None of them seemed to recognise her from television, although would they let on if they did? She recognised none of them, either, nothing in anyone’s face or feet that hinted at the old, reviled ‘Innsmouth look’. They no longer seemed to have anything to hide here, but maybe the instinct that they did went so far back that they knew no other way.
Although what to make of that one storefront on Eliot Street, in what passed for the heart of the town? The stencilled lettering—charmingly antiquated and quaint—on the plate-glass window identified the place as
THE INNSMOUTH SOCIETY FOR PRESERVATION AND RESTORATION.
It seemed never to be open.
Yet it never seemed neglected.
Invariably, whenever she peered through the window Kerry would see that someone had been there since the last time she’d looked, but it always felt as if she’d missed them by five minutes or so. She would strain for a better look at the framed photos on the walls, tintypes and sepia tones, glimpses of bygone days that seemed to be someone’s idea of something worth bringing back.
Or perhaps their idea of a homecoming.
It was January in New England, and most days so cold it redefined the word bitter, but she didn’t miss a single one, climbing seven flights of stairs to take up her vigil for as long as she could endure it. The house was an old Victorian on Lafayette Street, four proud storeys tall, peaked and gabled to within an inch of its mouldering life. The only thing she cared about was that its roof had an iron-railed widow’s walk with an unobstructed view of the decrepit harbour and the breakwater and, another mile out to sea, the humpbacked spine of rock called Devil Reef.
As was the custom during the height of the Age of Sail, the widow’s walk had been built around the house’s main chimney. Build a roaring fire down below, and the radiant bricks would keep her warm enough for a couple of hours at a time, even when the sky spat snow at her, while she brought the binoculars to her eyes every so often to check if there was anything new to see out there.
“I’m bored.” This from Tabitha, nearly every day. Booorrrrred, the way she said it. “There’s nothing to do here.”
“I know, sweetie,” Kerry would answer. “Just a little longer.”
“When are they coming?” Tabby would ask.
“Soon,” she would answer. “Pretty soon.”
But in truth, she couldn’t say. Their journey was a long one. Would they risk traversing the locks and dams of the Panama Canal? Or would they take the safer route, around Argentina’s Cape Horn, where they would exchange Pacific for Atlantic, south for north, then head home, at long last home.
She knew only that they were on their way, more certain of this than any sane person had a right to be. The assurance was there whenever the world grew still and silent, more than a thought… a whisper that had never left, as if not all of Barnabas Marsh had died, the greater part of him subsumed into the hive mind of the rest of his kind. To taunt? To punish? To gloat? In the weeks after their island prison fell, there was no place she could go where its taint couldn’t follow. Not Montana, not Los Angeles, not New Orleans, for the episode of The Animal Whisperer they’d tried to film before putting it on hiatus.
She swam with them in sleep. She awoke retching with the taste of coldest blood in her mouth. Her belly skimmed through mud and silt in quiet moments; her shoulders and flanks brushed through shivery forests of weeds; her fingers tricked her into thinking that her daughter’s precious cheek felt cool and slimy. The dark of night could bring on the sense of a dizzying plunge to the blackest depths of ocean trenches.
Where else was left for her to go but here, to Innsmouth, the place that time seemed to be trying hard to forget.
And the more days she kept watch from the widow’s walk, the longer at a time she could do it, even while the fire below dwindled to embers, and so the more it seemed that her blood must’ve been going cold in her veins.
“I don’t like it here,” Tabby would say. “You never used to yell in your sleep until we came here.”
How could she even answer that? No one could live like this for long.
“Why can’t I go stay with Daddy?” Tabby would ask. Daddeeeee, the way she said it.
It really would’ve been complete then, wouldn’t it? The humiliation, the surrender. The admission: I can’t handle it any more, I just want it to stop, I want them to make it stop. It still mattered, that her daughter’s father had once fallen in love with her when he thought he’d been charmed by some half-wild creature who talked to animals, and then once he had her, tried to drive them from her life because he realised he hated to share. He would never possess all of her.
You got as much as I could give, she would tell him, as if he too could hear her whisper. And now they won’t let go of the rest.
“Tell me another story about them,” Tabby would beg, and so she would, a new chapter of the saga growing between them about kingdoms under the sea where people lived forever, and rode fish and giant seahorses, and how they had defenders as tall as the sky who came boiling up from the waters to send their enemies running.
Tabby seemed to like it.
When she asked if there were pictures, Kerry knew better, and didn’t show her the ones she had, didn’t even acknowledge their existence. The ones taken from Colonel Escovedo’s office while the rains drenched the wreckage, after she’d helped the few survivors that she could, the others dead or past noticing what she might take from the office of their commanding officer, whom nobody could locate anyway.
The first eight photos Tabby would’ve found boring. As for the ninth, Kerry wasn’t sure she could explain to a six-year-old what exactly it showed, or even to herself. Wasn’t sure she could make a solid case for what was the mouth and what was the eye, much less explain why such a thing was allowed to exist.
One of them, at least, should sleep well while they were here.
Came the day, at last, in early February, when her binoculars revealed more than the tranquil pool of the harbour, the snow and ice crusted atop the breakwater, the sullen chop of the winter-blown sea. Against the slate-coloured water, they were small, moving splotches the colour of algae. They flipped like seals, rolled like otters. They crawled onto the ragged dark stone of Devil Reef, where they seemed to survey the kingdom they’d once known, all that had changed about it and all that hadn’t.
And then they did worse.
Even if something was natural, she realised, you could still call it a perversity.
Was it preference? Was it celebration? Or was it blind obedience to an instinct they didn’t even have to capacity to question? Not that it mattered. Here they were, finally, little different from salmon now, come back to their headwaters to breed, indulging an urge eighty-some years strong.
It was only a six-block walk to the harbour, and she had the two of them there in fifteen minutes. This side of Water Street, the wharves and warehouses were deserted, desolate, frosted with frozen spray and groaning with every gust of wind that came snapping in over the water.
She wrenched open the wide wooden door to one of the smaller buildings, the same as she’d been doing every other day or so, the entire time they’d been here, first to find an abandoned rowboat, and then to make sure it was still there. She dragged it down to the water’s edge, ploughing a furrow in a crust of old snow, and once it was in the shallows, swung Tabby into it, then hopped in after. She slipped the oars into the rusty oarlocks, and they were off.
“Mama…?” Tabitha said after they’d pushed past the breakwater and cleared the mouth of the harbour for open sea. “Are you crying?”
In rougher waters now, the boat heaved beneath them. Snow swirled in from the depths overhead and clung to her cheeks, eyelashes, hair, and refused to melt. She was that cold. She was always that cold.