THE STAFF AT the Gilman House Hotel, Owen gathered, were used to having people show up tired, hurt, and friendless, bringing nothing with them but the clothes on their backs. The housekeeper, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, asked if he’d taken a gunshot or any other injury, and then quickly ran through a list of his needs, all the while guiding him through the hotel to what he gathered would be his room for the time being. It turned out to be much like the one he’d stayed in while visiting Innsmouth the first time, a clean little space with furniture that looked most of a century old. He slumped in the chair while the housekeeper went for toiletries and linen, blinked awake from a doze when she came back, and when she left again, undressed and showered, leaving his rumpled clothing on the floor as she’d requested. The amulet he’d been given by the witch of Pickman’s Corners stayed with him; he hung it over the hook on the bathroom door, put it on again as soon as he’d toweled off.
A shower and shave did a good deal to make him feel less feral, if no less tired, and he came out of the bathroom to find his clothes gone and another set piled neatly on the bed: the sort of thing he dimly remembered his grandfather wearing, wool slacks, a pressed cotton shirt, a knitted vest whose pattern somehow made him think of fishermen in old photos. Still, they fit comfortably enough, and he had time to towel his head again and drag a comb through his sand-colored hair before a knock came at the door.
“Better?” the housekeeper asked. “Good. Supper’s still an hour or so off, but Miss Marsh would like to speak to you if you’re willing.”
“Sure,” Owen said.
The housekeeper nodded and led the way through the windings of the hotel, and then through a door with a peephole in it. On the other side was what looked very much like a living room, with a big old-fashioned couch and a low table on one side, a scattering of chairs on the other. A brown-haired woman in a white blouse and a long brown woolen skirt was sitting on the couch, reading a book, her feet tucked up under her where they couldn’t be seen.
“Laura my dear,” said the housekeeper, “Mr. Merrill. Mr. Merrill, Laura Marsh.”
She turned. To Owen’s surprise, it was the woman he’d seen behind the hotel’s front desk on his earlier visit to Innsmouth. She was clearly just as startled to see him. After a moment, she motioned to the other end of the couch and said, “Won’t you have a seat. Would you like tea, coffee?”
“Tea, please,” Owen said.
“Good.” She smiled unexpectedly. “Tea’s been an Innsmouth thing since I don’t know when: back to the days of the China trade, probably. We’ve got coffee, but—” Her nose wrinkled. “Not my favorite.”
“NYARLATHOTEP SAID YOU’LL get along well here,” said Laura Marsh. “No offense meant, but I’m not so sure of that.”
The two of them were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, teacups in hand. The housekeeper had vanished after introducing them, returned a moment later with the cups and a full teapot in a cozy, vanished again. The saltwater scent he’d noticed around the waitress at Barney’s and the housekeeper surrounded her as well. Perfume? He suspected not.
“Why?”
“You’re human. Most people in Innsmouth aren’t—not entirely, or not at all. Humans don’t always handle that well.”
“I suppose I’ll just have to see.”
“We could put that to the test right now, if you like.”
He finished his cup of tea. “Sure.”
“More tea?”
“Please.”
All at once something long and slender snaked out from beneath her skirt: a smooth tentacle the same color as the rest of her skin. It was neither squamous nor rugose; it looked like ordinary human skin and flesh, drawn out somehow into an unhuman shape and tapering to a flattened point. It wrapped its tip three times around the handle of the teapot, lifted the pot, and brought it over to the couch. Owen, who had somehow managed not to drop his cup in surprise, held it steady while the tentacle bent, deftly filling it with tea. It filled Laura’s cup as well, set the pot back down, and then curled in a graceful spiral on the couch between them.
After a moment, he looked up from the tentacle to her face. She had been watching him the whole time. “Good,” she said. “I’ve seen humans scream and toss themselves out the nearest window for less than that.”
He sipped tea to cover his shock, set down the cup, drew in a ragged breath. “May I ask you a very personal question?”
“Go ahead.”
“How many of those do you have?”
Her hand went to her mouth, stifling a laugh. “Just two. Are you disappointed?”
“Well—”
She shook her head, obviously amused. “Under—certain circumstances—people here are born with tentacles in place of the more usual sort of body parts. Usually it’s the arms, the legs, or the lips that are affected.”
“The lips—oh. Of course.”
“Just like the Dreaming Lord. In Innsmouth we say that it’s very good luck to have a child like that. I have a great-uncle with mouth tentacles; he used to make my sister and I laugh ourselves into hiccups sometimes. He’d take a spoon in every single tentacle when ice cream got served, and...” She mimed a flurry of movement ferrying dessert to mouth.
Owen laughed; the image made the concept of tentacles less unnerving to him. “That would be something to see.”
“Oh, it was.” Then, in a more serious tone: “Here in Innsmouth, though, that sort of thing is normal. When you’re growing up, some of your friends have tentacles, the rest don’t, and if you’re lucky you have an aunt or an uncle in Y’ha-nthlei who comes to visit now and then, and takes you swimming in the deep water out past Devil’s Reef when the weather’s good. If you met my sister Belinda, I promise you you’d be out the window screaming the same minute, but to me, she’s family, and that’s just what she looks like.”
Owen considered the tentacle curled up between them on the couch, tried to think of some way to ask what he wanted to ask. “You want to touch it,” she said suddenly, as though she’d read his thoughts.
He looked up at her, embarrassed. Laura was watching him with something just a little too ambivalent to be called a smile. “Well, yes,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be rude.”
“You’re not. For a human who’s just seen something of the real world, you’re being astonishingly polite. You haven’t even mentioned that we all smell like fish here.”
“You don’t,” Owen said, startled. She put her hand to her mouth, stifling another laugh, and he went on. “I noticed the—salt smell, if that’s what it is.”
“Yes. If you’ve got ancestors from Y’ha-nthlei, you inherit that. It’s—I forget the phrase; it’s been too long since high school biology class.”
“A dominant gene,” Owen guessed
“That’s the one.” The tentacle uncurled, flowed over his hand and wrapped itself gently around his wrist; the gesture felt oddly intimate. “The Deep Ones get rid of the salt in sea water through their skins, and so do we. If Innsmouth folk drink fresh water too often we get sick.”
“That makes sense.”
She considered him. “You’re taking all this amazingly well. Still, you’ve traveled with Nyarlathotep. I don’t know which of his powers he used when you were with him.”
“I’ve seen his dogs,” Owen said.
She shuddered. “Those terrify me.”
“Me too,” Owen admitted. “I saw him do a few other things. Mostly, though, it’s—it’s finding out that so much of what I thought I knew about the world is wrong.”
The tentacle gave his hand a reassuring squeeze, then slipped back off it and coiled on the couch between them. “I can hardly imagine what that would be like,” Laura said. “To be taught all your life that there are no elder races or elder gods, that humans are the only thinking beings that ever lived on Earth, that history started just five thousand years ago—it seems so bleak and barren to believe that.” She shook her head. “And then to find out that it’s all wrong, and that everyone you trusted to teach you how things are had either been deceived or was deliberately lying to you. That’s got to be hard.”
“Well, yes,” said Owen. “But it’s got its good side. I’d rather find out that the world is bigger and richer and stranger than I thought, instead of constantly being told that it’s smaller and poorer and less wonderful than it seems.”
“The sort of thing the other side says,” she said.
“Yes.” Then: “Who are they? What are they after?”
“You should probably ask Nyarlathotep about that,” Laura told him. “He knows the whole story better than anyone—well, other than the King.”
Before Owen could think of a response, the housekeeper came into the room. “Supper’s ready,” she said.
“Of course,” said Laura. She stood up in a fluid motion that would have been impossible for someone with legs. “You like seafood, I hope?”
“Of course.”
“Then Nyarlathotep may have been right after all. He usually is.” Walking with an odd but graceful gliding motion, she led the way into the next room
DINNER WAS A thick seafood chowder, homebaked bread, and slices of cold raw fish that they taught him to spear on the end of an oddly shaped two-tined fork and dip in any of half a dozen sauces before eating. There was water to drink, in two pitchers, one for fresh water and one for salt. He didn’t recognize half the ingredients in the chowder, but it would have been tasty under any circumstances; after the harrowing journey he’d had, it was beyond delicious. When he sat back, sated, the warmth in his belly and the weariness of the road very quickly had him struggling to stay awake.
“I think,” said the housekeeper, “that our guest needs to turn in.”
“No, I—” he started to say, and then had to stifle a yawn.
Laura laughed, not unkindly. “I’m curious. Where did you sleep last night?”
“I didn’t,” Owen said, fighting back sleepiness. “We walked all night. I got a couple of hours this morning on a witch’s couch. Before that, I spent most of the day sleeping in a pile of leaves in a ravine.” Suddenly he started laughing at the absurdity of it. “I know how silly that sounds,” he said, still laughing, “but that’s what happened.”
“Doesn’t sound silly at all,” said the housekeeper. “You travel with Nyarlathotep, by all accounts, that’s the sort of thing you can expect.”
Laura made a shooing motion with one hand. “For Dagon’s sake, go get some sleep. You don’t have to settle for dry leaves or spare couches tonight, at least.”
“You’ll want to be shown the way, I’d guess,” the housekeeper said to him, and without waiting for an answer led him back through the living room to the stairs, the hall, and the door of his room. “Sleep well,” she told him.
He thanked her and went inside. The little room seemed indescribably peaceful just then. He got ready for bed as quickly as he could, tucked the witch’s amulet under his pillow in the hope that that would protect him through the night, and settled into bed. He was asleep moments after his head touched the pillow.
He woke to find clear autumn sunlight splashing in through the room’s one small window, stretched, and wished he hadn’t. The muscles in his legs were still far from happy about his run out of the Miskatonic campus, the long walk that followed, and the last sprint into Innsmouth. Still, he felt comfortable and warm in the bed, and let himself lie there for some minutes before finally tossing back the covers and getting up.
As he got to his feet, though, the warmth trickled out of the sunlight, and the little room stopped feeling quiet and comfortable. The furniture and wallpaper took on a decrepit air, as though rot had spread through them during uncounted years of decay. The ceiling pressed down; Owen found himself wondering if the hotel was structurally sound, and whether the whole structure might suddenly fall on him. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but the thoughts clung to him the way a dog’s jaws cling to a rat.
He made himself shower, shave, and go through the rest of his normal morning routine, but the sense of something profoundly wrong would not let him go. Everything seemed twisted and menacing; the water in the shower was always either too hot to too cold, the towel felt clammy and slippery on his skin, the little bathroom crowded in on him from all sides. When he finally stumbled out of the bathroom, he was pale and shaking, his thoughts in tatters
Something could protect him, he recalled vaguely. What was it?
The cord of the witch’s amulet looping out from beneath his pillow reminded him. As he reached for it, though, voices seemed to shout in his mind, warning of unspeakable consequences if he let himself so much as come near it. Something in the voices seemed oddly familiar to him, though it was a moment before he placed the memory: they reminded him somehow of the not-quite-voice that had tried to stop him on the last run into Innsmouth.
Remembering that broke whatever grip the voices had on his mind, and he reached for the amulet. The moment his hand touched the cord, the sense of nightmare menace vanished.
He blinked in surprise, looked around. The little room was as comfortable as he remembered it from the night before, the elderly furnishings and wallpaper were pleasant rather than foreboding, and the sunlight slanting down through the little window was as clear and warm as it had ever been.
He pulled the amulet out from under his pillow, then deliberately set it on the desk and let go of it. As soon as he did so, the sunlight turned pale and cold, and the dreadful pressure and the sense of menace began to build around him again.
“No, you don’t,” he said aloud, and reached for the amulet. Once again, as soon as he touched it, the sense of nightmare stopped. He put the cord around his neck, settled the amulet in place above his heart, then got dressed and left the room.
He was able to find his way back down to the living room with only a moment or two of perplexity in the corridors. When he got there Laura Marsh was sitting on the couch, reading a book, just as she’d been the day before. She glanced up as the door opened, wished him a good morning, then gave him a second look and said, “Something’s wrong?”
“Yes,” Owen said. “I think someone’s trying to mess with my mind.”
“Do you need—” she began, and stopped, gave him another close look. “You’ve got a protective amulet, a strong one. Good.” She motioned him to a seat on the couch. “Tell me exactly what happened. Please.”
He settled onto the couch, described his experience in the room. Laura was nodding well before he was finished. “That’s one of their usual gambits,” she said then.
“So this is from—the other side?”
“Of course,” she said, as though startled by the question. “They’ll have something of yours—do you know about voor yet?” At his nod: “Okay, good. Anything that’s been in contact with you, especially if it’s something you care about, is linked to your voor, and they can use the link to focus one of their machines on you.”
Owen nodded, thinking about the coat and backpack that had ended up in Shelby’s hands, and everything he’d left behind in his room in Arkham.
“This may be difficult for you,” she said then, “but would you be willing to take off the amulet for a few minutes? It’ll be much easier for me to figure out exactly what sort of machine they’re using, and how best to work a counterspell.”
“I hope you won’t mind my asking,” said Owen, “but—are you a witch?”
“Me? No, I’m an initiate of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. We know some of the same things as the witches do, but if you want to have somebody’s ill-wishing taken off your cows, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Owen said, laughing. “Yes, I think I can stand another dose.” He took the amulet from around his neck, set it on the couch between them.
The moment it left his hand, everything in the room pressed inwards toward him. The light from the lamps turned pale and cold, the couch radiated corruption and decay, and Laura’s face became a pretty mask over infinite malignity. His imagination served up images of her mouth opening to reveal jagged yellow fangs, a dozen tentacles surging out from underneath her skirt to hold him helpless the couch while she drained his blood and battened on his flesh. He tried to force the images out of his mind, with no success.
“Don’t do that.” Laura’s voice seemed to come from measureless distance. “Bring the images to the center of your attention. Turn them into objects of awareness, so you don’t confuse them with yourself as the subject of awareness. Does that make sense?”
“Y-yes,” he managed to say, and tried to do what she’d asked. The images were elusive once he tried to pay attention to them, but after a time—how long a time, he could not tell—he managed to fix them in his attention, and as he did so the sense of dread and the images that clustered around it lost a little of their grip on his mind.
“Good,” she said then. “With your permission, I’m going to do something now to take most of the pressure off you.”
“Please.”
She began to sing in a low voice. The words were in a language he didn’t know—it sounded like bits of the elder speech he remembered out of Lovecraft’s stories—and the tune rose and fell hypnotically. Within moments the song was the only thing in Owen’s mind. Every trace of dread and every scrap of imagery had dissolved; he barely noticed Laura moving her hands in curious gestures, her eyes focused intently on him.
The song ended and she lowered her hands. A moment later he blinked, as though waking up. He could still feel the pressure of whatever the other side was trying to do to him, but it was far off. He found he could set it aside and ignore it, like a quiet but annoying noise. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s a lot easier to deal with.”
“I’m glad,” she said, blushing a little at the praise. “You should use the amulet only when you really need it—it’s strong, but its power can be used up, and you may need it for something much worse someday. And get some breakfast, too—even with magical help, you’ll need to keep your strength up to deal with an attack like that.”
“And you?”
“Oh, Becky and I ate something like three hours ago—it’s after ten. Nyarlathotep must really have run you ragged.” Then, with a look he couldn’t read: “When you’ve eaten, if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you some questions about that amulet.”
BREAKFAST WAS AS good as supper, though equally strange, and there was more raw fish; Owen guessed that it was an important part of Innsmouth home cooking, and wondered whether they’d gotten the habit from the Deep Ones in Y’ha-nthlei. Still, the meal left him feeling fortified, and when he went back into the living room he found that Laura had gotten a pot of tea made. She was sitting with the tips of her tentacles peeking out from under her skirt. He felt somehow comforted by that, as though it was a gesture of confidence in him.
When he’d settled on the couch and she’d poured him a cup of tea, he said, “You wanted to ask me about the amulet I have.”
“Yes. If you don’t mind, I’d like to know how you came to have an amulet that’s been blessed by Shub-Ne’hurrath.”
It took him a moment to parse the name. “So that’s how it’s pronounced.”
“Yes. If Lovecraft wasn’t long since dead, I’d go find him and slap him silly for turning her name into a cheap racial slur.”
“You make it sound personal.”
“Well, actually, it is.” She considered him for a long moment, then said, “I’m one of her children. Of course we all are, but in my case it’s a little more direct.”
Owen took that in. “Thus your—” He stopped in mid-sentence.
She put a hand to her mouth, stifling a laugh. “You really can mention my tentacles. It’s not considered rude or anything.” Then: “But you have something that’s been blessed by my mother, and I’m wondering how you came by it.”
He nodded. “It’s simple. Nyarlathotep told me, before I came here to Innsmouth that first time, that if I had to run to get away from—the other side—I should go to the white stone in the ravine north of Arkham.”
“I’ve heard of it,” she said. “It’s one of her holy places.”
He told her about his flight from the Miskatonic campus, his arrival at the stone and the old woman who greeted him there. “I’m—I’m not really sure what happened after that. She put a blanket over me to keep me warm—I’m not sure if it was actually a blanket, but that’s what it felt like. She told me that I was safe, and that I should follow the moon path north when I woke, and then she told me to sleep. I remember—” He stared into his teacup, trying to recover the last fragmentary memories of a shattered night. “She bent over me, and she was—huge. Bigger than anything human. And—” In a whisper: “I think she had horns.”
Laura nodded. “She often appears that way. Then you woke up?”
“In a pile of leaves.”
“You mentioned that last night.”
“But I wasn’t the one who piled up the leaves. When I woke up it was dusk, and I knew it was going to be another cold night. I didn’t have a coat, so I stuffed some of the leaves into my sweatshirt for insulation, to keep me warm. And they did; I was comfortable all night.”
“I bet,” said Laura. “You just had the feeling that you should have the leaves with you.”
“Pretty much.” He described his journey by night, and the distribution of the leaves in the house of the witch at Pickman’s Corners. “And that’s how I ended up with this amulet.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “Thank you.”
He considered her for a while, sipping his tea, and then asked, “May I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“Are there many—children of the Old Ones?”
“Oh, yes. A dozen of us in Innsmouth these days, many more in Y’ha-nthlei—I don’t know if anyone but Nyarlathotep knows how many there are all over the world, but you’ll find us wherever the elder races mingle with humans, or where humans still remember and reverence the Great Old Ones. That’s to say nothing of crosses between humans and the elder races, which happen all the time. The only people in Innsmouth who don’t have plenty of relatives in Y’ha-nthlei are people who were born somewhere else and moved here.”
“Do all the children of the Old Ones have tentacles, then?”
“No, not by a long way. One in two or three, maybe, comes out with tentacles in place of something or other, and then every so often you get an epigenetic cascade and the child doesn’t look human at all. My sister’s like that. With me, though, it was just the legs.”
He considered the tentacle-tips before him. They looked familiar and alien at the same time, human skin and flesh molded into an unhuman shape. “Your sister Belinda.”
“Yes.”
“Is she here in Innsmouth?”
“No, she mostly lives down in Y’ha-nthlei. Most of the really unhuman-looking crossbreeds go there once they grow up, if they can breathe water. It’s safer that way, and the Deep Ones are glad to have them.” She gestured with the tip of one tentacle. “These are more useful in water than on land, and Belinda has lots of them.”
“Y’ha-nthlei,” Owen said then. “When I was here in Innsmouth earlier, I saw a book about a little girl who went there. I think you might have written it.”
Unexpectedly, she blushed and looked away. “My stepmother thought you might have seen it.”
“Your—oh. Of course. Mrs. Marsh, the librarian.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t have time to read it,” Owen said, “just to look at a few of the pictures—which were really pretty good, you know.”
She mumbled something inaudible that might have been thanks.
“I’m sorry,” Owen said then. “Shouldn’t I have mentioned it?”
“No,” she said, composing herself with an evident effort. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just—I wrote that the year I finished high school. One of those things you do, and then get teased about for years.”
There was more to it than that, Owen guessed, but he let it pass. “I’m sorry if I stepped on a sore—” He stopped in confusion.
Laura laughed. “Tentacle,” she said. “As I said, you really can mention them.”