hide something worse than a Changer?

He turned to ask Daniel if he'd felt anything similar, but Daniel was getting out of the car. Eddy looked at Sean, and sighed, and said, “We've got to do it sometime.”

“Where are we going? If it's to Marsh's house, shouldn't we drive?”

“I'm letting Daniel take the lead on this one.”

And so Eddy exited the Civic, and so Sean exited, too.

As he swung his door shut with a faux-confident bang, the kiwi-green Bug swung a door open and disgorged two enormous sneakered feet followed by the rest of Curious Changer. Coincidence? Sean's ass.

As Curious slouched toward them, he said, “Get back in.”

Eddy cracked her door.

“No,” Daniel said. “If he's from my grandfather, like Geldman said—”

Curious stopped a yard from the Civic and bobbed a lopsided bow. “Yours in Father Dagon and Mother Hydra,” he slurred.

Daniel stepped around Sean and up to the plate: “Yours in the same, I guess. You're the one who's been following us?”

“Just you,” Curious corrected.

“Okay, so why?”

“Old Man Marsh said to.” Curious deposited himself on the hood of the Civic. Sean might have imagined his butt giving a rubbery squelch, but he wasn't imagining the stink, only compounded by a cologne not made by Cybele.

He retreated upwind, to Eddy's side of the car.

Curious glanced their way, shrugged, turned back to Daniel. “I'm Abel. Work for Old Man Marsh.”

Maybe Daniel was immune to Changer smell. Anyhow, he held his ground. “You're talking about Barnabas Marsh, my grandfather.”

“The same. You didn't think he forgot about you?”

“I thought he was dead. That's what my father told me.”

Curious—no,
Abel
—slurped air, apparently his version of snorting. From his standing vantage, Sean could see under his raised collar. He had deep creases in the sides of his neck, gills like Daniel's minus the rawness, and they quivered when he spoke. “Well, your father lied.”

“Yeah, I get that now.”

“Old Man Marsh, dead. Not too likely. So, you've come to see him?”

“Yeah.”

“I've told him you're here. I'll walk you over to the house.”

Abel slouched off. Daniel followed him like a sleepwalker, but he snapped out of it when Eddy grabbed Sean's elbow—Daniel must have felt her alarm as acutely as Sean felt the bite of her nails. “Wait,” he called to Abel. “What about my friends?”

Abel barked a laugh. “They're welcome to come along. Old Man Marsh knows they're here. He's ready.”

Eddy went to Daniel at once. Sean locked the Civic, wondering whether they were as ready as the Old Man, and what exactly it was that the Old Man was ready to do about them.

 

19

Abel
led them from the town square to Federal Street, which climbed Innsmouth's tall westward hill. The higher up they went, the bigger the houses got. At the halfway point, they passed New Church Green. On the far side of its central park was a gray stone church with a squat tower, supposed headquarters of the Deep Ones. Sean asked if the Esoteric Order of Dagon still met there, and Abel nodded and sneered, revealing yellowed mouth guards. Okay, maybe he didn't mean to sneer—in stretching his wide mouth even wider, he couldn't help but look nasty, especially if you knew what kind of teeth the guards hid. The Green was deserted except for a Changer on a park bench. Unlike Abel and most of the downtown Changers, this dude wore no hood or cap. Probably he couldn't find one to fit his grotesquely elliptical head. He'd molted all but a few straggling hairs; his scalp was mottled and scabby, and his ears curled in on themselves like desiccated leaves about to drop. When his unblinking eyes met Sean's, Sean looked away fast. “I guess the church doesn't give guided tours?”

Abel gave him another sharky smile. “No, and best you stay out of the Green. It's no place for strangers.”

So Lovecraft had gotten that part right.

Washington Street stood at Innsmouth's highest point in more than geography. It featured residences with lots so extensive, it took only four of them to fill the street. Wrought iron fences enclosed terraced gardens; white marble steps made the long climbs from sidewalk to houses. And yeah, the houses were mansions. They were all in this style, Empire something, that Joe-Jack hated, what with the mansard roofs (he called them bastard roofs) and the center towers that were so hard to scaffold for repair work. Abel walked past the first three lots, chanting: “Here's Gilman, and here's Eliot, and here's Waite.” The fourth house he introduced as “Marsh.”

It was the biggest of the big, three stories with a tower that sported a pope's-hat roof. Just the hat for the Changer in New Church Green, if you ditched the porthole windows and the widow's walk. “Marsh,” Abel repeated, pride in his slurpy voice.

“My grandfather's house,” Daniel said.

“Go on up. I'll be waiting out here to take you back to your car.”

Daniel unlatched the iron gates. Each had a decorative shield with the initials
O-M
picked out in gold. That had to be for Obed Marsh, the guy who'd first invited the Deep Ones to party in Innsmouth way back in the 1800s. After tracing the letters on one shield, Daniel shoved the gates back so hard, their hinges rained rust flakes on the marble steps. From his grunt, Abel didn't appreciate this abuse of his boss's property, but Daniel had already taken off, and he kept his lead on Sean and Eddy all the way to the porch steps, where either his energy or his courage ran out. They pulled up, panting, in time to turn with Daniel toward the view. Innsmouth fanned out below the Marsh House from hilltop to harbor. Across the glinting bay stretched Plum Island. South were the marshes and dunes they'd driven through, along with a misty hint of Arkham's cliffs. North, more marshes, more dunes, and another misty hint, this time of Newbury and a small airfield. Normal civilization, not far off, really. They could drive to it in less than an hour.

“It's too late not to do this, isn't it?” Daniel said. He turned to Eddy.

“Not if you don't want to.”

“Half of me says go inside. The other half says run like a bitch.”

“We can do either one,” Eddy said. “Your decision.”

Sean looked down the marble steps. Lounging on the lowest one, Abel scratched one huge sneakered foot with the heel of the other. Would he try to stop them if they bugged out?

What Abel might do wasn't the question. “If we run,” Sean said, “you won't find out what happened to your mom.”

“Maybe I don't want to know?”

“Dude, you thought she killed herself. What could be worse than that?”

“He's right,” Eddy said. “If you can do it, go in.”

“You'll come, too?”

“No, I'm going to wait out here with Abel.” She dashed up the porch steps, and in a Perfect Eddy moment, she spun around, pumping her fists high overhead, ready for the big match.

There was nothing Sean and Daniel could do after that but follow.

*   *   *

The
doors of the Marsh House had arched tops, etched glass windows, and a brass knocker shaped like whale flukes. Daniel plied the flukes; the rap summoned a young woman dressed in an old-time maid's uniform, black dress and white apron and rubber-soled shoes polished to a high sheen. Her mouth was a little too wide and her eyes a little too popped, but she didn't yet smell like a Changer. Before Daniel could speak, she said that Mr. Marsh was expecting them—would they mind waiting in the parlor?

Daniel sat, fidgeting, on the couch to which she led them. The way Eddy sat beside him, crouched on the edge of her seat, she looked ready to broad-jump over the low table set with tea and pastries for which none of them seemed to have an appetite. Sean sat in a gilt and velvet armchair, but not for long. The parlor boasted several cabinets of curiosities, all begging him to have a look. One held taxidermied birds, including a raven that reminded Sean too much of himself in the seed world. The next held trays of pin-skewered beetles and butterflies, the next two exotic weapons and jewelry that Captain Obed Marsh must have brought home from his South Seas adventures. Coolest was the fifth case, which contained three large statues. The middle figure was Cthulhu himself, three feet high including his pedestal, carved in silver-veined green stone. Flanking him were two ivory figures reminiscent of the “merpeople” in the
True Atlantis
book.

Sean read the handwritten labels at the feet of the ivories. The one on Cthulhu's right was
Dagon, Indonesia, 18th c.
The one on his left was
Hydra, Indonesia, 18th c.
They were the god and goddess Abel had mentioned, human except for some decorative scales and fins. If the Deep Ones looked like them, they were way prettier than the Changers he'd seen so far.

“Sean,” Eddy said. “Stop snooping around.”

“I'm not. You don't put stuff on display if you don't want people to look at it.” And beside a pair of pocket doors was a final intriguing case—no, it was an aquarium, the frameless acrylic kind, but its top was sealed, and there weren't any visible filtration or heating systems. Moving closer, he saw that what he'd taken for massed corals was a glass sculpture in every shade of water from colorless crystal through Caribbean blues and greens to deep-sea blacks. It melded the aqueous rainbow into an organic cityscape whose curved terraces grew seaweed and sponges and whose towers were impossibly stretched and filigreed. The sculpture was illuminated by fixtures hidden in the aquarium base, which vibrated slightly, agitating the tank water so that the glass-refracted light danced like sunbeams through waves.