“Doctor Croftmarsh, don’t be ridiculous,” she says, barely concealing disdain. I tighten my fingers around her wrist. She jerks her arm away.
“No, Tilly, I’m not being silly. Something is happening and you’re in danger.”
“No,” she says, smiling, but I can’t quite fathom the demeanour. “I’m not in danger—He has called my name and I will heed him. He will know me and choose me for I am new.”
And all at once I know that inimitable combination of tone and expression: triumph and malice, jealousy and hope. The child thinks she is part of a greater mystery. She thinks Thackeray will—will what? Despair and desperation well up inside me as rhythmic pulses of pain.
We stare at each other, time seemingly marching in place until, at last, there is the sound of the final flick of the clock hands shifting into place. Mechanisms begin to sing midnight and all of my agonies fall away. I smile at the girl and offer my hand in conciliation.
VII
FEBRUARY 18TH
If thou know not, O thou greatest among beasts,
Send me dreams so I might guess,
and kill the flock by the shepherds’ tents.
With my free hand I hook the edge of the tapestry and pull. The right half of it hangs from a rail separate to that for the left, so, when drawn across, the picture changes, the forest folded back upon itself becomes a creature, muscular, tentacled, winged; the broken stones become a second throne and the lord’s limbs, now seen true, caress his bride in lewd love.
More importantly, this redecoration shows a door in the wall behind the arras, a door which leads down to the academy’s rarely used chapel; to the undercroft more precisely. I wrench it open and a whiff of dust puffs out. Dust and something else, like long-dead fish.
“Come, Tilly,” I say. There is no answer. I turn to look at her; she is staring at the hanging. I take her face in my hands, run my fingers through her hair, tender as a mother. I kiss her on the forehead, a chaste embrace, and say, “You were right: you have been called, Tilly, and you are needed. You are anointed, the coming one. And He will know your name and I shall see you covered in the throes of glory before this night is out.”
In the darkness, I can see with the unerring stare of a creature from the deep. In her gaze is my reflection, my features rewritten by my memories, my true memories: eyes set wide and angled up, icthyoid and protuberant, pouting lips, flattened nose. And the hair, a waving tangle of green-black tentacles, a-shiver with a life of their own. I stretch, my bones cracking. I am taller.
The girl’s expression is stunned. “Doctor Croftmarsh?”
I nod and smile, my teeth sharp and liberally spaced. The girl shudders. Some panic at this moment, the imminence of death shaking them from the enchantment of being chosen; some go quietly. Tilly, I suspect, is beginning to realise that she did not take note of the fine print in the deal that was struck. I lock a webbed hand around her wrist and pull her towards her destiny.
My head is full of things long-forgotten, long set aside so that I—we—might hide and survive. Today, this anniversary of the Fall of Innsmouth, of my Lord’s terrible injuries and afflictions, of his ever-dying, this day the memories are whole. They do not afflict me. They are mine and they rest easy in the pan of my skull.
“Never fear, Tilly.” The language feels strange in my mouth, the words seemingly square, not sibilant, not long and serpentine, but blocky. I persist, dragging the girl behind me, down into the darkness of the cold stone staircase and the crushing blackness of the undercroft and the tomb. The space is just large enough to fit the rest of the staff, teaching and domestic, all changed, all re-made like me; all clustered in a tenebrous group at the far end of the crypt. “Know that you are a part of something great.”
Here she will breathe her last, her soul, her blood given so that my Lord may heal. A process oh-so-slow, but only on this one day is the barrier between his death and my life thin enough for this service.
In my haste I am clumsy.
In her terror she is strong.
When she kicks at me, I loosen my grip and she pulls away, races in the shadows, back towards the stairs, towards freedom. All the trouble gone to, to cut her from the herd, to groom her, to make her feel special—and she runs. There is the sound of a slap, a grunt.
“Careless,” says Thackeray. “You are not what you were.” He holds the girl still, carries her as a child does a reluctant cat, her back against his chest, her limbs splayed, belly exposed. She no longer struggles. Thackeray offers her to me. I stare into her moon-wide eyes and whisper, “All will be well.”
The talons of my right hand open up her chest, the nightgown then the skin. A silver mist bursts from the hole, followed by a gush of blood, and both are drawn down to the stone of the tomb, then immediately begin to seep through the porous surface.
I hear, as her life pours out, the great booming rhythm of my Lord’s heart, strengthened across aeons, across life and death and the space in between. Such a slow healing.
From the gloom steps Fenella, a broad smile on her plain face. “We must talk, before you grow forgetful again,” she says.
I don’t answer, merely look at the shell of Tilly Sanderson sprawled across my husband’s resting place where Thackeray discarded her. The rhythm of his renewal is loud and I think: If one can do this, then surely a legion…
“You will lose yourself once more,” Fenella continues. “We must discuss matters for the coming year.”
“Tomorrow’s forgetting will be but a dream,” I say, skittering my nails across the top of my Lord’s tomb, finding not a skerrick of blood left there.
I am so tired of waiting.
How many years between Innsmouth and now? How many times have I taken filaments from young heads and selected a fine needle so I may embroider a new flower into the weave of the tapestry, its border growing with each passing sacrifice? How many years have I sat beside a rock and told my Lord, my liege, my love the same tale, of the patient queen who hides away, protecting her beloved from his enemies? The tale of a wife who loses herself for his very sake, who folds the cloak of Vivienne Croftmarsh around her recollections, her histories, and suppresses everything she is, so hunters may not track him through the power of her memory. A woman who sings him his song, his hymn, his dirge, and waits and waits and waits.
A woman who is weary of waiting.
From beneath, from across, I hear him sigh.
“Bring them,” I say to Burrows and Thackeray, who give me blank stares. My voice is thunder when next I speak, and they cringe with the power of my rage. “Bring them all!”
“But—” begins Thackeray and I grab the front of his shirt and lift him off his feet, revelling in the strength of my arm, myself; and knowing, at last, that I am unwilling to once again give up this self. I shake him for good measure.
“Bring them, by twos and threes. Bring them here and we shall see my Lord awake before too many more cycles have passed. I am tired of waiting.”
A new tomorrow is about to dawn on the Esoteric Order’s Orphans Academy. And then, when my Lord shall finally rise again, I shall take my proper place at His side…
THE SAME DEEP WATERS AS YOU
by BRIAN HODGE
THEY WERE DOWN to the last leg of the trip, miles of iron-grey ocean skimming three hundred feet below the helicopter, and she was regretting ever having said yes. The rocky coastline of northern Washington slid out from beneath them and there they were, suspended over a sea as forbidding as the day itself. If they crashed, the water would claim them for its own long before anyone could find them.