“You want me to…to come with you? To be a…a…?”
“But you already are! There’s a certain faint but distinct odour about you, Anne. Yes, and I have it, too, and so did your half-brother. But you can dilute it with pills we’ve developed, and then dispel it utterly with a dab of special cologne.”
A much longer silence, and again she took his bare forearms in her hands, stroking down from the elbow. His skin felt quite smooth in that direction. But when she stroked upwards from the wrist…
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose I am. My skin is like yours…the scales don’t show. They’re fine and pink and golden. But if I’m to come with you, what of my mother? You still haven’t told me what’s wrong with her.”
And now, finally, after all these truths, the old man must tell a lie. He must, because the truth was one she’d never accept—or rather she would—and all faith gone. But there had been no other way. And so:
“Your mother,” the old man hung his head, averted his gaze, started again. “Your mother, your own dear Jilly…I’m afraid she won’t last much longer.” That much at least was the truth.
But Anne’s hand had flown to her mouth, and so he hurriedly continued. “She has CJD, Anne—Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease—the so-called mad cow disease, at a very advanced stage.” (That was another truth, but not the whole truth.)
Anne’s mouth had fallen open. “Does she know?”
“But how can I tell her? And how can you? She may never be herself again. And if or when she were herself, she would only worry about what will become of you. And there’s no way we can tell her about…well, you know what I mean. But Anne, don’t look at me like that, for there’s nothing that can be done for her. There’s no known cure, no hospital can help her. I wanted her to have her time here, with you. And of course I’m here to help in the final stages. That specialist from St. Austell, he agrees with me.”
Finally the girl found her voice. “Then your pills were of no use to her.”
“A placebo.” Now Jamieson lied. “They were sugar pills, to give her some relief by making her think I was helping her.”
No, not so…and no help for Jilly, who would never have let her daughter go; whose daughter never would have gone while her mother lived. And those pills filled with synthetic prions—rogue proteins indistinguishable from the human form of the insidious bovine disease, developed in a laboratory in shadowy old Innsmouth—eating away at Jilly’s brain even now, faster and faster.
Anne’s hand fell from her face. “How long?”
He shook his head. “Not long. After witnessing what happened the other day, not long at all. Days, maybe? No more than a month at best. But we shall be here, you and I. And Anne, we can make up for what she’ll miss. Your years, like mine…oh, you shall have years without number!”
“It’s true, then?” Anne looked at him, and Jamieson looked back but saw no sign of tears in her eyes, which was perfectly normal. “It’s true that we go on—that our lives go on—for a long time? But not everlasting, surely?”
He shook his head. “Not everlasting, no—though it sometimes feels that way! I often lose count of my years. But I am your ancestor, yes.”
Anne sighed and stood up. And brushing sand from her dress, she took his hand, helping him to his feet. “Shall we go and be with my mother…grandfather?”
Now his smile was broad indeed—a smile he showed only to close intimates—which displayed his small, sharp, fish-like teeth. And:
“Grandfather?” he said. “Ah, no. In fact I’m your father’s great-great-grandfather! And as for yourself, Anne…well you must add another great.”
And hand in hand they walked up the beach to the house. The young girl and the old—the very old—man…?
Rising with Surtsey
Another jump back in time—way back, some thirty-eight years in fact, as I make this record—to my very first year of writing. For I produced Rising With Surtsey—a title that Derleth found very much to his taste—in December 1967, during the so-called Cold War, when my Military Police duties included patrolling the all-but ensieged city of Berlin. As previously stated, I was completely absorbed in Lovecraftian prose in that period, and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise if the writing is flawed both by purple prose (my fault) and adjectivitis (Lovecraft’s). The horror too is highly Lovecraftian, but its introduction is not nearly as subtle as it could be. If he had still been alive and working at the time, I think that HPL might have been able to do a decent revision job on this one. Also, I like to think that the storyline might have appealed to him as it did to Derleth, who published it in an anthology called “Dark Things” in 1971…
It appears that with the discovery of a live coelacanth—a fish thought to have been extinct for over seventy millions of years—we may have to revise our established ideas of the geological life spans of certain aquatic animals…
—Linkages Wonders of the Deep
Surname
—Haughtree
Christian Names
—Phillip
Date of Birth
—2 Dec 1927
Age (years)
—35
Place of Birth
—Old Beldry, Yorks.
Address
—Not applicable
Occupation
—Author
WHO STATES: (Let here follow the body of the statement)
I have asked to be cautioned in the usual manner but have been told that in view of my alleged condition it is not necessary…The implication is obvious, and because of it I find myself obliged to begin my story in the following way: I must clearly impart to the reader—before advising any unacquainted perusal of this statement—that I was never a fanatical believer in the supernatural. Nor was I ever given to hallucinations or visions, and I have never suffered from my nerves or been persecuted by any of the mental illnesses. There is no record to support any evidence of madness in any of my ancestors—and Dr. Stewart was quite wrong to declare me insane.
It is necessary that I make these points before permitting the reading of this, for a merely casual perusal would soon bring any conventionally minded reader to the incorrect conclusion that I am either an abominable liar or completely out of my mind, and I have little wish to reinforce Dr. Stewart’s opinions…
Yet I admit that shortly after midnight on the 15th November 1963 the body of my brother did die by my hand; but at the same time I must clearly state that I am not a murderer. It is my intention in the body of this statement—which will of necessity be long, for I insist I must tell the whole story—to prove conclusively my innocence. For, indeed, I am guilty of no heinous crime, and that act of mine which terminated life in the body of my brother was nothing but the reflex action of a man who had recognized a hideous threat to the sanity of the whole world. Wherefore, and in the light of the allegation of madness levelled against me, I must now attempt to tell this tale in the most detailed fashion; I must avoid any sort of garbled sequence and form my sentences and paragraphs with meticulous care, refraining from even thinking on the end of it until that horror is reached…