This wasn’t a prison where the inmates would need to be protected from each other. They were all on the same side down there, prisoners of an undeclared war.
Above the pit, the roof was louvred, so apparently, although closed now, it could be opened. They could see the sky. They would have air and rain. Sunshine, if that still meant anything to them.
The water, she’d learned from last night’s briefing paper, was no stagnant pool. It was continually refreshed, with drains along the bottom and grated pipes midway up the walls that periodically spewed a gusher like a tidal surge. Decades of this had streaked the walls with darker stains, each like a ragged brush stroke straight down from the rusty grate to the foaming surface of their makeshift sea.
Fish even lived in it, and why not? The prisoners had to eat.
Not at the moment, though. They lined the rocks in groups, as many as would fit on any given surface, sitting, squatting, facing the unseen ocean in eerily perfect alignment to one another.
“What do you make of it?” he asked.
Kerry thought of fish she’d watched in commercial aquariums, in nature documentaries, fish swimming in their thousands, singularly directed, and then, in an instantaneous response to some stimulus, changing directions in perfect unison. “I would say they’re schooling.”
From where they’d entered the observation deck, she could see only their backs, and began to circle the retaining wall for a better view.
Their basic shapes looked human, but the details were all wrong.
Their skin ranged from dusky grey to light green, with pale bellies—dappled sometimes, an effect like sunlight through water—and rubbery-looking even from here, as though it would be slick as a wetsuit to the touch, at least the areas that hadn’t gone hard and scaly. Some wore the remnants of clothing, although she doubted anything would hold up long in the water and rocks, while others chose to go entirely without. They were finned and they were spiny, no two quite the same, and their hands webbed between the fingers, their feet ridiculously outsized. Their smooth heads were uncommonly narrow, all of them, but still more human than not. Their faces, though, were ghastly. These were faces for another world, with thick-lipped mouths made to gulp water, and eyes to peer through the murky gloom of the deep. Their noses were all but gone, just vestigial nubs now, flattened and slitted. The females’ breasts had been similarly subsumed, down to little more than hard bumps.
She clutched the top of the wall until her fingernails began to bend. Not even photographs could truly prepare you for seeing them in the flesh.
I wish I’d never known, she thought. I can never be the same again.
“You want to just pick one at random, see where it goes?” Escovedo asked.
“How do you see this working? We haven’t talked about that,” she said. “What, you pull one of them out and put us in a room together, each of us on either side of a table?”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“It seems so artificial. The environment of an interrogation room, I mean. I need them open, if that makes sense. Their minds, open. A room like that, it’s like you’re doing everything you can to close them off from the start.”
“Well, I’m not sending you down there into the middle of all sixty-three of them, if that’s what you’re getting at. I have no idea how they’d react, and there’s no way I could guarantee your safety.”
She glanced at the guard posts, only now registering why they were so perfectly triangulated. Nothing was out of reach of their rifles.
“And you don’t want to set up a situation where you’d have to open fire on the group, right?”
“It would be counter-productive.”
“Then you pick one,” she said. “You know them better than I do.”
* * *
If the Innsmouth prisoners still had a sense of patriarchy, then Escovedo must have decided to start her at the top of their pecking order.
The one they brought her was named Barnabas Marsh, if he even had a use any more for a name that none of his kind could speak. Maybe names only served the convenience of their captors now, although if any name still carried weight, it would be the name of Marsh. Barnabas was the grandson of Obed Marsh, the ship’s captain who, as village legend held, had sailed to strange places above the sea and below it, and brought back both the DNA and partnerships that had altered the course of Innsmouth’s history.
Barnabas had been old even when taken prisoner, and by human terms he was now beyond ancient. She tried not to think of him as monstrous, but no other word wanted to settle on him, on any of them. Marsh, though, she found all the more monstrous for the fact that she could see in him the puffed-up, barrel-chested bearing of a once-domineering man who’d never forgotten who and what he had been.
Behind the wattles of his expanded neck, gills rippled with indignation. The thick lips, wider than any human mouth she’d ever seen, stretched downward at each corner in a permanent, magisterial sneer.
He waddled when he walked, as if no longer made for the land, and when the two guards in suits of body armour deposited him in the room, he looked her up and down, then shuffled in as if resigned to tolerating her until this interruption was over. He stopped long enough to give the table and chairs in the centre of the room a scornful glance, then continued to the corner, where he slid to the floor with a shoulder on each wall, the angle where they met giving room for his sharp-spined back.
She took the floor as well.
“I believe you can understand me. Every word,” Kerry said. “You either can’t or won’t speak the way you did for the first decades of your life, but I can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t still understand me. And that puts you way ahead of all the rest of God’s creatures I’ve managed to communicate with.”
He looked at her with his bulging dark eyes, and Escovedo had been right. It was a disconcertingly inhuman gaze, not even mammalian. It wasn’t anthropomorphizing to say that mammals—dogs, cats, even a plethora of wilder beasts—had often looked at her with a kind of warmth. But this, these eyes… they were cold, with a remote scrutiny that she sensed regarded her as lesser in every way.
The room’s air, cool to begin with, seemed to chill even more as her skin crawled with an urge to put distance between them. Could he sense that she feared him? Maybe he took this as a given. That he could be dangerous was obvious—the closer you looked, the more he seemed covered with sharp points, none more lethal than the tips of his stubby fingers. But she had to trust the prison staff to ensure her safety. While there was no guard in here to make the energy worse than it was already, they were being watched on a closed-circuit camera. If Marsh threatened her, the room would be flooded with a gas that would put them both out in seconds. She’d wake up with a headache, and Marsh would wake up back in the pit.
And nothing would be accomplished.
“I say God’s creatures because I don’t know how else to think of you,” she said. “I know how they think of you. They think you’re all aberrations. Unnatural. Not that I’m telling you anything you probably haven’t already overheard from them every day for more than eighty years.”
And did that catch his interest, even a little? If the subtle tilt of his head meant anything, maybe it did.
“But if you exist, entire families of you, colonies of you, then you can’t be an aberration. You’re within the realm of nature’s possibilities.”
Until this moment, she’d had no idea what she would say to him. With animals, she was accustomed to speaking without much concern for what exactly she said. It was more how she said it. Like very young children, animals cued in on tone, not language. They nearly always seemed to favour a higher-pitched voice. They responded to touch.