The thought made her head swim. Something with that much power behind it… there could be nothing good about it. Something that loud was the sound of death, of cataclysm and extinction events. It was the sound of an asteroid strike, of a volcano not just erupting, but vaporising a land-mass—Krakatoa, the island of Thera. She imagined standing here, past the north-western edge of the continental US, and hearing something happen in New York. Okay, sound travelled better in water than in air, but still—three thousand miles.
“Despite that,” Escovedo said, “the analysts say it most closely matches a profile of something alive.”
“A whale?” There couldn’t be anything bigger, not for millions of years.
The colonel shook his head. “Keep going. Somebody who briefed me on this compared it to a blue whale plugged in and running through the amplifier stacks at every show Metallica has ever played, all at once. She also said that what they captured probably wasn’t even the whole sound. That it’s likely that a lot of frequencies and details got naturally filtered out along the way.”
“Whatever it was… there have to be theories.”
“Sure. Just nothing that fits with all the known pieces.”
“Is the sound occurring again?”
“No. We don’t know what they’re cueing in on this time.”
He pointed at the prison. Even though he couldn’t see it, because there were no windows, and now she wondered if he didn’t prefer it that way. Block it out with walls, and maybe for a few minutes at a time he could pretend he was somewhere else, assigned to some other duty.
“But they do,” he said. “Those abominations over there know. We just need to find the key to getting them to tell us.”
* * *
She was billeted in what Colonel Escovedo called the guest barracks, the only visitor in a building that could accommodate eight in privacy, sixteen if they doubled up. Visitors, Kerry figured, would be a rare occurrence here, and the place felt that way, little lived in and not much used. The rain had strengthened closer to evening and beat hard on the low roof, a lonely sound that built from room to vacant room.
When she heard the deep thump of the helicopter rotors pick up, then recede into the sky—having waited, apparently, until it was clear she would be staying—she felt unaccountably abandoned, stranded with no way off this outpost that lay beyond not just the rim of civilisation, but beyond the frontiers of even her expanded sense of life, of humans and animals and what passed between them.
Every now and then she heard someone outside, crunching past on foot or on an all-terrain four-wheeler. If she looked, they were reduced to dark, indistinct smears wavering in the water that sluiced down the windows. She had the run of most of the island if she wanted, although that was mainly just a licence to get soaked under the sky. The buildings were forbidden, other than her quarters and the admin office, and, of course, the prison, as long as she was being escorted. And, apart for the colonel, she was apparently expected to pretend to be the invisible woman. She and the duty personnel were off-limits to each other. She wasn’t to speak to them, and they were under orders not to speak with her.
They didn’t know the truth—it was the only explanation that made sense. They didn’t know, because they didn’t need to. They’d been fed a cover story. Maybe they believed they were guarding the maddened survivors of a disease, a genetic mutation, an industrial accident or something that had fallen from space and that did terrible things to DNA. Maybe they’d all been fed a different lie, so that if they got together to compare notes they wouldn’t know which to believe.
For that matter, she wasn’t sure she did either.
First things first, though: she set up a framed photo of Tabitha on a table out in the barracks’ common room, shot over the summer when they’d gone horseback riding in the Sawtooth Range. Her daughter’s sixth birthday. Rarely was a picture snapped in which Tabby wasn’t beaming, giddy with life, but this was one of them, her little face rapt with focus. Still in the saddle, she was leaning forward, hugging the mare’s neck, her braided hair a blonde stripe along the chestnut hide, and it looked for all the world as if the two of them were sharing a secret.
The photo would be her beacon, her lighthouse shining from home.
She fixed a mug of hot cocoa in the kitchenette, then settled into one of the chairs with the summary report that Escovedo had sent with her.
Except for its cold, matter-of-fact tone, it read like bizarre fiction. If she hadn’t seen the photos, she wouldn’t have believed it: a series of raids in an isolated Massachusetts seaport that swept up more than two hundred residents, most of whose appearances exhibited combinations of human, ichthyoid, and amphibian traits. ‘The Innsmouth look’ had been well known to the neighbouring towns for at least two generations—“an unsavoury haven of inbreeding and circus folk”, according to a derisive comment culled from an Ipswich newspaper of the era—but even then, Innsmouth had been careful to put forward the best face it possibly could. Which meant, in most cases, residents still on the low side of middle-age… at least when it came to the families that had a few decades’ worth of roots in the town, rather than its more recent newcomers.
With age came change so drastic that the affected people gradually lost all resemblance to who they’d been as children and young adults, eventually reaching the point that they let themselves be seen only by each other, taking care to hide from public view in a warren of dilapidated homes, warehouses and limestone caverns that honeycombed the area.
One page of the report displayed a sequence of photos of what was ostensibly the same person, identified as Giles Shapleigh, eighteen years old when detained in 1928. He’d been a handsome kid in the first photo, and if he had nothing to smile about when it was taken, you could at least see the potential for a roguish, cockeyed grin. By his twenty-fifth year, he’d visibly aged, his hair receded and thinning, and after seven years of captivity he had the sullen look of a convict. By thirty, he was bald as a cue ball, and his skull had seemed to narrow. By thirty-five, his jowls had widened enough to render his neck almost non-existent, giving him a bullet-headed appearance that she found all the more unnerving for his dead-eyed stare.
By the time he was sixty, with astronauts not long on the moon, there was nothing left to connect Giles Shapleigh with who or what he’d been, neither his identity nor his species. Still, though, his transformation wasn’t yet complete.
He was merely catching up to his friends, neighbours and relatives. By the time of those Prohibition-era raids, most of the others had been this way for years—decades, some of them. Although they aged, they didn’t seem to weaken and, while they could be killed, if merely left to themselves, they most certainly didn’t die.
They could languish, though. As those first years went on, with the Innsmouth prisoners scattered throughout a handful of remote quarantine facilities across New England, it became obvious that they didn’t do well in the kind of environment reserved for normal prisoners: barred cells, bright lights, exercise yards… dryness. Some of them developed a skin condition that resembled powdery mildew, a white, dusty crust that spread across them in patches. There was a genuine fear that, whatever it was, it might jump from captives to captors, and prove more virulent in wholly human hosts, although this never happened.
Thus it was decided: they didn’t need a standard prison so much as they needed their own zoo. That they got it was something she found strangely heartening. What was missing from the report, presumably because she had no need to know, was why.
While she didn’t want to admit it, Kerry had no illusions—the expedient thing would’ve been to kill them off. No one would have known, and undoubtedly there would’ve been those who found it an easy order to carry out. It was wartime, and if war proved anything, it proved how simple it was to dehumanise people even when they looked just like you. This was 1942, and this was already happening on an industrial scale across Europe. These people from Innsmouth would have had few advocates. To merely look at them was to feel revulsion, to sense a challenge to everything you thought you knew about the world, about what could and couldn’t be. Most people would look at them and think they deserved to die. They were an insult to existence, to cherished beliefs.