Carla thanked him, abandoned the rest of her croissant, checked her watch and went back to her room to put on some make-up. Dr Khalil was the medical examiner who had reported the cases to CDC in the first place. Hopefully, a conversation with him would fill in enough gaps for her to arrive at a workable hypothesis, give her somewhere to begin her investigation. She had just finished applying lip gloss when the phone rang to tell her he had arrived.
He was younger than she’d expected, maybe ten years older than she was, with handsome, Persian features. His hand, when she shook it, was strong and warm. He greeted her effusively. “Doctor Edwards! I’m so glad the Centers decided to send someone after all. I was beginning to think they were ignoring me! I trust your journey wasn’t too arduous?”
Carla gave a wan smile. “Doctor Khalil? It’s ever so good of you to come over. I hope I’m not keeping you from your work?”
“Well, it’s as easy for me to drive here as for you to drive over to Rowley, isn’t it? It seemed like the least I could do, given that you had to fly down from Atlanta. Shall we take a walk?”
He held her coat for her while she slipped into it. Carla couldn’t remember anyone actually doing that for her before. She rather liked it.
The fog had lifted a little before the eerie glare of the late autumn sun and a stiff breeze from the sea. The street was quiet. There was one scruffy-looking bum pushing an empty shopping cart down the pavement, and a fierce-looking, aproned man standing in the doorway of the barber’s shop, smoking a cigarette.
Dr Khalil led the way, steering them down a series of desolate, unkempt streets in the direction of the sea front. Their voices seemed almost indecently loud in the oppressive stillness, echoing slightly off the crumbling walls around them.
“So” began the examiner. “You read my report?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?”
Carla hesitated. “I’m not sure what to think. Yet. I’m still a little unclear on what you think we’re looking at here.” The examiner glanced at her. “Did you see the pictures?” Somewhat defensive now.
“Yes. I saw the pictures, and I agree that there are some… peculiar similarities between the four victims. I’m just not sure that they can’t be explained by lifestyle factors and environment. I’m not seeing any signs of an infectious process yet.”
“Well, I never said it was an infectious process.”
“But you do think it’s a disease?” persisted Carla.
“It seems, to me, the most plausible explanation. The feet, the hands, the eyes? The missing hair? Teeth? The lesions on the Ramsgate boy?”
“Well, from what I understand the children were using drugs. That can explain some of the symptoms. Especially if their supply was cut with toxic chemicals of some kind.”
“And the other features? Webbed fingers?”
“It’s hard to say. This is a small town, it’s remote… over the generations it’s probably become a bit consanguineous.”
“The changes in bone structure, then. You saw the pictures of the eyes? Did you see the extra cartilage being laid down around the face?”
“Yes, and that is strange. Something congenital, presumably.”
“In all four of them? Only two of them have the same father, and only two have the same mother.”
The road they were following became a two-lane bridge across the Manuxet river. The pilings were fortified with tangled accumulations of rubbish – shopping baskets, discarded beer cans, plastic bags – around which the brackish, eutrophic water simmered, heavy with silt.
“Well, it could be foetal alcohol syndrome” retorted Carla. “Or something their mothers took during pregnancy. Phenytoin. Lithium. Something like that. Can we even rule out that the skulls were damaged in the accident?”
The examiner laughed, mirthlessly. “The “Accident”? Oh, I know that’s what the police called it, but it is a bit disingenuous?”
“You don’t think it was an accident?”
“No! The four of them must have made a pact. Or three of them, at least. The Parker girl was drugged, she might have been in the car involuntarily.” He sighed. “They drove the car off the road on purpose. It was suicide.”
Carla felt herself becoming defensive now, as he became increasingly animated. “What makes you so sure?”
“Well, I’m not sure, but it is a safe assumption. Innsmouth is the teen suicide capital of Massachusetts. Per capita, five times as many child deaths as Boston – and that’s just the reported ones. Most of them are suicides.”
“Why? Is it that bad here?”
“This is a poor area, Dr Edwards. The towns around here have been hit hard by the recession. Innsmouth didn’t have much going for it in the first place. Look at any metric you like: unemployment, crime, teen pregnancy, truancy, missing persons, literacy… across the board, this place is deprived. These are the people who fall through the gaps. They don’t visit a doctor, they don’t attend school most of the time, most of them don’t have jobs. The only support system that’s engaged at all with the community here is the church.”
“I saw the church in the town centre, but it was derelict.”
“Once, Innsmouth had three churches. They were all closed down. Burned. No, there’s a church group that operates out of a converted warehouse down on Water Street. They give out food and clothes, run some AA meetings, that kind of thing. That’s about all that’s going on here though.”
He sounded frustrated. Looked it too, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Carla wavered, trying to find a diplomatic way of saying what she really didn’t want to say.
“OK” she began, “it certainly sounds as though there are issues here.” Dr Khalil looked at her, his brow furrowed. Carla pressed on. “What I’m saying is, if you want to draw attention to shortcomings in the welfare system here… you know, if that’s why you reported these deaths—”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” interrupted the examiner, exasperated. “You don’t get it do you? This isn’t some… social crusade! Here, I’ll show you! Come on, come in here!”
He steered Carla towards the door of a shop. It didn’t have a visible name but it seemed to be some kind of electrical repairs shop. A sign taped to the door offered ‘cash 4 applyances working / broke’. The sidewalk outside it was piled high with rusting refrigerators and washing machines, obscuring the windows.
A bell jangled as Dr Khalil pushed open the door and led the way into the gloomy interior. Carla followed hesitantly, wincing at the shop’s sepulchral smell of dust and lingering, marine putridity.
The right hand side of the shop seemed to be the display area, and was lit by a couple of wall-mounted spots. The shelves underneath were dedicated to ostensibly functioning goods – kettles, clocks, radios, microwaves, video recorders, car stereos, a couple of ghetto blasters – not much that had been made in the last two decades. In the middle of the shop were broken but still recognisable items that had evidently been cannibalised for parts. Entropy seemed to increase towards the left hand wall, on which were shelves with nothing but random loose components.
Khalil coaxed Carla forwards through the graveyard of consumer goods, towards the cash desk. Behind it sat a fat, dirty man, who appeared to be wearing nothing but grubby dungarees and a baseball cap with ‘Kaiser Cement’ written across it. He was watching wrestling on a portable TV, and didn’t look up until Khalil rapped a coin on the counter.
The examiner began talking – some spurious story about needing an obscure part for a fax machine – but Carla wasn’t really listening. She was too transfixed by the face behind the counter.
The man’s suspicious, piggy eyes were at the opposite extremes of his face, far from the subtle swelling which was all that remained of his nose. His ears seemed to have atrophied away to almost nothing, and if he had ever had a neck it had been absorbed by rich rolls of fat under his chin. He seemed to have some kind of acute psoriasis too, his skin dry and flaking; and, like the children on the autopsy tables, he had no eyebrows or lashes.