The ship wasn’t deserted. That much was obvious.
I could hear music. It wasn’t Cab Calloway or Benny Goodman. There was a Hawaiian guitar in there but mainly it was a crazy choir of keening voices. I wasn’t convinced the performers were human and wondered whether Brunette was working up some kind of act with singing seals. I couldn’t make out the words, but the familiar hawk-and-spit syllables of “Cthulhu” cropped up a couple of times.
I wanted to get out and go back to nasty Bay City and forget all about this. But Jungle Jillian was counting on me.
I made my way along the passage, working towards the music. A hand fell on my shoulder and my heart banged against the backsides of my eyeballs.
A twisted face stared at me out of the gloom, thickly bearded, crater-cheeked. Laird Brunette was made up as Ben Gunn, skin shrunk onto his skull, eyes large as hen’s eggs.
His hand went over my mouth.
“Do Not Disturb,” he said, voice high and cracked.
This wasn‘t the suave criminal I knew, the man with tartan cummerbunds and patent leather hair. This was some other Brunette, in the grips of a tough bout with dope or madness.
“The Deep Ones,” he said.
He let me go and I backed away.
“It is the time of the Surfacing.”
My case was over. I knew where the Laird was. All I had to do was tell Janey Wilde and give her her refund.
“There’s very little time.”
The music was louder. I heard a great number of bodies shuffling around in the casino. They couldn’t have been very agile, because they kept clumping into things and each other.
“They must be stopped. Dynamite, depth charges, torpedoes...”
“Who?” I asked. “The Japs?”
“The Deep Ones. The Dwellers in the Sister City.”
He had lost me.
A nasty thought occurred to me. As a detective, I can’t avoid making deductions. There were obviously a lot of people aboard the Monty, but mine was the only small boat in evidence. How had everyone else got out here? Surely they couldn’t have swam?
“It’s a war,” Brunette ranted, “us and them. It’s always been a war.”
I made a decision. I’d get the Laird off his boat and turn him over to Jungle Jillian. She could sort things out with the Panther Princess and her Esoteric Order. In his current state, Brunette would hand over any baby if you gave him a blanket.
I took Brunette’s thin wrist and tugged him towards the staircase. But a hatch clanged down and I knew we were stuck.
A door opened and perfume drifted through the fish stink.
“Mr. Lovecraft, wasn’t it?” a silk-scaled voice said.
* * * *
Janice Marsh was wearing pendant squid earrings and a lady-sized gun. And nothing else.
That wasn’t quite as nice as it sounds. The Panther Princess had no nipples, no navel, and no pubic hair. She was lightly scaled between the legs and her wet skin shone like a shark’s. I imagined that if you stroked her, your palm would come away bloody. She was wearing neither the turban she’d affected earlier nor the dark wig of her pictures. Her head was completely bald, skull swelling unnaturally. She didn’t even have her eyebrows pencilled in.
“You evidently can’t take good advice.”
As mermaids go, she was scarier than cute. In the crook of her left arm, she held a bundle from which a white baby face peered with unblinking eyes. Franklin looked more like Janice Marsh than his parents.
“A pity, really,” said a tiny ventriloquist voice through Franklin’s mouth, “but there are always complications.”
Brunette gibbered with fear, chewing his beard and huddling against me.
Janice Marsh set Franklin down and he sat up, an adult struggling with a baby’s body.
“The Cap’n has come back,” she explained.
“Every generation must have a Cap’n,” said the thing in Franklin’s mind. Dribble got in the way and he wiped his angel-mouth with a fold of swaddle.
Janice Marsh clucked and pulled Laird away from me, stroking his face.
“Poor dear,” she said, flicking his chin with a long tongue. “He got out of his depth.”
She put her hands either side of Brunette’s head, pressing the butt of her gun into his cheek.
“He was talking about a Sister City,” I prompted.
She twisted the gambler’s head around and dropped him on the floor. His tongue poked out and his eyes showed only white.
“Of course,” the baby said. “The Cap’n founded two settlements. One beyond Devil Reef, off Massachusetts. And one here, under the sands of the Bay.”
We both had guns. I’d let her kill Brunette without trying to shoot her. It was the detective’s fatal flaw, curiosity. Besides, the Laird was dead inside his head long before Janice snapped his neck.
“You can still join us,” she said, hips working like a snake in time to the chanting. “There are raptures in the deeps.”
“Sister,” I said, “you’re not my type.”
Her nostrils flared in anger and slits opened in her neck, flashing liverish red lines in her white skin.
Her gun was pointed at me, safety off. Her long nails were lacquered green.
I thought I could shoot her before she shot me. But I didn’t. Something about a naked woman, no matter how strange, prevents you from killing them. Her whole body was moving with the music. I’d been wrong. Despite everything, she was beautiful.
I put my gun down and waited for her to murder me. It never happened.
* * * *
I don’t really know the order things worked out. But first there was lightning, then, an instant later, thunder.
Light filled the passageway, hurting my eyes. Then, a rumble of noise which grew in a crescendo. The chanting was drowned.
Through the thunder cut a screech. It was a baby’s cry. Franklin’s eyes were screwed up and he was shrieking. I had a sense of the Cap’n drowning in the baby’s mind, his purchase on the purloined body relaxing as the child cried out.
The floor beneath me shook and buckled and I heard a great straining of abused metal. A belch of hot wind surrounded me. A hole appeared. Janice Marsh moved fast and I think she fired her gun, but whether at me on purpose or at random in reflex I couldn’t say. Her body sliced towards me and I ducked.
There was another explosion, not of thunder, and thick smoke billowed through a rupture in the floor. I was on the floor, hugging the tilting deck. Franklin slid towards me and bumped, screaming, into my head. A half ton of water fell on us and I knew the ship was breached. My guess was that the Japs had just saved my life with a torpedo. I was waist deep in saltwater. Janice Marsh darted away in a sinuous fish motion.
Then there were heavy bodies around me, pushing me against a bulkhead. In the darkness, I was scraped by something heavy, cold-skinned and foul-smelling. There were barks and cries, some of which might have come from human throats.
Fires went out and hissed as the water rose. I had Franklin in my hands and tried to hold him above water. I remembered the peril of Jungle Jillian again and found my head floating against the hard ceiling.
The Cap’n cursed in vivid 18th Century language, Franklin’s little body squirming in my grasp. A toothless mouth tried to get a biter’s grip on my chin but slipped off. My feet slid and I was off-balance, pulling the baby briefly underwater. I saw his startled eyes through a wobbling film. When I pulled him out again, the Cap’n was gone and Franklin was screaming on his own. Taking a double gulp of air, I plunged under the water and struggled towards the nearest door, a hand closed over the baby’s face to keep water out of his mouth and nose.
The Montecito was going down fast enough to suggest there were plenty of holes in it. I had to make it a priority to find one. I jammed my knee at a door and it flew open. I was poured, along with several hundred gallons of water, into a large room full of stored gambling equipment. Red and white chips floated like confetti.
I got my footing and waded
towards a ladder. Something large reared out of the water and shambled at me, screeching like a seabird. I didn’t get a good look at it. Which was a mercy. Heavy arms lashed me, flopping boneless against my face. With my free hand, I pushed back at the thing, fingers slipping against cold slime. Whatever it was was in a panic and squashed through the door.
There was another explosion and everything shook. Water splashed upwards and I fell over. I got upright and managed to get a one-handed grip on the ladder. Franklin was still struggling and bawling, which I took to be a good sign. Somewhere near, there was a lot of shouting.
I dragged us up rung by rung and slammed my head against a hatch. If it had been battened, I’d have smashed my skull and spilled my brains. It flipped upwards and a push of water from below shoved us through the hole like a ping-pong ball in a fountain.
The Monty was on fire and there were things in the water around it. I heard the drone of airplane engines and glimpsed nearby launches. Gunfire fought with the wind. It was a full-scale attack. I made it to the deck-rail and saw a boat fifty feet away. Men in yellow slickers angled tommy guns down and sprayed the water with bullets.
The gunfire whipped up the sea into a foam. Kicking things died in the water. Someone brought up his gun and fired at me. I pushed myself aside, arching my body over Franklin, and bullets spanged against the deck.
My borrowed taxi must have been dragged under by the bulk of the ship.
There were definitely lights in the sea. And the sky. Over the city, in the distance, I saw firecracker bursts. Something exploded a hundred yards away and a tower of water rose, bursting like a puffball. A depth charge.
The deck was angled down and water was creeping up at us. I held on to a rope webbing, wondering whether the gambling ship still had any lifeboats. Franklin spluttered and bawled.
A white body slid by, heading for the water. I instinctively grabbed at it. Hands took hold of me and I was looking into Janice Marsh’s face. Her eyes blinked, membranes coming round from the sides, and she kissed me again. Her long tongue probed my mouth like an eel, then withdrew. She stood up, one leg bent so she was still vertical on the sloping deck. She drew air into her lungs—if she had lungs—and expelled it through her gills with a musical cry. She was slim and white in the darkness, water running off her body. Someone fired in her direction and she dived into the waves, knifing through the surface and disappearing towards the submarine lights. Bullets rippled the spot where she’d gone under.
I let go of the ropes and kicked at the deck, pushing myself away from the sinking ship. I held Franklin above the water and splashed with my legs and elbows. The Monty was dragging a lot of things under with it, and I fought against the pull so I wouldn’t be one of them. My shoulders ached and my clothes got in the way, but I kicked against the current.
The ship went down screaming, a chorus of bending steel and dying creatures. I had to make for a launch and hope not to be shot. I was lucky. Someone got a polehook into my jacket and landed us like fish. I lay on the deck, water running out of my clothes, swallowing as much air as I could breathe.
I heard Franklin yelling. His lungs were still in working order.
Someone big in a voluminous slicker, a sou’wester tied to his head, knelt by me and slapped me in the face.
“Peeper,” he said.
* * * *
“They’re calling it the Great Los Angeles Air Raid,” Winthrop told me as he poured a mug of British tea. “Some time last night a panic started, and everyone in Bay City shot at the sky for hours.”
“The Japs?” I said, taking a mouthful of welcome hot liquid.
“In theory. Actually, I doubt it. It’ll be recorded as a fiasco, a lot of jumpy characters with guns. While it was all going on, we engaged the enemy and emerged victorious.”
He was still dressed up for an embassy ball and didn’t look as if he’d been on deck all evening. Genevieve Dieudonne wore a fisherman’s sweater and fatigue pants, her hair up in a scarf. She was looking at a lot of sounding equipment and noting down readings.
“You’re not fighting the Japs, are you?”
Winthrop pursed his lips. “An older war, my friend. We can’t be distracted. After last night’s action, our Deep Ones won’t poke their scaly noses out for a while. Now I can do something to lick Hitler.”
“What really happened?”
“There was something dangerous in the sea, under Mr. Brunette’s boat. We have destroyed it and routed the... uh, the hostile forces. They wanted the boat as a surface station. That’s why Mr. Brunette’s associates were eliminated.”
Genevieve gave a report in French, so fast that I couldn’t follow.
“Total destruction,” Winthrop explained, “a dreadful setback for them. It’ll put them in their place for years. Forever would be too much to hope for, but a few years will help.”
I lay back on the bunk, feeling my wounds. Already choking on phlegm, I would be lucky to escape pneumonia.
“And the little fellow is a decided dividend.”
Finlay glumly poked around, suggesting another dose of depth charges. He was cradling a mercifully sleep-struck Franklin, but didn’t look terribly maternal.
“He seems quite unaffected by it all.”
“His name is Franklin,” I told Winthrop. “On the boat, he was...”
“Not himself? I’m familiar with the condition. It’s a filthy business, you understand.”
“He’ll be all right,” Genevieve put in.
I wasn’t sure whether the rest of the slicker crew were feds or servicemen and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to know. I could tell a Clandestine Operation when I landed in the middle of one.
“Who knows about this?” I asked. “Hoover? Roosevelt?”
Winthrop didn’t answer.
“Someone must know,” I said.
“Yes,” the Englishman said, “someone must. But this is a war the public would never believe exists. In the Bureau, Finlay’s outfit are known as ‘the Unnameables,’ never mentioned by the press, never honoured or censured by the government, victories and defeats never recorded in the official history.”
The launch shifted with the waves, and I hugged myself, hoping for some warmth to creep over me. Finlay had promised to break out a bottle later, but that made me resolve to stick to tea as a point of honour. I hated to fulfil his expectations.
“And America is a young country,” Winthrop explained. “In Europe, we’ve known things a lot longer.”
On shore, I’d have to tell Janey Wilde about Brunette and hand over Franklin. Some flack at Metro would be thinking of an excuse for the Panther Princess’s disappearance. Everything else—the depth charges, the sea battle, the sinking ship—would be swallowed up by the War.
All that would be left would be tales. Weird tales.
<
* * * *
Another Fish Story
In the summer of 1968, while walking across America, he came across the skeleton fossil of something aquatic. All around, even in the apparent emptiness, were signs of the life that had passed this way. Million-year-old seashells were strewn across the empty heart of California, along with flattened bullet casings from the ragged edge of the Wild West and occasional sticks of weathered furniture. The sturdier pieces were pioneer jetsam, dumped by exhausted covered wagons during a long dry desert stretch on the road to El Dorado. The more recent items had been thrown off overloaded trucks in the ‘30s, by Okies rattling towards orange groves and federal work programs.
He squatted over the bones. The sands parted, disclosing the whole of the creature. The scuttle-shaped skull was all saucer-sized eye-sockets and triangular, saw-toothed jaw. The long body was like something fished out of an ash-can by a cartoon cat—fans of rib-spindles tapering to a flat tail. What looked like arm-bones fixed to the dorsal spine by complex plates that were evolving towards becoming shoulders. Stranded when the seas receded from the Mojave, the thing had lain ever closer to the surface, waiting to be re
vealed by sand-riffling winds. Uncovered as he was walking to it, the fossil—exposed to the thin, dry air—was quickly resolving into sand and scraps.
Finally, only an arm remained. Short and stubby like an alligator leg, it had distinct, barb-tipped fingers. It pointed like a sign-post, to the West, to the Pacific, to the city-stain seeping out from the original blot of El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de la Reyna de los Angeles de Rio Porciunculo. He expected these route-marks. He’d been following them since he first crawled out of a muddy river in England. This one scratched at him.
Even in the desert, he could smell river-mud, taste foul water, feel the tidal pull.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 30
