Morning traded the rain for fog, lots of it, a chilly cloud that had settled over the island before dawn. There was no more sky and sea, no more distance, just whatever lay a few feet in front of her, and endless gray beyond. Without the gravel pathways, she was afraid she might’ve lost her bearings, maybe wander to the edge of the island. Tangle herself in razor wire, and hang there and die before anyone noticed.
She could feel it now, the channels open and her deepest intuition rising: this was the worst place she’d ever been, and she couldn’t tell which side bore the greater blame.
With breakfast in her belly and coffee in hand, she met Escovedo at his office, so he could escort her to the corner of the island where the prison stood facing west, looking out over the sea. There would be no more land until Asia. Immense, made of brick so saturated with wet air that its walls looked slimed, the prison emerged from the mist like a sunken ship.
What would it be like, she wondered, to enter a place and not come out for seventy years? What would that do to one’s mind? Were they even sane now? Or did they merely view this as a brief interruption in their lives? Unless they were murdered outright — a possibility — their lifespans were indefinite. Maybe they knew that time was their ally. Time would kill their captors, generation by generation, while they went on. Time would bring down every wall. All terrestrial life might go extinct, while they went on.
As long as they could make it those last few dozen yards to the sea.
“Have any of them ever escaped from here?” she asked.
“No.”
“Don’t you find that odd? I do. Hasn’t most every prison had at least one escape over seventy years?”
“Not this one. It doesn’t run like a regular prison. The inmates don’t work. There’s no kitchen, no laundry trucks, no freedom to tunnel. They don’t get visitors. We just spend all day looking at each other.” He paused in the arched, inset doorway, his finger on the call button that would summon the guards inside to open up. “If you want my unfiltered opinion, those of us who pulled this duty are the real prisoners.”
Inside, it was all gates and checkpoints, the drab institutional hallways saturated with a lingering smell of fish. Them, she was smelling them. Like people who spent their workdays around death and decay, the soldiers here would carry it home in their pores. You had to pity them that. They would be smelling it after a year of showers, whether it was there or not.
Stairs, finally, a series of flights that seemed to follow the curvature of some central core. It deposited them near the top of the building, on an observation deck. Every vantage point around the retaining wall, particularly a trio of guard posts, overlooked an enormous pit, like an abandoned rock quarry. Flat terraces and rounded pillows of stone rose here and there out of a pool of murky seawater. Along the walls, rough stairways led up to three tiers of rooms, cells without bars.
This wasn’t a prison where the inmates would need to be protected from each other. They were all on the same side down there, prisoners of an undeclared war.
Above the pit, the roof was louvered, so apparently, although closed now, it could be opened. They could see the sky. They would have air and rain. Sunshine, if that still meant anything to them.
The water, she’d learned from last night’s briefing paper, was no stagnant pool. It was continually refreshed, with drains along the bottom and grated pipes midway up the walls that periodically spewed a gusher like a tidal surge. Decades of this had streaked the walls with darker stains, each like a ragged brush stroke straight down from the rusty grate to the foaming surface of their makeshift sea.
Fish even lived in it, and why not? The prisoners had to eat.
Not at the moment, though. They lined the rocks in groups, as many as would fit on any given surface, sitting, squatting, facing the unseen ocean in eerily perfect alignment to one another.
“What do you make of it?” he asked.
Kerry thought of fish she’d watched in commercial aquariums, in nature documentaries, fish swimming in their thousands, singularly directed, and then, in an instantaneous response to some stimulus, changing directions in perfect unison. “I would say they’re schooling.”
From where they’d entered the observation deck, she could see only their backs, and began to circle the retaining wall for a better view.
Their basic shapes looked human, but the details were all wrong. Their skin ranged from dusky gray to light green, with pale bellies — dappled sometimes, an effect like sunlight through water — and rubbery looking even from here, as though it would be slick as a wetsuit to the touch, at least the areas that hadn’t gone hard and scaly. Some wore the remnants of clothing, although she doubted anything would hold up long in the water and rocks, while others chose to go entirely without. They were finned and they were spiny, no two quite the same, and their hands webbed between the fingers, their feet ridiculously outsized. Their smooth heads were uncommonly narrow, all of them, but still more human than not. Their faces, though, were ghastly. These were faces for another world, with thick-lipped mouths made to gulp water, and eyes to peer through the murky gloom of the deep. Their noses were all but gone, just vestigial nubs now, flattened and slitted. The females’ breasts had been similarly subsumed, down to little more than hard bumps.
She clutched the top of the wall until her fingernails began to bend. Not even photographs could truly prepare you for seeing them in the flesh.
I wish I’d never known, she thought. I can never be the same again.
“You want to just pick one at random, see where it goes?” Escovedo asked.
“How do you see this working? We haven’t talked about that,” she said. “What, you pull one of them out and put us in a room together, each of us on either side of a table?”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“It seems so artificial. The environment of an interrogation room, I mean. I need them open, if that makes sense. Their minds, open. A room like that, it’s like you’re doing everything you can to close them off from the start.”
“Well, I’m not sending you down there into the middle of all sixty-three of them, if that’s what you’re getting at. I have no idea how they’d react, and there’s no way I could guarantee your safety.”
She glanced at the guard posts, only now registering why they were so perfectly triangulated. Nothing was out of reach of their rifles.
“And you don’t want to set up a situation where you’d have to open fire on the group, right?”
“It would be counterproductive.”
“Then you pick one,” she said. “You know them better than I do.”
If the Innsmouth prisoners still had a sense of patriarchy, then Escovedo must have decided to start her at the top of their pecking order.
The one they brought her was named Barnabas Marsh, if he even had a use anymore for a name that none of his kind could speak. Maybe names only served the convenience of their captors now, although if any name still carried weight, it would be the name of Marsh. Barnabas was the grandson of Obed Marsh, the ship’s captain who, as village legend held, had sailed to strange places above the sea and below it, and brought back both the DNA and partnerships that had altered the course of Innsmouth’s history.
Barnabas had been old even when taken prisoner, and by human terms he was now beyond ancient. She tried not to think of him as monstrous, but no other word wanted to settle on him, on any of them. Marsh, though, she found all the more monstrous for the fact that she could see in him the puffed-up, barrel-chested bearing of a once-domineering man who’d never forgotten who and what he had been.