Deedee Dawson—June 18, 1949:
I try to shake off the anger. You can’t let people play you like that, and Peters’s offense was no accident. I should’ve stuck around. I’m glad I didn’t.
Caleb trembles. Such strange intimacy—I can feel his pulse as if it races through my own chest, the pain as it pushes blood too fast beneath his skin. But when I touch his shoulder, I can still sense the masks between us. Friction, thrill, and the comfort of two people who respect each other’s stupidly overgrown shields.
“So, bank?” I ask.
“Bank. And a decent hotel. I want a place where they can’t find us. Let’s figure out how we’re going to keep up the search without them, and keep in touch with the others. Oh gods, I want to strangle that jackass.” His fingers flex, full of violence decades suppressed.
“So do I. But it would upset Mary.”
He snorted. “If she wants to work with that kind of man, she deserves what she gets. Spector offered her the chance to leave.”
My shoulders lift. “I guess she likes knowing where she stands with them. Maybe it’s fun to be the only person in the room who knows what she’s doing.” I’m not being fair, but I don’t want to be fair right now. “Bank. Then get ourselves a big room with a big bed. Then—” I don’t know if it’s his twitchiness or mine, or if there’s a difference. My nerves jangle with unspent tension, fury with no outlet. “—Do you have a brilliant idea for what we should do tonight?”
He slumps, sullen. “No.”
“Good. Neither of us is going to come up with anything useful until we blow off some steam. You know how to dance?” I know damn well he doesn’t.
“I can waltz, a little.” He ducks his head. I imagine decades-past lessons in deportment. Little Caleb, concentrating hard on stepping in time, one-two-three one-two-three, with a roomful of bug-eyed five-year-olds. It’s hard to picture him so young.
“I’m not thinking about a waltz. Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up.” In R’lyehn I add, “I’ve seen how fast you learn.” I earn a fleeting smile.
We find a bank, and an absurdly glitzy hotel, and a department store—three reassuring reminders that we’re still far enough north that money can buy obsequious politeness. I start to relax, and see Caleb tucking his tension deeper below his skin. Nothing’s going to make him pretty, but in New York we can find a proper suit for his lanky frame, and I know how to look at him right. A proper dress for me, too, picked to suit my own tastes rather than some assignment.
Taking my pasty-skinned Deep One boyfriend to a Harlem nightclub may not be the subtlest thing I’ve done all year. But I want, for once, to be the one who fits in. The desire to see people I used to know churns in my belly with the terror that someone I knew will see me and ask where the hell I’ve been.
Massachusetts has been safe, after a fashion. Morecambe County’s lily-white, and I’ve rarely dared socialize with the other negro servants from the university—or better yet, sneak off to Boston to relax with people who wouldn’t ask why the dean’s floozy can swear in Russian. This isn’t safe: the painful pressures and stupid choices of my childhood lurk far too close.
The music’s loud, just on the edge of what I know Caleb can handle. The crowd flashes. We get drinks; he watches the dancers. I watch him—when he catches the rhythm, starts nodding and tapping his feet, I pull him out on the floor. He’s new to it, but he knows his body and mine.
We’re outside for a breath of air, sharing a cigarette, when a girl with curls spilling past her shoulders and a grin a mile wide comes through the door trailing the soaring notes of a sax solo. She stares at me and her grin widens.
“Thea—is that you?”
Every bit of FBI training rises in the moment when I don’t flinch, when I look up with my arm easy around Caleb’s shoulder and ask, “You looking for someone?”
Carrie Waters, who I swapped notes with all through grade school, loses the edges of her smile and says, “Sorry, I guess not.”
“Need a light?”
She doesn’t, thankfully, and goes off down the walk.
“You okay?” Caleb asks when she’s out of sight.
“Yeah. She was just confused.”
He rubs my back, and I lean against him. He doesn’t pry, doesn’t reassure me that I can tell him anything. “Do you want to go back?”
“Sure. I’m getting tired, and we’ve got a long day ahead.” My feet still itch to dance, but I’d just keep looking over my shoulder. “Whatever we do with it.”
We walk slowly. He flirts in two languages; I flirt in six; he almost distracts me from worrying.
I’ve never been as close to anyone as I am to Caleb, or for that matter to Aphra and Charlie and Audrey. Unlike the rest of them, I came to that closeness with my eyes open. I wanted magic that no one could take away, and intimacy was the price. I’ve been surprised by how easy it is. The confluence slips around the walls that have plagued family and lovers my whole life. Maybe it’s the certainty. With them, there’s no doubt and nothing to prove; our connection is tangible as a held hand.
But secrecy’s a long habit, and lies told long enough become real. The confluence doesn’t care about the shameful secrets they think I hide, the wounds Peters imagines he can tear open with his insinuations. Now, too close to home and yearning for its taste as much as they yearn for their own, I wonder what they’d think of my true past, duller and realer than what they assume.
* * *
I settled on the floor an acceptable distance from the slate, with Neko beside me. Audrey prowled the boundaries. My fascination and pent-up anger eventually mixed with reluctantly admitted boredom. It was slow, painstaking work. A little over two hours after they began, they gathered around the slate. Mary still leaned on Barlow’s arm. They lit candles much like the ones in the shop window. Mary spoke—no chant, just a string of equations and unfamiliar words—and if there was blood I didn’t see it. Only two of the three ingredients I’d always thought necessary for any spell, but the diagram glowed briefly and flowed into a new configuration, and the candles guttered out.
Peters stood, stretched, flicked on the light, and described the configuration to Mary. Based on her answer and an apparent correction from Trumbull (neither of which I understood), he drew an arc on the map around one edge of the Bronx.
The cycle began again. They drew, and read, and argued, and at midnight made another mark on a different part of the map. And again. My eyes were dry and drooping by the third round. Exhaustion made me almost willing to trust their judgment—or at least to trust that if I napped on the couch, someone would wake me for any deviation from the earlier working. Audrey tucked her legs up and dozed on a cushioned chair. Neko draped her arms across the couch’s spine, on watch and vigilant.
I fell asleep thinking about new men of the water, and dreamed fields of mushrooms. When their light waxed, I half-woke to count candlelit map-marks, then dropped back to sleep.
I woke fully when Spector and Charlie returned. The windows showed a sky bruising purple, and concrete rising bright out of sunless streets.
“Where are Mr. Marsh and Miss Dawson?” asked Spector.
“They decided not to work with us,” I said stiffly. If he followed the track of my glare, he could draw his own conclusions.
Three arcs lined the map’s edges. Within their intersection, three smaller arcs converged on a space of a few blocks. Barlow promised we’d find our quarry there.
“Hunts Point,” said Spector, looking over his colleague’s shoulder.
“Your stomping grounds, right?” asked Barlow.
“Maybe they hide their wings under those scarves,” said Peters. He mimed the head coverings I’d seen on women around the boardinghouse, tying an imaginary knot under his chin. My hands clenched, unseen. How long can I keep an eye on him before I lose all self-control?
Spector drew back from the map. “It’s next to St. Mary’s Park, sure. But there’s a stretch of old factories in between, and it’s full of abandoned buildings. You could hide anything in there.”
* * *
The area where we came out of the subway wasn’t quite as Spector described. In an ordinary town, the traffic by foot and car would have seemed ordinary; it was only in contrast to the city around it that Hunts Point could be described as unpopulated. The map led us not to abandoned warehouses, but to low buildings with flat roofs and shuttered or boarded windows. People spoke with animated gestures, laughed raucously on stoops—but even so the city’s energy felt muted.
Here in the waking world, the Outer Ones’ abode wasn’t obviously marked. I lifted my nostrils, trying to catch a whiff of green, but smelled only New York’s pervasive dust and smoke. Nor did vining mushrooms announce the presence of something wondrous and alien. But on the stoop of one clearly uninhabited building—windows shattered on the first floor, empty even of cheap boards—loiterers looked not at each other but at the street. And they stood out just as we did. An Asian man and a white woman bent their heads together; two black men sat on the step below them, one older and bearded, the other young and clean-shaven.
A fifth person sat beside the Asian man, reading a book. I couldn’t see his face clearly. But the Asian man—Chinese, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure—elbowed the other’s side. “Hey, I didn’t know you had littermates!”
The man looked up. His skin was darker than his mother’s, the far end of Innsmouth’s spectrum from my own. It padded his bones well. Long fingers wrapped his book. He had large eyes set high in his face, a thick neck, and a wide mouth just now gaping open. He was unmistakable. Freddy Laverne elbowed his companion back and said, “Of course I do. Too smart for anyone to drown us!” But he stood when I came over. My companions waited across the street, even Spector’s colleagues giving me this moment on my own.
If I’d been unsure how to talk to Frances, I found myself utterly tongue-tied with her son. He stared back, seeming equally uncertain, equally fascinated. Eventually he asked, quietly, “Are we related?”
“Yes. Distantly.” I hesitated. At last I said, “Cousin. We’ve been looking for you.”
“You brought a lot of company,” said the white woman. She was thick-set with graying hair, and clearly none of our kin.
“Did you, um, come looking here last night?” asked Freddy.
“Yes,” I said again. “It seemed like the best way to find your … hosts?” Do you need rescuing?
“They detected an intrusion.” He turned the book over, and over again, passing it hand to hand. Science fiction pulp, I noted, the sort we’d sell for a penny at Charlie’s store. “That’s why they sent us out. I’d better take you to meet them.”
“We’d like that,” I said. “But why don’t we talk first?” I tilted my head toward a spot on the sidewalk a few feet away, within sight of his friends (if friends they were), but out of earshot if we kept our voices low.
He glanced nervously at the others on the stoop. I couldn’t tell whether he sought their support, or feared their interference. If they were captors, I might be grateful for the gaggle of FBI agents at my back. “I can talk right here.”
I wanted to press. But a confrontation could easily blossom out of control—some of my own companions no more trustworthy than his. “Your mother’s looking for you, and those people back there say a dozen others have gone missing. What’s going on?”
“Mom doesn’t get it. She doesn’t think much of me when I’m home—anyway, it doesn’t matter. You went looking in the near spaces, so you’ve got to know what’s below.”
“The Outer Ones,” I said. Mindful of all the witnesses looking on, potential interference as well as backup, I continued: “I’ve heard stories about them. If you don’t want to be here, we can help, in ways no one else could.”
That earned glares from his companions, and he shook his head vehemently. “All of us ‘missing’ people, we’re here because we want to be. There’s so much wonder and glory in the universe, why would we stay in the neat little holes our families make for us?” He peered over my shoulder. “Those guys look like a bunch of cops. Can you get them to go away? I tell you we’re not ‘missing,’ we’re just not where we were.”
“They’re going to want to see that for themselves, I’m afraid,” I said.
“I can’t introduce them to everyone,” said Freddy. “Not everyone’s here in the mine. Not everyone’s even on Earth.” He announced this last with whispered relish. “I’ve heard stories about you. I always thought Mom made them up. If you try to make me go back or take me into the sea, they can stop you.”
“We’re not going to force you to do anything.” His fervent enthusiasm for the Outer Ones made my skin prickle, seeming to confirm my worst suspicions. I couldn’t fully articulate the sense of danger, but I wanted to stay out here, with friends and backup close to hand. But I could already tell that I’d learn nothing that way. Another push, and he’d retreat behind that boarded-up door. I held out my hands. “If you can promise our safety, we’d like to meet your new friends.”
“That would be great,” he said. Another glance across the street, pupils wide and eyes narrow. “How many of these people do you need to drag along?”
The answer to that question took extended negotiation. It would have stretched longer if Barlow had been willing to look indecisive. He wanted to bring his whole team, but I feared what he—or worse, Peters—would say to these creatures we barely understood. I didn’t know what we’d meet below, but I didn’t expect anything as simple as violence. Barlow and Mary had an argument that never rose to the level of words. In the end, Mary and Spector were chosen to represent the state’s first deliberate contact with creatures from another world.
I was grateful for Caleb’s absence; I knew what Grandfather would have said if we both descended into such unknown territory. Trumbull wanted to see for herself people who could so distress the Yith. I didn’t want to do without either Audrey or Charlie, but reluctantly delegated Audrey to stay behind and ride herd on the FBI agents.
“If you think I’m coming all the way to New York and then hanging out on the street while you talk to people with wings, think again,” said Neko.
The deliberations kept me from thinking too carefully about what I’d agreed to. Like Neko, I could hardly imagine finding our cousin allied with otherworldly creatures, and then avoiding them. Even if that might be the wiser course. We knew that they were old and powerful, and that the Yith despised but had not destroyed them. We knew very little else.
All this, to gain the trust of a boy we’d just met. He couldn’t possibly understand how valuable he was.
Freddy led us inside. The hall was dingy, scattered with plaster pebbles and broken glass. Rickety wooden stairs descended into bare-bulbed shadow. His fellows stayed behind. I could only guess what messages they’d sent ahead, and what powers might now watch over him, invisible and immanent.
“It’s a long way down,” he warned. Then, shyly, “Tell me about our family. Are there a lot of us?”
I was grateful anew that Barlow and Peters remained above. Mary had already met my elders, and seen us vulnerable. “In the water, there are. On land, I know of none except for my brother, and you and your mother. You’ll meet Caleb later.”
He listened as I told him about the raid, and about what it meant to go into the water. Where his mother had twitched, questioned, doubted, Freddy soaked up these ideas in stillness, even as he directed us down a labyrinth of increasingly clean and well-lit corridors and stairs. We were beyond the building above, I thought; these must be new excavations.
“Is Mom going to do that?” he asked. “Grow scales and gills? Am I?”
“You both might,” I said. I wanted to give him a more certain answer—no. I wanted the more certain answer myself, to know whether this new relative might someday dive beneath Union Reef and swim Y’ha-nthlei’s carven streets, or stand with intimidating confidence born of centuries’ experience. “Anyone with even a little of our blood has a chance. But the more generations that blood’s been diluted, the smaller the chance.”
“Well, I suppose if I really want scales, I can ask them.”
“It’s more than scales,” I said. I ran my hand across the whitewashed wall beside us, reassured by its cool solidity. We were deep underground. “It’s more than the metamorphosis. You’ve always stood out, I know. Men of the air think we’re strange and ugly. Getting our heads measured is about the best we can expect. Imagine living surrounded by people like you. People who think you’re normal and reasonable, and who won’t judge what you can do based on the shape of your eyes.”
He stopped at a door more solid than any we’d come across thus far. “I have imagined that. All my life. And I’ve finally found it.” The certainty in his voice, the confident awe, were things I’d heard before—and they confirmed my premonition of danger. For I’d heard them from a woman shining with faith in Shub-Nigaroth’s love, eager to walk into the ocean and drown herself for an imagined immortality.
Freddy looked over the party that trailed behind us. “They’re through here. Show respect.” And he opened the door.