“Well, hello there,” she said to the box, carefully slipping it from its hiding place beneath the tray. “How’d I ever miss you, hmmm?” It wasn’t a small box—only a couple of inches deep, but easily a foot and a half square, sagging just a bit at the centre from having supported the weight of the tray for who knows how many years. There was writing on one corner of the lid, spidery fountain-pen ink faded as brown as dead leaves: from Naval dredgings, USS Cormorant (April, 1928), Lat. 42° 40″ N., Long. 70° 43″ W, NE. of old Innsmouth Harbour, Essex Co., Mass. ?Devonian. But there was no catalogue or field number, no identification either, and then Lacey opened the box and stared amazed at the thing inside.
“Jesus,” she whispered, swallowing a metallic taste like foil or a freshly filled tooth, adrenaline-silver aftertaste, and her first impression was that the thing was a hand, the articulated skeleton of a human hand lying palm-side up in the box, its fingers slightly curled and clutching at the ceiling or the bright fluorescent lights overhead. She set the box down on one of the larger Chaleur Bay slabs, stared at the tips of her own trembling fingers and the petrified bones resting in a bed of excelsior. They were dark, the waxy black of baker’s chocolate, and shiny from a thick coating of varnish or shellac.
No, not human, but certainly the forelimb of something, something big, at least a third again larger than her own hand, and “Jesus,” she whispered again. Lacey lifted the fossil from the excelsior, gently because there was no telling how stable it was, how many decades since anyone had even bothered to open the box. She counted almost all the elements of the manus—carpals and metacarpals, phalanges— and the lower part of the forearm, sturdy radius and ulna ending abruptly in a ragged break, the dull glint of gypsum or quartz flakes showing from the exposed interior of the fossil. There was bony webbing or spines preserved between the fingers, and the three that were complete ended in short, sharp ungual claws; a small patch of what appeared to be scales or dermal ossicles on the palm just below the fifth metacarpal, oval disks with deeply concave centres unlike anything she could remember ever having seen before. Here and there, small bits of greenish-grey limestone still clung to the bones, but most of the hard matrix had been scraped away.
Lacey sat down on a wooden stool near Cabinet 34, her dizzy head too full of questions and astonishment, heart racing, the giddy, breathless excitement of discovery, and she forced herself to shut her eyes for a moment. Gathering shreds of calm from the darkness behind her lids, counting backwards from thirty until her pulse began to return to normal; she opened her eyes again and turned the fossil over to examine the other side. The bone surface on the back of the hand was not so well preserved, weathered as though that side had been exposed to the forces of erosion for some time before it was collected, the smooth, cortical layer cracked and worn completely away in places. There was a lot more of the greenish limestone matrix on that side, too, and a small snail’s shell embedded in the rock near the base of the middle finger.
“What are you?” she asked the fossil, as if it might tell her, as simple as that, and everything else forgotten now, all her fine coelacanths and rhipidistians, for this newest miracle. Lacey turned it over again, examining the palm-side more closely, the pebbly configuration of wrist bones, quickly identifying the ulnare, what she thought must be the intermedium, and when she finally glanced at her watch it was almost six-thirty. At least an hour since she opened the box and she’d have to hurry to make her seven o’clock lecture. She returned the hand to the excelsior, paused a moment for one last, lingering glimpse of the thing before putting the lid back on. Overhead, high above the exhibits halls and the slate-tiled roof of the Pratt Museum, a thunderclap boomed and echoed across the valley, and Lacey tried to remember if shed left her umbrella in her apartment.
1:49 P.M.
Sitting next to a woman who smells like wintergreen candy and mothballs, the steady clackclackclack of razorwheels against the rails, and Lacey’s been staring at the photograph from the manila envelope for almost five minutes now. A movie still, she thinks, the glossy black-and-white photograph creased and dog-eared at one corner, and it shows an old man with a white moustache standing with two Indians beside a rocky outcrop. Someplace warm, someplace tropical because there are palmetto fronds at one edge of the photograph. It isn’t hot on the train, but Lacey’s sweating anyway, her palms gone slick and clammy, tiny beads like nectar standing out on her forehead and upper lip. The old man in the photograph is holding something cradled in both hands, clutching it like a holy relic, a grail, the prize at the end of a life-long search.
...’cause you’ve seen it all, from top to bottom and pole to pole...
The man in the photograph is holding the Innsmouth fossil. Or he’s holding a replica so perfect that it must have been cast from the original and it really doesn’t make much difference, either way. She turns the picture over and there’s a label stuck to the back— Copyright © 1954 Universal-International—typed with a typewriter that drops its “N’s”.
There was a letter in the envelope, as well. A faded photocopy of a letter, careless, sprawling handwriting that she can only just decipher:
Mr. Zacharias R. Gilman, Esq.
7 High Street
Ipswich, Mass.
15 January 1952
Mr. William Alland
Universal Studios
Los Angeles, Cal.
Dear Mr. Alland,
Sir, I have seen your fine horror picture “It Came From Outer Space” six times as of this writing and must say that I am in all ways impressed with your work. You have a true artist’s eye for the uncanny and deserve to be proud of your endeavours. I am enclosing some newspaper clippings, which may be of some small interest to a mind such as yours, regarding certain peculiar things that have gone on hereabouts for years. Old people here talk about the “plagues” of 1846 but they will tell you it wasn’t really no plague that set old Innsmouth on the road to ruin, if you’ve a mind to listen. They will tell you lots of things, Mr. Alland and I lie awake at night thinking about what might still go on out there at the reef. But you read the newspaper clippings for yourself, sir, and make of it what you will. I believe you might fashion a frightful film from these incidents. I will be at this address through May, should you wish to reply.
Respectfully, your avid admirer,
Zacharias Gilman
“Do you like old monster movies?” the wintergreen and mothball woman asks her and Lacey shakes her head no.
“Well, that photograph, that’s a scene from—”
“I don’t watch television,” she says.
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean made-for-TV movies. I meant real movies, the kind you see in theatres.”
“I don’t go to theatres, either.”
“Oh,” the woman says, sounding disappointed, and in a moment she turns away again and stares out the window at the autumn morning rushing by outside.
10:40 A.M.
“Well, I like it,” Dr. Morgan says, finally. “It looks good on paper.” He chews absently at the stem of his cheap pipe and puffs pungent, grey smoke clouds that smell like roasting apples. “And a binomen should look good. It should sound good, rolling off the tongue. Damn it, Lacey, it should almost taste good.”
More than three months since she found the Innsmouth fossil tucked away in Cabinet 34, and Lacey sits with Dr. Jasper Morgan in his tiny, third-floor office; all the familiar, musty comforts of that small room with its high ceilings and ornate, moulded plaster walls hidden behind solid oak shelves stuffed with dustwashed books and fossils and all the careful clutter of an academic’s life. A geologic map of Massachusetts framed and hanging slightly askew. Rheumy hiss and clank from the radiator below the window and if the glass wasn’t steamed over, she could see across the rooftops of Amherst, south to the low, autumn-stained hills beyond the town, the weathered slopes of the Holyoke Range rising blue-grey in the hazy distance.