by Adam Nevill
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.
All four members of my little “social group” had been consuming a powder made from my extracted, purified plasma, mixed with various biogenic chemicals, for the past year and a half. I had monitored dosages, dates, everything, and watched them all for signs of transformation. Two of them had confirmed Innsmouth heritage, the bloodlines too thin and attenuated to allow them to hear Dagon calling without outside aid. The other two were human, as ordinary and temporary as anyone else. All of them would be told that they were Innsmouth-born. All of them would be encouraged to listen for Dagon’s voice whispering to them through my blood, which was even now dripping, one pure, perfect drop at a time, through their IV lines.
Two could see the sea; two could see the land. One of each group had Innsmouth blood; one did not. For however long it took, they would eat the same, drink the same, experience all the same physical stimuli, and then…
Then we would see what we would see.
Quietly, I let myself into Jeremy’s room and sat down, reopening my journal and resuming my documentation of the day. It was easy to lose myself in my notes, letting the simple facts of the experiment take priority over everything around me. It was harder to keep going. Harder than I’d ever thought it would be when I had first sat down at the table and explained to my parents what I wanted to do, how I wanted to go among the outsiders and look for the missing cousins, the ones we had always known existed, so far from the singing of the sea. I had come to them with Dagon’s voice in my heart and the great god Science in my hands, and when they had let me go, I had promised them that the world of men wouldn’t change me, could never change me. I was a daughter of Innsmouth, beloved of Dagon, destined for the sea. Nothing as small or simple as the company of humans could change that.
I had been young then. I had been a fool, unaware of the way rational scientists could sometimes fall in love with their laboratory animals, disrupting experiments and risking years of work for the sake of saving something with a lifespan no longer than a sneeze. I had believed my morality to be absolute and unassailable, and I certainly hadn’t expected to find myself feeling sorry for them.
There was no room for pity here. Two of them would almost certainly die. My control group. I would have been happier if I’d been able to find more than four experimental subjects, but I had also wanted a fifty-fifty split, and even finding two of the lost cousins in a place where I could gain their trust had been a trial. I had followed hundreds of genealogies and family records to wind up back at Harvard, discarding schools with only one Innsmouth descendant, or whose resident cousins were too young, or too old, or too involved in fields where I would have no excuse for access. Harvard had been the only choice, and years of effort had been required to woo the four of them.
Unless my treatments were more effective than they had any right to be, the two with no Innsmouth blood would leave me very soon. But the two who had an ancestral claim to these shores…
They might still have a chance.
Jeremy made a small, confused sound. I looked up, and smiled.
***
“Violet? What’s wrong?” My sister stood, frowning at me as I leaned, white-faced and shaking, in the kitchen doorway. Silently, I held out my hand, showing her the contents of my palm. Two human incisors, both intact down to the root, blood-tipped and pearly.
Her eyes widened.
“Are your teeth falling out?” she asked, looking at my face, my hair, searching for some sign that my transition had accelerated.
I shook my head. “My teeth have been loose for weeks, but I think it’s because of the immune response triggered when I harvested my plasma. They stopped weakening when I started spreading the harvests out among the family.” The words came easily, devoid of emotional response. If only everything were that easy. “They belong to Terry. The girl in the room that looks out over the forest.”
How she had screamed when the teeth started dropping out of her head, when the hair started wisping from her scalp. How she had fought, how she had kicked, how she had done her best to deny what was happening to her. It would have been impressive, if it hadn’t been so frightening. She could hurt herself, and until we knew where she was in her transition, I didn’t want to risk it. Sedating her would be a solution. It might be the only solution. It was still something to be avoided for as long as possible.
“Does this mean the process is working?” My sister made no effort to conceal the excitement in her voice. If this worked—if I could activate the sleeping seeds of Dagon that waited, eternally patient, in each of us—then she might be able to follow our father to the city below Devil’s Reef decades sooner than her thinning blood would have otherwise allowed.
I couldn’t blame her for her excitement. I couldn’t join her in it, either. Not with Christine’s death so fresh in my mind. She’d lost all her teeth, too, and her fingers had twisted as the bones struggled to reshape themselves, following biological imperatives that were alien to her too-human flesh. She had still tasted human when we disposed of her body according to the best and most traditional methods available to us. I’d fed her, one spoonful at a time, to her surviving classmates. They would never know, unless they lived. And if they lived, the life of one human woman would no longer seem so important.
“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “They’re all changing. They’re all… becoming something more. But none of them is transforming with any real speed. Michael stopped breathing this morning. I had to give him CPR.” And his bones had been soft under my hands, almost like cartilage, bending and yielding until I’d been afraid of crushing his sternum. “They may survive. They may all die.”
Terry’s teeth were falling out. Jeremy was completely bald, and his eyes had developed nictitating membranes that slid closed a second before he blinked. Michael’s skeleton was going soft, and his irises had taken on a flat, coppery cast that looked more like metal than flesh. They were all changing. They had all changed.
We were so far past the point of no return that it couldn’t even be seen on a clear day.
The authorities had come to the house weeks ago. I had hidden upstairs while they spoke to my sister in the kitchen, asking whether she had noticed anything wrong with the car when my friends and I had left to drive back to Boston. She had shaken her head and wept almost believable tears, asking again and again whether they thought that I was dead or simply missing. Then she had mentioned, as if offhandedly, that we had been planning to drive down the coast before heading back to school.
The footage of our cars being pulled out of the Atlantic had been shown on all the news programs two days later. There had been no bodies, of course, but there had been blood,
and the windows had been broken. It wasn’t hard to go from the images on the screen to the thought that we’d been pulled from the vehicle by the current, and would never be seen again.
At least part of that was true. None of my test subjects were ever going to be seen in the world of men again, and as for me… I had done my time outside of Innsmouth. I would stay here until my own returning was upon me, and then I would go, gladly, to the depths and the abyssopelagic dark below Devil’s Reef, where I could drift, and dream with Dagon, and allow my false idols and service to Science to fall away from me, no longer needed, no longer required.
My sister regarded me gravely. “Do you think this is going to work?”
“I don’t know.” I looked down at the teeth in my hand. “I honestly don’t.”
***
They had been locked in their rooms for almost a month when Jeremy surprised me. I unlocked the door, pushed it open, and found his bed empty, the window standing ajar. For a moment, I froze, trying to understand what I was seeing. The bowl containing his breakfast fell from my suddenly nerveless fingers.
“Jeremy?” I whispered. Then I bolted for the bed, jerking back the covers like he might be hiding there, somehow sandwiched between the blanket and the sheet. “Jeremy!”
I never heard him moving behind me. I was completely oblivious when the chair slammed into my back, knocking me forward. He hit me a second time, harder, before he turned and ran, fleeing down the hall.
Humans are hardy, resilient—mortal. Even unfinished and larval as I effectively was, I was still a daughter of Innsmouth. I shrugged off the blow and turned to run after him, my feet slipping in the spilled soup on the floor near the door. The stairs were steep, and his damp footprints—the soup again—told me I was on the right track, at least until I reached the ground floor. He had enough of a head start that I only knew which way he had gone when I heard the back door slam behind him.
There wasn’t time to inform my siblings, not if I wanted to stop him before he could reach the street and go looking for a payphone. I ran after him, out into the bright outside world, where the sea slammed against the shore like the beating of a vast, immortal heart. Then I stopped.
Jeremy was some twenty yards ahead of me, standing motionless on the place where the soil gave way to sand. The sun glinted off the polished dome of his skull, catching odd, iridescent highlights from his skin. I hadn’t seen him in the sunlight before, not since his changes had truly begun. He was glorious. He was beautiful.
I walked to join him. He glanced my way, flat copper irises shielded from the sun by his half-deployed nictitating membranes, and he did not run.
“What did you do?” he asked. His words were mushy, soft. All his teeth had fallen out the week before, and while I could see the needles of his new teeth pressing against his gums, they hadn’t broken through yet. He’d develop the Innsmouth lisp soon, assuming the transformations continued, that his body was able to endure the strain. “What did you do to us? Why?”
“Why did you give cancer to all those mice?” I shrugged. “I needed to know if it was possible. I was telling you the truth when I said you had Innsmouth blood.” A runaway girl, a local boy, a relationship cut short when her parents had followed her trail to the Massachusetts coastline. It was an old story, and one that had played out in every coastal town like ours. But in the case of Jeremy’s long-buried ancestor, there had been things about her suitor that she hadn’t been aware of. She had carried his Innsmouth blood back to Iowa, where it had run through the generations like a poisonous silver line, finally pooling, dilute and deadly, in the veins of a man who wanted to change the world.
Jeremy turned to give me a shocked, even hurt look. The newly inhuman lines of his face didn’t quite suit the expression. Deep Ones are many things. We’re very rarely shocked. “This is nothing like the mice. We’re human beings, and you took us captive and… did things to us. It’s not the same at all.”
“You were human beings who experimented on lower life forms to see what would happen to them, and because you thought you had the right,” I said. “I read your Bible, you know. Years ago, when I first started at U.C. Santa Cruz. I wanted to… understand, I suppose. I wanted to know. And it said that God had given you dominion over all the plants and animals of the world, which meant that turning mice into explosive tumor machines was just fine. You were doing what God told you to do.”
Jeremy didn’t say anything. He just turned, slowly, to look back at the sea. I think that was the moment when he understood. The moment he stopped fighting.
“My God told me things, too, although I think He spoke to me a bit more directly than yours spoke to you. He said that some of His children had lost their way and needed someone to guide them home. He said that if I could figure out the way to do that, I could even help the faithful here in Innsmouth.” A world where we could choose to return to the sea, to swim with Mother Hydra, to be glorious and smooth and darting through the depths like falling stars. To live forever, and not worry about the fragile human skins of our tadpole state.
“That didn’t give you the right.”
“If your God gave you the right to put the needle to the mouse, then my God gave me the right to put the needle to the man.” I offered him my hand. “Come on. I need to get you back to the house.”
“The sea doesn’t let me sleep.”
I dropped my hand.
“I can hear it, always. I think it’s trying to talk to me. I’ve started hearing words when the surf hits the shore.”
“What does it say?”
Jeremy turned to me, expression bleak. He was so beautiful, with his skin gleaming iridescent, and his sunken eyes. I would never have believed he could be so beautiful. “It’s saying ‘come home to me.’”
“You’re not hearing the sea,” I said, and offered him my hand again. This time, he took it. His skin was cooler than mine. He would dive below Devil’s Reef before I did; he would see the abyssopelagic, and understand. I would have been envious, if I hadn’t been so relieved. “You’re hearing the voice of Dagon. He’s welcoming you. He’s welcoming you home.”
Terry would need to be moved to a room that faced the sea; she deserved the chance to hear Him too, especially when she was doing so much better than Michael. Especially if hearing Dagon might mean that she would live. It would invalidate the experimental controls, but those didn’t matter anymore; the human rules of scientific inquiry had only ever been a formality. I was bringing the lost children of Dagon home.
So much needed to be done. So much needed to be accomplished. My sister would be my first willing volunteer, and my heart swelled to think of her, finally beautiful, finally going home. But that was in the future. For now, I stood hand in hand with my first success, and turned to the sea, and listened to the distant voice of Dagon calling us to come down, deep down, below the waves.
The Deep Ones
The race of sea-dwelling creatures called the Deep Ones are the offshoots of the god Dagon and his union with the female monster known as the Hydra by the Greeks. In appearance, Dagon is said to be an enormous being shaped somewhat like a man, but with the head of a fish, long scaly arms, and short powerful legs. The appearance of Hydra is unknown, but it may be that the Greek legend of the monster known as the Hydra contains some suggestion of her true form. The Greeks say this monster is of vast size, serpentine, with numerous heads that respawn if they are cut off.
The details of how the engendering of offspring between Dagon and Hydra was accomplished or what it entailed are not know, but it is a curious fact that the Deep Ones, being like humans in their size and general appearance, have the ability to interbreed with men and women. This they are always eager to do, for the blood of the Deep Ones is weak from countless generations of inbreeding, and they require the vigor of human hybrids to restore vitality and fertility to their race. This caused the Greek philosopher Philolaus to speculate that humans and Deep Ones are at root the same species.
It wa
s sightings of the Deep Ones by mariners that gave rise to the wondrous tales of mermaids and mermen that are told wherever men dwell near the sea. The Deep Ones make their many-pillared cities in trenches beneath the ocean, and have no need to ever walk upon the land, but their curiosity concerning the doings of humanity causes them to sometimes approach fishing villages or trading ports. They hold conversations with any man or woman they chance to encounter on the sands, for they have the power of speech and are ever willing to enter into trade with our kind.
The males of the species covet some of the tools and machines fashioned by men from steel, and their females are delighted by our finer silks. In return for these goods, they give gold, for it is said that they have gold in abundance due to the countless thousands of treasure ships that have foundered in storms or struck reefs and sunk beneath the waves over the millennia of human history. The Deep Ones know where all these ships lie.
They have great skill in the making of jewelry out of gold and gems, and on occasion will exchange these adornments for human goods, but their bodies are so strangely distorted that this jewelry fits humans poorly.
The heads of the Deep Ones resemble those of some bottom-dwelling fishes, being broad and high, hairless, and lacking ears, and their faces are wide like that of a frog. They have flat noses and mouths like great slits. Bulbous eyes project from the sides of their heads. Necks they have none, but in the sides of their heads are rows of flaps that serve them like gills to breathe beneath the water. These allow the Deep Ones to stay submerged indefinitely, although they also have lungs to breathe air when they walk upon the dry land.
