“Thank you,” Lacey said, and she turned the key in the switch and wrestled the stick out of park.
“Anytime at all,” the man replied. “You find anything interestin’, let me know.”
And as she pulled away from the gas station, lightning flashed bright across the northern sky, somewhere off towards Plum Island and the cold Atlantic Ocean.
3:15 P.M.
The train slips through the shadow cast by the I-84 overpass, brief ribbon of twilight from concrete and steel eclipse and then bright daylight again, and in a moment the Vermonter is pulling into the Hartford station. Lacey looks over her shoulder, trying not to look like she’s looking, to see if they’re still standing at the back of the car watching her, the priest and the oyster-haired crazy woman who gave her the envelope with the photograph and letter. And they are, one on each side of the aisle like mismatched gargoyle bookends. Ten minutes or so since she first noticed them back there, the priest with his newspaper folded and tucked beneath one arm and the oysterhaired woman staring at the floor and mumbling quietly to herself. The priest makes eye contact with Lacey and she turns away, looks quickly towards the front of the train again. A few of the passengers already on their feet, already retrieving bags and briefcases from overhead compartments, eager to be somewhere else, and the woman sitting next to Lacey asks if this is her stop.
“No,” she says. “No, I’m going on to New Haven.”
“Oh, do you have family there?” the woman asks. “Are you a student? My father went to Yale, but that was—”
“Will you watch my seat, please?” Lacey asks her and the woman frowns, but nods her head yes.
“Thanks. I won’t be long. I just need to make a phone call.”
Lacey gets up and the oyster-haired woman stops mumbling to herself and takes a hesitant step forward; the priest lays one hand on her shoulder and she halts, but glares at Lacey with her bulging eyes and holds up one palm like a crossing guard stopping traffic.
“I’ll only be a moment,” Lacey says.
“You can leave that here, too, if you like,” the woman who smells like wintergreen and mothballs says and Lacey realises that she’s still holding the box with the Innsmouth fossil.
“No. I’ll be right back,” Lacey tells her, gripping the box a little more tightly, and before the woman can say anything else, before the priest has a chance to change his mind and let the oyster-haired woman come after her, Lacey turns and pushes her way along the aisle towards the exit sign.
“Excuse me,” she says, repeated like a prayer, a hasty mantra as she squeezes past impatient, unhelpful men and women. She accidentally steps on someone’s foot and he tells her to slow the fuck down, just wait her turn, what the fuck’s wrong with her, anyway. Then she’s past the last of them and moving quickly down the steps, out of the train and standing safe on the wide and crowded platform. Glancing back at the tinted windows, she doesn’t see the priest or the crazy woman who gave her the envelope. Lacey asks a porter pulling an empty luggage rack where she can find a pay phone and he points to the Amtrak terminal.
“Right through there,” he says, “on your left, by the rest rooms.” She thanks him and walks quickly across the platform towards the doors, the wide, electric doors sliding open and closed, spitting some people out and swallowing others whole.
“Miss Morrow!” the priest shouts, his voice small above the muttering crowd. “Please, wait! You don’t understand!”
But Lacey doesn’t wait, only a few more feet to the wide terminal doors and never mind the damned pay phones, she can always call Jasper Morgan after she finds a security guard or a cop.
“Please!” the priest shouts, and the wide doors slide open again.
It ain’t me you got to be afraid of, Miss. Get that straight.
“You’ll have to come with us now,” a tall, pale man in a black suit and black sunglasses says as he steps through the doors onto the platform and the sun shines like broken diamonds off the barrel of the pistol in his left hand and the badge in his right. Lacey turns to run, but there’s already someone there to stop her, a black woman almost as tall as the pale man with the gun. “You’ll only make it worse on yourself,” she says in a thick Caribbean accent, and Lacey looks back towards the train, desperately searching the crowd for the priest, and there’s no sign of him anywhere.
* * *
After the gas station, Lacey followed Highway 1 south to Kent Corner and from there she took Haverhill Street to the 1A, gradually working her way south and east, winding towards Ipswich and the sea. The sky beaten black and blue by the storms and the day dissolving slowly into a premature North Shore night while lightning fingers flicked greedily across the land. At Ipswich, she asked directions again, this time from a girl working behind the counter of a convenience store. The girl had heard of Innsmouth, though she’d never seen the place for herself, had only picked up stories at school and from her parents—urban legends mostly, wild tales of witches and sea monsters and strange lights floating above the dunes. She sold Lacey a Diet Coke and a bag of Fritos and told her to take Argilla Road out of town and stay on it all the way down to the river. “Be careful,” the girl said worriedly and Lacey smiled and promised that she would.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I just want to have a quick look around.”
And twenty minutes later she reached the dead end of Argilla Road, a locked gate and chain-link fence crowned with loops of razor wire, stretching east and west as far as she could see. A rusty Army Corps of Engineers sign hung on the gate, NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED AND THIS AREA PATROLLED BY ARMED GUARDS—DO NOT ENTER. She parked the Jeep in a sandy spot near the fence and sat for a few minutes staring at the sign, wondering how many years it had been there, how many decades, before she cut the engine and got out. The wind smelled like rain and the sea, ozone and the fainter, silty stink of the salt marshes, commingled smells of life and sex and death; she sat on the cooling hood of the car with a folded topographic map and finished the bag of Fritos. Below her the land dropped quickly away to stunted trees, billowing swells of goldenrod and spike grass, and a few stingy outcroppings of granite poking up here and there through the sand. The Manuxet River snaked along the bottom of the valley, wandering through thickets of bullrush and silverweed, tumbling over a few low falls on its way down to the mouth of Ipswich Bay.
But there was no indication that there had ever been a town of any sort here, certainly no evidence that this deserted stretch of coastline had once been the prosperous seaport of Innsmouth, with its mills and factories, a gold refinery and bustling waterfront, its history stretching back to the mid-17th century. So maybe she was in the wrong place after all. Maybe the ruins of Innsmouth lay somewhere farther east, or back towards Plum Island. Lacey watched two seagulls struggling against the wind, raucous grey-white smudges drifting in the low indigo sky. She glanced at the topo map and then northwest towards a point marked castle hill, but there was no castle there now, if indeed there ever had been, no buildings of any sort, only a place where the land rose up one last time before ending in a weathered string of steep granite cliffs.
She’d drawn a small red circle on the map just offshore, to indicate the co-ordinates written on the lid of the old box from Cabinet 34— Latitude 42° 40″ N, Longitude 70° 43″ W—and Lacey scanned the horizon, wishing she’d remembered her binoculars, hanging useless in her bedroom closet at home. But there was something out there, a thin, dark line a mile or more beyond the breakwater, barely visible above the stormy sea. Perhaps only her imagination—something she needed to see—or a trick of the fading light, or both, and she glanced back down at the map. Not far from her red circle were contour lines indicating a high, narrow shoal hiding beneath the water and the spot was labelled simply ALLEN’S REEF. If the tide were out and the ocean calm, maybe there would be more to see, perhaps an aplitic or pegmatitic dike cutting through the native granite, an ancient river of magma frozen, crystallised, scrubbed smooth by the waves.