Fathomless (28 page)

Eddy stayed folded. “Weird stuff's worse when it's somebody you know.”

“Yeah, but you know me, and I'm weird.”

“You're still human.”

“So? Look at Mr. Marsh. He's not human, but I don't know, he doesn't seem like a bad guy.”

“He looks human.”

“If looking human's all it takes, Nyarlathotep's cool in a whole bunch of his avatars.”

Eddy gave herself a final scrunch, digging her chin between fisted hands. “I know it's—,” she began, but talking with her cheeks punched in made her sound like a Munchkin. She sat up. “I know it's stupid. But this is Daniel.”

The guy she was probably falling in love with. “I think it'll help Daniel if one of us sees. I'm going in, Eddy. You don't have to.”

She picked up a sofa pillow. Her fingers sank deep into it. Then she hurled the pillow at the chair where Marsh had sat, and, soft as the thing was, it would have put a hurt on him if he'd still been there. Sean grabbed it as it bounced back toward the china-laden table. “You don't have to go in,” he said again.

Eddy stood. “Yeah, I do.”

Sean parked the pillow, and they went into the second parlor together.

*   *   *

Somebody
had switched on a floor lamp that threw a truncated cone of light over the wingback chair but left Daniel and Marsh in shadow. They faced Tom, who continued to rasp and gurgle. And stink—as shallowly as Sean was breathing, the back of his throat burned. To control his nausea, he fixed his eyes on the portrait above the fireplace and made up his own little docent lecture about it. Life size. In oils. From back in the days when people dressed like Dickens characters. Dude in a bay window overlooking Innsmouth, complete with the harbor and Plum Island and beyond both a reef of jagged black rock. Dude pointing at the ships in the harbor, or maybe at the reef. And smirking. He had to be Obed Marsh, sea captain, merchant, and Deep One collaborator, but not a Deep One himself. He had died at a normal human age, but his descendants would live for centuries, including this Barnabas, who'd been Old Man Marsh since the 1920s.

Sean and Eddy had taken each step in unison, and they halted together a few feet from the chair. Daniel had disappeared behind it, as if to kneel in front of his cousin. Marsh motioned them to come forward but to the side of the fireplace.

It would be close enough, maybe too close. While Eddy followed Marsh's direction, the raw magic pulsing from the chair made Sean hesitate. It wasn't because the energy was so strong, but because it felt so messed up, one second an airy sucking at his skin and the next a zap of static discharge. Between that and the smell and the respirator soundtrack, he would have run if it hadn't been for Eddy. He'd talked her into this. He couldn't leave her—or Daniel—to see it through alone.

His eyes on the carpet (which was scarier than Geldman's, with fleshy red carnivorous-looking flowers), he made it to Eddy. It wasn't reassuring to hear how fast she was breathing or to see the quake in her knees. Screw it. He raised his eyes to the guy in the chair, who looked a lot like Daniel, actually, as Daniel might look in a few years. The impression faded as Tom began to blur and jitter, one second in full-color focus, the next graying into a humanoid smear with parts that overlapped all wrong.

Either he was a ghost, or he was a living magician whose attempt to illusion himself had gone haywire.

The illusion theory won out when the illusion dropped. Eddy's breathing didn't hitch; while Sean was hanging back, she must have already seen the real Tom. Sean's breath clogged in his throat, and the wall thrust into his back. It was covered with thick-flocked wallpaper but hard underneath, something that wouldn't collapse while he took in the person in the chair.

That Changer in New Church Green? Compared to Daniel's cousin, he'd barely started to morph. Sean's brain struggled to make sense of Tom by imagining that someone had merged a shark with a frog, then flayed it, then stuffed the flayed-off hide with a human whose bones and muscles were bending and breaking, straining and tearing, in order to fit in his new skin. Tom's head, stretched elliptical, had no hair (though it did have a finlike ridge that ran from forehead to nape and then out of sight down his back) or ears (unless you counted the pinkish drumheads where ears should have been) or nose (apart from two tight slits of nostrils). His eyes had migrated toward the sides of his head, where they bulged from telescoping orbits. A milky cataract covered the left eye. Maybe the film was an “under construction” shield that had already fallen from the right eye, which was all shark-black pupil edged with a narrow blue iris. Neither eye had a lid to blink. More mobile, the lipless mouth gaped from drumhead to drumhead. The teeth were serrated arrowheads. The chin receded into a neck as wide as the head, slashed on either side by five gill slits that flared with every hissing exhalation and oozed a viscous yellow fluid onto the towel around Tom's sagging shoulders. Where the human skin hadn't split and peeled away from his emerging gray-green hide, a similar fluid swelled pustules to bursting, then hardened and flaked like orange resin.

Was it this gunk that put the extra kick in Tom's stink?

The rest of his body hid under an oversized T-shirt and jeans. Enormous mitts covered his hands, and sacklike socks his feet. It was only a partial mercy: Sean could still see the convulsive flex of crazily elongated fingers and toes.

Though Daniel had done some Changing himself, Sean gave him huge credit for having the courage to put his hands over Tom's mitted fingers and still their jerks. His face was blank. His lips shaped silent words. It looked like he was trying telepathy, and maybe it was working. At least he didn't seem to be mouthing the same thing over and over. As far as Sean could tell, Tom's gasps weren't an attempt at speech but the sound of air bellowing in through his mouth and out through his gills. As if in sympathy, Daniel's gills flared beneath his bandage.

Marsh sidled to Eddy and Sean, deftly herded them into the first parlor, and shut the pocket doors. The maid must have come in while they were gone, because the food and tea things had vanished. Eddy's missile was back in its former place on the sofa, too. She snagged the pillow, not to hurl it at Marsh as he settled into his armchair but to hug it to her belly.

“You both did very well,” Marsh said.

Because, what, they hadn't passed out?

“Is he in pain?” Eddy asked in a strangled voice.

“Tom? Well, he's not comfortable, obviously, but we have medicines to ease the transition. If he were stranded in your world, it would be another story.”

“He won't die?”

“A caterpillar doesn't die when it changes into a moth.”

Eddy sniffed. “That's not the same. Humans don't naturally turn into Deep Ones.”

“But hybrids aren't human, not altogether. That includes Daniel, miss, and it always will include him, no matter what Solomon Geldman does.”

Tears busted through Eddy's dam, but she let them run unswiped down her face. “You wanted us to see Tom so we'd be scared away from Daniel.”

“Exactly wrong. I wanted to see if you had the nerve to look at the truth and still stick by him. His father already hates what he is. He doesn't need friends doing it, too.”

“I'm not going to hate him.”

“Good, then. You, Mr. Wyndham?”

“Not even a chance,” Sean said. “I mean, I might get freaked sometimes, but why should I hate him? You guys aren't evil, are you? Deep Ones. That other word you said.”

As you'd figure from his old-school outfit, Marsh carried a cloth handkerchief, which he handed across the table to Eddy. “Shn'yeh,” he said.

“Right. You're not monsters. You're just another species.”

“Tigers are also another species.”

“Tigers are cool.”

“Except when they eat you.”

“Shn'yeh eat people?”

“I can't guarantee it's never happened,” Marsh said. “But it would be an aberration, and very few of us would approve.”

“That's all right, then. I mean, sometimes people eat people. You know, Jeffrey Dahmer.”

Normally Eddy would have said “Jesus, Sean” by this point, but she remained muffled behind Marsh's handkerchief. “Miss Rosenbaum,” he said. “If you'd like, there's a powder room in the main hallway, the door under the stairs.”

Eddy nodded and took off.

Marsh watched her go, shaking his head the least you could and still get caught at it. With an equally quashed sigh, he turned back to Sean. “Where were we?”

“Eating people, sir.”

“And we don't do that. We don't particularly want to kill people, either, or take over the world.”

“That all works for me.”

“We do at times mix with humans, but as I said earlier, it's disastrous to do so with uninformed partners. Look what's happened with my own daughter. She had no business marrying Eli Glass, and she's not the only one who has to pay for the mistake. Daniel's paid. He's still paying.”

As much as Sean wanted to stay diplomatic and open minded, the idea of Deep Ones hooking up with humans was squicking him out. Maybe it happened only when the hybrids were still human looking, like with Aster and Eli Glass? Though to have hybrids in the first place, 100 percent Deep Ones would have had to mate with 100 percent humans, right? “You said something about the treaty you've made with the Order.”

“Not something you've heard of before?”

“Not the details.”

“The Order of Alhazred likes secrets. We do, too, of course. I hate to admit it, but things got out of hand in Innsmouth back in Obed's time, and they stayed out of hand until the Order intervened. Some folks thought Innsmouth wasn't enough of an air-side foothold in this part of the world—if our magic was strong enough to let us hide in plain sight, we should keep expanding. Others of us saw how you humans were getting new weapons, new ways to communicate and travel, even underwater. At the same time, most of you were as primitive as ever about accepting strangers. Take Howard Lovecraft. Smart fellow, with a heart that pulled him toward the truth of the worlds, but at the same time the truth scared him silly. If he felt like he had to bad-mouth us in his stories, what would the rest of you do in real life? Or try to do and force us to make a damn mess.”

Eddy returned and sat beside Sean, her face shiny from scrubbing, her mouth set. She must have paused at the door long enough to hear Marsh's history lesson, because she said, “You and the Deep Ones against expanding, Mr. Marsh, you were glad when the Order came in?”

“Well, I can't say
glad,
but we saw how the Order could help us control the troublemakers. Frank Gilman and I negotiated for our side. We'd been to college at Miskatonic, and we both knew Henry Arkwright. Long as he and the Order promised not to interfere with us Deep Ones, long as they'd mediate for us with the government people, we were willing to make concessions. We'd stay in Innsmouth, not try to take over any other human towns, and we'd keep rambunctious types from coercing humans to mix, or attacking them if they tried to settle here. The second part wasn't that hard. By 1930, any family that wasn't all right with mixing had already left. New people? We don't build to lure them in, neither houses nor jobs nor much by way of sightseeing. The few who do give us a try can't help but feel we're clannish, unwelcoming. They don't stay long. And while they are here, magic keeps them from seeing too much or remembering anything inconvenient.”

He was talking about purging memories, like Orne had done with Mom. “I've heard about that kind of magic.”

“Have you now? Mind manipulation's a tough study, but it's one some of us have had to learn.”

“You could make us forget what we saw in the other room?” Eddy said.

Marsh leaned back. “I could make you forget Tom. I could make you forget Innsmouth. I could even make you forget what Daniel really is. Then, as long as Geldman keeps him from Changing, you could go on not knowing.”

Eddy didn't respond, so Sean said, “Could you go back even farther, sir?”

“Farther?”

“In somebody's memory. Like, to a year ago.”

Eddy got him. “Back to before the Servitor? To before we even knew about magic?”

“That would be more complicated, but possible. Is that what you want, miss?”

“That would be the easy way out,” Eddy said, almost in a whisper.

“But for how long? And do you think that's what Daniel would want?”

If Eddy had an answer, she didn't get to give it. The pocket doors shooshed open. Marsh stood. What the hell, Sean did, too. It was easier than craning his neck to look over the back of the sofa.

Daniel shooshed the doors closed, then leaned against them.

“You had a long talk with Tom,” Marsh observed.

“I tried,” Daniel said. He sounded like the conversation had wiped him out, but not in an entirely bad way. “I think we mostly understood each other.”

“It will get easier. Telepathy's new to you.”

Eddy, too, stood and faced Daniel. “You're glad you saw Tom?”

Daniel nodded, then said to Marsh, “He's met people from Y'ha-nthlei.”

“Quite a few,” Marsh said. “Including his aunt Aster, as I'm sure he told you.”

“Yes.”

Marsh waited. He knew what was coming next. No big psychic trick. Damn, even Sean knew.

“I want to meet her, too,” Daniel said. “I want to meet my mother.”

 

20

By
meeting his mother, Daniel didn't mean
sometime
. He meant, like,
yesterday
.

“I understand your eagerness,” Marsh said, “but it's not possible.”

Daniel didn't yell or beg. He also didn't back down. “If you say I can't see her, then you
don't
understand.”