“Then what are you?” Anne tilted her head on one side. “I mean, what’s your religion? Are you an atheist?”
“Something like that.” Jamieson shrugged. “Actually, I do have certain beliefs. But I’m not one to believe in a conventional god, if that’s what you’re asking. And you? What do you believe in?”
“I believe in the things my father told me,” she answered dreamily. “Some beautiful things, some ugly, and some strange as the strangest myths and fables in the strangest books. But of course you know what I mean, even if I’m not sure myself.” As she spoke, she took up her book and hugged it to her chest. Bound in antique leather, dark as old oak and glossy with age, the book’s title, glimpsed between Anne’s spread fingers, consisted of just three ornately tooled letters: E.O.D.
“Well,” said Jamieson, “and here you are with just such a book. One of your strange books, perhaps? Certainly its title is very odd. Your mother once told me she gave you such books to burn…”
She looked at the book in her hands and said, “My father’s books? There were some she wanted rid of, yes. But I couldn’t just burn them. This is one of them. I’ve read them a lot and tried to make sense of them. Sometimes I thought I understood them; at others I was at a loss. But I knew they were important and now I know why.” And then, suddenly galvanized, gripping his arm below the elbow. “Can we please stop pretending? I know almost everything now…so won’t you please tell me the rest? And I swear to you—whatever you tell me—it will be safe with me. I think you must know that by now.”
The old man nodded and gently disengaged himself. “I think I can do that, yes. That is, as long as you’re not going to be frightened by it, and provided you won’t run away…like your father.”
“He was very afraid, wasn’t he?” she said. “But I’ll never understand why he stole the books and the Innsmouth jewellery. If he hadn’t taken them, maybe they’d have just let him go.”
“I think that perhaps he planned to sell those books,” the old man answered. “In order to support himself, naturally. For of course he would have known that they were very rare and valuable. But after he fled Innsmouth, changed his name, got back a little self-confidence and started to think clearly, he must also have realized that wherever the books surfaced they would be a sure link—a clue, a pointer—to his whereabouts. And so he kept them.”
“And yet he sold the jewellery.” She frowned.
“Because gold is different than books.” Jamieson smiled. “It becomes very personal; the people who buy jewellery wear it, of course, but they also guard it very closely and they don’t keep it on library shelves or places where others might wonder about it. Also, your father was careful not to spread it too thickly. Some here, some there; never too much in any one place. Perhaps at one time he’d reasoned that just like the books he shouldn’t sell the jewellery—but then came the time when he had to.”
“Yet the people of the Esoteric Order weren’t any too careful with it,” she said, questioningly.
“Because they consider Innsmouth their town and safe,” Jamieson answered. “And also because their members rarely betray a trust. Which in turn is because there are penalties for any who do.”
“Penalties?”
“There are laws, Anne. Doesn’t every society have laws?”
Her huge eyes studied his, and Jamieson felt the trust they conveyed…a mutual trust, passing in both directions. And he said, “So is there anything else I should tell you right now?”
“A great many things,” Anne answered, musingly. “It’s just that I’m not quite sure how to ask about them. I have to think things through.” But in the next moment she was alert again:
“You say my father changed his name?”
“Oh yes, as part of the merry chase he’s led us—led me—all these years. But the jewellery did in the end let him down. All winter long, when I’ve been out and about, I’ve been buying it back in the towns around. I have most of it now. As for your father’s name: actually, he wasn’t a White but a Waite, from a long line—a very, very long line—of Innsmouth Waites. One of his ancestors, and mine, sailed with Obed Marsh on the Polynesian trade routes. But as for myself…well, chronologically I’m a lot closer to those old seafarers than poor George was.”
She blinked, shook her head in bewilderment; the first time the old man had seen her caught unawares, which made him smile. And: “You’re a Waite, too?” she said. “But…Jamieson?”
“Well, actually it’s Jamie’s son.” He corrected her. “Jamie Waite’s son, out of old Innsmouth. Have I shocked you? Is it so awful to discover that the kinship you’ve felt is real?”
And after the briefest pause, while once again she studied his face: “No,” she answered, and shook her head. “I think I’ve probably guessed it—some of it—all along. And Geoff, poor Geoff…Why, it would also make you kin to him, and I think he knew it, too! It was in his eyes when he looked at you.”
“Geoff?” The old man’s face fell and he gave a sad shake of his head. “What a pity. But he was a hopeless case who couldn’t ever have developed fully. His gills were rudimentary, useless, unformed, atrophied. Atavisms, throwbacks in bloodlines that we hoped had been successfully conditioned out, still occur occasionally. That poor boy was in one such ‘state,’ trapped between his ancestral heritage and his—or his father’s—scientifically engineered or altered genes. And instead of cojoining, the two facets fought.”
“A throwback,” she said, softly. “What a horrible description!”
And the old man shrugged, sighed, and said, “Yes. Yet what else can we call him, the way Geoff was, and the way he looked? But one day, my dear, our ambassadors—our agents—will walk among people and look no different from them, and be completely accepted by them. Until eventually we Deep Ones will be the one race, the true amphibious race which nature always intended. We were the first…why, we came from the sea, the cradle of life itself! Given time, and the land and sea both shall be ours.”
“Ambassadors…” Anne repeated him, letting it all sink in. “But in actual fact agents. Spies and fifth columnists.”
“Our advance guard.” He nodded. “And who knows—you may be one of them? Indeed, that’s my intention.”
She stroked her throat, looked suddenly alarmed. “But Geoff and me, we were of an age, of a blood. And if his—his gills? —those flaps were gills? But…” Again she stroked her throat, searchingly now. Until he caught at her hand.
“Yours are on the inside, like mine. A genetic modification which reproduced itself perfectly in you, just as in me. That’s why your father’s desertion was so disappointing to us, and one of the reasons why I had to track him down: to see how he would spawn, and if he’d spawn true. In your case he did. In Geoff’s, he didn’t.”
“My gills?” Yet again she stroked her throat, and then remembered something. “Ah! My laryngitis! When my throat hurt last December, and you examined me! Two or three aspirins a day was your advice to my mother, and I should gargle four or five times daily with a spoonful of salt dissolved in warm water.”
“You wouldn’t let anyone else see you.” The old man reminded her. “And why was that, I wonder? Why me?”
“Because I didn’t want any other doctor looking at me,” she replied. “I didn’t want anyone else examining me. Just you.”
“Kinship,” he said. “And you made the right choice. But you needn’t worry. Your gills—at present the merest of pink slits at the base of your windpipe—are as perfect as in any foetal or infant land-born Deep One. And they’ll stay that way for…oh, a long time—as long or even longer than mine have stayed that way, and will until I’m ready—when they’ll wear through. For a month or so then they’ll feel tender as their development progresses, with fleshy canals like empty veins that will carry air to your land lungs. At which time you’ll be as much at home in the sea as you are now on dry land. And that will be wonderful, my dear!”