“I don’t know what I’m seeing any more,” she says and he nods his head very slowly, up and down, up and down, like a small, pale thing on the sea, and she looks up at the screen again.
The man in the rubber monster suit, the flicker, the soft, insectile flutter from the projector in the booth above her head.
“Just an old movie,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says knowingly, not bothering to whisper because there’s no one else is in the theatre but the two of them, him and her, the skinny, antique man and the bookish woman with her cardboard box. “A silly old movie to scare children at Saturday afternoon matinees, to scare teenage girls—”
“Is that what it is? Is that the truth?”
“The truth,” he says, smiles a tired sort of a smile and coughs again. A handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his thin lips clean, and then the man with the ice-cream name stares for a moment into his own spit and phlegm caught in folds of linen as though they were tea leaves and he could read the future there.
“Yes, I suppose that’s what you would call it,” he tells her, stuffing the soiled handkerchief back into his pocket. “You would call it that until something better comes along.”
On screen, a cavern beneath the black Amazonian lake, glycerine mist and rifle smoke, and the creature’s gills rise and fall, struggling for breath; its bulging eyes are as blank and empty as the glass eyes of a taxidermied fish.
“It’s almost over,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says. “Are you staying for the end?”
“I might talk,” the woman whispers, even though they are alone, and the creature roars, its plated, scaly flesh torn by bullets, by knives and spears; rivulets of dark blood leak from its latex hide, and the old man nods his head again.
“You might. You wouldn’t be the first.”
“Would someone try to stop me?”
“Someone already has, Miss Morrow.”
And now it’s her turn to nod, and she looks away from the movie screen, the man in the latex suit’s big death scene up there, the creature drifting limp and lifeless to the bottom of its lonely, weedy lagoon. Lacey Morrow looks down at the box in her lap, and If I’d never found the goddamned thing, she thinks, if someone else had found it instead of me. All the things she would give away for that to be true, years or memories, her life if she could die without knowing the things she knows now.
“Well, there it is,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says again and the last frames flicker past before the screen goes white and the red velvet curtain comes down and the house lights come up. “Not quite as silly as I remember. Not a bad way to pass an afternoon.”
“Will they mind if I sit here a little longer?” she asks and he shrugs his thin shoulders, stands and straightens the lapels of his jacket, fusses with the collar of his shirt.
“No,” he says. “I shouldn’t think they’d mind at all.”
She doesn’t watch him leave, keeps her eyes fixed on the box, and his shoes make small, uneven sounds against the sticky floor.
1:30 P.M.
Waking from an uneasy dream of childhood, a seashore and her sisters and something hanging in the sky, something terrible that she wouldn’t look at no matter what they promised her. Lacey blinks and squints through the streaky train window at the Connecticut countryside rushing by, surely Connecticut by now, probably somewhere well past Springfield and headed for Hartford. Crazy quilt of fields and pasture land stitched together with October leaves, the fiery boughs of birch and beech and hickory to clothe red Jurassic sandstone, and then she catches sight of the winding, silver-grey ribbon of the river to the west, flashing bright beneath the morning sun. She rubs her eyes, blinks at all that sunlight and wishes that she hadn’t dozed off. But trains almost always lull her to sleep, sooner or later, the steady, heartbeat rhythm of the wheels against the rails, steel-on-steel lullaby, and the more random rattle and clatter of the couplings for punctuation.
She checks to see that the cardboard box is still there on the empty aisle seat beside her, that her satchel is still stowed safely at her feet, and, reassured, Lacey glances quickly about the car, slightly embarrassed at having fallen asleep. That strangers have been watching her sleep and she might have snored or drooled or mumbled foolish things in her dreams, but the car is mostly empty, anyway—a teenage girl reading a paperback, a priest reading a newspaper—and she looks back to the window, her nightmare already fading in the warmth of the day. They’re closer to the river now, and she can see a small boat—a fishing boat, perhaps—cutting a V-shaped wake on the water.
“Have yourself a nice little nap, then?” and Lacey turns, startled, clipping the corner of the box with her elbow and it almost tumbles to the floor before she can catch it. There’s a woman in the seat directly behind her, someone she hadn’t noticed only a moment before, painfully thin woman with tangled, oyster-white hair, neither very old nor very young, and she’s staring at Lacey with watery blue eyes that seem to bulge slightly, intently, from their sockets. Her skin is dry and sallow, and there’s a sickly, jaundiced tint to her cheeks. She’s wearing a dingy black raincoat and a heavy sweater underneath, wool the colour of instant oatmeal, and her nubby fingernails are painted an incongruous flamingo pink.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” the woman says in her deliberate, gravel-voice, and Lacey shakes her head no, “No, it’s okay. I guess I’m not quite awake, that’s all.”
“I was starting to think I’d have to wake you up myself,” the woman says impatiently, still staring. “I’m only going as far as Hartford. I don’t have the time to go any farther than that.” As she talks, Lacey has begun to notice a very faint, fishy smell, fish or low-tide mud flats, brine and silt and stranded, suffocating sea creatures. The odour seems to be coming from the white-haired woman, her breath or her clothes, and Lacey pretends not to notice.
“You’re sitting there thinking, ‘Who’s this lunatic?’ ain’t you? ‘Who’s this deranged woman and how can I get her to shut the hell up and leave me alone?’”
“No, I just don’t—”
“Oh, yes you are,” the woman says and she jabs an index finger at Lacey, candy-pink polish and her knuckles like dirty, old tree roots. “But that’s okay. You don’t know me from Adam. You aren’t supposed to know me, Miss Morrow.”
Lacey glances at the other passengers, the girl and the priest. Neither of them are looking her way, still busy with their reading, and if they’ve even noticed the white-haired woman they’re pretending that they haven’t. Not like she’s their problem, and Lacey says a silent, agnostic’s prayer that it isn’t much farther to the Hartford station; she smiles and the woman makes a face like she’s been insulted.
“It ain’t me you got to be afraid of, Miss. Get that straight. I’m sticking my neck out, just talking to you.”
“I’m very sorry,” Lacey says, trying hard to sound sorry instead of nervous, instead of annoyed. “But I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“Me, I’m nothing but a messenger. A courier,” the woman replies, lowering her voice almost to a whisper and glaring suspiciously towards the other two passengers. “Of course, that wouldn’t make much difference, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t have any idea what you mean.”
“Well, you got the box right there,” the woman says and now she’s pointing over the back of Lacey’s seat at the cardboard box with the Innsmouth fossil packed inside. “That makes you a courier, too. Hell, that almost makes you a goddamn holy prophet on Judgement Day. But you probably haven’t thought of it that way, have you?”