Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  But that August afternoon she wasn’t lonely, not with the tall rows of battleship-grey steel lane cabinets and their stony treasures stacked neatly around her, all the company she needed and no thoughts but the precise numbers from her digital calipers – the heights and widths of pelvic girdles and scapulocoracoids, relative lengths of pectoral fins and radials. She was finishing up with a perfectly preserved porolepiform that she suspected might be a new species, and Lacey noticed the box pushed all the way to the very back of the drawer, half-hidden under a cardboard tray of shale and bone fragments. Something overlooked, even though she’d thought she knew the contents of those cabinets like the back of her hand, and any further surprises would only be in the details.

  “Well, hello there,” she said to the box, carefully slipping it from its hiding place beneath the tray. “How’d I ever miss you?” It wasn’t a small box – only a couple of inches deep, but easily a foot and a half square, sagging just a bit at the center from having supported the weight of the tray for who knows how many years. There was writing on one corner of the lid, spidery fountain-pen ink faded as brown as dead leaves: from Naval dredgings, USS Cormorant (April, 1928), Lat. 42° 40” N., Long. 70° 43” W, NE. of old Innsmouth Harbor, Essex Co., Mass. ?Devonian. But there was more, no catalog or field number, no identification either, and then Lacey opened the box and stared amazed at the thing inside.

  “Jesus,” she whispered, swallowing a metallic taste like foil or a freshly filled tooth, adrenaline-silver aftertaste. Her first impression was that the thing was a hand, the articulated skeleton of a human hand lying palm-side up in the box, its fingers slightly curled and clutching at the ceiling or the bright fluorescent lights overhead. She set the box down on one of the larger Chaleur Bay slabs then, stared in turn at the tips of her own trembling fingers and the petrified bones resting in a bed of excelsior. The fossil was dark, the waxy black of baker’s chocolate, and shiny from a thick coating of varnish or shellac.

  No, not human, but certainly the forelimb of something, something big, at least a third again larger than her own hand. “Jesus,” she whispered again. Lacey lifted the fossil from the excelsior, gently because there was no telling how stable it was, how many decades since anyone had even bothered to open the box. She counted almost all the elements of the manus – carpals and metacarpals, phalanges – and the lower part of the forearm, sturdy radius and ulna ending abruptly in a ragged break, the dull glint of gypsum or quartz flakes showing from the exposed interior of the fossil. There was bony webbing or spines preserved between the fingers, and the three that were complete ended in short, sharp ungual claws. There was a small patch of what appeared to be scales or dermal ossicles on the palm just below the fifth metacarpal, oval disks with deeply concave centers unlike anything she could remember ever having seen before. Here and there, small bits of greenish-grey limestone still clung to the bones, but most of the hard matrix had been scraped away.

  Lacey sat down on a wooden stool near Cabinet 34, her dizzy head too full of questions and astonishment, heart racing, the giddy, breathless excitement of discovery, and she forced herself to shut her eyes for a moment. Gathering shreds of calm from the darkness behind her lids, counting backwards from thirty until her pulse began to return to normal. She opened her eyes again and turned the fossil over to examine the other side. The bone surface on the back of the hand was not so well preserved, weathered as though that side had been exposed to the forces of erosion for some time before it was collected, the smooth, cortical layer cracked and worn completely away in places. There was a lot more of the greenish limestone matrix left on that side, too, and a small snail’s shell embedded in the rock near the base of the middle finger.

  “What are you?” she asked the fossil, as if it might tell her, as simple as that, and everything else forgotten now, all her fine coelacanths and rhipidistians, for this newest miracle. Lacey turned it over again, examining the palm-side more closely, the pebbly configuration of wrist bones, quickly identifying the ulnare, what she thought must be the intermedium, and when she finally glanced at her watch it was almost six-thirty. At least an hour had passed since she’d opened the box, and she’d have to hurry to make her seven o’clock lecture. She returned the hand to the excelsior, paused a moment for one last, lingering glimpse of the thing before putting the lid back on. Overhead, high above the exhibits halls and the slate-tiled roof of the Pratt Museum, a thunderclap boomed and echoed across the valley, and Lacey tried to remember if she’d left her umbrella in her apartment.

  1:49 P.M.

  She’s sitting next to a woman who smells like wintergreen candy and mothballs, listening to the steady clackclackclack of razor wheels against the rails. Lacey’s been staring at the photograph from the manila envelope for almost five minutes now. A movie still, she thinks, the glossy black-and-white photograph creased and dog-eared at one corner, and it shows an old man with a white mustache standing with two Indians beside a rocky outcrop. Someplace warm, someplace tropical because there are palmetto fronds at one edge of the photograph. It isn’t hot on the train, but Lacey’s sweating, anyway, her palms gone slick and clammy, tiny beads like nectar standing out on her forehead and upper lip. The old man in the photograph is holding something cradled in both hands, clutching it like a holy relic, a grail, the prize at the end of a life-long search.

  …’cause you’ve seen it all, from top to bottom and pole to pole…

  The man in the photograph is holding the Innsmouth fossil. Or he’s holding a replica so perfect that it must have been cast from the original, and it really doesn’t make much difference, either way. She turns the picture over, and there’s a label stuck to the back – Copyright © 1954 Uiversal-Iteratioal – typed with a typewriter that drops its N’s.

  There was a letter in the envelope, as well. A faded photocopy of a letter, careless, sprawling handwriting that she can only just decipher:

  Mr. Zacharias R. Gilman, Esq.

  7 High Street

  Ipswich, Mass.

  15 January 1952

  Mr. William Alland

  Universal Studios

  Los Angeles, Cal.

  Dear Mr. Alland,

  Sir, I have seen your fine horror picture “It Came From Outer Space” six times as of this writing and must say that I am in all ways impressed with your work. You have a true artist’s eye for the uncanny and deserve to be proud of your endeavors. I am enclosing newspaper clippings which may be of some small interest to a mind such as yours, regarding certain peculiar things that have gone on hereabouts for years. Old people here talk about the “plagues” of 1846, but they will tell you it wasn’t really no plague that set old Innsmouth on the road to ruin, if you’ve a mind to listen. They will tell you lots of things, Mr. Alland, and I lie awake at night thinking about what might still go on out there at the reef. But you read the newspaper clippings for yourself, sir, and make of it what you will. I believe you might fashion a frightful film from these incidents. I will be at this address through May, should you wish to reply.

  Respectfully, your avid admirer,

  Zacharias Gilman

  “Do you like old monster movies?” the wintergreen and mothball woman asks her, and Lacey shakes her head no.

  “Well, that photograph, that’s a scene from – ”

  “I don’t watch television,” she says.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean made-for-TV movies. I meant real movies, the kind you see in theaters.”

  “I don’t go to theaters, either.”

  “Oh,” the woman says, sounding disappointed, and in a moment she turns away again and stares out the window at the autumn morning rushing by outside.

  10:40 A.M.

  “Well, I like it,” Dr. Morgan says, finally. “It looks good on paper.” He chews absently at the stem of his cheap pipe and puffs pungent grey smoke clouds that smell like roasting apples. “And a binomen should look good. It should sound good, rolling off the tongue.”

  More than three mon
ths have passed since she found the Innsmouth fossil tucked away in Cabinet 34, and Lacey sits with Dr. Jasper Morgan in his tiny third-floor office: all the familiar, musty comforts of that small room with its high ceilings and ornate, molded plaster walls hidden behind solid oak shelves stuffed with dust-washed books and fossils and all the careful clutter of an academic’s life. A geologic map of Massachusetts is framed and hanging slightly askew. The rheumy hiss and clank from the radiator below the window, and if the glass wasn’t steamed over, she could see across the rooftops of Amherst, south to the low, autumn-stained hills beyond the town, the weathered slopes of the Holyoke Range rising blue-grey in the hazy distance.

  Three months that hardly seem like three full weeks to her, days and nights, dreams and waking all become a blur of questions and hardly any answers, the fossil become her secret, shared only with Dr. Morgan, and Dr. Hanisak over in the zoology department. Hers and hers alone, until she could at least begin to get her bearings and a preliminary report on the specimen could be written. When she was ready and her paper had been peer-reviewed and accepted by Nature, Dr. Morgan arranged for the press conference at Yale, where she would sit in the shadow of Rudolph Zallinger’s The Age of Reptiles and Othniel Marsh’s dinosaurs and reveal the Innsmouth fossil to the whole wide world.

  “I had to call it something,” she replies. “Seemed a shame not to have some fun with it. I have a feeling that I’m never going to find anything like this again.”

  “Exactly,” Jasper Morgan says and leans back in his creaky wooden chair, takes the pipe from his mouth and stares intently into the smoldering bowl. Like a gypsy with her polished crystal ball, this old man with his glowing cinders. “‘Words,’” he says in the tone of voice he reserves for quoting anyone he holds in higher esteem than himself, “‘are in themselves among the most interesting objects of study, and the names of animals and plants are worthy of more consideration than biologists are inclined to give them.’’ He sighs and adds, “Unfortunately, no one seems to care very much about the aesthetics these days, no one but rusty old farts like me.”

  He slides the manuscript back across his desk to Lacey, seventeen double-spaced pages held together with a green plastic paper clip. She nods once, reading over the text again silently to herself. Her eyes drift across his wispy red pencil marks: a missing comma here, there a spelling or date she should double-check.

  “That’s not true,” Lacey says.

  “What’s not true?”

  “That no one but you cares anymore.”

  “No? Well, maybe not. But, please, allow me the conceit.”

  “Dr. Hanisak insists the name’s too fanciful. She said I should have called it something more descriptive. She suggested Eocarpus.”

  “Of course she did. Hanisak has all the imagination of a stripped wing nut,” and the paleontologist slips his pipe back between his ivory-yellow teeth.

  “Grendelonyx innsmouthensis,” Lacey whispers, the syllables across her tongue as smooth as good brandy.

  “See? There you are. ‘Grendel’s claw from Innsmouth,’” Jasper Morgan mutters around his pipe. “What the hell could be more descriptive than that?”

  Across campus, the steeple chimes begin to ring the hour – nine, ten, ten and three-quarters – later than Lacey had realized, and she frowns at her watch, not ready to leave the sanctuary of the office and his company.

  “Shit. I’ll miss my train if I don’t hurry,” she says.

  “Wish I were going with you. Wish I could be there to see their faces.”

  “I know, but I’ll be fine. I’ll call as soon as I get to New Haven,” and she puts the manuscript back inside its folder and returns it to the battered black leather satchel that also holds her iBook with the PowerPoint presentation, the photographs and cladograms, her character matrix and painstaking line drawings. Then Dr. Morgan smiles and shakes her hand, like they’ve only just met this morning, like it hasn’t been years, and he sees her to the door. She carries the satchel in one hand and the sturdy cardboard box in the other. Last night, she transferred the fossil from its original box to this one, replaced the excelsior with cotton and foam-rubber padding. Her future lies in this box, her box of wonders.

  “Knock ’em dead, kiddo,” he says and hugs her, wraps her tight in the reassuring scents of his tobacco and aftershave lotion, and Lacey hugs him back, twice as hard.

  “Don’t you go losing that damned thing. That one’s going to make you famous,” he says and points at the cardboard box.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not going to leave my sight, not even for a minute.”

  A few more words, encouragement and hurried last thoughts, and then Lacey walks alone down the long hallway past classrooms and tall display cabinets, doors to other offices, and she doesn’t look back.

  “I couldn’t find it on the map,” she said, watching the man’s callused, oil-stained hands as he counted out her change, the five dollars and two nickels that were left of the twenty after he’d filled the Jeep’s tank and replaced a windshield-wiper blade.

  “Ain’t on no maps,” the man said. “Not no more. Ain’t been on no maps since sometime way back in the thirties. Wasn’t much left to put on a map after the Feds finished with the place.”

  “The Feds?” she asked. “What do they have to do with Innsmouth?” and the man stepped back from the car and eyed her more warily than before. A tall man with stooped shoulders and gooseberry-grey eyes, a nose that looked like it’d been broken more than once. He shrugged and shook his head.

  “Hell, I don’t know. You hear things, that’s all. You hear all sorts of things. Most of it don’t mean shit.”

  Lacey glanced at the digital clock on her dashboard, then up at the low purple-black clouds sailing by, the threat of more rain and nightfall not far behind it. Most of the day wasted on the drive from Amherst, a late start in a downpour, then a flat tire on Route 2, a flat tire and a flat spare. By the time she made Cape Ann, it was almost four o’clock.

  “What business you got up at Innsmouth, anyhow?” the man asked suspiciously.

  “I’m a scientist,” she said. “I’m looking for fossils.”

  “Is that a fact? Well, ma’am, I never heard of anyone finding any sort of fossils around here.”

  “That’s because the rocks are wrong for fossils. All the rocks around the Cape are igneous and – ”

  “What’s that mean, igneous?” he interrupts, pronouncing the last word like it’s something that might bite if he’s not careful.

  “It means they formed when molten rock – magma or lava – cooled down and solidified. Around here, most of the igneous rocks are plutonic, which means they solidified deep underground.”

  “I never heard of no volcanoes around here.”

  “No,” Lacey says. “There aren’t any volcanoes around here, not now. But there were a very long time ago.”

  The man watched her silently for a moment, rubbed at his stubbly chin, as if trying to make up his mind whether or not to believe her.

  “All these granite boulders around here, those are igneous rock. For fossils, you usually need sedimentary rocks, like sandstone or limestone.”

  “Well, if that’s so, then what’re you doing looking for them out here?”

  “That’s kind of a long story,” she said impatiently, tired of this distrustful man and the acrid stink of gasoline, just wanting to get back on the road again if he can’t, or won’t, tell her anything useful. “I wanted to see Innsmouth Harbor, that’s all.”

  “Ain’t much left to see,” he said. “When I was a kid, back in the fifties, there was still some of the refinery standing, a few buildings left along the waterfront. My old man, he used to tell me ghost stories to keep me away from them. But someone or another tore all that shit down years ago. You take the road up to Ipswich and Plum Island, then head east. If you really wanna see for yourself, that is.”

  “Thank you,” Lacey said, and she turned the key in the switch and wrestled the stick out of par
k.

  “Any time at all,” the man replied. “You find anything interestin’, let me know.”

  And, as she pulled away from the gas station, lightning flashed bright across the northern sky, somewhere off towards Plum Island and the cold Atlantic Ocean.

  3:15 P.M.

  The train slips through the shadow cast by the I-84 overpass, a brief ribbon of twilight from concrete and steel eclipse and then bright daylight again, and in a moment the Vermonter is pulling into the Hartford station. Lacey looks over her shoulder, trying not to look like she’s looking, to see if they’re still standing at the back of the car watching her – the priest and the oyster-haired crazy woman who gave her the envelope with the photograph and letter. They are, one on each side of the aisle like mismatched gargoyle bookends. It’s been ten minutes or so since she first noticed them back there, the priest with his newspaper folded and tucked beneath one arm and the oyster-haired woman staring at the floor and mumbling quietly to herself. The priest makes eye contact with Lacey, and she turns away, looking quickly towards the front of the train again. A few of the passengers already on their feet, already retrieving bags and briefcases from overhead compartments, eager to be somewhere else, and the woman sitting next to Lacey asks if this is her stop.

  “No,” she says. “No, I’m going on to New Haven.”

  “Oh, do you have family there?” the woman asks. “Are you a student? My father went to Yale, but that was – ”

  “Will you watch my seat, please?” Lacey asks her, and the woman frowns at being interrupted, but nods her head yes.

  “Thanks. I promise I won’t be long. I just need to make a phone call.”

  Lacey gets up, and the oyster-haired woman stops mumbling to herself and takes a hesitant step forward. The priest lays one hand on her shoulder, and she halts, but glares at Lacey with her bulging eyes and holds up one palm like a crossing guard stopping traffic.