And why does it have to be the same thing I dread?
When she told him how they might be able to use that to their advantage, she expected Escovedo to say no, out of the question. Instead, he thought it over for all of five seconds and said yes.
“I don’t like it, but we need to fast-track this,” he said. “We don’t just eyeball their alignment in the pit, you know. We measure it with a laser. That’s how we know how precisely oriented they are. And since last night they’ve shifted. Whatever they’re cued in on has moved north.”
* * *
The next morning, dawn came as dawn should, the sky clear and the fog blown away and the sun an actual presence over the horizon. After two days of being scarcely able to see fifty feet in front of her, it seemed as if she could see forever. There was something joyously liberating in it. After just two days.
So what was it going to feel like for Barnabas Marsh to experience the ocean for the first time in more than eighty years? The true sea, not the simulation of it siphoned off and pumped into the pit. Restrained by a makeshift leash, yes, three riflemen ready to shoot from the shore, that too, three more ready to shoot from the parapet of the prison… but it would still be the sea.
That it would be Marsh they would try this with was inevitable. It might not be safe and they might get only one chance at this. He was cunning, she had to assume, but he was the oldest by far, and a direct descendant of the man who’d brought this destiny to Innsmouth in the first place. He would have the deepest reservoir of knowledge.
And, maybe, the arrogance to want to share it, and gloat.
Kerry was waiting by the shallows when they brought him down, at one end of a long chain whose other end was padlocked to the frame of a four-wheel all-terrain cycle that puttered along behind him—he might have been able to throw men off balance in a tug-of-war, but not this.
Although he had plenty of slack, Marsh paused a few yards from the water’s edge, stopping to stare out at the shimmering expanse of sea. The rest of them might have seen mistrust in his hesitation, or savouring the moment, but neither of these felt right. Reacquainting, she thought. That’s it.
He trudged forward then, trailing chain, and as he neared the water, he cast a curious look at her, standing there in a slick blue wetsuit they’d outfitted her with, face-mask and snorkel in her hand. It gave him pause again, and in whatever bit of Marsh that was still human, she saw that he understood, realised who was responsible for this.
Gratitude, though, was not part of his nature. Once in the water, he vanished in moments, marked only by the clattering of his chain along the rocks.
She’d thought it wise to allow Marsh several minutes alone, just himself and the sea. They were midway through it when Escovedo joined her at the water’s edge.
“You sure you’re up for this?” he said. “It’s obvious how much you don’t like the idea, even if it was yours.”
She glanced over at Marsh’s chain, now still. “I don’t like to see anything captive when it has the capacity to lament its conditions.”
“That’s not what I mean. If you think you’ve been keeping it under wraps that you’ve got a problem with water, you haven’t. I could spot it two days ago, soon as we left the mainland behind.”
She grinned down at her flippers, sheepish. Busted. “Don’t worry. I’ll deal.”
“But you still know how to snorkel…?”
“How else are you going to get over a phobia?” She laughed, needing to, and it helped. “It went great in the heated indoor pool.”
She fitted the mask over her face and popped in the snorkel’s mouthpiece, and went in after Marsh. Calves, knees… every step forward was an effort, so she thought of Tabby. The sooner I get results, the quicker I’ll get home. Thighs, waist… then she was in Marsh’s world, unnerved by the fear that she would find him waiting for her, tooth and claw, ready to rip through her in a final act of defiance.
But he was nowhere near her. She floated facedown, kicking lightly and visually tracking the chain down the slope of the shoreline, until she saw it disappear over a drop-off into a well that was several feet deeper. There he is. She hovered in place, staring down at Marsh as he luxuriated in the water. Ecstatic—there was no other word for him. Twisting, turning, undulating, the chain only a minor impediment, he would shoot up near the surface, then turn and plunge back to the bottom, rolling in the murk he stirred up, doing it again, again, again. His joyous abandon was like a child’s.
He saw her and stilled, floating midway between surface and sand, a sight from a nightmare, worse than a shark because even in this world he was so utterly alien.
And it was never going to get any less unnerving. She sucked in a deep breath through the snorkel, then plunged downward, keeping a bit of distance between them as she swam to the bottom.
Two minutes and then some—that was how long she could hold her breath.
Kerry homed in on a loose rock that looked heavy enough to counter her buoyancy, then checked the dive compass strapped to her wrist like an oversized watch. She wrestled the wave-smoothed stone into her lap and sat cross-legged on the bottom, matching as precisely as she could the latest of the south-westerly alignments that had so captivated Marsh and the other sixty-two of them. Sitting on the seabed with the Pacific alive around her, muffled in her ears and receding into a blue-green haze, as she half-expected something even worse than Marsh to come swimming straight at her out of the void.
Somewhere above and behind her, he was watching.
She stayed down until her lungs began to ache, then pushed free of the stone and rose to the surface, where she purged the snorkel with a gust of spent air, then flipped to return to the seabed. Closer this time, mere feet between her and Marsh as she settled again, no longer needing the compass—she found her bearing naturally, and time began to slow, and so did her heartbeat in spite of the fear, then the fear was gone, washed away in the currents that tugged at her like temptations.
Up again, down again, and it felt as if she were staying below longer each time, her capacity for breath expanding to fill the need, until she was all but on the outside of herself looking in, marvelling at this creature she’d become, amphibious, neither of the land nor the water, yet belonging to both. She lived in a bubble of breath in an infinite now, lungs satiated, awareness creeping forward along this trajectory she was aligned with, as if it were a cable that spanned the seas, and if she could only follow it, she would learn the secrets it withheld from all but the initiated—
And he was there, Barnabas Marsh a looming presence drifting alongside her. If there was anything to read in his cold face, his unplumbed eyes, it was curiosity. She had become something he’d never seen before, something between his enemies and his people, and changing by the moment.
She peered at him, nothing between them now but the thin plastic window of her mask and a few nourishing inches of water.
What is it that’s out there? she asked. Tell me. I want to know. I want to understand.
It was true—she did. She would wonder even if she hadn’t been asked to. She would wonder every day for the rest of her life. Her existence would be marred by not knowing.
Tell me what it is that lies beyond…
She saw it then, a thought like a whisper become an echo, as it began to build on itself, the occlusions between worlds parting in swirls of ink and oceans. And there was so much of it, this was something that couldn’t be—who could build such a thing, and who would dream of finding it here, at depths that might crush a submarine—then she realised that all she was seeing was one wall, one mighty wall, built of blocks the size of boxcars, a feat that couldn’t be equalled even on land. She knew without seeing the whole that it spanned miles, that if this tiny prison island could sink into it, it would be lost forever, an insignificant patch of pebbles and mud to what lived there—