Harrison Squared (30 page)

No, not over.

A shape rose out of the depths. The raft tipped up, and I plunged into the water.

*   *   *

The thing filled the sea below me. Its body was too big to see at once; I only sensed its size, the way the shadow of a mountain tells you of its mass. The body moved beneath me, a vast expanse of dark flesh just under my left foot.

And then it was past me. Still my limbs refused to move. I sank into the black depths, lungs burning, ears pounding.

And then, a sliver of light to the right, like the reflection of the crescent moon. I stared at it, and the crescent swelled, filled with white, and became an alabaster disk: the milk-white eye of the beast. The tentacles bloomed in front of me, then wrapped around themselves again, as if hugging themselves in excitement. The great eye drank me in.

I recognized it. And it recognized me.

The knowledge shuddered through me. This was the thing that had touched me. The thing that had taken my father. And it somehow knew that I was that child.

I should have felt nothing but fear. I should have sunk into the dark, or been swallowed by the beast. But then static roared in my head, and the black hole of rage I'd carried with me my entire life—that rage that I'd stoked ever since my mother disappeared—blossomed into something like heat.

I screamed at the creature. Or maybe not. Maybe that was a false memory generated by an oxygen-starved brain. Because how could I scream when I was out of air?

My paralysis, however, was broken. I kicked for the surface, and it seemed as if two legs propelled me. I swam blindly, instinctually, not sure if I was moving in the wrong direction. Then my face broke the surface, and I gulped air.

The raft was a dozen feet away. I took another breath, and swam to the raft, to
her
. My hands slapped against the wood, and this time I hauled myself onto it with idiot strength. The knife was gone. It must have been knocked from my hands when the raft tipped.

Mom was still unconscious. I got to my knees, scanning the water. The raft still stood in the center of a glassy lake. The
Muninn
still orbited at the edge of the whirlpool, along with the scores of Dwellers, their heads still visible, singing in those warbling, disturbing voices. Behind them, safely outside the whirlpool, was the white bulk of the
Albatross
. I could see a huge figure on its front deck: the Toadmother, taking in the show.

A hundred yards from me, the glassy surface of the water swelled, becoming a great dome. Then the shell cracked, and Urgaleth thrust upward. Water poured from its knuckled spine. Gripping its back was a lustrous oil-black blob the size of a man. It could have been some tumor, or a weird external organ—but somehow I knew that it was something that rode
on
Urgaleth, like a lamprey. Or a parasite.

Urgaleth had delivered its precious cargo. The Blood Pilot had made it to our world.

The bulk of Urgaleth surged toward the raft, and the black thing leaped from its back, or was flung from it. It seemed to glide through the air, flattening like a manta, a blot of deeper black against the star-fuzzed sky. Its arc would take it to the raft.

I cried out and threw my arm over my mother. Then the blob splashed into the water, inches short of the raft.

The wave of Urgaleth's surfacing rose like a wall. The raft went near-vertical. I latched onto Mom, thankful that she was still tied down by three limbs, and then the front of the raft dropped, skating fast along the back of the wave. My mother's free arm flopped like a bronco rider's. I couldn't do anything but hold on.

Another wave, smaller than the first, tossed us up. The raft bucked and slid, but did not flip. The next wave was smaller still. Were Urgaleth and the parasite gone?

I moved across my mother and felt for the ropes that held her left wrist. The knot seemed like a solid lump. I'd lost the knife. How was I going to free her?

The back of the raft dipped, and water splashed over my ankle. I glanced back.

A trio of blue-black tendrils rose out of the water and latched on to the logs between my mother's legs. The creature rolled up out of the water. It seemed to change shape with each movement, growing and absorbing limbs as it needed them. A globulous head formed, then fell forward, as if bowing in prayer. A new tendril extruded from its side and caressed my mother's foot.

“No,” I said. “She's not for you.”

The Blood Pilot rose up. A hole opened in its surface, and the interior was ringed with teeth.

I recognized it now, as I'd recognized Urgaleth. This thing had taken a piece of me when I was three years old. Its bite had been poison, and had put me in the hospital for months. But it had never left me. Some of the infection stayed inside me. It roared in my head when I was angry. If I had let it control me, I would have killed someone by now. It would have liked that.

A second tendril reached for Mom's other leg.

I screamed. I don't know what I said, or in what language. All I heard was static. But I do know that it was a
command
.

I felt the same rush of power I'd felt when I forced Professor Freytag to solidify, when I'd made him speak despite the Scrimshander's hold on him.

“She's
mine
,” I said.

The Blood Pilot shrank back, recognizing a fellow predator. And like any hunter, it understood territoriality.

“Go!” I shouted.

It oozed over the edge of the raft—at first slowly, and then all at once.

I dropped onto my butt, shaking. After a moment I realized that the
Muninn
was under power again, and churning toward me. Good. That was good. I'd need that trident to cut through these ropes.

Lydia was at the bow. She was pointing at me. No, not at me. Past me.

I twisted to see. The
Albatross
floated on the other side of the whirlpool. Montooth and the Toadmother stood on the deck, and the huge woman was screaming—not in fear, but in rage.

“COME BACK HERE, YOU STUPID CREATURE!” Her bellow carried across the water. “DON'T YOU LEAVE ME! BRING ME THE PILOT! BRING IT TO ME!

Fifty yards from her, Urgaleth surfaced again. Huge flukes like charcoal wings swept up and crashed down, loud as thunder. The sea buckled. But this time Urgaleth didn't dive. It coursed along the top of the water … heading straight toward the
Albatross
.

Perhaps they had time to say a prayer to whatever gods they worshiped. Certainly the god rushing toward them wasn't listening.

Urgaleth, the Mover Between Worlds, slammed into the
Albatross.
The ship exploded like a matchstick model, timbers and shards pinwheeling through the air. I crouched over my mother and ducked my head. When the waves subsided, both ship and beast were gone.

22

O dream of joy! is this indeed

The lighthouse top I see?

Is this the hill? is this the kirk?

Is this mine own countree?

Mom lay in the center of a large bed. She'd become a switchboard for a dozen tubes and wires, all connecting her to a choir of beeping, hissing machines. Her skin was pale, her lips colorless but strangely glossy from the Vaseline the nurses had applied. But what disturbed me most was that she was lying in a way she never did at home. Mom was a sprawler and a twitcher, and this person was as still and compact as a mummy.

But she was warm. I gripped her hand, and talked to her to convince myself that the machines were not lying.

The nurses weren't happy that I was out of my own bed. I'd been checked in last night, after passing out in one of the emergency examination rooms, and had woken up in a room with Aunt Sel asleep in a chair beside me. I'd insisted on seeing my mom, and had tried to hop into the hallway. Aunt Sel and the nurses had calmed me down by getting me into a wheelchair and taking me to her. As long as I stayed in the chair and didn't unplug the IV from my arm, they let me sit beside her. Aunt Sel told me to take as much time as I wanted and left me alone.

The doctors didn't know why she was in a coma. They'd taken CAT scans, sampled her blood, monitored everything they could think of. Besides the fact that she was a little malnourished and very dehydrated, they could see no reason for her continued unconsciousness. One of the older doctors said he'd seen this before, a spate of similarly unsolved cases in the area, the most recent one from ten years ago. Then they'd suspected a new type of virus. Their unofficial name for it was “the Dunnsmouth Disease.”

I didn't try to tell them about monsters and mystical scrimshaw. They wouldn't have believed me. But I did try to tell Mom.

I told her everything, from the night she disappeared until the moment Erik Hallgrimsson had cut her free from the raft: meeting Lub and Lydia, spying on the Toadmother, outing Professor Freytag. Every new detail sounded more and more insane. But I told myself that Mom would understand, because she'd lived through half of the story herself. And someday she'd tell me her side of it: what had happened the night Dad drowned, and the night Hal Jonsson's second boat went down, and even, if I could bear to hear it, what the Scrimshander had done to her. That would come later, when she woke up. But for now, I talked and talked, because I was afraid to say the one thing I most needed to.

Finally, I was out of words, except for those. I held her hand in both of mine, and laid my forehead down on the bedrail.

“I should have found you earlier, Mom,” I told her. “I'm so sorry.”

All those days we spent searching the wrong stretch of coastline. All those days of following Waughm instead of Montooth. If I'd been smarter, I would have found a way to make Montooth turn her over to me. Or called down Detective Hammersmith to search the school, top to bottom.

But it was too late. Now she was a vegetable, turned into a living ghost, exactly like Lydia's parents. We came from a family of scientists, but what could science do in the face of this?

The door opened behind me. “Harrison?” It was Aunt Sel. “There are some officers who'd like to talk to you.”

I released my mother's hands and sat up. I wasn't ready for this.

“But there's someone who
insists
on talking to you first. Would it be all right if she came in?”

That could only be one person. “Sure,” I said.

Lydia closed the door behind her. “I'm pretty sure she thinks I'm in love with you.”

“Yeah.” I couldn't think of anything more witty to say. I lowered my voice. “Is Lub okay?”

“He's banged up, but fine. Turns out he's a little hard to kill.”

“How about Montooth?”

“Still missing. But I don't think anything could have survived that crash. Waughm's in charge of the school now. It turns out that he never got on the
Albatross
.”

“Lucky him,” I said. “But your uncle Micah?”

“He was steering the ship. Also missing.”

“I'm so sorry.”

Her face held no expression. “He brought it on himself.”

“Okay, but—”

She handed me a piece of paper. I could tell by the off-kilter letters that it had been typed on an actual typewriter. “I had the Involuntaries bulletproof this,” she said. “We think it's solid.”

“What is it?”

“Our story.”

“I'm supposed to
memorize
this?”

“The details, not the sentences. That would be an amateur mistake.”

“It says that Garfield heard Montooth tell Waughm to ‘get that Harrison woman' on the boat.” I looked up. “Waughm will deny it.”

“Sure. But we're going to implicate him as much as possible—Waughm and Chief Bode. Let them squirm.”

The rest of the story was almost the truth. After getting the word from Gar, I convince Erik Hallgrimsson to follow the
Albatross
, he tries to radio the Coast Guard but fails, and then when I see my mom tied up to the raft, I instinctively dive in to save her.

“No mention of Lub,” I said. “Or Dwellers. Or sea monsters.”

“We thought it was best to keep it believable.”

“So what's the explanation for how the
Albatross
blew up?”

“Not your problem. Don't speculate.”

I looked it over one more time, then handed the sheet back to her. “There's one thing that doesn't make sense, though.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“You. Why were you on the boat with me? Why'd you do all this for me? This was my problem, not yours.”

“Because we're in love,” she said flatly. “Everybody thinks so.”

“You're a criminal mastermind,” I said.

“We're not finished breaking the law yet, Harrison Squared.”

*   *   *

A week later, I was standing with Lydia at the edge of the arena pool in the middle of the night. She was uncharacteristically nervous: pacing, playing the beam of her flashlight over the pool's surface, hands moving in fingercant as if she was talking to herself. I leaned on crutches and watched the water. It would take weeks and a trip back west for me to get a new leg, and I'd outgrown all my old models.

Lub's head popped up out of the water, and he handed me his canvas bag. “That's it,” he said. “Those are the last ones.”

We helped him out of the water. The cut on his forehead was still visible, but he looked otherwise unharmed. He said no one among the Elders had even noticed his wounds—they were too busy celebrating. Evidently, they were all excited that Urgaleth had surfaced and that the Blood Pilot had been delivered. It didn't seem to matter to them that I'd kept the thing from inhabiting the host. They were all sure they'd fulfilled their holy duty and that the destruction of the human world was nigh.

Cults. They always thought the glass was half-doomed.

Lub and I began unloading the bag, and Lydia began stacking the scrimshaw according to some scheme I couldn't work out. There were over fifty pieces, and each one I'd touched was blood-warm, almost moving in my hands. The arena seemed to be filling with voices murmuring to each other.