by Martha Wells
Oh, we heard them. We heard them, and we spent the bulk of our time trying to beat them out of ourselves if we were ever intending to cross the town line, because people gravitated toward strangeness, so we were only allowed to leave during the brief time when we were normal. Such a pretty, petty, pointless word.
I said none of that. I only pointed to the turnoff that would take us from the main road to my family’s home and said, “This way.”
Jeremy obligingly turned, looking slightly dismayed as Innsmouth dropped away behind us. “I thought we were staying in town.”
“Technically, we are. The town limits encompass six miles of shoreline. If we ever wanted to sell, everyone who lives here would walk away a millionaire.”
Human families living in our homes; human children playing on our beaches, unaware of what slumbered, peacefully dreaming, only a few fathoms away. It was a charmingly terrible thought, the sort of world that could never be allowed to exist. The consequences of a few brightly-colored shovels and pails would be too terrible for words.
I leaned back in my seat, still smiling, still speaking. “There are three bed and breakfasts in town. My parents are generally believed to operate the nicest one. We certainly have the best view. But you’ll see for yourself soon enough. Keep driving. We’re almost there now. We’re almost home.”
Jeremy said nothing, sensing, on some deep, primate level, that there was nothing for him to say. The road twisted beneath us like the body of a great eel, like a tentacle reaching out to take what it wanted from the world, until we came around the final curve, and there it was, standing beautiful and bleak against the skyline. My home.
Relaxation came all at once, so profound that I could feel my muscles soften all the way down to where they brushed against the bone. I was back. Finally, after years of care packages and quiet refusals, I was back where I belonged.
“Holy shit,” said Jeremy. “Does Dracula live with you?”
“Only on summer vacation, and he tips well,” I said blithely.
“Holy shit.”
Normally, I would have called him on his failure to come up with something better. He was a scientist: he prided himself on always knowing the right words to describe a situation. But I had to admit that it was nice to have him so impressed with my childhood home, which I hadn’t seen in so many, many years. We had all known that if I came back, I wouldn’t leave again. The longing for the sea would have been too great.
It already was. “Carver’s Landing,” I said, swallowing the sudden thickness of my voice and hoping he wouldn’t notice. “Built in 1625, after the original house burned down in an unfortunate candle incident. My ancestors wanted to make a statement about how we didn’t die in fire; we only died in water, and we refused to fear it.”
Jeremy didn’t say anything. He didn’t even tease me about having a house with a name. He really was in shock.
Most New England bed and breakfasts were quaint things, suitable for the cover of little pamphlets intended to be distributed at local bus stations and airports. Not so Carver’s Landing. Our family home was a glorious four-story monstrosity, built right up on the edge of the cliff, so that any shift in the tectonic plates would send us tumbling down, down, down below the waves, where anyone who saw us fall would presume we had gone to a watery grave. The wood was white, weathered by wind and coated in salt; the architecture was Colonial, with striking Victorian influences. It was the sort of house that should have been the topic of thesis papers written by wide-eyed history students. It had grown organically under the hands and hammers of generations; it had seen a nation rise. And we rented rooms for fifty dollars a night to tourists lucky or foolish enough to make a wrong turn and find themselves in Innsmouth for the night.
Jeremy drove slowly down the shallow hillside separating us from the house. A small paved lot cupped the left side of Carver’s Landing. Three cars were already there, all more than twenty years old, their sides pitted and rusted by saltwater and wind. I wrinkled my nose at the sight of them. It was time to open the garage and pull out something a little newer. Caution was important, sure, but so was having a car that would actually run. So was not attracting attention for driving a junker.
Jeremy pulled his shining silver hybrid into a space a safe distance from the other cars, like a gray shark sliding past whales, and I realized dimly that I was ashamed of my family’s choices. I was ashamed of the rust and the salt and the decay, of things I’d viewed as natural and right when I was a child, growing up eternally in sight of the sea. I had been out in the world too long. It had been necessary for my work, and I didn’t regret doing as was required of me—I could never regret doing as was required of me, not when the world was so wide, and the landlocked parts of it so dangerous and wild—but I had still been out in the world too long. It was time, and past time, for me to have come home.
“You unload the trunk,” I said. “I’ll go get us a luggage cart.” I didn’t give him time to answer or object before I was shoving my door open with my foot and running for the kitchen door. The curtains were drawn, but I knew that someone was watching us. Someone was always watching at Carver’s Landing. Someone had always been watching at school, too, but there they tried to pretend that they weren’t, that privacy was a thing that could exist on land, even though anyone with any sense would know it was a lie.
The door was unlocked. I flung myself through, and there was my older sister, still taller than me, still straight-backed and flat-faced—poor thing, to be so long grown, and still here—and when she stepped aside, there was my mother, short and hunched and smiling her sea-changed smile, and I threw myself into her arms, and I was finally, finally home.
***
By the time I finished greeting my family, two more cars had arrived in the parking lot. I collected my sister and a luggage cart and went out to meet them.
Christine was uncurling herself from the driver’s seat of her car, a long, foreign flower trying to decide whether she could flourish in unfamiliar soil. She offered a polite Midwestern smile as my sister and I approached. “Violet,” she said. “I was afraid you’d run off and deserted us. Who’s this?”
“I’m Violet’s mother,” said my sister, and my heart burned for her, and for the world we had to live beside. She smiled charmingly as she stepped toward Christine, holding out her hand. “You must be Christine. I’ve heard so much about you, but I must admit, Violet never told us how lovely you were.”
“Oh,” said Christine brightly, smiling as she tossed her hair. “It’s lovely to meet you, Ms. Carver. Your home is… wow. It’s really something.”
“Wait until you see the inside,” said my sister, and laughed, and kept laughing as the rest of my classmates got out of their cars and began loading their bags onto the luggage cart. They would all be distracted by the sound, I knew, by the bright simplicity of it. They wouldn’t be looking at her cold, calculating eyes, or at the curtains behind her, which twitched as our parents and siblings stole glances at us.
The door opened. Two of our brothers, both my age, emerged to help with the bags. Chattering, excited, and unaware, the other students followed me inside, ready to begin their seaside escape. Get away from your problems, get away from your woes, get away from the real world—get away from everything except for the sea, which cannot be run from once the waves have noticed your presence. Once the sea has become aware, it can only be survived, and not many can manage that much.
Despite the fact that spring was often our “busy” season, my parents had accepted no bookings for the month, and every room was open. Christine and Jeremy were settled with seaside views, while Terry and Michael had to content themselves with the sweeping cliffs behind the town. None of them complained, at least not in my hearing, and I was grateful. All of them would be able to hear the sea, to smell it in the air, but the last part of my study involved denying two of them the sight of it.
“Oh, Violet, it’s beautiful,” said Terry, gazing rapturously out her window
at the tree-covered hills. Most of it was virgin forest. We had little interest in cutting down the trees that protected us from prying eyes, and when we were alone at home, we kept our houses cool, verging into cold. Leave the tropics for those who were not predestined to go down into the unrelenting deeps. Heat was a luxury of the land, and it was better not to get too accustomed to something that could never stay.
“I never really thought about it,” I said. My own window faced the water, of course. No one I knew who lived in Innsmouth voluntarily faced away from the waves. Still, she looked so happy… I stepped closer, pointing to a distant rocky outcropping. “There used to be a house there, a long time ago. It burned down in a thunderstorm. The fire never spread to the trees, and since the family who owned the place owned all the surrounding woodlands, no one else has ever tried to develop there.”
“It’s like traveling backward through time.” Terry shook her head. “How are you not crawling in conservationists?”
“Most of them are out at Devil’s Reef, doing marine impact studies.”
Terry turned to me, eyes wide. “We’re near Devil’s Reef?”
I nodded. The government’s “accidental” bombing of Devil’s Reef back in 1928 was still taught in wildlife conservation classes, which pointed to the destruction of both the habitat and several potentially undiscovered species—a lot of the fish caught in that area were unique, unknown to science—as a clear example of why we needed more protected areas. Devil’s Reef had been locked down for decades. Human ships patrolled the waters; human scientists cataloged and studied the fish, excited by each new find, all blissfully unaware of what they would find if they dove too deep.
Sometimes one of them did. And then it was all very sad, and their colleagues were reminded to respect the sea.
“We can’t take a boat out to the reef itself, of course, but we can get pretty close,” I said. “Maybe we could go sailing in a few days, and let you see the rocks that break the surface.”
Terry smiled brightly. “I would like that.”
“Then I’ll see what we can do,” I said. “Dinner’s in an hour. Fish chowder. I hope you’re hungry.”
“Starving,” she said.
I felt a little guilty as I let myself out of the room and started down the hall. None of my friends had volunteered for this. They thought they were having a nice vacation that would end when they returned to their lives with suntans and new stories. They didn’t understand.
But then, the mice hadn’t volunteered either. And none of my friends, when pressed, had hesitated a moment before picking up the needle.
***
Mother might have been offended by being relegated to the kitchen while Pansy pretended to be her, but she still knew her role; the stew was thick and rich with cream, and the smell of the sedatives rolling off the bowls belonging to my friends was strong enough that it was a miracle none of them noticed. One by one, they filled their mouths, only to swallow, look puzzled, and lose consciousness. Christine was the first to pass out, followed in short order by Michael, and then by Terry, who slumped gently forward, already snoring.
Jeremy was the last. He stopped, spoon halfway back to his bowl, and gave me a deeply befuddled, deeply betrayed look. “Violet,” he said, and his tongue twisted; it didn’t want to do as he said. His befuddlement deepened. “Wha’ did you do?” he asked, words slurring at the end.
I said nothing. I just looked at him solemnly, and waited until his head struck the table next to his bowl. The spoon skittered from his hand, coming to a stop when it hit the base of the soup tureen. Those of us who had joined my friends for dinner—my brothers, my sister Pansy, a few selected folks from town who were supposed to make the gathering seem realistic—sat in silence for several seconds. Finally, I pulled out my phone and checked the stopwatch app that had been running since the soup was served.
“Thirty-seven seconds,” I said. “They should be out cold for at least an hour. Are the rooms ready for them?”
“They are,” said my mother, from behind me. Her voice was thick with undercurrents and dark with tidal flows. I turned to her. She was standing in the doorway, her thinning hair slicked down wet against her flattening skull, and she was so hideous that men would have screamed to see her, and so beautiful that she took my breath away. “Everything is as you asked. Now I have to ask you a question, my arrogant, risk-taking girl. Are you sure? Do you really think this will work?”
I nodded solemnly. “I do.” Her voice was distorted, like she was speaking through thick mud. The Innsmouth accent had claimed her speech almost entirely. Underwater, her new voice would sound like the ringing of a bell, clean and clear and so perfect that it could never have existed in the open, impure air. She had nearly completed the change.
She was looking at me dubiously. All my family was. Undaunted, I pressed on. “When I started this experiment, I told you what it would entail, and you agreed. Dagon—”
“Not this again,” grumbled my eldest brother. Half his teeth were needled fishhooks, designed to catch and keep the creatures of the abyssal zone. It was almost a race between him and my mother, whose blood had never been as pure as my father’s. He had been gone before I left for Harvard, slipping silently down to the city beneath Devil’s Reef while I was at Santa Cruz. And that right there—the difference between my mother and my brother, and my poor, still almost-human sister—was the reason that they needed me so badly.
I looked at my brother, and I didn’t flinch. “Dagon chose me for a reason. I’ll make Him proud. I’ll make you all proud.”
“And if you don’t?” There was a challenge in his voice, naked to the world.
“Then I’ll have failed, and I’ll answer to Him when I go down below the waves,” I said. “Letting me try cost us nothing but time, and if we can’t afford a little time, who can?”
My classmates were still sleeping. Christine was drooling. I looked at them, studying them, memorizing them as they were now. All this would change soon.
“Besides,” I said. “If this doesn’t work, they’ll taste like anybody else. Now help me get them upstairs.”
***
Christine and Michael woke alone. One more control on an already complicated experiment. Jeremy was still out, thanks to an additional dose of sedatives slipped between his cheek and gums. I was sitting by Terry’s bedside, making notes in my journal, when she jerked on the cuffs that held her to the bed. It was a small motion, but enough to cause the chain to clink against the bedframe. I lifted my head in time to see her open her eyes and blink groggily in my direction.
“Violet?” she asked, voice thick with sleep. “Did I doze off?”
She tried to sit up. The cuffs held her fast. Panic flashed through her eyes, taking the last of the drowsiness with it.
“Violet?” There was a shrill note to my name this time. She still hadn’t fully processed what was happening to her. This time, she strained against the cuffs hard enough to shift the bedframe slightly, and to yank at the IV line connected to the inside of her left elbow. She stopped, and stared at the needle like she had never seen anything like it.
“There’s an excellent chance your great-great-grandmother was from Innsmouth,” I said calmly, looking back to my journal. “Did you know? I suppose not, since you didn’t seem to recognize the name of the town. She had two children before she died. Your great-great-grandfather remarried, and had three more children by his second wife, who always presented the entire brood as her own. I guess remarriage wasn’t as commonplace back then, which seems odd, given the overall mortality rate. It’s hard to be absolutely certain who descended from which woman, but I’m ninety percent sure at this point that you descended from your great-great-grandfather’s first wife. We’ll know soon, I guess.”
“Violet, this isn’t funny.”
I glanced up. “It’s not supposed to be. I’m telling you why you’re here.”
Terry stared at me. “What?”
“You’re here because ther
e’s a very good chance that you’re descended from your great-great-grandfather’s first wife,” I said. “She was weak. She hadn’t even started to show the Innsmouth look when she died. I suppose that’s why her children never showed it—or if they did, we can’t find any record. At least one of them reached adulthood. That’s simple math. Your great-great-grandfather had five children by two wives, and four of them lived to have children of their own. If you are, in fact, descended from an Innsmouth woman, we’ll know in a few days.”
Genuine fear flashed across her face. “A few… a few days? Violet, I have to get back to the school. You can’t just keep me here. The others will notice if I disappear.”
“The others aren’t noticing anything right now, except for their own predicaments,” I said. “Christine has been screaming nonstop for the last two hours. Michael won’t stop laughing.”
“You’re insane.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Where’s Jeremy?”
“Still asleep. I’ll go to wake him soon.” I tried to sound reassuring. “I wouldn’t worry about it, honestly. We’ll keep you comfortable. We put the catheter in while you were asleep, so you won’t have to go through that messy ordeal, and in a few days, we’ll know everything we need to.”
“You can’t…”
“I’m a scientist,” I said. “This is exactly what I can do.”
She was screaming at me as I got up and left the room, closing the door neatly behind myself and cutting off her shouts at the same time. Soundproofing had so many excellent uses. Checking my journal one last time to be sure I had all the notes I needed, I started down the hall toward Jeremy’s room, steeling my expression as I went. He would never know how easy he’d had it, working with mice. Mice couldn’t talk back, or ask why you were doing this to them… or figure out that they were in the control group.
