The Nightmare Garden

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I guess I’ll figure it out when I get to the Bone Sepulchre.” I shrugged, feigning a confidence I didn’t feel in one iota of my being.

  “There’s a submersible that runs from Innsmouth,” Dean spoke up. “Usually up to Nova Scotia and beyond, ferrying fugitives into Canada.” He took out his pack of cigarettes and tapped it against the table. “But I wager that for the right price they’d go all the way to the top. The captain’s a tough nut—not afraid of going under the ice.”

  I looked at Dean, pained. “You know I don’t have any money.”

  “There’s things other than money,” Dean said. “But they’re not pirates. They won’t take you unless I vouch for you. And if I vouch, I’m coming.” He took out a Lucky and stuck it behind his ear, and I could tell by his posture I wasn’t going to get to argue.

  I didn’t want to appear scared, but I did want Dean along. Without him, I’d be alone, at the mercy of whatever cropped up between here and the Bone Sepulchre. “That’s fine.”

  “Getting out of the house isn’t going to be easy,” Cal said. “Neither your dad nor Valentina is exactly asleep at the wheel.” He cocked his head and then jerked a thumb at the door. “Speaking of. Someone’s coming.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told all three of them. “That part I’ve got covered.”

  Valentina was in the library, and for a minute I thought Archie was with her before I realized she was seemingly talking to herself.

  “No, I don’t know when.” A pause. “Stop it. Stop pushing. It will happen when it happens.”

  I knocked twice, softly.

  There was a clatter from inside, and then Valentina yanked the door wide. “What, Aoife?”

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m sorry about what happened before. I shouldn’t have fibbed. But I really would like to use the Munin.” I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered in the ever-present drafts that ran through the Crosley house like the vapor trails of dirigibles. “It’s kind of dreary in here.”

  “I know,” Valentina sighed. “It’s meant to be a summerhouse. Open windows, cool ocean breezes and all that.”

  “Maybe just for an hour or two a night?” I wheedled. “You can even watch me if you want.”

  “You’re a big girl, Aoife,” Valentina said. “I trust you’ve learned your lesson?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I won’t touch the journals. I just want a little peace and quiet and space.”

  “Fine,” Valentina said. “Honestly, I’m glad to see someone so enamored of the old bucket. Always hated the damn thing when my father would pile us all in it for family trips.”

  “It’s a beautiful craft,” I said. It was a relief to say one thing, at least, that wasn’t a lie.

  “You know what it means, Munin?” Valentina asked. She absently straightened a few books on the shelf before her. “Before the Storm, the Vikings and such worshiped a father-god, a man who put out his own eye for the wisdom of the world.” Valentina brushed a stray curl behind her ear and looked past me, to something only she could see. “To replace the eye, the Allfather had two ravens named Hunin and Munin that flew out into the world every day and brought back what they had seen. Hunin and Munin—‘thought’ and ‘memory.’ ” Valentina smiled. “My father always did have a flair for the dramatic.”

  “So does mine,” I murmured.

  “Anyway, the dusty wisdom of that particular bird is all yours,” Valentina said. “But you and that boy are not to canoodle in there. You get me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Loud and clear.”

  “I thought you were a brat when we first met,” Valentina said. “Sheltered and petulant. I’m glad I was wrong.”

  “Me too,” I said as she brushed past me and left the library. When I turned back to take stock of the books, I was startled by a gleam of metal from the shelf where she’d stood. I pulled out a few volumes, then a fat handful. I recognized the simple brass box, the aether tube and the speaker and receiver. It was an aethervox, a long-range variety, wired into an antenna on the top of the house. Valentina hadn’t been talking to herself.

  I turned the dial, watched the aether swirl inside the clear glass tube at the top of the vox for a moment as it warmed up, but only static greeted me when the speaker clicked on. The vox was tuned to a dead channel.

  Whoever Valentina had been speaking to, she didn’t want anyone else to know.

  I covered the vox again. It couldn’t help me now, and I knew I couldn’t afford to accuse Valentina of anything; I’d just lose all the credibility I’d gained with her and my father, and I’d never be able to slip away and find the Brotherhood.

  After I’d hidden the vox, I went up to my room to pack a few things and meet Dean before I lost my nerve.

  Despite Conrad’s naysaying, running away went pretty smoothly. Dean and I slipped out separately to the Munin, where I made sure to turn on all the lights and find a station on the aether tubes to send noise back toward the house. Cal and Bethina waited in the shadow of the boxwoods by the porch. The hard part was up to me.

  The Crosley house had bright arc lamps mounted on the four corners, a standard precaution against ghouls in unprotected areas. Dean glared at them. “You got an idea for those? Your old man is gonna see us the minute we make a break.”

  I hefted the small ditty bag I’d picked up from Valentina’s dressing table. “I’ve got it covered. Help me find the transformer box.”

  We crept around the house, keeping below the windows. Valentina was at the piano again, Archie was sitting near her scribbling in his journal, and Conrad was sitting across from him doing the same. The very image of the good son. I guessed that left the black sheep role for me.

  Dean helped me get the cover off the box that controlled the aether flow to the exterior lanterns, the transformer hissing as it converted the elemental gas to electrical impulses.

  I pulled a handful of Valentina’s hair curlers out of the bag and, using a careful, delicate touch, shoved them one by one between all the circuits. The ceramic protected me from an electrical current, and the fat rollers pushed the wires off the contacts.

  There was a shower of sparks, the snap of aether against air, the scent of burnt paper, and then the gardens all around the house went dark. Only the glowing hulk of the Munin was visible in the shadows, like a lamprey floating in a black sea.

  We crept back to the ladder. My heart thudded. We didn’t have a lot of time before Archie noticed the house was dark outside and came to see what had happened.

  Dean started to climb after me, but I stopped him. “No. It’ll be less dangerous if there’s only one of us.”

  We’d gone over the plan, all four of us, again and again that afternoon, but I was still nervous. Dean stayed behind, grumbling. “Be careful, all right?”

  I nodded my assent as I scrambled up the ladder and across the cabin into the pilothouse. I flipped the switches to turn on the fans and felt the Munin strain against its ties.

  Now it was a race against time and physics. Almost sick to my stomach, I skidded back to the ladder and slid down it, skinning one of my knees. I hit the ground as the first tie-down snapped, a whip crack that echoed through the black night like a bullet.

  Dean ran to me and helped me up, and together we ran.

  As far as distractions went, a runaway airship was a pretty good one. We were already a hundred yards from the house when the outside lamps came back on. I could hear Archie and Conrad shouting.

  I felt one last stab of guilt for what I’d done, and then it was washed away by the cold night air stinging my chest. Dean and I moved, holding hands, our feet striking the frozen earth. The branches of the topiary animals tugged at my jacket as we ran through the darkness.

  I knew it was only my imagination turning every rasp and rustle of icy branches and wind into prowling ghouls and hungering nightjars, but I still gripped Dean as hard as I could.

  We’d arranged to meet Cal and Bethina beyond the grounds, and we stayed quiet until we
were well down the road. Not only because of my father, but also in case anything else was watching. Traveling at night was dangerous, but it was our only chance to make it to Innsmouth unobserved by either Archie or Proctors.

  I just wished Conrad hadn’t been so stubborn. I wished he could have been here with me.

  But what I wanted rarely came to be, so I just hunched deeper into my jacket, shouldering the small bag of things I’d taken from Valentina’s house, and ran.

  The house already seemed infinitely distant, and I turned back to the gravel road, lit to a white ribbon by moonlight, spotted with black where the ice had melted and formed reflecting pools for the stars above us.

  We came to a signpost, CAPE COD and GLOUCESTER and INNSMOUTH written in faded lettering on its crooked arms. It creaked in the wind, swaying back and forth.

  I didn’t bother looking behind me again as the four of us took the fork to Innsmouth. Archie would be furious, Conrad would be irritable, and Valentina would probably hit the roof, but it didn’t matter to me.

  In my mind, I was already on my way to the Arctic.

  Ravens over Innsmouth

  DEAN, CAL, BETHINA and I dozed for a few hours in a barn, taking turns sitting watch with Dean’s lighter trembling between our palms both for warmth and to ward off the night-dwelling creatures we could hear hooting and crying in the darkness beyond. Fire would keep them at bay—for a while, anyway.

  When the sun was just a stain on the horizon, we resumed walking. I was numb everywhere, especially in my heart and mind, but the horrible weight I’d been carrying since we left Lovecraft had lessened a little. Just to be doing something, instead of sitting and waiting for someone else to figure out the plan, was freeing enough that I actually hopped over an icy puddle.

  Dean gave me a crooked grin. “You’re in a good mood.”

  “Better than the last few days,” I agreed.

  He kicked a pebble ahead of us down the road. “You ever been to Innsmouth?”

  “No,” I said. “Conrad and I didn’t exactly get seaside vacations.”

  “Nice little town,” said Dean. “Quaint, I guess you’d call it. I ran a few fugitives up there to catch the boat for Canada.”

  Sometimes it was easy to forget Dean’s life before we met. He had been a guide to fugitives and those wanted by the Proctors; he’d lived every day of his life with danger. Because of that, I tried to stay in the good mood he was seeing. I didn’t want him worrying.

  “Tell me more about the places you’ve been.”

  “Favorite place ever was San Francisco, hands down,” Dean said. “They have the walls, not like Lovecraft, and inside it’s like a million cities compressed into one, piled on top of each other, like layers you could dive down through. They have a Chinatown there, and men who can breathe fire if they drink a potion, and women who can swallow knives. It smells like steam and smoke and gunpowder, and since it’s a modern city the Proctors don’t pay any attention to the poor folks and we have the run of the place without much risk of getting burned.”

  All I really knew about San Francisco was that it was home to one of the three great Engines in the States—now two, I supposed—and that off the coast was Alcatraz Island, where the worst heretics were confined to a hospital run by the Bureau of Proctors, like Ravenhouse in Lovecraft, only a hundred times worse.

  “At night you can see weird blue lights out on Alcatraz,” Dean said, as if reading my thoughts. “Everyone says the Proctors have got secret experiments going on out there.” He looked at me. “Knowing what I know now, I gotta wonder.”

  I’d wondered too: if there was no necrovirus, what had the necrodemons everyone had so feared during the war really been?

  “Maybe someday we’ll know,” I said to Dean.

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I doubt it. I don’t think the whole truth’s ever really going to get out.”

  Before I could give that too much thought and just depress myself all over again, we came over a hill and saw the sea, with a cluster of gray and blue buildings huddled at the water’s edge.

  “Innsmouth,” Dean said. “Doesn’t look like much, I know.”

  “No,” Cal agreed. Bethina wrinkled her nose.

  “Smells like fish.”

  “We need a plan,” I said. “Dean and I will go ahead and try to find the captain of the submersible, and you two wait here for him. If something happens, you need to get word back to my father. All right?”

  Cal instantly shook his head. I knew he wouldn’t like staying behind again, but Cal was the only one I trusted to be wily enough to get back to the Crosley house if we ran into trouble in the village. Plus, he could protect Bethina, which was more than I could do at the moment. I was so jittery and nervous I could feel myself vibrating, even standing still on the hilltop.

  “Please,” I said to Cal softly. “I promise we’ll either send word or we’ll be back in a few hours and this will all be a wash.” The last part was a lie. I had to go north.

  Bethina took Cal’s hand. “I think Miss Aoife is right,” she said. “If there’s trouble, they’ll need someone to light out and send help.”

  “There won’t be,” Dean assured them, but I saw worry lines in his forehead that usually weren’t there. I wondered if he knew something about Innsmouth that I didn’t.

  “As long as there’s someone down here who can get me out of this place,” I said aloud.

  “I’ll introduce you around,” Dean said. “If the boat I’m thinking of hasn’t been sunk yet, they can get us to the Great Old Ones themselves. Crackerjack crew, every one.” He shoved a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture that I’d come to recognize as Dean getting ready for trouble. “But antsy,” he said. “So move slow and stay quiet in the village, and don’t say anything stupid to anyone.”

  I squeezed his hand to reassure him I could handle it. “I trust you, Dean.”

  We walked in silence until we came to the village outskirts.

  Even as early as it was, I’d expected some movement, but there was nothing. No jitneys, no steam carriages. Not even the horse-drawn variety was in evidence, though far away I heard some sort of livestock bray and then quiet. The place felt as if it were holding its breath—not abandoned, but staying perfectly still, waiting for something.

  The curtains on the rows of pitch-roofed cottages were drawn, down to the last one; passing the houses was like passing a line of faces with blind eyes staring into nothing. I shivered, not entirely from the brisk sea air.

  I got close enough to Dean so I could whisper. “Is it supposed to be this quiet?”

  “No,” Dean said in the same tone, his hand going into his pocket for his knife. “Something’s wrong.”

  I reached deep for a little of my Weird, but nothing unusual prickled, just the usual sorts of machines and locks and clockworks that a village at the edge of the ocean would possess.

  There was a small town square, like a hub in a wheel, and a fountain in the center of it frozen solid, plumes of ice erupting from the mouths of a trio of metal leviathans.

  A scream came, then cut off as abruptly as a needle skipping off a record. I started down the narrow side street it had come from, placing my feet carefully and silently on the bricks.

  Dean caught up with me. “I’d say we should get to the docks, but I don’t know that I want to be that exposed right at the moment,” he whispered.

  I nodded silently and reached back for his hand. Dean squeezed it and then let it drop, and we crept ahead in matched steps, until we’d gone away from the sea and the center of town and come upon a farmhouse set a little back from the street. A sagging red barn beyond held the source of the scream.

  Something else, softer and more terrifying, drifted on the wind. Sobbing. Human sobbing, coming from a human throat.

  “Aoife …,” Dean started, but I shushed him and continued toward the barn, keeping myself out of view of the barn door.

  Through a slat in the side, I saw three people in nightclothes on
their knees on the dirt floor of the barn, two Proctors in black uniforms brandishing shock rifles at them. The girl, the one sobbing, had a split lip, and blood dribbled down her white nightgown. One of the Proctors drew back his hand again.

  “We’ve been flying up and down the coast looking in every rathole they could duck into,” he snapped. “We know everyone in this filthy town harbors fugitives. Now tell me where they are—at least two, boy and girl, dark haired. One calling herself Aoife Grayson.”

  “We don’t know,” the girl sobbed. “If that terrorist were here, we’d turn her in real quick. Please. We don’t know.”

  I almost shrieked when Dean clapped a hand on my shoulder. I’d been transfixed by the scene in the barn, and enraged. “Aoife,” Dean whispered.

  “I’m not leaving,” I hissed at him. “We have to do something.”

  “Not that,” Dean insisted, his mouth practically pressed against my ear. “Look. Past the barn.”

  There was a long field that sloped down to cliffs above the water, probably half a mile away. And there, moored at the edge of the cliff, was a familiar black hulk of an airship with the spiky Proctor insignia painted on the side.

  Draven’s. I’d been so preoccupied with the people in the barn I hadn’t even looked beyond. It wasn’t just regular Proctors in there, but Draven’s elite troops. How had he known I’d be coming to Innsmouth?

  “What do we do?” Dean muttered. His voice was still as soft as a flick of silk, but his grip on my shoulder betrayed panic as he squeezed hard enough to bruise.

  “I don’t know,” I said in the same voice. Inside the barn, the girl screamed again.

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know, sir! Please stop hitting me!”

  “Just … something,” I said to Dean, and wrenched free of his grasp.

  In Cal’s stories, heroines usually carried bullwhips or daggers, flew their own airships, swung in on ropes. They always had a daring plan. Or even a stupid plan. Never no plan.

  Inside the barn door, I grabbed up a disused axe handle and swung it at the nearest Proctor, catching him across the back of the skull. He went down with a grunt, and the other swung his rifle toward me.