“I never thought I’d be saying this, but the kid’s right,” Dean said. He kicked at the exterior hatch, bowed badly on impact. “You ain’t strapped down, you don’t survive a handshake with the ground.”
“Say.” Cal exhaled a whistle. “She’s got a stigma.”
“What?” Surprised, I leaned over his shoulder and beheld the small white scar on Alouette’s breastbone. Stamped by a hot iron that left an indelible kiss, the puckered spot on her skin made me think of the heretic in Banishment Square.
“I thought only sailors and delinquents got these,” Cal said. He reached out to brush his fingers over the twin wings etched into the scar tissue, and I slapped his hand away.
“Cal, that’s disgusting. She’d dead!”
“They’re bird wings,” said Cal, his fingers traveling back to the spot like it was magnetized. He licked his lips. “You know, pirates used to get swallows tattooed on their skin. To help them find land again. Birds find land.”
“That’s no swallow’s wing,” Dean said, his expression darkening like thunderheads. “Now, she’s shuffled loose this here mortal coil and I don’t love the plan of getting roasted when the hydrogen blows, so let’s get into gear.” He kicked the hatch free at last. “We hoof it, we can still make Arkham by dawn. Proctors probably think we all died in this bang-up.”
Cal still crouched by Alouette. “Raven’s wings,” he said. “Only Proctors can wear a raven’s mark.…”
Professor Swan’s bleating about us turning in fellow students with contraband books and things like tarot cards or Ouija boards—heretical items—unspooled again in my head, along with one of his interminable lanternreels. How We Fight! Joining the Bureau of Proctors.
“She’s a spy.” The word tasted sour. All of the heretics I’d seen burned and hauled away to Ravenhouse, all of the eyes of the clockwork ravens watching, and there were still people who sold out neighbors and friends and even family to the Proctors.
Evil, that was heretics if you listened to the Proctors. Wanton carriers of necrovirus. Breeders of things like the nightjar.
My mother.
“You think she spied on witches?” Cal frowned.
“Open your eyes, Calvin. She was spying on us. She probably radioed her pals at Ravenhouse the minute we came on board.”
Finding the hold of the Belle very small and hot, all at once, I clambered over wreckage to the hatch.
“But”—Cal panted after me—“Proctors only go undercover to spy on traitors. Foreigners and stuff.”
I lashed my head around. “You don’t get it, do you, Cal? You ran away with a heretic and with me. We are traitors to the Proctors, and the Proctors keep their eyes inward. Nobody cares about some far-off country. They watch us. They burn us. They spy and they kill and they stamp on lives with those horrible shiny jackboots they wear.”
Cal just stared at me, fiddling with the buckles on his camp bag. “You know what they tell us, Aoife. We’d all be dead if it weren’t for the Proctors. Professor Swan says—”
“Oh, grow up, Cal! Think a thought that the Proctors didn’t give you for once!” I snapped and took off at a march. We’d landed in a field, the grass and its frost veil knee high. I struggled on, school shoes and school stockings woeful against the frigid gloom.
Dean ran and caught up with me. “Whoa, there. Pump your brakes, kiddo.”
“I’m sorry.” I was already shamefaced, burning with humiliation. Young ladies didn’t lecture and they certainly didn’t shout. “That was rude.”
“Don’t care if the kid riled you,” Dean said. “Hell, he’d rile most anyone spent more than a hot minute with him. I can’t have you running off, is all. This isn’t the city. No Proctors keeping the critters out.”
“I don’t care,” I hissed, fierce as a wounded cat. “Let them digest me.” I was practically mad anyway. What harm would it do the world if I wasn’t in it?
Dean looked at the dark ground rippling with cold mist, to the high moon slashed with clouds, the bleak barren humps of the Berkshire Mountains beyond, and the ink stain of forest between us and them. “If it’s all the same, Miss Aoife, I’d rather keep you alive.”
I let a stanza of footsteps pass without speaking, my shoes breaking through the frost with a sound like grinding teeth.
“How far to Arkham?” I said at length. It seemed the most inoffensive topic at the moment.
“Four hours walking. Maybe a little more. We’ll set eyes on your old man’s house by dawn.” Dean yawned and stretched, popping his back like a cat. “Stay awake. Don’t let the cold get its teeth into you.”
“The Proctors will send out dogs and men to the crash site,” Cal piped up. “To be sure.” He was hopping along, and I slowed and offered him my arm. Cal didn’t know how cruel he could be sometimes, with his parroting of the Proctors and by listening to their crowing about the necrovirus, his tacit agreement with them that I would inevitably go mad.
Cal took my arm with a part-smile, and his dogged recitation of propaganda didn’t matter as much. That was Cal’s way—calm and reliable, bumbling and normal. If only he knew how normal he was compared with me.
“We can’t be caught,” I told Dean. “Not after what that wretched Alouette must have told them.” Behind us I saw Jean-Marc and Harry emerge from the wreckage, battered but intact. I hoped they’d make it to wherever they called home without any further trouble.
“Don’t worry your pretty brunette head, miss,” Dean said. He lit a cigarette as we marched, and puffed a smoke ring. “They haven’t managed to catch me yet.”
The Shoggoth’s Dream
HOURS OF CHILLED cheeks and aching feet later, a sign on the mud-spattered, ice-pocked road, snugged against the Berkshire foothills, pointed to Arkham. Its wooden limbs stood akimbo, tattered from buckshot.
“Off the road now,” Dean said. “Arkham’s village police run to mean and bored, and they’ll call down the ravens on us if we go through town.”
The winding lane sat as a ribbon of darker against dark, overhung with the winter skeletons of oak trees and bound by stone. Dean hopped the low mossy wall and I helped Cal over.
The predawn field rolled and dipped, low curls of ground fog like tongues and tentacles rising from the frosted stubble of grass. The sky made a lid on the earth, a dome of silk dove clouds, and on the horizon the faintest line of blue-white fire sparked the dawn.
The ground was soft and thick as a coverlet, and I slipped in the freezing mud and fell against Dean. He caught me around the waist.
“Sorry!” I whispered. “I’m clumsy. Always have been.”
“I don’t see the downside.” His smile matched the ghostly glow of sunrise. “Care for a dance, while you’re here?”
I pulled myself free too fast and nearly fell again. Dean Harrison wasn’t my kind. He was wild-raised, no one I needed to form attachments with. If I let Dean get close, we wouldn’t go on a proper date, where I’d smile and laugh behind my hand while I lowered my eyes demurely like a city-bred young lady. Dean was trouble, and I’d be in an even worse stripe if I acquiesced to his charms. “No, that’s not happening,” I said, and felt myself flush even in the cool damp air of dawn.
Cal grumbled until Dean and I parted, and ignored my offered hand even though he was reduced to hopping on one leg with his bound-up ankle swinging.
We walked through the mist in silence, and it closed in on us like it could see and taste our presence.
“There’s a path cut in the rock,” said Dean. “Far side of this field.” He pointed at the raw gray granite climbing out of the earth. “I’m guessing that honking mansion up on the cliff is your pop’s place, since there’s not one Grayson inside the village walls that I’ve ever met.”
I had never seen Graystone, except for a curl-cornered picture my mother kept in a shoebox. The house of my father was all angles and turrets and the rough, body-sized granite blocks that gave the estate its name. Singularly unwelcoming, like an asylum or a heretic prison. M
uch like, I’d always assumed, the man who called it home.
Would I see my father? I could ask him how he and Nerissa had come together, what her madness first showed itself as. Cleverness, like Conrad, or her fancies about fairies and witches? Or just that sad, miles-gone stare that looked through me as if I were window glass?
Alternately, I could say nothing, and just savor my first look at the man who was half of me. There were no pictures of my father except the clues in my own face. I wanted to memorize him if I could, because the one thing you learned as a ward was never to assume the same face would open the door when you came home again. It wasn’t something to be maudlin about, just a truth, like secondhand shoes or being the last to eat at supper.
“You quit talking, Miss Aoife. You five by five?” Dean said. The mist held us in, kept our secrets close to our skin.
“Squared away,” I said, sneaking a phrase from Cal’s lexicon.
Dean slowed so we walked abreast. “Ain’t thrilled about seeing your old man?”
“You’re assuming he wants to see me.” That was the other half of the orbit of possibilities. Archibald Grayson could deny his bastard child, shut the door and send me on my way. As would be his right, as a man of breeding and good standing.
Dean winced. “I’m with you there, kid. All the way down the line.”
An owl hooted in the trees at the field’s edge, concealed by the morning twilight. Nerissa hated owls, shrieked about them watching her, lantern eyes and iron claws.
Owls carried the necrovirus, if you minded the lanternreels. I’d seen pictures of their wings, aerodynamics lessons drawn in fine, careful ink. The rounded tips of the feathers that let them fly silent. What I’d give to fly silent as an owl, unwatched by the Proctors or anyone else. Sometimes I thought that if I made my clothes colorless enough, my shoulders narrow enough, that I could round off all my edges and disappear into the air like the lantern-eyed harbingers of the night. I hadn’t managed it yet.
I watched my feet squelch into the mud instead. The mist and the morning called for silence, and even Cal had given up the challenge of talking. I was almost enjoying the quiet, haunted walk until the sweet stench of meat left in a warm place clapped me across the nose, thick and wet as a wool blanket.
Cal pressed his handkerchief over the lower half of his face like a bandit. “Stones … what’s rotted on the vine?”
The mist parted on a humped black hide with a watery sheen, and a great lidless eye that swam up from the depths of the thing’s boneless mass, bilious green and cloudy with cataract.
“Shoggoth,” I breathed, stumbling to a halt. “It’s an actual shoggoth.”
The shoggoth exhaled with a sound of pipes belching steam. Its eye roved over its hide in no particular pattern, floating like a lamprey below the surface of a dark sea.
“They swallow us whole.” Cal’s whisper came as a shout in the absolute stillness. “Digested by degrees inside that mass. You can stay alive for days, becoming a part of it. Listening to it whisper in your brain. Filthy damn thing.” He picked up a stone and flipped it in his palm.
“Cal, no …,” I started, but Cal cocked his arm and threw.
A fingerlet of skin and muscle snapped out of the creature’s mass, sprouting a mouth, round and rimmed with teeth. The rock disappeared into the shoggoth’s maw with a snap of gravel.
Dean worried the Lucky Strike behind his ear as the shoggoth shuddered all over like a bear waking up from a long hibernation. “Fine job, cowboy. You work to be this stupid, or is it innate?”
“It doesn’t have a brain!” Cal argued. “It’s just a dumb, deaf ball of necrovirus. Wasn’t even human once. Grew up out of the mud, like a living infection.”
I watched in fascination as the creeper of boneless, waterlogged flesh writhed over the ground where the rock had come from, seeking and searching. More eyes opened on the shoggoth’s hide, filmy and infected as the first.
“It’s blind,” I realized.
“And ancient, to get that big,” Dean said. “I’ve seen them from the air, and I’ve seen the carcasses they leave behind. You want my expert guide’s opinion, we need to stoke fires and get outta here.”
“We’ll have to find another way up to Graystone,” Cal sighed. “I knew I should have packed my road atlas. I could practice my navigation.”
“Or we could knock off pelting Ol’ Stinky here with rocks and just tiptoe on around,” Dean suggested. “If that meets with your approval, Scout Leader.”
“You know, I’ve had just about enough of you,” Cal snapped. “So far, all you’ve guided us to is a heap of trouble, and kept Aoife out in the cold and the wet.”
“Cal”—I scratched at my scar, underneath the damp wool of my school scarf—“leave me out of this.”
“We can’t just go around,” Cal growled at Dean, ignoring me completely. “Shoggoth can travel fast over ground, and then we’ll be dead, as well as trapped out here in stinking manure.”
“Here’s an idea,” Dean retorted. “Unknot your bloomers and admit that your lily-white city-boy ass doesn’t know everything.”
Behind Cal, I saw black in the corner of my vision, windy-twisty black that sought warm skin and bone with a sharp, hungry mouth.
“Cal.” I raised my numb finger and pointed.
“Aoife, I won’t be shouted down this time,” he snapped. “You’re smart for a girl, but this was a rash idea and I’m sorry I let you talk me into it. Now I’m leaving this shyster, going into Arkham and catching a jitney for home, and you’re coming with me. I have a responsibility.”
The tentacle from the mass of rotting muscle reared as it caught Cal’s scent, and bore down on him. I lunged, planting my hands against the rough wool of his coat and shoving with my whole weight. “Cal, watch out!”
In the instant Cal and I touched, the shoggoth struck.
I felt the freeze and smelled the stench of dead orchids rotting in hothouse dirt. The teeth bit into my skin, straight through my clothes, and pain slashed my sight and breath to ribbons.
I fell, hitting hard on frozen ground, and scrabbled for purchase as the shoggoth dragged me backward. I kicked at it, but that did all the good of kicking a pile of vulcanized raincoats—the thing was rubbery and solid, inexorable and hungry.
I felt my skin burning as the shoggoth’s mouths ate through the layers of my clothes, heard a low sizzle like slow-frying bacon. I kicked and scratched at it, sloughing off chunks of rotted hide under my nails. I caught a frozen furrow in the ground and held on for dear life as the shoggoth dragged me toward its mass, all its eyes clustered together now and staring at me sightlessly. Blood from under my nails sank into the earth, and I’m sure I screamed.
Through the pain came a buzzing, a humming of locusts or bird’s hearts, speaking to me inside the deep, secret place of dreams.
So sweet so sweet meat so sweet blood blood condemned blood hot fresh meat …
My eyes flew open. Not my eyes. The shoggoth’s eyes. I saw the shoggoth’s visions. I was the shoggoth.
I saw everything at once, a screaming void of black, a field of starry flowers whiter than snow on a dead man’s skin. A great Engine of black iron that ground gears and belched smoke into a sky stained red by a double sunset. I heard the crack of a whip and I shuddered and mewled, forced across barren earth while ice clawed at my soft underbelly. The world was white, entombed in ice, and my brothers built a great stone city on the bones of brick and steel. I knew this skyline. I knew the river that churned red, naked fleshy corpses bobbing on the tide. The spires of Lovecraft lay reduced to blood-colored ash, and all around me tall white figures held whips, glaring at me from solid blue and silver eyes.…
I was floating in a void; no, a sea; no, a great birthing tank, watched by men in black uniforms, jagged silver lightning bolts on their collars, skull pins on their peaked caps.
I slithered through grasses the color of bruises and decay while the white figures loosed their great hounds with fire for
eyes to hunt me.
I writhed on sand as sailors sank harpoons into me and a pair of men in black coats watched the carnage of my brothers and sisters, the red tide that pushed us onto this foreign shore, where everything tasted like ash and smoke.
My own voice rolled over the tableau of slaughter, and the sailors grabbed their heads, twitching and losing their minds from the very sound.
Help me help me see us see the lost see the forgotten spill the sweet blood set us free send us home …
The shoggoth howled and my eyes flew open to find Dean standing above me, wreathed in a halo of mist. He lifted his fist and brought it down. His knife flashed, again and again, hacking at the shoggoth’s creeper. Black-green blood the consistency of motor oil watered the ground, eating away the topsoil, sending foul sulfuric smoke into the air.
“Get off her,” Dean growled. He locked his long artful fingers around my good arm and pulled, hefting me easily and hauling me over the stone wall, away from the moaning, rippling shoggoth. It was thrashing in a fit, eyes rolling and blinking all over its hide, masses of creepers growing and retreating in every direction as it bled ichor into the field.
Dean gathered me against him. “I’ve got you, Aoife.” His smell of leather and tobacco made my head spin. Dean whispered against my ear. “I’ve got you.”
“It—it talked to me,” I jittered. My skirt and jumper were soaked with melted frost, and trickles of my own blood painted a road map down my arm and over my palm where my blouse had torn away. “The shoggoth. Talked to me …”
Dean snapped his fingers at Cal. “Kid. You got a clean bandanna in that scout pack?”
Cal just stared at the darkening wool of my jumper, his hands slack at his sides, tongue creeping out to catch between his front teeth.
“Doorstop.” Dean’s voice could have drawn blood. “She needs help, double-quick time. You want to gawk, buy a ticket.”
Cal came back to life and dug into his kit bag, drawing out a pristine red bandanna, still with the paper band from the department store around it. He tossed it underhand at Dean, who snatched it out of the air, a cotton bird interrupted in flight.
The Iron Thorn Page 11
