“What do you think you’ll find out there?” Jasper Morgan had asked her the day before. He’d come by her office with the results of a microfossil analysis of the sediment sample she’d scraped from the Innsmouth fossil. “There sure as hell aren’t any Devonian rocks on Cape Ann,” he’d said. “It’s all Ordovician, and igneous, to boot.”
“I just want to see it,” she’d replied, skimming the letter typed on Harvard stationary, describing the results of the analysis.
“So, what does it say?” Dr. Morgan had asked, but Lacey read all the way to the bottom of the page before answering him.
“The rock’s siltstone, but we already knew that. The ostracodes say Early Devonian, probably Lochkovian. And that snail’s definitely Loxonema. So, there you go. Devonian rocks somewhere off Cape Ann.”
“Damn,” he’d whispered, grinning and scratching his head, and they’d spent the next half-hour talking about the thing from Cabinet 34, more than a hundred million years older than anything with a forearm like that had a right to be. No getting around the fact that it looked a lot more like a hand, something built for grasping, than a forefoot, and “Maybe we ought to just put it back in that drawer,” Jasper Morgan had said, shaking his head. “Do you have any idea what kind of shit storm this thing’s gonna cause?”
“I think maybe I’m beginning to.”
“You might as well have found a goddamn cell phone buried in an Egyptian pyramid.”
Thunder rumbles somewhere nearby, off towards Rowley, and a few cold drops of rain; Lacey glanced down at the map and then out at the distant black line of Allen’s Reef one last time. Such a long drive to find so little, the whole day wasted, the night and the time it would take her to drive back to Amherst. Money spent on gasoline that could have gone for rent and groceries, and she slid off the hood of the Jeep and was already folding the map closed when something moved out on the reef. The briefest glimpse from the corner of one eye, the impression of something big and dark, scuttling on long legs across the rocks before slipping back into the water. Another thunder clap, then, and this time lightning like God was taking pictures, but she didn’t move, stared at the reef and the angry sea crashing over it.
“Just my imagination,” she whispered. Or maybe it had been a bird, or a particularly high wave falling across the rocks, something perfectly familiar made strange by distance and shadow.
The thunder rolled away and there were no sounds left but the wind blowing through the tall grass and the falls gurgling near the mouth of the Manuxet River. In an instant, the rain became a torrent and her clothes were soaked straight through before she could get back inside the Jeep.
3:25 P.M.
Handcuffs and a blindfold tied too tightly around her face before the man and woman who aren’t FBI agents shoved her into the back of a rust-green Ford van. And now she lies shivering on wet carpeting as they speed along streets that she can’t see. The air around her is as cold as a late December night and thick with the gassy, soursweet stench of something dead, something that should have been buried a long, long time ago.
“I already told you why,” the man in the black suit and sunglasses growls angrily, and Lacey thinks maybe there’s fear in his voice, too. “She didn’t have it, okay? And we couldn’t risk going onto the train after it. Monalisa’s people got to her first. I already fucking told you that.”
And whatever is in the back of the van with her answers him in its ragged, drowning voice like her grandmother dying of pneumonia when Lacey was seven years old. There are almost words in there, broken bits and pieces of words, vowel shards and consonant shrapnel, and the woman with the Caribbean accent curses and mumbles something to herself in French.
“Please,” Lacey begs them. “I don’t know what you want. Tell me what the fuck you want and I’ll give it to you.”
“You think so?” the woman asks. “You think it would be that easy now? After all this shit and you just gonna hand it over and we just gonna go away and leave you alone? Merde...”
The van squeals around a corner without bothering to slow down and Lacey is thrown sideways into something that feels like a pile of wet rags. She tries to roll away from it, but strong hands hold her fast and icy fingers brush slowly across her throat, her chin, her lips. Skin like sandpaper and Jell-O, fingertips that may as well be icicles, and she bites at them but her teeth close on nothing at all, a mouthful of frigid air that tastes like raw fish and spoiled vegetables.
“We had strict fucking instructions to avoid a confrontation,” the man says and the car takes another corner, pitching Lacey free of the rag pile again.
“You just shut up and drive this damn car,” the woman says. “You gonna get us all killed. You gonna have the cops on us—”
“Then you better tell that slimy motherfucker back there to shut the hell up and stop threatening me,” the man growls at the woman. “I’m just about ready to say fuck you and him both. Pop a fucking cap in his skull and take my chances with the Order.”
The rag pile gurgles and then makes a hollow, gulping noise. Lacey thinks it’s laughing, as close as it can ever come to laughing, and she wonders how long it’s going to be before it touches her again, wonders if they’ll kill her first, and which would be worse.
“Yeah, this is sure some real goddamn funny shit,” the man grumbles.
Lacey presses her face against the soggy carpeting, eyes open but nothing there to see, rough fabric against her eyeballs, and she tries to wipe its touch from her skin. Nothing she’ll ever be able to scrub off, though, she knows that, something that’s stained straight through to her soul.
“Is it the fossil?” she asks. “Is this about the goddamn fossil?”
“Now you startin’ to use that big ol’ brain of yours, missy,” the woman says. “You tell us where it’s hid, who you gave it to, and maybe you gonna get to live just a little bit longer.”
“She ain’t gonna tell you jack shit,” the man sneers.
The rag pile makes a fluttering, anxious sound, and Lacey tries to sit up, but the van swerves and bounces over something, a pothole or a speed bump, a fucking old lady crossing the street for all she knows, and she tumbles over on her face again.
“It’s in the box,” she snarls, rolling onto her back and she kicks out with her left foot and hits nothing but the metal side wall. The rag pile gurgles and sputters wildly and so Lacey kicks the van again, harder than before. “Haven’t you even opened the goddamn box?”
“Bitch, ain’t nothin’ we want in that box,” the woman says. “You already handed it off to Monalisa, didn’t you?”
“Of course she fucking gave it to him. Jesus, what the fuck else do you think she did with it?”
“I told you to shut up and drive.”
“Fuck you,” and then a car horn blares and everything dissolves into the banshee wail of squealing brakes, tyres burning themselves down to naked, steelbelt bones, the impact hardly half a heartbeat later, and Lacey is thrown backwards into the gurgling rag pile. Something soft, at least, she thinks, wondering if she’s dead already and just hasn’t figured it all out yet, and the man in the sunglasses screams like a woman.